Dream is wakefulness (English version)

 

DREAM IS WAKEFULNESS

 

Ricardo Gabriel Curci

To Laura, because in her rest I watch, and in my dream she wakes. But there is always a corner where we embrace.

 

“So many afternoons, sitting on the unpleasant earth

worked by his hands, Adam must have thought of paradise. Paradise can be a whirlwind.

And Cain, what must he have thought of?”

 

Sara Gallardo

 

PREFACE

 

The texts that we introduce were found among the scattered papers that Cecilia Taboada left unfinished or finished, but in no way classified or ordered in a way that would indicate clues to a possible publication. The poems from the cycle El sueño es vigilia were discarded at the time of the publication of Alimentar a las moscas, also posthumously and by the undersigned, due to the express ordering and schematization of Cecilia, a book that she did not live to see published. In this last case, she had organized the structure by thematic axes, discarding the poems from El sueño… because she did not consider them mature or sufficiently worked. She was always very strict with her written work, and I can say, from my own experience, that she was with almost everything in her short life. The frustration at the continuous failure to which she felt she was exposed, like everyone, in reality, -and this was what I, as a doctor and her partner at that time, could not make her not only accept, or even bear-, made her correct her texts again and again. By making these papers public, and even by taking full responsibility for the organization and selection of the texts, I am exposing myself to the same criticism that Ted Hughes has already received when publishing Sylvia Plath's texts. Comparisons, of course, are always unpleasant, especially as regards my role, but not as regards the poetic quality of Cecilia, which, in the opinion of many specialists and literary figures of worth, leaves nothing to be desired in relation to Plath's work.

In this edition, I decided to reincorporate the discarded poems, and to intersperse them with stories in poetic prose that have been completed or could be considered completed, and which present a certain stylistic or argumentative similarity with the poems.

There are still many papers to be sorted and classified, as well as many folders still unopened, tied with the sisal thread that I said was the best way to prevent the overflowing pages from spilling out. I remember her small figure, her fragile body, tottering on her aching legs, trying hard to put together the folders after each exhaustive revision, then tying them together, and finally, when she herself failed, asking me to help her put them on the shelves of her library. Then she would watch me do it as if she saw beyond me, and seal the moment with a kiss that was like the touch of a fly on the cheek, rough, irritating, but whose brevity immediately provoked desire.

She has left behind many texts, mostly prose, among which there are stories, articles and essays, and even a long fantasy novel that I saw her write sporadically, which she would call The War, an iconic title of her inner body-soul conflict. During the ten years we lived together, I very rarely saw her put aside her pencils and papers, both to write and to correct. Her mind was brilliant, and she knew it, of course, that's why she wrote, but her virtue was in letting a few people know about it. I was one of those privileged few. One of those who also glimpsed her constant pain, that of her body and that of her soul.

Cecilia was a mystery that reveals itself on every page, contradictory, astonishingly imaginative, terribly sharp and sharp always, disenchanted and apocalyptic on many occasions. That is what will result from reading her for those who do not yet know her, or know her little, which are the majority of those interested in poetry.

Cecilia never slept, because she even dreamed while awake. That is why these strange poems are titled. That is what my current wife told me, while we were classifying, and digging, I must confess, in the papers leaning against the shelves of the apartment where she died. Natalia, being a singer and creator of small leaders, pointed out to me, on one of those long and dreamy winter afternoons in Buenos Aires, with the large window open to the balcony overlooking Sarmiento Street, one of the poems included in the first book. All of Cecilia's philosophy, she told me, that still remains to be revealed, could be summarized in one of those verses. Then she handed me the paper with the manuscript, which Cecilia perhaps wrote in my presence not long before, at the time when I was tossing and turning in my frustrated dreams of science and knowledge, while she was desperately trying to correct God's mistakes. As she says in one of her most lucid poems:

 

error is a number zero after the last digit

 

Dr. Bernardo Ruiz

Compiler

 

I. LAZARUS'S DOG

 

1

 

Who has ever said that you must get up? Who, who has the moral obligation, the supposedly human obligation, as if man were exposed to a writing from the same imperishable instant, indelible by the ink of time, incorruptible and eternal, traveling thousands of kilometers beyond all known or imagined reason, or even never imaginable, like the modesty of the pagan gods?

There is no writing or scribe, and not even the old Christian God is a sufficient excuse to determine the birth and death of men.

Lazarus, synonym of resurrection and annoyance. Of incomprehension and terror expressed in terms not yet elucidated by the magnanimous and simultaneously cruel current of the everyday world. Who has ever said that you have risen? Perhaps, you are a fraud, one of the many perpetrated by the imagination of thieves and liars. Because it is already known that many thieves have been pardoned. Theft is not as serious as murder, so the judges have decided.

But is not killing definitely stealing a life? Perhaps this question cannot even be called definitive, because that life can be returned with the life of the one who has taken it under his arm. Like someone who steals a loaf of bread, stealthily and in the shadow of a falling afternoon, on Golgotha ​​or the River Plate, the place or the time is the same.

The bread has not changed, the wheat continues to be cultivated and harvested at the expense of the land in which Christ is buried every day, with the uncontrollable verbosity of Hitler in original teaching, or the slow decrepitude of Seneca, while the verses of Horace or Catullus support the death that will come. The overwhelming death that not even Christ himself could contain, as if his body were a dam that could not hold for long the pressure of the waters from the melting of the highest mountain in Asia, the tower that was never really demolished, Babel, the one on which languages ​​began to diversify, and each man began to call God in a different way. From then on, death was not from hunger, but from possession. Not from women or land, although these are the closest to the power of God in the ambitious hands of man, but from the name of God, whose revelation is the same as being called God of the entire universe. We name in order to possess, to contain in a single word all time and space.

To name is to have without even moving the hands or the lips, because thought is the sole possession of man, language is power emanating from a place of darkness, from shadow pushed aside by brief luminous winds. Each letter is a birth, a delivery where the cries are spheres of anguish exhaled by women made of earth and stone. Women sprouting from the ground like plants, like flowers, like trees with broken stems and splendidly strong roots. Each letter is a man already grown but blind, groping for the light, as if it could be felt. But we all know that the light of God is cold and does not give warmth, like a fluorescent tube on a marquee announcing a show on Broadway on a Saturday night, a Coca-Cola advertisement on an avenue in Buenos Aires, or a cabaret hidden in the suburbs of Montevideo. Each of these examples, thus ordered, shows the catastrophe of God, the degradation of thought. Because thinking is the sum of all the virtues and all the power that man can ever have.

Lights and music, orchestras intoning unforgettable melodies, songs to love and happiness. And when Christ's disciples leave the theatre humming the songs they just heard, they will be faced with huge posters that will incite them to spend and consume, to drink what they do not want and eat what they do not want. But they will pretend that the pizzas These are taverns in Jerusalem, the restaurants a place similar to the banks of the river where Jesus multiplied the loaves and fish, except that this time they will find gourmets offering almost empty plates that the disciples will have to pay at high prices. Bills so exorbitant that they will curse the abundance of deception, the fraud of ambition that they once felt before the economic miracle of Christ. As in a Germany recovered from the Second World War, a miracle arising from the blood of non-believers in the Messiah, the disciples will leave those restaurants drunk, their bodies overflowing with food covered in tunics that barely cover the excited parts of their bodies. They will urinate beer on the sidewalks, they will escape from some policemen and from the disapproving gaze of aristocratic couples who pretend to be on their way to their oriental palaces located on neighborhood streets with facades of peeling lime and roofs of a warp more destined to collapse than to posterity. They will walk slowly, staggering, shouting and laughing, sometimes crying with joy and anguish, hugging and holding each other. The twelve apostles will approach the suburbs in search of the neon lights that draw figures of women moving and swaying lewdly, but which under a closer look, would not bear the weight of seriousness. The laughter is not from the joy of sex, but the laughter of children in front of cartoons. Drawings of women that barely hint shamelessly at what is hidden inside those places: bodies turned upside down, sex as anatomy in public school textbooks.

They, however, will not laugh. They will enter, passing through the doors without any Saint Peter asking the merits or demerits of each one. They will enter Paradise. And they know that like all the paradises of which wise men and fools, kings and beggars have spoken throughout the centuries, it will not last long. They will see the most beautiful nakedness, they will taste the most delicious flavours, and later, after fatigue and regained lucidity, a muscular doorman will come to kick them out with his fists and kicks. They will barely have time to gather their clothes so as not to go out unprotected, vulnerable to the light of the city in the morning.

They will see, when their eyes have become accustomed to the sun, that this sun has the musicality of the word that names it, that single syllable to which its letters give a faint music whatever the language in which it is pronounced. They will then look at each other, realising a small and sublime revelation, hidden by the hunger of the morning: with one of the letters of the sun begins the name of Lazarus. The miracle of their Lord that they never came to understand, that they looked at with terror, both at the resurrected man and at the very idea of ​​that event. The incomprehensible was as simple as the rebirth of the sun, as the world turning over and over again.

Until when…? Until God decided to retire with a great celebration, a tribute similar to that of a football player or a movie star. Or perhaps simply like the farewell meeting of an old office worker on San Martín Street in Buenos Aires, one afternoon twenty minutes before the time of departure, with cider in paper cups, sandwiches and a couple of sad speeches, while everyone, even the God ready for his retirement, looks at their watches, thinking about the train or the bus they will miss if they do not hurry, about the meeting at the corner café with friends, or about the woman who is waiting for them to go to a hotel.

Only God will not have anyone waiting for him in his empty apartment, maybe a cat, maybe a canary. But not a dog. Dogs smell fear and know the fate of their masters, and that is why the old man never wanted to have one, because it would have been like having a mirror in front of him every day when he came home. And although he would not have tolerated such a thing, he always regretted not hearing barks or being able to stroke the back of a faithful dog, like a friend who was too sincere. Like a friend he could not have killed. That is what his Son was for, the unknown, whom he never touched or saw, and therefore for whom he avoided having any kind of feeling.

No, he never had and would never have a dog.

However, he would regret it eternally, because it is known by all that even Lazarus once had a dog.

 

2

 

Why have you woken up, Lazarus? For whom, perhaps, we should ask. To open your eyes to the blinding light of day behind the opening in the stone of your tomb, light that drinks from the spring of Christ, a source exhausted for many centuries. Because light is as ghostly as water and the light that is reflected in it. Bubbling sounds that resemble the barking of your dogs, the cries of women that are confused with howls, the screams of spasms of women in labor who, thousands of kilometers away from your desert, give birth to shapeless babies, without legs or arms, children with open heads where you can study the brain in all its magnificent convolutions, secrets and funereal fanfares surrounded by blood.

They are all ghosts, Lazarus, my friend through the centuries, my father more than my own father. Even the stones are ghosts, and at every moment the world ends and never returns. Except one who bears the name of Lazarus, with his music of Zs and Ls skillfully ordered by a merciful God towards those who possess the gift of tongues, the skill of impious language and the acute appreciation for the exquisiteness of each language. Language is the opposite of death, and the sound that does not even reach to attack it with dignity is followed by thought, which is language, which is word, which is letter: merciless cell, indivisible atom: God spread out on a slide under the lens of a microscope.

And there, under the whip of an old scientist, saddened by the immense accumulation of disappointments and failures, of successes and discoveries that became sad remains, God explains, reveals reluctantly, like a victim of an illegal interrogation during a dictatorship, the supposed secrets of the resurrection of life.

Why Lazarus, and not others? And if there were others, why should he be the best known? Perhaps the musicality or the not too accentuated extravagance of his name, the exquisite fluidity that perfectly imitates the slide from darkness to the light of life; the return, the turning back on oneself of the obligatory path, until then the only one for man.

Your face, Lazarus, has never been portrayed, because, lacking portraits of you in life, those who saw you after you were reborn did not dare, or could not, even sketch the clear, diaphanous, otherworldly face that one suspects you must have had until your next death (and here we could all laugh or be amazed, or ask ourselves if we are keeping track of events correctly, but this will be a topic for later). Your face, then, remains in the shadows. Your eyes are not eyes but rather notes with unfinished messages. Your hands have dirt that you would never manage to wash off again, and that is despite the fact that they saw you scrubbing them for hours and hours under all the substances you used for the rest of your life. Your emaciated and weak body, and your voice coming out of it like an equestrian echo springing from flooded caverns nine months a year.

How long have you been dead: nine minutes, nine hours, nine days? The scriptures say that three days, but multiples of a unit, a unit of three, are nothing more than ghostly, rhetorical, useless repetitions of the original entity. Seven times seven, three times three, stoic numbers, superstitious examples of what might be called the slenderness of wicked souls. Old witches, spinsters, and old drunks see in their nights of mourning the infinite extension of time, repeated events, and Christs who die every thirty-three years.

Therefore, Lazarus, in tomb number nine in the cemetery of Judea, surrounded by nine men who tore the stone from your tomb, you heard the barking of nine dogs placed in a strange row until they were lost in the daylight that penetrated through the opening. At the end of the row, you saw Christ and your sisters. You heard long after they were spoken, the words that commanded you to rise and walk. The tumult that followed your appearance was far beyond your meager powers to penetrate reality, your senses, slightly and belatedly recovered, saw only the figure of your savior, the scrawny man with long hair and a thin beard, who was now crouching, kneeling perhaps - you could not see him well - and who was praying, or crying, while his shoulders moved with incessant spasms, which led you to feel pity for him.

When you approached, he did not raise his head, he let himself be petted like a dying dog: the tenth dog of the pack that had gathered to welcome you. Behind him was the long chain of legs and tails and snouts and teeth, the nine dogs that had pulled as if they were wearing harnesses of something very heavy, not because of its real weight, but because it was attached to a place of high density, incredibly deep, deep as the black stones embedded in the abyss. The dogs who fought to rescue you, under the orders of the leader of the pack, the tenth dog who waited for you in the light. Who finally stopped again to resume the form of man. Scrawny and dirty, weak as a weak specimen of the human form, but whose hands grabbed you like claws to rescue you from peace, from nothingness, from monstrous oblivion.

 

3

 

What was the first thing you said, or the first thing you heard? Both things were perhaps the same: the sound of the word spoken by your voice. But it was not a voice, but a guttural sound, a rudimentary expression of your already confused and lost thought, making its way through obstacles placed There, because of the reality that advanced with the battalions of light. That reality that we agreed to call thus because we lack another name, even another concept for a set of words distorted like still-formless fetuses, words emerging from the darkness after the long period of freezing in the semi-darkness of death.

We know, thanks to your example, that from death one returns, and therefore we have proven that the thawing is a scientifically proven truth and corroborated by the facts throughout the centuries. However, those who return are chosen, but who is in charge of such a choice? Or is it simply chance, a conjunction of stars-atoms that at a certain moment cross their paths and form something other than what they were before separately: an entity reconceived, undone by the decomposition of death and reconstructed for reasons that man will still have to wait a long time to discover, to explain rationally for his own satisfaction?

The voice of a man is the man. The voice of God is the sum of all the sounds in the world, including the worn-out voice of old men, the shrill voice of newborns, the plaintive voice of women. The bark of a dog contains the wisdom of the morning dew, which disappears at the exact moment it must disappear: not before or after sunrise, not before or after the morning awakening of any man who gets up for work. It is the sound of a car that you will later hear, when you are taken to your next and final funeral, the song of mourners hired by undertakers as a cordial service for those dead without mourners to mourn them.

You got up, Lazarus, and said something without sound, only perceived by the imagination of those dogs who accompanied you. You uttered the word of wonder, perhaps an insult, most likely a curse towards that figure at the bottom of the light, outside the dark cave, in full light, alone in the desert of the open world, splendidly immense, king of nothingness, as extensive as the totality of everything that exists can be.

Thus, you have learned in the strangest way, that everything has its opposite, the positive and the negative. Not what is called ambiguity, but contradiction in vivid coexistence and connivance with each other. Light and darkness depending on the plane from which you look at it. Life and death, silence and noise. God and his opposite. Then you ask yourself who is the opposite of God: a demon or nothingness?

Thought and semantics are curses for man, you tell yourself. Creation of a son with the potential of a criminal, of a parricide. A suicide is the creation of language, a self-imprisonment in labyrinths that each one builds throughout life. And now, when you had already left the edge of your own labyrinth, someone has put you back in it, or in another one even more complicated and cruel, colder and longer, full of the barking of invisible dogs that you hear over the inviolable fences not because they are high or impregnable, but because of their enormous beauty. Walls that we build to our liking, the best we know because it is made with the material of our bones, bricks amalgamated one to the other with the substance of our daydreams.

Sounds, Lazarus, that you never heard before, even if they are the same braying of your pack donkeys, the screams of your close women, the laughter of the children who bathed you with balms when you died for the first time. Noises that you hear like a newborn because from nowhere you emerge like a virgin, with the hymen intact and your thoughts set on something beyond the simple contradiction of opposites: man and violence, man and sweat, man and crime.

You once said that every death is a crime, even illness is a murder that someone perpetrates on themselves. You always wanted to blame someone in your eagerness not out of anger or resentment, but as a researcher many centuries before such a concept was created. A scientist from bygone times. You meddled in death through your own death.

What pacts did you create before, I ask you. Like Poe seeking eternity through his Valdemar, like the delicate Mrs. Shelley creating the memorable double creation of her intellect: the monster and his father. It is known that with God one can make pacts, tricks that any mafia ruffian would envy, or any executive of a large company would pay millions to know.

What price did God ask of you to make you resurrect?

 

4

 

The price was a second definitive death.

God is an excellent merchant. Miserly, he knows how to reconcile justice with his own benefit; he also knows how to make a sentimental fraud appear true. He misses the prison where he was once, together with Oscar Wilde and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, ju

 

He misses prison life and the maneuvers to get a better piece of bread and a better place to urinate every day. He knows how to make sure no one hears his nocturnal discharges, simulating prayers to himself, because that is what those dalliances with his own body are. Like every prisoner, like every ex-convict, he has incorporated into his soul the bars that surrounded him for a certain time. He walks with the bars in front of his eyes, makes love with the bars in front of him, dreams and suffers and sweats trying to hold on to the bars without which he could not move across the surface of the world.

That is why he has created a similar world, limited by gravitational laws that simulate the limits of the prison, a world surrounded by abysses beyond the bars, and laws that are more ironclad, harder and more gloomy than the mere idea of ​​eternal and inviolable iron. But returning to our protagonist, Lazarus accepted such a condition, and prepared his journey to the bottom of the void. He explored, staying in hotels created at the ends of the world, with windows facing precipices and doors forever open to darkness. He traveled in cars pulled by red and blind horses, and in cars driven by dead people who did not know how to drive. But the cars and cars moved as if on paths marked out in advance, paths that everyone has followed towards the deep, the density of dreams and the depth of nothingness.

More contradictions of language, more dissatisfaction for his scientific spirit. Disillusioned by the patient darkness of the long road, he only had to wait for God to fulfill his part of the deal, and rescue him by bringing his discovery, the notes in his notebook about the findings of death. Nothing was written, however, only the white pages in a book that never existed. When he woke up, when he returned, when he returned to the livid consciousness of the so-called real world, he would dedicate himself to another task that was much less remunerative; he would dedicate himself to paying, in reality, for that trip that he believed to be a privilege and from which he thought he would be exempt from all travel expenses and consequences.

He woke up, half seeing, half listening, half speaking like a snail moving in the sand, awaiting the redeeming tide. He only knew that they did not see his face clearly, and no one, no artist would portray the face of the resurrected one. No one would describe the peculiarity of his voice, which he had expected to be sweet and heavenly and was nasal and deep, hoarse like slaughtered animals. No one dared to touch him or come close, or inhale the breath of his open mouth, with yellow teeth stained with tar. When he emerged from the tomb, finally into the light of day, guided by the line of dogs, supported by the limits of the shadows of those who had gathered around him, like pillars in the desert, like bars, he walked staggering like a drunk towards the figure of the last dog.

The dog was a man who looked up with shining eyes, and the strangest hand that Lazarus had ever seen in his entire postponed life. He was the only man who touched him after his resurrection. On that hand was written the question for the final exam.

Lazarus answered, but he already knew that he had failed.

From then on his life was a coming and going through the streets of a town that avoided him, as if the streets were capable of escaping from under our feet, until we found ourselves walking on deserts and sands in the heat of a sun as lonely as us. Two who do not keep each other company, not even as enemies. Two, and each one always alone.

He walked looking for a look, calling with his new muteness, and from everyone he received a crow's croak. Only the dogs followed him, sometimes a few, sometimes many, perhaps hundreds. They come to find me, he thought, or they come to look after me, to guard me, to watch over me. They are God's hounds, and among them all he could make out the many heads of the Cerberus.

Many times he wished to provoke them into attacking him and ending his new life, this appendage of existence that did not even deserve the name. And yet it was life. He breathed and felt the warmth of the sun on his skin, touched the prominences of his bones, smelled the dirt in his hair, felt the length of his nails.

And he longed for the exquisite perfection he had enjoyed while he was dead.

The decrepitude of life, the exuberance of death.

Then he stopped on a street, as always newly deserted by his steps. He turned to look at the dogs following him. He put a hand to his forehead to shield himself from the sun, for it was hard for him to look at the long line, repeated many times across the land behind him.

He made a sound, a clicking sound with his tongue, which he remembered calling his only dog ​​with in his previous life. Then all of them, who until that moment had stopped, They looked up at him, watching their master. There was envy in their eyes, and there was sadness. Then they stood up, and they were no longer dogs.

They were men, all the men who had preceded him on his journey to death, but had not managed to return. Lazarus wondered what they were looking for, what they expected from him, answers he could not give them, solutions he could not grant them.

When the first of them advanced towards him, he knew that he was not just a messenger, a cadet of God, or a collector with a briefcase and a blank checkbook. That is why Lazarus fell at his feet, and let God rest his right boot like a yoke on his back.

 

1

 

A mist of crystal rises from the cemetery

That breaks like the dry skin of the dead

Earth like a great broken bone

When we walk on it

 

We inhabit the surface of a skull

Whose center contains the fiery mass of the brain

 

The human head is a cemetery

 

II. DISQUISITIONS ON NOTHINGNESS

 

1

 

The whole.

Nothingness.

The face of God stimulating the expressive features of the atoms that lie on the intimate surface of chaos. Chaos as an enviable disorder, surreptitiously caged in the various canons of today's world: trains running at slow speed between deranged vagabonds, children drugged by shoe glue, women wrapped in the incorruptible vapors of man's fluids: baths perpetuated behind dark corners, behind the unconscious walls of wealthy corruption, torn to shreds by counterfeit bills and wrapped in layers of gold by the light of the media and spectaculars: television presenters, dancing prostitutes, resigned transvestites, children abandoned in hospitals without real doctors, only frauds, false diplomas, and not even that, only men and women dressed like bad actors who play their role to perfection. Actors who play bad actors, playing characters that are as far from themselves as the moon is from the sun. So close and yet so far, never found, always seen by witnesses from the irregular surface of sorrow and despair. Nothingness is an order. In its exquisite coldness it resembles the eternal light of the morning. The light that is just emerging and establishing itself, blinding with its tyranny the early-rising eyes that open without an alarm, accustomed, immersed in the impassivity of an incorporated innocence, or in the tenuous decomposition of everyday anger. An insult translates into downcast guitar strums with strings made of hair tangled on the sheets. Women's hair on heads shrouded by pillows dry of ideas and wet with saliva and semen. Men's hair, sparse and sparse, but abundant pine needles of all colors secreted from beards and pubes.

But it is they who, without wanting to, strum with sweet harmony the hair on their chest, bringing out tender morning melodies of forgiveness and resignation. Brief diasporas that are born from the male thorax, like hearts that crawl from the darkness of the nights in which they spent their heartbeats sighing for impossible women, their bodies fainting over women possibly exactly like themselves. Listening to words and voices coming from the fearsome ancestors of time, heart after heart, or voice after voice, or wall after wall.

They say that behind the walls there is always something, but I have seen emptiness. Nothingness concentrates like a smell for weak human perception. What is seen is deceptive, what is palpable is impossible if it does not exist, what is audible always has a distorted trace of truth, the taste of the walls can sometimes timidly approach the unreconstructable sensation of power and coldness: the only ponderable praises to God. But the smell is almost always, if not always, a weak but certain indication of what is hidden beneath every surface, even if it is the invisible surface of air and nothingness.

Shadows hidden in the full light of midday under the halos of the sun on the streets and buildings of any city, yours, mine, the cities where Jesus and Abraham were born to free us from the pharaohs or the merchants of death. Shadows perpetrated from black alleys where whores are born from the cobblestones, rising like statues of misunderstood goddesses, ugly from birth and beautified with every drop of semen, with every drop of saliva, with every blow and word sketched from the aftertaste and remains of a culture in ruins behind the ribs of men. Children who have developed their muscles by perpetrating crimes, emptying their lungs with cigarettes of alcohol on mouths as fleshy as the bodies of shrews.

On all the walls that hide nothingness is God, as a lookout, as an ad-honorem security employee, since he is his own boss. Without fixed hours, he does not leave even to enjoy a light meal of air and love, of hate and sorrow, of dead bodies that ascend from one side and descend from the other of those walls. The employees that he does not pay, bring him the food, the dead and the souls that have been dragged in wheelbarrows since the wheel was invented, because before the dead were not insulted, only placed in the treetops, on the rocks of the desert, thrown into the sea, or simply left out in the open for the work of the flies.

Flies like gods.

Flies and gods sharing, reluctantly, the treasures of the abyss.

 

2

 

Other interpretations give us the idea of ​​emptiness as a whole. Not air or atoms only proven with subsequent theories of knowledge, as abstract in the end as a feeling, as the invisible or the non-concrete. Something diametrically opposed to death, which for many is only directly verifiable through a body: but what is more concrete and lacking in need of corroboration than the rotting of a corpse, the sweet aroma of flesh wrapped in fungi and worms, the weak bones of carrion and the gaze full of nothingness, the absolute absence that no longer deserves to be called absence, but non-existence, where even the word, the human cell, where even the thought and the vital energy of what we call life, soul, or whatever religions or thoughts want to call it, is something so subtly stupid to mention, that it is an insult to the brain of man to even consider a word or a thought for that which does not exist.

The whole, then, is nothingness.

The whole consumes each of the past and future existences, because the emptiness that we now call the whole shares with nothingness the lack of temporal chronology. There are simultaneous times here, so we should not even be talking about time, since our concept is a succession of stages, and in the whole there is a sum, to call it in some way close to human understanding, of all times. If the sum gives a final result, it is beyond understanding, even intuition. As far away as the very idea of ​​God.

That is why we turn to God so frequently. God as the sum of times, or the totality of times, or times added and subtracted from each other successively and constantly, in the most varied and infinite ways of algebra and chance, carrying within itself the number zero, the perfect circle whose perimeter contains an infinite number: the sample, the pinch that the brain of man has discovered as the tip of an iceberg that has soon sunk taking with it the secrets of its origin and its death. The number Pi, 3, 14666… eternally.

And if God is a mathematics teacher, it would not be irrelevant to consider him a genius of teaching. He would deserve to be like a bust sculpted by children of early childhood on gilded metal, bronze perhaps, or copper, more malleable for those tender hands, in the courtyard of every school, without distinction of creeds or races.

Time without time, the whole as simultaneity, a beautiful word as a gift from God, as a concession from God, to bring us closer to the peace of soul that brings us understanding, at least the slight proximity of the deceptive concept of understanding. The human brain: what a great fraud, what a great actor, what a great Falstaff deservedly played not by an Olivier of his best times, but by Ustinov, perhaps, or simply by the uncontrollable harlequin that the angels play to their unbeatable measure: the drunken mollusks of life moving on the beaches, escaping from the waves, from the albatrosses and seagulls, from the dogs and the man-children.

The brain that has created nothingness and has given it a name to calm that fearful restlessness that it itself has invented for its own condemnation.

Nothingness fills everything.

Each act as a condemnation whose sentence will be fulfilled in that place in time and space. But of space, another nothingness, another death in life created by the same incorrigible brain, we will speak later. When my mind is ready, calmer, more serene, in the contemplation of the balance lying behind the windows of my body, my refuge, my mortuary house, my tomb and my home.

 

3

 

If nothingness is behind the walls, then we ask ourselves if there is a space, a place, where to locate emptiness. If we consider that nothingness, by its very concept, is not a particular “nothingness,” but absolute nothingness, this very definition does not conceive of any other existence than itself.

Nothingness does not tolerate anything other than the absence of everything, even of absence, since this last word, as a word, has its own weight, an ontological space in existence. Nor should it tolerate being referred to in such a way as “nothing,” as an entity. which rejects its name and anyone who wants to name it. So, if particularized nothingness is a phenomenon of human consciousness, and absolute nothingness a necessity of the universe as such, nothing exists.

If nothing exists, who is it that created me, who gave me the idea of ​​the existence of nothingness?

Is God, perhaps, the only creature that tolerates all examinations, that is beyond all reasoning, and is required, like the last atom of oxygen, to explain the existence of what can no longer be understood: nothingness, the void?

God is not an explanation, either, perhaps a creature, a mind that thinks of nothingness as a mechanism that feeds itself. Let us say as an infinite series of black holes that consume each other, devouring each other without any malice or need, only as a routine silent hecatomb within the innumerable dimensional planes in which our mind allows us to tolerate or understand it. The human brain is a method, a comprehensive series of phenomena that need to be rationalized so that madness does not take hold of it. They would act the same way, with or without madness, but we would not be people but things, animals. Thought is the sharpest gift given to man by the primordial entity: peace and war at the same time, simultaneous theocratic and democratic government, with the ideal premise of anarchy.

If we change the point of view, nothingness encompasses everything. If everything exists, even nothingness, then we have a balance of existences separated by gaps, like pauses in a musical recording. Silences necessary to reorder the chaos caused in our mind by the ordered disorder of the notes, driven mad by the feelings they have made emerge for a moment. The universe therefore follows the harmonious logic of the human mind. Spaces are boundaries, walls, fences, wire fences, privets or trees, electrified or not, fences with machine guns, barriers of simple wood eaten away by humidity, rows of sandbags, trenches, high arches, watchdogs, tired old watchmen, children who by chance play ball on the edge of that border. Looking from one side to the other, like spectators of a match, while they play their own game of delicate balance with a ball heavier than they think. Children like men who must not let it fall, because on that will depend when and how they will spend the rest of their lives.

There are those who live in a continuous station of passage, others choose from very early on. The latter are the worst players, those born without skill or dexterity, those called by the first force that has made them stagger and lose themselves in the unfathomable abysses on each side of the line: the rapier stone of existence, or the silent and frozen black void of nothingness.

 

4

 

But I wonder if emptiness is the same as nothingness. Emptiness contemplates a space, a comparison between a presence and an absence, something that is outside and not inside. Sometimes, presence is at the center, surrounded by a void that, yes, now, could be called nothing. However, when the core is a void, where is the essence of such existence? Because walls are only walls, whatever material they are made of, even if the bricks are made of the bone material of the gods, bones of the Jewish God and flesh of the Christian God.

The body, therefore, is a good comparison. There are hollow organs, but they are only virtual voids, walls that collapse when they are without content, prepared to expand to a certain volume, not beyond, at the risk of exploding like the big bang that gave rise to the universe, they say.

Perhaps, so long ago, God's body exploded in that way, and gave rise to everything that exists. I say well, what exists is everything. Even in the emptiness of the universe between stars and planets, there is an existence that can be defined as immeasurable, even if man lives many centuries and knowledge reaches levels not imagined by us contemporaries.

From everything, nothingness emerged, fraud of the senses, as when we see the empty marrow of a broken bone: the blood has escaped, poured into the channels and rivers of the air, the beds and gutters through which the fluids go towards the always misunderstood sea.

The earth is a sea, and the body returns to it.

Does the soul exist? Is it nothingness or everything?

If the body alternates between states of wakefulness and sleep, if it passes from nothingness to everything, from absence to presence in such a dizzying, intolerable balance that it has been necessary to build such a vast and complex universe, how can we dedicate ourselves to speaking of the soul without falling into pejorative, outmoded concepts. Returning to religions is not the answer, returning to paganism is a kind of serene escape which lasts as little as the life of a blade of grass.

Is it enough for me to feel the love of a woman in her caresses? It is certainly an irremediable consolation in the face of existential doubt. But is it only a consolation or the tip of the iceberg of the secret answer?

Books like spearheads in forests full of furious animals that pursue us, relentlessly, day and night. Days of eternal hunting where we are victims, never caught and always on the run. Condemned to eternal anger and fear.

Hands like knife edges to tear the earth and plants, to wound the skin of dangerous animals, to break the river beds and open the waters wrapped in blood molecules.

Lungs like bellows resonating amidst the steps and runs over the fallen leaves, under which lie other corpses, old as the stars that have already stopped shining in our terrestrial sky. Crouching on the bank of a misty, torrential river, in the dark at night, with no stars in the frozen, empty sky, so like nothing, so like absence with no answer or possibility of filling, because there is nothing at hand.

Only fear, the last invincible boa survivor of the chaos of the beginning of time. Anxious, insatiable, and sometimes tender in the softness of its scales, like a small-town madam, behind a counter by the entrance to the brothel, charging the price of eternity for one night, and the sterile promise of a resurrection in the dead womb of nothingness.

 

2.

 

The golden cat

ate three-quarters of the cake

prepared by the jailer's grandmother

 

a bean cake with artichoke hearts

returned by hungry dogs

who could not tolerate the diet of a murderer

 

The grandmother visited her grandson for his birthday

with the cat in her arms and the cake,

she began to dictate a recipe

 

I will return with the neighbor's girl

she said as she said goodbye

 

When she left she had empty hands

 

III. JUDAS REHABILITATED

 

1

 

Here we wonder about monsters. What does Judas Iscariot have to do with them, you will tell me, if this association does not come from simple and eternal prejudices of caste and race, from the conventual imagination of a Christian saturated with rosaries, prayers and dogmas. His mind is so structured that he can only conceive of beauty in angelic beings with blond hair, blue eyes and harmonious shapes in their non-existent cosmic albatross bodies.

But this whole question is for us to ask ourselves, like the statement of a problem to be solved, or the initial hypothesis of a theorem that no one has yet invented, because it does not belong to mathematics, nor to philosophy, but to physiology, or rather to the biology of living beings, human or not. The big question tonight, in this contest that is transmitted by television waves to millions of inhabited or uninhabited worlds throughout time and space molded between the sweaty hands of God, is the following: can evil, imperfection, and as one of its manifestations: betrayal, be expressed externally through the form of a body, an expression, perhaps a smell, a movement that the most elementary brain would be capable of interpreting as a symbol of a birth defect? ​​

This is what we will call from now on any manifestation of something shameless for the human soul, considering it as an equivalent of God, of the vital substance that has given rise to the universe. But then the following question arises: why is good the cause of creation, and evil cannot be? We will be told that evil is chaos, and by its very definition it would not be capable of maintaining the order and balance that the creations of the universe demonstrate. However, this is to ignore intelligence as part of those creations, perhaps as the main cause of the first and great creation: the energy that has created the entity that created the rest of things: intelligence created God. Therefore, intelligence, as vital energy and zone of countless and infinite reasoning, is capable of doing anything in order to survive, even eliminating itself if this would satisfy its own logic.

We then arrive at the character that interests us. Judas betrayed the savior of mankind, history says and confirms it, even if reinterpretations or allegories try to show the circumstances, the mitigating factors, increasing or diminishing his responsibility. We will talk about that later. Now we are interested in asking ourselves if there was any manifestation in Judas' body of his betrayal.

Literature has shown us that a benevolent soul can be hidden in deformed bodies, like the bell ringer of Notre Dame, but we also have references to beautiful bodies that hide vile souls. What is expected for reasoning is that what is bad, manifests itself as evil, and what is ugly is shown Ugly. Evil and betrayal will manifest themselves with deformities, oblique glances, crooked mouths, wild hair, leaning and disproportionate bodies. Sometimes, a simple mole in the wrong place is the only sign of what the soul hides. It may even be that the body does not express anything by itself, but the education of the protagonist leads him to adopt peculiar attitudes or customs: a certain dress to keep warm, a cameo to adorn himself, simple things that in one way or another, and sooner or later, will be the clear symbol of the most hidden part of his soul. A monocle on a nineteenth-century accountant, a gesture of an artist in the theater, an eye that closes at the wrong time of the other in a man who is talking to someone in the street, a stain on the forehead of a child who is playing with the dogs in the square, a bone that sticks out on the wrist of an elegant lady who is shopping. At some point we will see how the child has thrown stones at the dogs, the lady has pushed a baby carriage into the street, the artist has squeezed his partner's neck too much on stage, the accountant has fabricated accounts for millions and caused suicides, and the two men on the street begin to fight to the death.

It may also be that neither of them does anything. That such manifestations of their bodies remain unscathed and firm for a long time, and in the eyes of those who have noticed them, these people go on their way without hurting anyone, and their momentary interlocutors, or those who have simply crossed their path at some point, will feel relieved to leave them behind, without really knowing the reason for such a feeling.

What did Judas have to show on his body that would denote his future action? Thousands of signs, gestures, bizarre adornments, words, ways of behaving in front of the clergy or a prostitute, his glances at Jesus, or his particular way of kissing. If we expected to see a hunchback and a sarcastic sneer, an offensive word, a hoarse and unpleasant voice, moles like ferocious beasts on his face, wrinkles hiding in their folds the scent of rot, hands clenched by hatred and envy, we would have always been wrong.

Evil is as pure as good, it is even more intelligent. Its chaos is engendered in the folds and balanced convolutions of healthy bodies. It hides in caves and finally makes itself known, becomes famous like an artist of the cinema. It unfolds its brilliant screen and darkens it with shadows so that through contrast, each of us discovers the scales of life, the weight of death on a third plate, the sorrow and despair of feeling immersed in a balanced chaos, in a balance that chaos creates over the centuries.

Men like ants that a gardener kills by kicking an anthill.

These are the monsters that human imagination has created when looking in the mirror.

 

2

 

Judas played a role in God's plans, it has been said ad nauseam. Philosophers, historians, theologians have pronounced sentences that do not validate Judas' role as anything other than a secondary actor in the great drama of Christ. How long will we wait for the mind that discovers the thoughts of Judas Iscariot in those times? The mind that most accurately imagines the doubts or certainties on which his actions were based.

To proclaim the coming of the Messiah, to tell the four winds of the region of Jordan, to the Philistines, to the scribes, to the Roman representatives, to the poor and the disabled, to the river Golgotha ​​that has endured so much death and putrefaction, so much corruption described as baptisms on the banks of a river full of filthy crowds singing praises to pagan, lecherous gods sentenced to death by the same forgetfulness: death of the fragile human memory.

To go along the roads accompanying Christ, talking with him, listening to him, sharing food, bread and fish, fruit taken from trees very similar to that of good and evil. Disciples who have plucked apples without realizing how few centimeters their hands were from a forked tongue, receiving in their subconscious the images of naked Eve and her contortions on Adam's body. Feeling in their bodies, as they contemplated the miracles of the newcomer, the passion that would later become love and death, the pain of nails like the painful pleasure of Eve the day she lost her virginity.

Shouting out to the ancient temples, impervious to new ideas, that the savior of the world has arrived, the body of God finally walking among us.

Believing, worshipping, and with the continuous thought of doubt, of the death of the body in contradiction with its divine origin. Many times she would have liked to ask Jesus what he would do with his body, since she knew that being the son of God he could not die, and if so, why did not all men deserve the same fate. Eternal life on earth.

Then he thinks that on earth all will dwell, even Christ. And he knows, from the silent gaze of the other, that he was right. Blood is absorbed by the earth almost with more affinity than water. The thick blood that gushes and bubbles in his veins every time his teacher proclaims words of rebellion and resistance, every time he speaks of love for all beings, and he imagines the bodies of women lying in wide beds, one next to the other, waiting for him, claiming him, submissive and wild.

Judas was an intelligent being, that is perhaps why he was chosen. While Peter was more heart and soul, Judas was the brain that distinguished the fallacy, the fantasy, the hallucinations of love. Call it politics, strategies, juggling of destinies and men in the hands of powerful sages whose only virtue is to deny everything that is outside their contours.

Even Christ could not see beyond his nose, only the charm of his divine body in communication with the heavens, the mantra, the soul's coming and going through universes inhabited by atoms where the genes of God are inscribed.

Only Judas, with his wisdom obtained from the experience of the corrupt city, next to dry lakes and streets of murdered people at dawn, with the experience of money passed from hand to hand, of hunger endured every cold morning, of the open abyss of each hidden hatch in the walls of buildings built to house the monsters engendered every night, every midday or afternoon with the semen fallen from the sky through the gutters from the terraces. Seeds of pollen that the helicopters will drop like insect bombs to populate the blood and that will feed the growth of the monsters.

Beauty outside, ugliness inside. Judas knows it and hides his discomfort with smiles. But he has caught Christ's eye. He knows that the other knows what he thinks, what he plans, what he will do, because Christ is Judas Iscariot. He is Judas's hands searching for coins, he is the lips that will kiss themselves, he is Judas's love for idealistic men, and his hatred for those very men whom he cannot be. Then he raises his eyes to heaven and contemplates what is written in the shapes of the clouds, the trajectories of the birds, the dance of the devil's drool, the sounds that come and go in the form of screams, of feathers, of dog hair, of blood splattered by sacrificed calves. How clear, how simple is the writing of God, and he wonders why he could not read those writings before.

He put aside the memory of the scrolls, of the Talmud, of the long conversations with the wise men. He denigrated the commercial scales, the accounts of the shopkeepers, the claims of the suppliers, the demands of the lenders. He raised all this to the realm of the superfluous and unnecessary, and he entered into the deep waters of the word written in the sky and reflected in the waters of the lake, the lagoons and the rivers, the cisterns and puddles, the vessels that innocent old women with ten children carry to wash their clothes for hours and hundreds of paths along the shores of death.

Judas stopped on the fast road to nowhere, let the disciples continue their journey alongside Christ, and contemplated the back of Jesus. He followed the shape of his body, the legs and feet in the old sandals that he dragged on the dust, and read the codes whose meaning he now understood with shivers, not only because of what they said, but because of the ease with which he now deciphered them.

Words written on dust and sand, seemingly erased by every step of every man, but quickly melted by the science of God in the deep earth, in the abysmal center where they say fire lives. The fire that melts and makes the fragile explode, but preserves for posterity in carbonized figures the ephemeral, the pulsating, the fallacious and the apparently inconsequential.

Not the paper money that burns into ashes, not the metal of coins that melts into relics that will adorn churches and temples, not the fabrics with which the rich merchants of the city dress, not even the perfumes, which by their very volatility, like wine, are the substance of the transitory. But the wood.

The bark of the trees grown alone on the mountains, far from each other.

Like gallows.

Like gallows.

 

3

 

Judas thought he had decided. He was convinced that he had made his own decisions. What we call free will could have been applied to his last and most decisive choice, just as we believe ourselves free to do what we wish. But this freedom refers to what has the name of destiny, to what the longest traditions have told us is written and cannot be changed. Each of us We follow a marked path without knowing that it is marked, that is to say that we are blind beyond our noses.

But there is also the factor of the world, of what we call reality, of the circumstances that determine our acts and decisions, even from the very moment of our conception: why not before, why not after? For this reason, free will is a fallacy, and the reality of the world is stronger than God. It acts from multiple sectors, countless points of attack that make us go there or here like wind-up dolls passing through a path of obstacles.

However, as this conception of life is apparently unconscious, Judas' decision, like that of everyone before and after him, is so true that it cannot be called hypocritical, because this word is equivalent to deception, and deception is a lie knowing the truth.

Life as a marked path is still a suspicion, granted only to thinking and reflective minds. An intuition, even, in sensitive beings. And who can say that Judas ever suspected that God was choosing him to play a role in a drama written by the Creator? Judas, a believing and practicing Jew, obedient to the laws of his religion, was a man who went around the markets and the temples, the social institutions and the places of recreation. He was a man who, without a doubt, loved women and found pleasure in them, who rejoiced in the wine shared with friends and laughed at the jokes and clumsiness of the town's jokers. He spoke seriously about politics and religion with the rabbis, about economics with the owners of the markets, and went to sleep at home, alone and pensive, recalling the strange miracles of the man from Nazareth.

Perhaps he dreamed that he was the one who performed them, because they were so easy, but their very ease hid the danger of their performance. They were like future bombs placed in the middle of train stations and airports: if they exploded they brought chaos to the world; if they did not, fear took over the world for a long time. Judas should not have thought or believed that Jesus was the son of God; such an idea was very far from his practical thinking, from his logic, closer to Kant than to St. Augustine.

Judas was a sensitive and tough man according to the occasion, violent and repentant, intelligent and clumsy, selfish and generous, pleasant and boring, sad, solitary and serene. His soul hid perversions, his spirit great envy, his body a need for satiety that was never fully channeled, perhaps only on the day he hanged himself from the tree. They say that the hanged swing to the rhythm of true time: the time of death has its own rhythm, which can only be captured in this way. Those who lie on the ground do not allow us to discover it, and death has a way of hiding and concealing itself, a way that is its disguise and its essence simultaneously. Therefore, it is everything.

He loved the trees as the earth, the city as the beds where he lay with women, the taverns where he got drunk and the markets where he exchanged goods and money. He abhorred the folds of the rabbis where they hid money and perfumes, he despised politicians for their perks and false words of well-being.

He came to think, in his long lonely nights in his rented room, that he loved Christ for that sincere attitude of contempt for everything that did not interest him, regardless of what others thought. He appreciated the intense voice from the cane fields of his spirit, the voice born for those words, which seemed invented only for him. The gestures of his hands as he rubbed his face after an exhausting day of touring fields and cities, talking and trying to be understood. She never saw him cry, but she knew he had done so when she saw him with his eyes already dry, as they can only be after intense anguish, like women when they dry the patio of their houses when it stops raining, enthusiastic and absorbed in the obsessive need for everything to be clean and impeccable when their husbands return from work, with that sad and ochre mist of a sad Sunday afternoon that rises not like a rainbow of the full moon, but like the decrepit explosion of a tree sick with worms.

Always the trees, Judas told himself. Dreaming and looking at trees even though he was a city man, and the city was surrounded and founded in the middle of the desert. Far from the garden of Gethsemane, the gardens of Babylon, the prairies of Botswana or Central Park in New York. All the possibilities of the trees, their requirements, their falls, their unpredictable heights, their arms raised to the sky and the rain, their roots buried like men still alive but suffering from catalepsy, the first burials that came to Edgar Allan Poe's dreams.

The drama of the Passion as A chilling horror story. No castles or stormy nights, no ghosts and howling wolves. Only the desert sun, blood and nails, money and words. And the song of thunder hiding the late, irreconcilable, sterile cry of Judas, swinging from a rope to the unique rhythm of the world.

 

4

 

Was, then, repentance the cause of Judas' death?

The official version says that, repenting of his betrayal upon realizing the divine origin of Christ, he could not bear to continue with his own life and decided to take his own life. He probably knew that he was committing another sin worse for his religion. A betrayal could even be forgiven if the person who commits it is not fully aware of the true value of the person he betrays; we could almost say that, as the world is divided into fools and clever people, betrayal is just another form of survival.

However, suicide is condemned as a mortal sin. Since the beginning of time, suicides have been buried outside a sacred place, but this is still a concession when many would like to see bodies decompose under the sun and the elements. Those who despise their bodies should not care about their fate.

Judas passed a rope through a high branch, made a loop around his neck and hung himself, letting his body fall swaying while the coins of his betrayal scattered like seeds on the ground just a few centimeters from his feet. They say that nothing grew on such ground for a long time, that the tree dried up and the rain refused to wash away the remains of dust. In the torrid summers, whirlpools formed so high that they seemed to reach the sky. In winter, swamps full of mud were created that sank in the spring, leaving a pit deeper and deeper each year.

Who knows if all this was true. Most likely life continued as it had until that moment: a tree exultant with dew on spring mornings, dropping leaves in autumn around its trunk, leaves that hid the worms and earthworms that eat away and feed on the roots of the tree. Perhaps there were buried and rusty coins, whose exhumation would later be the desire of theologians and scientists anxious to prove or refute the divine nature of the drama that occurred there.

No one has spoken of Judas' bones. Who buried him? It is barely told as an anecdote, as a secondary element, an appendix for specialists. If the bones lie underground, in the shadow of the tree, they are less valuable than the rusty coins.

They have always been so.

That is why Judas made a mistake, the fruit of his brief and fallacious dream.

Love confused among metals, sadness and pain as an essential vision of the world.

He knew, as a practicing Jew, that he was condemning himself beyond this life. That his soul would lie like a dirty sheet under the shadows of oblivion and ignominy.

Repentance as atonement. But there is no such atonement for those who do not forgive themselves. Nor can those who mourn the sorrows of others evade the bitter fruits of the past.

Judas knew that the future is nothing more than a fallacy invented by time to console us.

There was no repentance.

There was guilt.

Errors that cannot be corrected, because nothing can be corrected, it is only a matter of forgetting.

 

3.

 

The house has ten bells:

one for the front door

another for the one in the yard facing the river

the third for the dog who has been timid since his puppies died

the fourth for the razor blade salesman

the fifth for the winter wind-although he rarely uses it-

the sixth for the ants, when the house is empty

the seventh for the undertaker, on any day he wishes

the eighth for the entrance and exit of the prostitutes

the ninth, above the door, for my mother's visit

the last is not outside, but on the inside,

for the morning when the house allows me to leave

 

4.

 

The soul of tigers is as far from the spirit of an oak tree

as a gun shop is from a mental hospital

or a lightning rod salesman from a feather salesman

 

the secret is in the similarity

with which a man crying his eyes out

can be mistaken for a cut tree

 

the distance between things

is the essence of each object

just as God is so far from his own face

 

IV. THE DISCUSSION OF THE FROGS

 

1

 

In the park of my house, at night, especially on summer nights, when the sun leaves its black trail of invisible heat on the grass, on the roofs that have absorbed during the whole day the scorching fire of the star closest to our soul, the conversation of the frogs can be heard.

I say that the sun is the closest thing to our soul not for trite literary effects, although it turns out that way in the end, referring to the heat that feeds the human body, or the trivia

 

The sun, I say, is burning itself out at the expense of our lives.

 

We think we are living corpses as we pass through the world, but in reality we are dead stars that consume the sun's energy under our skin. We are constant fire, lashes on living wounds, executioners of ourselves, like inquisitorial priests trying to obtain confession of sins, witchcraft and spells, the tricks of the devil in our sinful souls from birth, from the very moment of conception. Because our parents begot us under the sign of sin, on moonlit nights, when wolves howl calling their semi-human brethren, when even the vampires of medieval legends emerge to make themselves present in the writings that the brain of God has generated in the creative hands of men.

Civilization, literature.

Fundamental bases for the atonement and condemnation of men.

That is what the frogs talk about. I have heard them talk about it during long sleepless nights, where the nocturnal heat, the sweat under the sheets, the blush of the roofs that rest from the merciless vassalage of the sun by the houses on which it sleeps the long summer naps, are not the cause, but mere companions, excuses that try to deceive the weak wisdom and reasoning of the poor idiot who tries to recover the sleep of many nights before, since the summer began, after the long hours in the office, in the factory, of walks, of wanderings through the endless recesses of the domestic and world economy.

The cause of insomnia is the noise, the intermittent and constant buzzing, the dissonant, discordant music, which resounds and transforms into bodies that fall like rain from the summer sky, clear of storm clouds, full of deceitful stars, disguised as laughter, with moon masks on their pregnant women's dresses, constantly mounted by stallions, nocturnal birds that emerge from the black holes of the night, from the bestial orifices where the tricks of the gods merge and emerge converted into desires, into inviolable drives, to violate under tacit consent the nocturnal stars under the moonlight, dead star, sterile planet, that looks at and illuminates sexual acts with the envy of a frigid wife, and older than all the virgin stars. The croaking of frogs is a song, a hymn beneath the howls of wolves and the barking of dogs, the cries of stray cats and the moans of couples making love under the trees in the nearby square, inside cars that rock with the weight of bodies that, from one moment to the next, will feel that God, not man or image or deity, but God themselves, is in the car, an instant as full as eternity, to then slowly fade away, as the heart returns to its normal rhythm, and bodies congregate so that the warmth of the world is preserved a little longer inside that car: symbol of the world, cave and refuge, cell that would like to remain unique eternally, because there are both, the only necessary ones: the nucleus and the plasma. So I get out of bed, look at my wife for a moment, aware that she is not looking at me, asleep under the effects of the light from the television screen, slowly, so that she does not wake up, so that I do not have to give her explanations, to grant me a space in time in which we are the world and I, so that she, my wife, is the stratum to which I can return as someone returning from a day of war, from a desert without water, from a trial lost in the courts, from an irremediable sentence. Let her be the canon to which I can turn: the irrefutable proof that God exists because he has created beings like indelible stains on the hearts of men. Ink stains that women have spilled like splashes from old fountain pens, immersing our hearts in lakes of purple ink, to rise from the surface as newly created beings. Letting her rest, not knowing for sure if her closed eyelids are an excuse to hide the vigilance of her eyes attentive to the darkness of the night, to the sounds of her man's body on the bed, on the floor, approaching the window, wondering what is bothering her husband's heart, worried, attentive, nervous, unsatisfied by the death that haunts the present and  the future, which circles around the house, stalking the man she loves, the dogs she protects and who protect her, the house that collapses under the signs of past moons.

I turn my gaze and steps toward the windows, almost naked, knowing that my body is the spirit over which her thoughts hover, perhaps the now definitely awakened gaze of her sleepwalking eyes watching, caring, lost in reasoning, observing my back drawn against the windows illuminated by the stars, and in the background the moon like a skeleton of white light, wondering, inquiring of the creatures of the night what it is that bothers her husband.

And I, the one who lies in the posture of a restless statue, standing in front of the window, drawing the curtains a little to observe what can barely be glimpsed by eyes more tenacious than human ones, think about the outside and the inside. I think of the dangers that threaten to destroy the precarious balance of my world, of the troubles that are born like internal germs in the nocturnal nightmare of each day's dream. I escape from such thoughts, as when I listen to music.

Attentive, then, but not lacking in sorrow and anxiety, I listen to the conversation of the frogs, which is more like a discussion, an exchange of everyday ideas, some intelligent, many profound. Until it becomes a monotonous and alternating diatribe, where the conversation gives way to deductive reasoning and the extrapolation of ideas on successive levels of knowledge. All their song is about the condition of men: generosity and meanness, simple extras in the distribution of virtues and evils, secondary actors we could call them. But symbols, allegories that they, the frogs, use to tell their story, just as we use animals to tell stories like fables.

I wonder if in this way, by using us as protagonists of their stories, they are really talking about themselves. I don't think it is that way. They go beyond allegory: they pass into myth.

And I listen to them as I can, traveling through the labyrinths of hidden anthills, closed long ago by municipal workers, where the bodies of the ants are human bodies buried after being killed by weapons wielded by meager gods. Enormous meadows, fields, remains of rubble, car cemeteries, wastelands of dead flesh, visiting other regular guests who do not pay any kind of rent, only the carrion of their own spirits.

I listen to the story of humanity on a summer night, and the sweet aroma of carrion threatens to penetrate the cracks of my house. Knowing in advance that my fight is a lost war, I prepare to defend myself, willing to sweat and fight until exhaustion. I will fight to keep it out, but it is already inside, I tell myself, because I am able to remember it.

Fear disguises itself in many different smells, but deep down it always smells the same.

 

2

 

How can I describe what I heard from the frogs? Their song was like the diatribe of men numbed by the fear of the winter cold, as if the night frost were something more frightening than what fear usually causes. Maybe that is so, maybe the cold is the only thing that is truly neutral when it comes to death, that is, the only thing capable of sufficient equanimity that human thought is not prepared to understand, much less to exercise.

They spoke of winter as if the world's catastrophe had arrived, the Apocalypse decided from the beginning of time by a God exacerbated by furious bile and attacked by an internal ulcer that forced him to remain cautious and always furiously angry with the angels, men or demons of his property. The winter that colors everything with mist and fog, that fogs up the windows of my house and prevents me from seeing the garden where the frogs sing, conversing, the impious declarations and sentences about men, in this case, man, me.

I as a representative of the human race, my wife as another individual who will be considered more as a victim on my part than as someone to judge. Perhaps she has heard them before, and that is why she does not get up to help me understand the interchangeable soliloquy of the frogs, the dialogues and speeches in which they insist as if they were Descartes saying that my existence, and therefore my whole world, exists because they think me, or rather pronounce me, declare my name and therefore create me. My house, my wife, my car, my garden, my parents, my future children, my misfortunes and my fortune, everything is because they, the greatest thinkers because they lack any trivial or self-interested initiative, have decided that I should be the object of their thought, of their croaking.

Their sound, more than the word Human language is the most subtle, direct and thought-like language of any system of communication invented by man. They speak of the gods, and the gods exist; they speak of man, and humanity exists; they speak of the future summer, and it will exist. They know that the winter of the soul is eternal, but the summer of the body returns and regenerates itself in each season by virtue of a natural cycle that is beyond thought, as if thought and soul were a whole of mutating forms, energy that transforms and moves through the different bodies of nature. Sometimes, frogs, sometimes men. That is why sometimes a man named Kant appears searching among the grasses for evidence of God, spending his life with his back bent and his eyes half-closed, fleeing from the light of the sun to darken himself in the shadow on the ground, getting used to the darkness to better perceive the ochre flashes of the hair that falls from the head of God. He knows that the god of our invention is old and depressed, that a long-ago premature baldness afflicts him and makes him feel angry, ugly before the mirror of the constellations, which do not console him as they sometimes know how to console lonely men who walk along the beaches at night, thinking of their finitude, returning to the feeling of humility that diminishes the sensation of horror and humiliation to which all experience leads us every day, every hour, every minute of the day.

There is no consolation for God, and Kant knows it, but he seeks evidence like a detective, he converses with the frogs of his time, who perhaps are the same ones that I hear conversing in my garden, although I am not able to communicate with them. I turn around and see the placid and serious expression of my wife, who continues sleeping, or pretending to be asleep, because she knows that I think and create her in this room of this house that is my mind. And out there, the frogs, like the authors of a drama, a serial, a television soap opera that changes day by day according to the numbers of a rating measured by parameters already established centuries ago by a god who never knew what television is, a god who has gone to the theater every day of his eternal life until he grew old among the boxes and the dust of the curtains, listening to the actors whisper backstage, spying on the murmur of the invisible public of an empty theater but always full of rumors.

And that is what I hear from my room, behind the fogged-up windows. The sound allows me to glimpse, behind the mists of the night that is already retreating like a defeated, obsequious, humiliated and cowardly lover, the laughter hidden behind the fans, the smiles hidden by childish palms, the gestures of mockery, the hands raised in a sign of commiseration, the endings called to sanity and piety. I see the fingers pointing at me, high and pointing as if a shot were about to come out of those phalanges like in the old Warner cartoons, a shot at point-blank range, a bullet not a prop but a real one, and I, waiting to get up again for the next scene, like every fictional character worthy of being called such, see myself submerged in the illuminated gloom of the floor of my house, a dawn.

God's characters do not resurrect like Tex Avery's. God's characters do not endure blows, falls, shots, without suffering an irreparable loss. The loss not of the body, but of the weak and fleeting existence in someone else's thoughts.

I fall, my world dies.

 

3

 

So how do I respond to the call of the frogs, when I don't even know if they are calling me? The most I feel is that they talk about me as if I were a piece of paper drifting in the autumn wind, already on its way to the long lethargy descending towards the winter ground, lying ready to be trampled by the drops of night dew, by the afternoon rain, by the urine of dogs and the tires of cars. Everyone is indifferent to my world, called to execrate me as if I were a prisoner, as if I were a vagabond corpse on the bunks of the street where the drain of a factory leads to waste.

My house smells of incense, of freshly cooked food, of perfumes from baths and showers, of soaps, of shit many times over, of sweat, of dirty sheets and of clean sheets. It smells of grass, it smells of foreseen death, it smells of pain and tears. It smells of loss and humiliation, it smells of happiness.

That is why I will go and kill them. I want to exterminate them so that they do not play with my life, so that they stop judging me, so that they abandon their roles as gods, philosophers or whatever they boast about. I am my own god, creator of the philosophy of my life. The one who creates my happiness and my death. My head is at the top of the world, at the center of the universe, in the spontaneous generation of the energy that enslaves and vitalizes everything around it. I am the executioner of my wife, of the grocer on the corner, of my mother, of my father, of my mother ... They are the children who await me around the corner of my life, of the dead I left abandoned in the streets of my brain, of the mother who offered me life as one offers a piece of her body, of my father whom I offended with indifference and oblivion, more offensive than mockery and even hatred.

I, a frog hunter, will go out into the garden of my house at dawn, barefoot, in my underwear, with a shovel, and I will begin to crush them, overcoming the disgust they might provoke in me with their slippery bodies, with that peculiar green that hides them in the grass, pretending they are what they are not in order to survive. They will use, I know, all the resources at their disposal: jumping, foaming at the mouth, urine that according to children's myths blinds whoever is targeted. But they will use nothing else, except, perhaps, thought. They will use it to wipe me off the face of the earth, but I know that oblivion comes with indifference, and if I attack them now it is so that the hatred generated by fear and anger turns into permanent thought. Thus, I will always exist, and my world will survive.

The initial alternative, killing them, is still an attractive attempt. Without them, the gods will stop bothering me, and if I die with their thought, that death will only be within the parameters of a philosophy that I refuse to accept. Therefore, my brain, more advanced than theirs, will create its own world, will spread the seed of creation to the four winds within the contours of my brain-house. And yet, I am afraid of them. They speak, they croak as they create my future, the sincerity of my ears is as unwavering as the truth of my eyes. I hear them murmur now, I hear them say between wet lips that I will go out with a shovel to kill them. They know of my plan, and I wonder if I have revealed it with my thoughts, or if I have spoken it out loud. It is known that their ears are deeply sensitive, that they understand human language, the gestures of men, the smell, the vibrations of pleasure or fear through the air that surrounds their sensitive reptilian skin.

I hesitate, but I must go out to find out if they will survive. Leaving them outside is no longer possible, because soon I will not dare to go out, when the fear of their judgment is so great that it inhibits my action, increases my fear to such enormous limits that it prevents me from rising from the foundations of my bones and opening my eyelids to the bright day of my house, where the body of my wife lies as if in the limbo of the world, at the limits of the possible.

I open the window that looks out onto the park, I feel an unbearable chill on my skin. I tremble and resist, I endure the fearful croaking that announces death, and it is as if the end of the world were approaching at any moment, as if beyond the fence that separates us from the sidewalk there was nothing but the frozen and arid end of emptiness, the silence that the wind brings like a whistle announcing the depths.

And the frogs grow, not in size but in cruelty, in that pity full of sarcasm with which God feeds himself to continue being the powerful god that he has always been: sadness behind the veil of melancholy, pity behind mercy, coldness behind the fire of embers, nothingness behind the fragile cover of time.

 

4

 

I go out through the window, and it is as if the hands of God were fanning the air that is already too cold to be endured by any man. Hands eager to play with the air to make it a hurricane wind that attacks the fragile human structure, its bones, not its houses or buildings. Constructions resist many centuries, man no more than a few years. And the wind is their main enemy, a wind without brain or reasoning, without worries or feelings. An instrument of greater forces: the air polluted with the breath of the dead who rise from the earth in every garden, every square or square meter of a city built on nameless graves.

And they, the frogs, sing on the disturbed earth, they sing their contentment and their victory among nooks formed by walls of gloomy, mysterious, dark sounds and with nothing but emptiness as substance.

I face them with the shovel in my hands. I raise my arms and run towards them with an angry cry of vengeance, an arrogant attitude without double meanings or false commitments, only the end as a goal, the end of the frogs: their mirages reflected in mirrors: faces of faces on faces, like successive days that leave faint and transparent features on the clearest images of recent days, until these too go away, back in time, leaving a residue of ghostly figures that overlap in two-dimensional images. Who can understand them, who will ever interpret them? Only he who reconstructs time with the patience and intelligence of a chess player but with pieces of a puzzle.

I step with my bare feet the grass, not as cold as I thought. Somehow it is a comfort to replace the icy, numbing cold of the tiles with the warmer shiver of fresh grass. I have seen dogs sleep on the grass on winter nights, the earth is warm deep down, the dead know that. I lift the shovel as high as I can, staring at the frogs around me, feeling their slimy bodies brushing against my feet. I drop the shovel on them, and I know I have killed a few. I lift the shovel again and see the broken bodies, surrounded by many other frogs jumping over their dead brothers trying to escape. I chase them all over the garden, running after them, hitting the ground, and I don't know if the neighbours are watching me, and I don't know what they are thinking. But nothing matters to me anymore, because I have found a reason that dominates me, a movement that I find unnerving and stimulating at the same time, something that makes me live so that I can live later. I know they are my enemies, I see it in their ugly, coarse bodies, in the ugliness that contradicts all sense of natural beauty. I shout insults as I run and crush two, three, four frogs simultaneously. With the edge of the shovel I sometimes stop to cut them in two, and I enjoy watching how both halves persist in a reflex movement that slowly diminishes, and it is on one of these occasions that I realize that the remaining ones have stopped to look at me. I see them with their little bodies turned towards me, still, pointing at me with something that is not their legs or their mouths, but that indefinite something that I have seen and heard in them from inside my house.

Then I see them heading towards there, and they go through the window.

My wife, I think, is in danger. My refuge is threatened. And when I get after them, they have already invaded the room, surrounded the bed, and they try to climb the walls, but they cannot do it.

I scream and call my sleeping wife, I sing a hymn of horror and pity. A cry that is not a complaint but a sorrow, an intimate commotion of inconsolable echoes. A poem that comes to me from ancestral places in the caves of my mind buried in the jaws of a wolf that died forty centuries before.

From far away comes the scream, the cry without sound because it is the sum of all the screams, and the sum is zero: it is incapable of engendering.

I run, stepping on the frogs, no longer disgusted but with hatred. I climb into bed and hug my wife, who is still asleep or dead. I feel how the bed now moves as if on waves: it is the sea of ​​frogs that displaces it in a shipwreck movement that has no beginning or end.

We are the inhabitants of a raft on an immense sea of ​​croaking frogs, the sound of storm and thunder, the sound of rough waves crashing together.

And we, the last vestige of a deceased humanity.

 

5.

 

The moon fell twenty meters from the Ministry of Justice

on two men who were fighting

No investigation was carried out

No extradition request was made

There are no borders for a murderer

Who has no hands or arms

Who has no eyes to see what he kills

 

The police picked up the bodies

And deposited them in the morgue

The remains of the moon were collected with shovels

Wrapped in black bags

And taken to the city dump

 

There the skeletons of the sky rest

 

There are no more lights at night or fire in homes

People look at the sky as if they were looking

at a well full of dead children

 

6.

 

I have walked along the ledge of a burning building

The firemen's water lances did not reach me

 

I reached the end of the interrupted bridge

I contemplated the city inhabited by giant snails

Which circle around themselves

The larks arrive in flocks

And by the hundreds they lift each snail

To take them to the nests of heaven

 

the water at my feet is a sea

with red helmets and black leather sails

where the cemetery beetles swim

 

for a city fire is a disease

but the sea is death

 

V. IAGO IS AFRAID

 

1

 

Today an anguish has become intolerable to me. I know that I am going to die, like everyone, someday.

When is unknown, but I know that soon, because I feel more and more alone. Others have friends, wives, girlfriends. They have partners with whom to share time and the tedium that comes with the passing of the years. It is not the need for company for the mere fact of not dying alone, since death is a path as solitary as birth. At least such is the argument that we impose on ourselves to console ourselves in the face of the abysmal fear of finitude, of there being no more, of the dark performance of reason that annihilates everything except despair. Perhaps there is hope in despair, perhaps there is faith in this very incongruity, and like an anchor deposited in the absurd, the absurd is the instrument of our salvation. An incontrovertible instrument of rescue of From a rough sea where memories are dreams and dreams are simple arguments refuted by logic.

The sea is reality, water in the lungs, waves like whips hitting our faces without letting us breathe, whipping our bodies like a hundred beasts of the Inquisition, forcing us to tell the truth: our impotence, our unhappiness, our terrible and never-released anger.

I envy those who walk through the streets of the city accompanied by someone who is more than a companion. I guess in their eyes a bond that unites them, even if it is anger, resentment or remorse. They are a bond perhaps more permanent than love, and it is better to have hated than to have never felt anything.

I mean nothing closer to happiness, more arcane than the summer between ruddy angels playing naked in Lezama Park, raising the old and dry feces of dogs, laughing like brainless fools but with a heavenly expression, so naive that it cannot be expressed in any way other than being seen, appreciated, contemplated as an irrefutable and unrepeatable feeling.

The couples who kiss on the benches in the square are saccharine and cheesy, but I envy them because they know, they have discovered, that their bodies are paths never trodden, wild trails where every breath, step, sound and every speck of dust and sandstone is a discovery. And kisses weave networks of tiny points that will only end when the material that constitutes them is exhausted. They know that this will never happen: the source may be lost or forgotten, it may lose its initial importance, its force, not through exhaustion but through simple indifference.

But they will be there, the caretakers, the gardeners, the cupids with their arrows to kill indifference and oblivion just as they kill spiders that threaten to poison bodies occupied with their pleasures, in the nooks and crannies of the embrace, in the unpleasantness of the savage bites on the hot and sweaty skin, in the blows that are not felt as blows but as pleasures of a wheel without exhaustion, without loss of impetus, even to the chance of the human heart, even to the interrupted heart that has said enough because God said enough.

My envy is hate and it is love, which consumes me like the starving dogs, the rabid dogs that roam the streets at night, knowing that every contact with a human being is a danger and a well-being. My bite frees me from a gram of hate and anger, because I share it with the scapegoat: a drunk lost between hallways, a prostitute returning home after a poor night of work, a hungry boy, perhaps drugged, who faces me with the anger of unreason, being his only opportunity to express with his eyes the true anger, the enormous resentment that if let out could end the whole city like a neutron bomb.

I hate, but I am not capable of killing. Doing so would be like ending the object of my life. Because more than my body, the essence of my life is them: those who have, do, take and possess what I cannot.

Those who can do what I cannot.

But what is power, I have asked myself many times. If I wanted to, I could do everything, I have heard many say. If you have a relatively healthy body there is nothing you cannot accomplish. Nonsense from evangelical messengers of God. I respond with a silent obscenity, touching my genitals or giving them the finger. Arbitrary responses that are of no use, it is true, but they show that sometimes silence is the best argument against other arguments lacking intelligence.

I point to my head and my heart, to continue with the commonplaces of any middle-class discourse, pointing out that both places are made up of two machines whose gears wear out and their spare parts are unobtainable because each piece has been hand-made by a craftsman who has already died. We go through the streets of the city, from store to store, through avenues and various neighborhoods. Here we don't have any, but maybe in the house on San Martín Avenue, or in that other one on Riobamba Street, or in the Pompeya neighborhood, who knows on what corner of a suburb already abandoned by the fortunate hand that accommodates the rigors of supply and demand.

Once the gear is broken, the rest of the machine will no longer be able to do anything, except occupy a place, and with luck, serve as a support for a flowerpot, a stack of books or the tools that will be used for another machine that is also on the verge of extinction.

I have the look that I imagine those useless machines have towards the tools still in use resting on them, indifferent to the place where human hands have placed them. Like a couple making love on a mattress, without asking themselves what that mattress thinks or feels, not even taking into account the quality, the comfort that the The mattress has offered them so that they can fulfill their desire satisfactorily.

It is that those who are happy think only of themselves, and each one in turn thinks of himself alone, an individual entity impossible to communicate with anyone else, even if a second before they were as in tune as if they were born in a single body. That is why I hate such sufficiency, the satisfied smile of those who have felt that: the indefinable as any sublime entity, all reach of a deity through a hand that touches with its fingers the bodies of a couple of humans sunk in the vaporous cage of the briefly eternal.

My problem is not loneliness, only, because this is measured according to the appreciation of oneself. My conflict is the difficulty, the impotence to access that which others possess. I have consoled myself by telling myself long stories of failures and rejections, of bad births or bad luck and bad company, places as common as the places where one wanders daily, practical places that leave no memory other than the drag, the hangover, the final oblivion.

I caress myself in front of the mirror, and I love myself as much as I hate those who pass by on the street as if they lived in a fairy tale mirage. Everyone is happy, it seems to me, so I will create my own happiness, my self-satisfaction, my flagellation: my only treasure, so that it may be the envy of others. Those who believe they have been touched by God by the simple fact that a hand takes them at any time of the night in their bed, and caresses them, and squeezes them as if that bed were the last refuge after the holocaust of humanity.

 

2

 

I know I am going to die, and I am afraid, not so much of the incalculable uncertainty of what I will find beyond, but of what I will leave behind in this world. I will leave behind, even what I do not have and need, just as I need the air I breathe.

Everything that others possess, I desire. Things in particular, things in general. Not because I particularly like them. I have come to the conclusion that what I need is the longing to feel what others feel when they possess such things.

So I know that I will die without having the car that my apartment neighbor has bought, showing it off at the door of the building every weekend, polishing it all day, with brief interludes to go up to his apartment to have lunch after suffering, even from the other neighbors and myself, the high-pitched and gradually hoarse calls of his wife from the balcony. I have endured the shrieks of his children as they went up and down the stairs, excited beyond belief about their father's new car. He has taken them for a ride, for fifteen minutes at most, a few laps around the block, surely, but the boys have been content, and his wife's indifference has made him content, it has comforted him in his absorption with his own pleasure: the car: looking at it, sitting inside, as if he were masturbating for hours and hours, polishing that metal skeleton of an unattainable, impenetrable woman.

That is what I envy, satisfaction, as if happiness depended on a ridiculous salary that would still be enough to pay the eternal installments of a car fresh from the factory, chrome-plated, patented, held in one's hands as if in the self-awareness of real satisfaction. As if my neighbor had just left church, from speaking to the salesman god with his circumstantial smile and his own hands clenched with desire: from signatures, checks, documents that will compromise my neighbor's life for many years. Guarantees, mortgages, loans, pay stubs, identity documents: all signs to mitigate suspicions that will never die, because that is the essence of society.

I recognize suspicions in my gaze when I watch him tirelessly scrub the metal of the car, which shines under the Sunday sun, giving off flashes that bounce off the windows of each apartment in this building and the one facing it, flashes that are not weak - since the sun penetrates with great effort into the tunnel of the street - less conspicuous, less heterodox in their religion of creating subjects forever faithful.

I still recognize myself as an atheist to this religiosity of consumerism, my desire is in the sensual pleasure that things give. I would like to take the hand of that woman I saw in the elevator this morning, distracted by the distance that the cell phone offered her in the center of this cage called an elevator. I remembered what I have read many times about many poets locked up in concentration camps, political prisoners or simply repentant or not criminals, people who in the midst of their sentence to confinement, live freedom thanks to the imagination that a book can offer them: a trigger to the effects and consequences of their own brilliant imagination. But this woman with her cell phone in her hand, her head slightly tilted, oblivious to the ascent The enso and descent of the mechanical-electric device in which we were both immersed, traveled in its own networks with many others, interconnecting in brief, virtual gazes fixed forever and forever lost in the history and past of non-time space.

Perhaps the first ones who got into an elevator have felt the same apprehension of their soul and body, for a brief instant before setting foot in the cage. The body resists being carried against the laws of gravity, and the soul is always fearful, like every good and intelligent woman, of the future of her soul in view of the protection of her loved ones. But every maternal reprimand or latent threat is overcome by the dominant logic of reason, and science is there to prove it, to refute it if necessary with new experiences that improve the product of technology.

This woman, I say, traveled doubly: in space-time against the established laws of gravity thanks to the paths that human intelligence has created, like paved grooves, in the physical structure of the world; But I was also traveling along other paths without possible dimensions of measurement, the virtual world that is and is not, the fourth dimension, perhaps, so sought after by fans of paranormal phenomena. The communication network that can be interrupted by the breaking of a satellite, but not the imagination that the world has created in that woman.

Watching her, while the elevator stopped at each floor, opening its doors automatically, I could appreciate the captive look, the naive smile, of mockery, sadness or astonishment, of unclassifiable pleasure, of hope fallen into disuse, of imminent death, of faith in future births, of lost battles, of love without hope and therefore higher and more beautifully adorned by the shine of the tears of happiness.

That is what I envied: the happiness of a timeless journey within the vulgar parameters of time-prison clearly represented by this cage that transported us, temporarily breaking, and confirming by its very exception, the known rules of space-time.

When the elevator stopped on the ground floor, the doors opened and I stood there pressing the button that held them for several seconds during which the notions that define the meaning of hours or centuries became confused, and I knew nothing but the sun penetrating from a space on the outskirts that could be the unyielding city or the very beginning of the ages, the paradise and hell that Blake described, or the abysmal purgatory that Dante and Virgil once traveled through, or the beginning of the apocalypse that the mouth of God hints at with angry and unintelligible murmurs.

I saw her, then, looking at me, returned from who knows where, returned, at least in body, from the distant immersed and divergent regions of her cell phone as if it were one more of the black holes of the universe, open at the other end in a white hole that expands the content towards the imponderable, or perhaps the dead. What is reality, what is imagination, if not states of parallel daydreams?

If she heard my question, if by some eventual chance of preeminent causality she came to understand what I was referring to, she decided, cautiously, like any intelligent woman, to ignore me. But not before throwing a look in my face that was harder than the entire set of concrete that makes up the structure of this building: a look as hard as her own life, or mine. So that oblivion fulfills its function correctly, and the world begins again without remorse.

 

3

 

I will die without all that: what I mentioned and everything that from now on I will mention as a fallacy pronounced to the south wind, against the wind of the enormous south. The one that will make me swallow my own voice so that my pleas consume my insides like an acid, so that my protests are invisible germs that slowly take the form of worms on the walls of my conscience. Everything I will never have because I always want it so much, at least that is what I tell myself to console myself with the only idea, atrocious and recalcitrant like all ideas of consolation, that I could have had, or could have been, what I longed for.

A man leaves his house in the residential suburbs of a city, gets into his car and starts the engine, and waits for it to warm up on a winter morning. He puts on music, sorts out his work papers, reviews the agenda for the day, stops to think. Suddenly, his wife comes out the door and approaches the car, leans over to kiss him goodbye, wipes her hands on her apron and takes her husband's head and rests it on her chest. Both faces are hidden, but I know they are smiling, both of them reconciled after a nighttime argument, elbow to elbow in bed, resentful at times, repentant at times. And always, united by the common skin of desire, eager to embrace each other but stubborn in the pride that ruins everything and takes us down high and always, always solitary paths.

On this winter morning, what is important has prevailed: not the house with its windows overlooking the front garden, nor the roof that slopes harmoniously to the sides, the birds that look for food in the grass on the sidewalk, the neighbor's dog that barks because of that morning interruption, or the school buses that go door to door picking up children; but them, both unique, united not by the fire or the bodies consumed in it, but by the incorruptible soul, which no matter how much they insist on dirtying it, remains unharmed next to them, the unique soul, the third that is not discord but a bond, a source, food, support, refuge, consolation, hope, need, not of the altars but of a god of bed inside, always ready to clean the dust from the porcelain surfaces of the old and delicate tableware of the grandparents. The grandparents who called love the same thing they call it now.

The man will leave for his job, a job, perhaps, that he has chosen because he has to make a living. I follow him through the streets to his office. I see him park in his usual spot, a creature of habit as he demonstrates by taking the same elevator on the left, passing on the right of the staircase where a worker has been fixing the walls on the fourth floor for six months, greeting the secretaries without stopping, avoiding the smell of lavender given off by his sixty-year-old colleague, whom he cannot stand, entering his office, turning on the computer first of all, leaving his briefcase on the chair, never on the table, opening it and taking out one by one the folders and sheets of paper he will work on that day. But he does not see what awaits him every morning on the desk: the cup of coffee with milk and a greasy croissant. He looks at the door that he rarely closes, only to isolate himself when a case requires greater concentration, he watches the secretaries come and go, but no one appears at the door to greet him, to ask with a knowing and also naive smile if he misses something in the office. In that case he would accept the joke, like a foolish joke on April Fool's Day, which he would later tell his wife, amazed at his own stupidity and that of the others in that rickety office.

But none of that happens. Silence surrounds him when beyond his senses the noise wreaks havoc, the hum of computers, printing machines, stamps hitting desks, angry shouts, protests from men and women, doors that close with the winter air current that sneaks in with each new member of staff who arrives late, even the signatures of the bosses can be heard like the squeak of pens on documents. No one thinks about his cup of coffee with milk and a greasy croissant, just one, for God's sake, a simple croissant that I could even accept as being from the day before. He searches through the drawers of his desk, and I can't help but smile as I confirm the imagined words of this man who thinks he's so intelligent. But sometimes we do such naive things because we resist recognizing a truth that we see coming and don't want, that we fear because it would change all the schemes that rescue us every day from the abyss: the unforeseen. What comes from chance or destiny so unknown, or so blind to it, that it's the same as calling it chance.

I, then, rejoice. I see his pale face, his astonishment of a beginner or of an old man abandoned in the middle of a crowded city. Surrounded by the echo of his own silence, while flies enter his mouth and come out again as if it were an unwanted dead person, a dead person who has not yet died, and they, surrounding him, waiting, form angelic orbits around his head.

He waits for the moment when someone will enter with a cup of coffee and a croissant on a plastic tray, finally breaking the momentary interruption, the interruption of an interruption, the change of a change that will return things and events to their usual course. But habituality is only another form of chance, and he is now beginning to realize it, even though he always knew it, knowledge not recognized by the accommodating conscience of his exemplary life.

I wait for the moment, now, when a man will arrive to bring him an envelope and a very short message, which he will not even read. A few minutes later, I see several men enter, who quickly and efficiently take away furniture, a computer, papers, leaving the almost empty briefcase at his side, except for paper clips, a calculator and a photo of his wife. He has nowhere to sit and rest from the tornado of that morning, his heart readjusts and he insists on committing suicide every minute, an up and down in a square devastated by anonymous criminals.

Desolation is my friend.

Despair ration my confidant.

When someone begins to feel the sourness of my heart in his mouth, and when his foot gives off the rancidity that I feel on my skin, it is the moment when I am no longer so alone.

Today I will approach him, peeking through the door of the office where he will not stay more than another ten minutes, and without him seeing me, I will murmur a few words of useless consolation, like alcohol on a wound.

I will call him my brother.

 

4

 

He will look at me as if he did not understand at first, still lost in his own thoughts, trying to understand what has happened to him, and how such events have come to manifest themselves in his until now peaceful life based on efforts. He laments, I see it in his eyes, with a hypocritical look that he will never dare to recognize, much less to himself. What efforts did you make in your life to achieve what you had until now, what sacrifices, how many hours of work, how much money invested, how much mental effort and physical work have led you to this loss? Because every loss is also a thing that one has, another achievement, an absence that shines by its very essence: the substance of nothingness, the emptiness of what was, the outline around the air of the absent, disappeared thing, the ghost, the aura, or whatever you want to call it according to the religions or philosophies that man has developed to console himself with mere sketches of ideas on sand. Buildings that now, my brother in misfortune, tries to save as best he can from the waves of fate, that whore who sells herself only at a very high price, as Balzac would say, so high that not even the soul of Faust and all the souls in Dante's purgatory would be enough to convince her to give up her body for one night and be nothing more than a prostitute, a body ready for anything, given to everything, even laceration and death.

But as we all know, the world will not survive without fate. And there are some of us who are his disciples, not for money but for communion of ideas, or rather for the same ends although not similar causes. I am one of them, and even if the desire to confess everything to this man who now looks at me twists my second face, the internal one, with a laugh that many would call despicable and I call reconciliation, I will not reveal my action to him: it was I who caused his dismissal.

And I walk away from that office, ready to continue with my agenda for the day. I don't know what he will do from now on, I'm going to his house in search of his beautiful wife, I'll ring the bell, she'll answer me perhaps with an apron in her hand or a still warm bottle. Maybe she'll open the door with a busy smile and a baby in her arms, rocking him with a movement of her body that reveals her calves, the arch of her hip under her skirt, her hair tied on the nape of her neck, no makeup, just a couple of delicate drops of sweat falling down her forehead. I tell myself that I would like to dry them with my tongue, feel the salt that feeds me, but I know that my ugliness is one of the many causes of my failure, so I put aside seduction, and set off on the winding path of destruction.

I know that a woman can forgive everything: the loss of a job, disorder, lack of ambition, even indifference, even resentment, since all of that is part of the daily sacrifice we call love. But she will never forgive the infidelity, and if she says she does, she will still retain a bitterness as firm as a stone in a sack full of whimpering puppies thrown into the river. Sooner or later, the fabric will rot and the bones will come to the surface.

I say what I have to say, not a word more or less. She understands, I see it in her face, suddenly eager for tears, then full of fury, and later, when I am gone and the door is closed, in the face successively rich in expressions of rancor, resentment, frustration, hatred. She will leave the baby in his crib to clean his face in the kitchen sink, but her son's crying will be an extension of hers, and both will transmit misery to each other.

I will walk along the flagstone path to the sidewalk, and continue my way listening from afar to that funeral music in broad daylight and under the most brilliant and beautiful sun of the season. My heart bursts with joy, and people who cross my path see me smiling as if I were a madman or an angel. I sit at a table in a bar on the corner. I can only see the entrance and the roof of the house, a few cars and the house next door hide the windows and the rest from me. But for me it is enough, my imagination has the virtue of truth. I don't know why I have been given this unique fortune, but I have to take advantage of it.

Five hours later, I see the man return in his car. He gets out with his head down, without his briefcase, forgetting to lock the car and heads towards the door of his house. I see him, or rather I guess he hesitates, delays his arrival. He stops for a moment, seeming to discover something other than his concern. He sees that the door of his house is ajar: he must be thinking of a new misfortune, a robbery this time. As if that emboldened him, as if in this way he channeled all his fury at the supposed thieves, he enters abruptly, slamming the door against the wall and ready to face everything, except what really awaits him.

From where I am, I hear, spread through the street like a bitter and desperate echo, a deep cry, already returned from all the paths of hell, already dead and resurrected a thousand times, already wise from all inert wisdom. Exactly like an echo without hope because there is no life in the heart of that cry.

I don't know if it's a woman's or a man's. Not even if it's the house that cries out as a whole, like another character: a symbiosis of those who lived there, lamenting inconsolably. Soon to become the monotonous cry of mourners, the Sephardic song of laments. Something, in short, that I am constantly lamenting, feeding the fountain of tears.

Something has happened in that house, and I don't know exactly what it is either.

But I can finally raise my gaze without fear towards those around me, towards those who look at me sensing something they will never be able to define, and return the gesture by looking towards that house.

My home and my destiny.

 

7.

 

A tree's mistakes are covered with manure

A saint's mistakes with pages of ink

 

Human crimes are not debts

They are payments to the god of grass

Which grows in the corners of the lips

And between the folds of the hands

 

The dirt of fungi like vast lakes

Where water gods are born

With fins folded in sacred palms

And mouths with bubbles of blood

 

The error is a zero number after the last digit

Where each point has two faces:

That of a fetus and that of a corpse

 

8.

 

When you see in the forest

A dozen owls hunting rats

It is because the moon has not yet risen

They fear it and do not hunt if it is watching them

 

When in the forest you find

A dozen dead wolves

The moon has already risen

They do not tolerate the light of its shadow

 

In the forest there are twelve fallen trees

Ordered symmetrically in a prism

And the moon lies among them

because they could not bear the size of the past

 

in all the forests of the world

you will see dozens of identical prisms

with wolf carcasses in the center

and owls flying over them

the moon rises and sets surrounded by dust

 

from the city you will hear every night

the cries of rats

 

VI. SANCTITY OF REASON

 

1

 

Rationalism was a school of enlightenment for the world. Reason grew slowly, progressively, falling step by step in an ascent without contradiction, because it was the natural evolutionary path of the predominant ideas. Concepts that acquired strength from places, situations, circumstances, unpredictable, hidden sources, that no one, not even the founders and advocates of this social, cultural and intellectual movement, could have defined with precision.

All this reminds me, however, of the slow ascent of a drop up the stairs in Dino Buzzatti's story. A drop that, overcoming the laws of gravity, rises at night without any cause that justifies such a procedure, that marvel and change in the usual resources of the laws of physics, but also without a reason for it to be doing that: climbing a staircase.

The dripping of a tap that is not properly closed due to the carelessness, forgetfulness or indifference of someone who gets up in the middle of the night to drink a glass of water, or the dripping of the drizzle in the drainpipe of the roof of our house, is justified, but we are not able to understand how a drop of water rises as if it were a crawling animal, avoiding the climate of the house, the characteristics of the tiles or the carpet, the dryness to which the accumulated dust should subject it, even being able to avoid the most curious and thirsty tongue of the dog, awakened without a doubt by that speculative drip of suspicions and sharp temperances.

But I cannot call my drowsiness temperance, but rather contemplative meditation. Reason then emerges easily despite the contradiction it carries within itself: capable of understanding everything, it denies and affirms emphatically: a drop of water cannot ascend, but it accepts the situation because its main instrument attests to it. Eyes and ears confirm the phenomenon.

For all this, Reason was discovered as the greatest discovery, the supreme power in the hands of man, as if he could take his own brain out of his head and contemplate it like a dissector, searching with delicate tweezers in the convolutions for the motivations, the discursive paths, the rational distortions that are nothing more than exceptions that confirm the natural laws.

Years and years of tireless search, of unprecedented efforts s for human minds that have no choice but to wear out at some point, the neurons old, fulfilling the cycle that knowledge applied this time to anatomy and physiology has discovered as patterns, rules and variations.

Variations on the same theme, a musical genre that has prevailed precisely after the zenith of Rationalism. Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and many others have speculated with themes by composers of much less talent to create works of varying length in order to fulfill an official or private commission, which would help their economies to be able to devote more time to their best works.

And that is what I do now, talk about Rationalism, about ideas already studied a thousand times by men of greater talent. Variations on the same theme that should contribute something to history. So I ask myself, what is the human brain more than a repeated series of ancestral customs. Isn't this, by chance, that Monteverdi melody, that Gluck aria, the fateful call at the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in the primate's mind?

I like to imagine that an ape might now be striking a stone against another stone, trying to strike a spark, such an apparently reflexive act serving as unconscious meditation on the struggle he has just engaged in and lost with another male for the possession of a female. I see him sitting on the ground, his legs open, his back slightly bent, his arms active and solemn, and his hands in full and supreme function: holding one stone, another stone, another, hitting them together, making innocent, weak sparks come out, but provoking something else perhaps more extensive than the centuries: a syncopated rhythm that slowly transforms, metamorphoses, varies in duration, in senses, imitating the sound of water or rain, of the animals of the jungle calling each other, of birds, of grunts, of screams and moans.

And finally, something moves the ape, transports him to a place that is not the jungle, something projects in his mind another space and another time: abstraction.

He does not know that this is the name of the power that he has now discovered. The rhythm has provoked such a thing in him, more consciously perhaps than at any other time, when he smells or hears the sounds of the jungle. His eyes search the space around him, the trees and the sky between them, for the place he had glimpsed for a moment, and which the interruption of the rhythm made suddenly disappear.

The ape becomes confused, he rubs his eyes, scratches his head, jumps up and down with joy and obstinacy, he is eager to understand what has happened to him, he calls out to his companions, but none of them come. He climbs a tree, as high as he can, and contemplates the arbitrary extension of the forest, more or less wide depending on the eyes that observe it. The visual capacity of the species, the sagacity of the gaze, the learning that this ape has begun to acquire depend on it.

He rubs his eyes again, searching in them for what he has seen before and cannot think again because he has not understood it. Just as he understands the ways in which the forest presents itself to his gaze, the smells and sounds, the touch within his reach, in the same way and with the same intensity he does not understand the other thing that he has glimpsed.

He senses that such an inversely proportional relationship will take him a long time to contemplate. Willing to stay there in search of a new experience, he knows that all of this is behind his eyes, and yet he does not know it completely, yet.

 

2

 

It is easy to confuse reason with logic or science. Logic has the appearance of truth, and truth seems to be formed by the structure of reason. Science, then, has the function of corroborating and affirming both.

But how far from truth is logic, and logic how far from reason, and reason even further from science.

If the ape that we take as an object of experimentation sees the foliage of the forest in which it lives, it only knows that there is the forest and beyond there is nothing, at least until it goes towards the limits and crosses the zone that will open its reason to other parameters. Then, logic will tell it, in the future, that beyond what it sees it could find other things. If this ape had more intelligence, it would develop a science to investigate, to study whether these experiences are repeated as often as it supposes. However, neither is the ape intelligent enough nor does its experience have the intensity required to provoke deductive reasoning similar to the flow of a river winding through the undergrowth. This is where it must descend from the tree and touch the water, drink it, satisfy its thirst and first conform to its body, and when it intuits the questions: where do the waters come from and where do they go, it will climb another tree to contemplate or A broader view of the river. He will look towards the cardinal points, which are not yet such for his mind but directions populated by different smells and sounds. He will relate one direction, upriver, with a certain frozen spirit of the air, stronger winds, a disturbing silence and the echo of growls not entirely precise but more feared. He will change the direction of his gaze towards the other side, there where the wide serpent of water disappears, with sounds of distance, with some thirst and sorrow, with the cry of macaws, with beasts with ferocious teeth, with the loneliness of his tribe moving away. Each season of the year, which, I repeat, is nothing more than changes of heat, cold, rain or frost, bare trees, trees full of flowers and fruit, ground full of leaves and covered with mud and shrews under the stones, a dry river, perhaps, or as thin as the thread of a very green and still very young leaf, each season will give him different sensations, and therefore each direction, where the river and the trees are milestones, punctual axes along which the ape slowly learns to guide itself. Smells and sounds are sensitive points that persist for the circumstantial, for the daily life of mating and feeding, for the survival of the strongest, the youngest and the most skillful. But when at some point in the evening, the hunger for food and sex are satisfied and a slight drowsiness makes him lie along a branch, with his legs entwined in it or his back resting on the trunk, he will take a leaf between his fingers and unravel it, amazed by that and by his own amazement at what he had never seen before: the parallelism, the similarity between the strands of the leaf and the directions of the river and its tributaries that he can now see not only because of the height or position of the tree he is in, but because of the sum of previous experiences and visions. Each one of them added together and superimposed, until forming a distribution that will be called a map, although he never defines it as such. Intuition, therefore, is an amalgam of knowledge, a need, a drive or restlessness that eats away and grows until it leaves no room for anything but its own overflowing body: an obsession that will not disappear until the moment we decide to open a book, open a door or explore the exquisite skeleton of our own body with a scalpel of words sharpened with ideas or the violent anger of a desperate truth.

That is what the ape intuits: the initial despair and the final despair.

It intuits the primordial nothingness at the ends of the river.

The nothingness, so objective, is cold as empty temples of piety.

Now the ape has learned to know its despair, to objectify it, perhaps to call it in some way that we will never know (both it and we know and do not know things that we could have exchanged for mutual benefit, but without a doubt that would be another story). He transforms it into anger because he doesn't know any other way to channel it without it first gnawing at him internally, undermining his conscience, which he barely senses as such.

The branch on which he sits shakes dangerously under his nervous weight, his growing discomfort with overwhelming, devouring impetus and certain in its next move.

He feels so alone with such a discovery, with this feeling coming from a then unknown part of his mind, as if he were seeing the incarnation of an alienated vision, of a monstrous soul emerging from nothing, of what was never there before because he never saw before.

A beast of his own size, calling him and questioning him with contradictory orders, which impels him to act and to be still, which hits him and flatters him in successive moments that fill him with perplexity and bewilderment.

He jumps. He looks down at the ground, accustomed to the primordial instincts that tied him to the earth, and that now feels so far away, so separated from him, with shame on top of him as if he had been thrown out, thrown for a cause or reason he does not know.

He looks up, straightens his body and puts his hands on his forehead to protect his now more powerful sight from the sun that tries to suffocate him as it did so many times before, perhaps saying goodbye in a last plea or act of a father abandoned by his son who grows up and leaves home, almost the last and loving blow on the head of a mischievous child who from now on will face the unknown.

Reminding him of his origin, what he is about to leave behind.

What is now forever unrecoverable.

 

3

 

He gets down from the tree and walks in one direction, the only valid one from now on. He feels it, confirms it with every step he takes while the river, next to him, goes in the same direction, more or less fast depending on the unevenness of the terrain, the rocks it finds, the banks overflowing with weeds and branches. The water flows faster in the center, just like what It happens to him, he feels in his chest, or lower down, where the food gets stuck and makes him feel bad many times, an annoying tickling, a compression as if his own body were twisting, or something unknown was growing inside him, imprecise, more imaginary than real, but whose existence he cannot get rid of so easily by stopping thinking about it.

The thought, he now realizes while walking along the bank of a river that guides him, is as amazing as it is annoying, and he knows that he is only beginning to glimpse its infinite possibilities. He wonders why he realizes so many things in these last few days, when his whole life was spent between instinctive behaviors that led to nothing but the survival and continuation of his species, even this he did not think like this, with these ideas, no longer words, and it was not even thought, but simple happening and acting. All this seems so far away and useless to him now, so innocent, that a nostalgia for peace and tranquility distresses him more with each step he takes away from the forest, towards the limit point that his renewed mind tells him is that beyond, somewhere, is the end of what he has seen and the beginning of what he has foreseen.

Little by little, the landscape becomes flatter, not because of the absence of rocks or unevenness, but because the trees give way to a plain planted with grass and gentle hills crossed by stream beds, sometimes dry, sometimes as fine as words that successively form and order themselves in his renewed mind, so many and so confusing that they lose him in a new ecstasy of sun, even when the sky, now so different, open, clear, abysmally immense in its heavy infinity, is attached to an endless layer of clouds that come and go, accumulating like new words and new ideas.

Walking orders them, places them in ubiquitous spaces in his mind, and it doesn't cost him much work, they go by themselves to spaces as small as prisoners' cells, destined for that place forever, condemned to a repetition as persistent as the life of the person to whom they belong. But he knows that they are ideas that will continue, because nothing denies him that the same thing is not happening to others of his species. Perhaps, behind him, others have begun to walk, following him out of curiosity, perhaps, but that curiosity is also a sign, another form of new thought. If for him knowledge came in the desperate form of a deforming and painful restlessness, for others it may have come in more friendly ways, such as simple curiosity, or the even more elementary form of imitation. One day many apes may wander out of the jungle, towards the plains, to populate them and discover the mountains that appear as insurmountable barriers, massifs populated by shadows and mists, which he senses will generate things without forms, sounds as fearsome as the growl of a lion hidden among the plants. But before getting there, he must master the plain, free himself from the vertigo that each step on the void suggests to him. Feel that his feet are stepping on solid ground and not a green lake. Systematically, the things around him give him sensations that he incorporates into his body, and he now trusts much more in his mind than in his body, his conscience: the sensation of being himself, a thing and a being at the same time, something separate from and integrated with what surrounds him. Susceptible, as he has always known, to dangers, but these are nothing more than fortuitous events, parts of a value determined by his own confidence and intelligence; There is nothing but him in this moment, and he is part of the whole. Able to communicate with a simple gesture or a shout, something that is as simple and effective as he had never known before.

Fear has moved to deeper levels. Everyday life loses relevance, and distances and remoteness, the apparent absence of food, are circumstantial, and hunger is a sensation that can be tolerated more than before. Fear is directed at darker things, at sensations that he cannot transmit to the outside because he finds no signs of identification or reference. Before he was a lion, a snake, a hyena surrounding a sick and dying woman. Now none of that is as vital as the unpredictable vision of his own eternity.

He does not define it that way, of course. Before he believed himself to be eternal because each day he erased the conscious memory of the previous day, and the present, in that way, was as long as eternity. However, now that he feels like an individual entity, that new deductive reasonings have been born to settle in him making nests where many others will grow, his own mortality becomes so certain that he can no longer help but feel expelled from his other life, from his other space, from the privilege of eternal life.

Longing for his unshakeable existence is from this moment the sign, the primordial factor of his new and indispensable life. Surviving will be as simple or complicated as he decides, but the rise of nostalgia and sorrow has begun.

Existential anguish is a product of Reason: a beloved son, only one, in whose existence not one life has been invested, but the sum of the events of the world.

Meanwhile, he will look at the mountains that rise to the sky, in search of another greater curiosity. Meanwhile, he will work the new fields of his mind and the new fields of his land obtained through walking and survival, through killings and some other remorse, through forgotten guilt and above all, through the pleasure obtained in each observation and tool carefully obtained, in each laugh and joy under the rain. Each artifact of his intelligence is a feat worthy of being told, of being left in some place in the world.

He already knows that memory is never enough, that everything tends to oblivion as each living being begins to die the same day it is born. He has seen it in his own children, in the futility of illness and life, in old age that evolves like a fish rotting out of water, in the dead pierced by spears, in angry screams after cries no less loud, capable, yes, of crossing distances greater than his imagination.

All human work is more permanent than man himself, every fluid, cry, offspring, cry, moan, laugh, construction, every given death is more persistent than the life that generated it.

Everything persists a while longer, despite oblivion, without its own existence because no one thinks about it anymore, and without consciousness the entity ceases to be.

They are only facts, events, similar to its previous life in the jungle.

The ape, which is no longer just an ape, knows the imponderable dichotomy, the contradiction of its very definition of being, and everything it touches and feels, starting with its soul, has two indefinable elements separated by a wall.

Perhaps, those mountains.

 

4

 

What seems so high and enormous must necessarily be something important. If something like these mountains seems to reach the sky, touching it, surrounded by clouds that form and die around them, it must be only that for which the soul of the ape is desperate for knowledge and relief.

Because still, and even at this advanced stage of its evolution, sensing that its consciousness is a manifestation of its soul, the tip of an iceberg never seen, the consciousness of its individuality, of its uniqueness; still, then, it believes that knowledge will give it satisfaction, will remove the weight of doubt that grows with each step it takes towards the mountains, in equal proportion to the growth of the massifs as it approaches.

With each step, he sees the slopes more clearly: the trees at the base, the sparse bushes whipped by the wind that makes them grow twisted but resistant, the bare rocks, ochre, white, grey, reddish, the white darkness of the clouds near the summit, which they hide.

It is there that the ape thinks knowledge must be, no longer discovery but revelation that will open the rest of the bony doors of his body. He cannot take his eyes off those distant peaks, even at the risk of stumbling over the obstacles that the plain presents to him, the dangers that lie in wait for him, the hunger that only a day of sun and moon can interrupt.

The ape has worked on the plain, has hunted, has fished in the streams, has mated with his females, has rested and slept while the wind passed like a rough hand over his naked body. A body that one day, at dawn, discovered itself more vulnerable, more unprotected, without so much of that fur covering that characterized its species: straight, black hair, frizzy on the haunches, thin on the elbows and knees, falling like two streams of water on each side of the head. The hair that the females caressed for a while after mating, astonished, perhaps, also moved.

But he has left it all aside, he has left it behind. He has decided to leave the plain just as he did before with the forest. He knows that space is another form of time, and places follow one another and have names because time has called them to unite them in the same hollow system, a place called time, which this time is past.

Reason dominates him, forces him to think about every step, idea, gesture, sound that his body makes. And what cannot be avoided must be submerged in the obligatory system of analysis. The why of things and events, the why of days and nights, of the sun and the moon, of rain and drought, of fear and joy, of fury and tenderness, of energy and tiredness. There are questions that he does not ask himself and yet he senses there, inside and outside, created and manifested by symbolisms that he cannot stop: the wind that whips him and tries to stop him. The ape, the females who appear on his path to entertain and delay him, the beasts that growl around him and which he ignores just as the man condemned to death ignores a toothache minutes before his execution.

He will climb the mountains, whatever the cost. He can already glimpse the figure of those who dominate the world, who see everything from their height, manipulating the clouds and the rains at will, stopping the wind and capable of causing the world to break up if they decide to collapse at any moment. The ape has never seen such a thing, but his reason tells him so, he deduces it without difficulty or questioning. He smiles because he realizes that he now knows and will know many things that he never saw nor will ever see.

They are there, like the gods. Present for something.

But he does not know for what.

The happiness of knowledge is not susceptible to sarcasm or irony. It cannot be destroyed, only mocked or discarded, never ignored. As fleeting and useless as doubt is eternal and essential.

Uncertainty metamorphosed into monsters called despair, procreating daughters with the name of bitterness.

The gods who do not let themselves be seen provoke anger and contemplation, prayer and suicide.

Those who do let themselves be seen, bring the immediate death of all doubt, but also of all hope.

The path of the ape is the rugged path of losses, of what was expensively bought and what was badly sold. Of procreation and dead children. Of what was recovered and what was lost. The path of the ape is a path that narrows, but widens in depth, in dangerous slides, in abysses formed by very high side walls. A route that involves lonely kilometers without service stations, without motels or boarding houses. Where there are no neon signs on the sides, no food stands, no road signs. Only at the perceived end of the asphalt, a watery image on the pavement in full sunlight, every day, disappearing every afternoon in shadows that advance from the sides, darkening everything as if the ape-man were going blind.

Without lights, without reflections, only a stupor that insomnia causes in the unprepared.

Up ahead, high up, are the mountain peaks, more threatening at night, larger and colder. With imprecise contours, flashing figures with whistles that travel with the wind.

The perceived clouds and the absent stars: the immensity above man.

And as much as he takes refuge in reason as a last resort, he knows that the sanctity of reason leads to the path of martyrdom.

The flagellation of bodies is only the exhaustion of souls.

And the amusement of God, the manifestation of silence.

9

 

On a train

There are a hundred passengers sitting

All men, staring at a fixed point

Maybe the back of the head of the man in front

Maybe the eyes of the man in front

 

They don't move

They barely blink every twenty seconds exactly

Only their hair flutters in the autumn breeze

That comes through the open windows

Their shoulders rub against the seats next to them

 

The train doesn't stop at the stations

The guard comes to ask for tickets

Only then does each passenger raise his right hand

And take the ticket out of the left pocket of his jacket

The guard doesn't ask questions and leaves in silence

 

But the train derails, leans to one side

More and more until it lies on the ground on either side of the tracks

The men don't hold on to anything, they fall on top of each other

The neat fabrics are torn, there is blood on their faces

Their arms twist, the irons of the wagon surround them

Like snakes with bones fused in forges

 

they have not resisted the desire of the train

the will of inertia, the heavy heart of physics

their eyes now closed do not blink

only their hair continues to move

touched by the white hands of the autumn wind

 

VII. ANGELS ON THE WAR PATH

 

1

 

I have read a strange news item in the newspaper. It was not on the front page or on the following pages. It was only a fifth of a column in that area that the newspaper dedicates to news that cannot be classified within any type, only general information. I was having my morning coffee in a bar in Buenos Aires, killing time before going to work. I usually start with the jokes page, that is, the last one. I am not interested in the sensationalism of the news on the front page, or if I am interested I try to leave it for later, when I have a full stomach and my brain with the dose of glucose necessary to fulfill all its functions, at least the most important one of making the world bearable and inhibiting the neurons that tend to commit suicide every day.

As I said, at the end of page thirty-four, I read: Birds prevent flights. Above the title, it said Neuquén. I no longer remember the rhetorical grammatical architecture. The journalist on duty, but I will make a very brief summary of a news story already very short of events or actions. It was something strange, an environmental phenomenon, a failure of nature, a pathological behavior, a premonition? None of this was mentioned in the article.

I wondered how long these events had been repeating themselves. Some birds, bustards to be more precise, settled on the landing strips one morning. They say they were seen for the first time that day, but most likely they had been arriving at night, flying against their custom without daylight, or perhaps for days before, hiding in the nearby woods. However, no one, as far as we could find out, reported anything resembling flocks by any zoological or ornithological institution, or any authority, whether forest rangers or municipal or provincial officials.

Because, suddenly, the runways were invaded by bustards that moved no more than a few steps, unable to move because there was almost no room between them. There was movement, of course, some took flight but others quickly took their place. Those that left landed on the hangars, on the cables and telephone poles, or disappeared into the cloudy sky. The squawks could be heard from miles away, and the flapping of the wings sounded like cardboard sheets being hit with incredible force against the asphalt, causing a breeze that spread a foul smell of feathers and excrement.

They said that the birds were increasing in number as the days went by. They no longer occupied only the main runway, but also the auxiliary ones, they gathered at the doors of the hangars, the roofs of the control offices, and they also landed on the radars. It was no longer possible to receive flights from outside or for local flights to take off. People protested in the first few days, after the expected curiosity and laughter of the first moment, as passengers watched through the airport windows, with their children in their arms, pointing out the curious birds searching for food on the tarmac. Smiles turned into angry looks, then anger, finally resignation. Everyone left with their suitcases and their heads downcast to their homes, to wait for the next possible flight, others would go to other cities, with the still very slight feeling, so that they could realize, that perhaps the same thing could be happening in them.

Of course, multiple attempts were made to scare the bustards off the runways. Water was sprayed with huge hoses, then ice cold water too, which should have embarrassed the competent authorities if they had been aware of the climate in which these birds usually breed. The water only caused the birds to rise like waves where the jet passed, and they settled down again, now cleaner in reality, shaking their feathers and adding an even more familiar smell.

The gendarmes and biology teachers arrived, first to observe, then to plan attack strategies. They threw gas bombs: the birds were still there when the smoke disappeared, some dead, very few. A little while later new birds arrived to take their places, on the bodies that later began to rot, and the airport then gave off an aroma very similar to that of a concentration camp.

They looked for methods that were less and less cruel, more subtle and, they hoped, more effective. They used sound waves produced by a device connected to loudspeakers. Humans could not hear them, but it was assumed that the birds would not tolerate it. The first test was on a cold, rainy October morning. The squawking was getting louder and more intense, so much so that there were protests from the nearby hospital because the patients remained restless, not wanting to eat or sleep. The scientists, who were now in control of the situation, spoke loudly to be heard by their colleagues. Finally they gave the alarm, and an unusual silence settled in the ears of all present, reaping, in contrast to a blooming hope, an arid resentment, a fetid emptiness of sand and dead flesh. The bustards stopped squawking, and remained still for several minutes. The machines stopped working and the scientists were happy about the apparent success of the experiment. They said that the next day they would carry out the definitive test, with the full spectrum of sounds and the greatest possible expansion through the full number of loudspeakers.

At eight in the morning, with no sun and no clouds, a strange sky that foretold disaster, the loudspeakers were checked, the sound machines prepared, and the alarm button was pressed. As the first time, the squawking stopped, the wing movements stopped. This lasted a few minutes, but suddenly the birds began to shake their heads, sticking to each other. The other did not do so violently, but as if they were scratching themselves or removing an insect. They squawked again, squealing, responding to the sound of the machines, and their responses were like mockery, because they seemed almost rhythmic, with a sense of chatter rather than protest. Then the scientists looked at each other, turned off the machines and began to dismantle them.

There was a pause of almost two weeks, long enough to know that the experience with the sound machines had left perhaps irreversible consequences: children as young as four complained of profound deafness and no response to immediate treatment.

Then the armed forces were given permission to attack the birds with extreme violence. Trucks arrived with weapons and soldiers, one November morning, perhaps on the first of the month, and they shot the birds en masse. The rattle of the machine guns replaced the squawking to which the inhabitants of Neuquén had already become accustomed, like a part of the noise of the earth, like a part of the sounds of their own body, like a memory impregnated with guilt and resentment, but so habitual that they could no longer live without it.

The soldiers stood in a long row on both sides of the track, enough to leave no gap where a bird could escape. But with the first shot, all the birds together took flight, and it was like seeing the asphalt ground suddenly rise towards the sky. Some bustards were hit by the bullets, but very few in relation to their immense number. The tracks were then empty although dirty with excrement, feathers and some dead bodies.

All the men and women who followed the experience, the journalists, the provincial authorities, the curious, even the national and Chilean tourists who crossed the border when it was known what was happening, gave a huge cry of joy and victory. They hugged each other, and needless to say, they celebrated all day and the rest of the night, without seeing or noticing that the birds were settling back on the runways, without giving the cleaning machines time to clear away the dirt and debris. When everyone got out of bed that morning and went to work at the airport, the bustards were back on the runways.

All this has lasted just over three months so far.

The first days of December have been very hot. The birds live, mate, make nests on the runways and raise their children. The males hunt small rodents, bring food from the forests and grasslands.

The airport workers were fired until further notice, or moved to other areas. The offices were dismantled, the hangars abandoned with the planes inside. Only the curious, the novelty seekers, the pretentious ones who try to unravel mysteries, remained camping in the surroundings. At the entrance to the airport there is a permanent guard, which has gradually given in to apathy and laziness. Young people enter and leave through the gate to head towards the runways, to watch the birds that move like the sea, in waves that come and go almost imperceptibly, without straying too far from the edge of the runways, rising less and less. A calm sea, a hot summer sea that does not move.

The birds are changing their habits, it seems. They hardly fly, they stay on the ground for every activity in their lives. They shake their wings, they feed on the rains, it has even been seen that sometimes they eat the flesh of their dead companions, because they hardly ever fly in search of food towards the forests or pastures. The curious have had to move their camp a few meters back, and they know that in the next few days they will do so again.

From time to time you see planes flying over the area, and some helicopters watching with their appearance of threatening mosquitoes. No evacuation instructions have been given to the inhabitants of the area. Helicopters fly by, the wind from their propellers shakes the feathers of the bustards, lifts the fallen feathers that are deposited again like a rain of remains, of memories, of times gone by and stopped in the crack of the world.

The birds remain, and the helicopters leave, sensing the disaster, the collapse of the sky.

 

2

 

The second case that caught the attention was that of the dogs of Dolores. This time the news was covered directly by television reporters, at first as one more of the curiosity notes that are used as filler in the absence of sensational news with which to occupy the attention of the viewer during the hour that the program lasts. It is in itself curious and a case of sociological study the fact that television news programs never stop having their high audience rating. It will always be attributed to the morbidity of the viewers, to the search for the truth.

 

We are all looking for the easy tear that reminds us for a moment that we are alive and still capable of feeling, but no one seems to ask themselves if those tears really come from the depths of our soul or are just the drops of dew that the humidity of the environment leaves on the surface of every body that knows it is alive. A leaf on a bush on a winter morning also cries if we see it, and is moved by the wind as if a shiver ran through it. Perhaps it knows, without human eyes to see a television screen, what is happening in the world, death and life conspiring to subject all creatures to an uninterrupted game of iniquities and betrayals. A television newscast is also a theatre, another variation of the fiction with which humanity tries to summarise complex reality in three or four permanent patterns. If something does not move us due to ignorance, art will make us aware of it through a well-staged performance, excellently acted by actors who are so amateur that they do not know they are acting, and above all written by scriptwriters who know nothing of life except the surface, and for this reason, from their height, they are able to not lose the irony and sarcasm necessary for their point of view. Hamlet, for example, could have been taken from a radio news programme in the fifties, while the whole family gathered after dinner to listen to the important events of the day. That is what happened with Orson Welles and his War of the Worlds: panic and confusion, but above all the exfoliation of fear on the bodily surfaces of hundreds of people. The fear that prevents us from acting and leads us to stay locked up in our houses as if in an atomic shelter, an old and ancestral childhood reminiscence of protecting ourselves in our own bed and covering ourselves with a blanket up to our heads. Or the psychological version of the womb and the grave, as each one prefers.

It is the same fear that has begun to invade the hearts of the inhabitants of Dolores for some time now.

The first reports reported that the dogs of the city had begun to proliferate. There were more than usual in the streets. Everyone assumed, because no one thought much about it, that they were stray dogs that had procreated more than expected, so the municipal authorities decided to dust off the old regulations, while also dusting off the bloated brains of their employees with respect to these same regulations, and with trucks in between and a decree quickly signed by the mayor between breakfast and lunch, they went to the streets to catch the dogs. This is what happened, it seems, giving rise to many afternoons and mornings of suburban occurrences and disasters between neighbors who claimed to be the owners of some of them, and the stampede of animals along the cobblestone streets, the relentless search in vacant lots, the confinement in doorways, the cries of children, and the occasional threat of bites, some of which were carried out. But rather the drama came from the men, women, and children who adhered to or rejected the municipal measure. The merchants agreed, as did the school teachers, or the old women who walked the sidewalks ten times a day to buy at the corner store a butter, a packet of sugar, or yerba, whatever their memory allowed them to filter from time to time during their timid and always the same days. Those who argued and confronted the employees were some men, excited to find in those days an opportunity to relive the old days of the leaders who fought tenaciously against the raiders in the era when the province was still more countryside and plain than buildings and asphalt. There were also those who miss, without having known them, the violent times of the American West, and stood in the middle of the streets, as if they were gunmen, to prevent the slaughter of dogs.

Some women, mothers of families, rescued animals and took them to their yards as if they were children to add to their families, their arms always being enough to embrace and protect every helpless member of human society. Women who believe that their arms are wings with extendable membranes that never break, that their tears are as inexhaustible as their patience and their capacity to be moved.

And the children, this time all together in a single mass irremediably united by a common element: the salt of fear and the iron will of rebellion. The adult enemy this time was no longer his parents, but a more determined and less personal group, and therefore less successful.

 

The enemy was now also the enemy of the parents themselves, and they could form a united front. But while the strategies followed one another and failed, as often happens between allies united more by necessity than by a common ideal, the children grouped together in a single group that moved from one street to another, taking dogs from the streets and taking them to their houses to hide them wherever they could: closed yards, closets, unused washing machines or boxes, always watched by their younger brothers, who, being too young to participate in the battlefields, served as lookouts, and thus also felt useful in the new war.

But the war subsided for a while. The dogs almost disappeared from the streets for a few months. The news stopped, only at the local level did people continue to talk about the protected dogs, and the fate suffered by those who were caught. Many went to see the corpses on the outskirts of the city, where a few days later the municipal authorities carried out a cremation that the townspeople, the unemployed at that early hour of the morning, witnessed until the smell caused them to disperse again to their homes and work.

As I said, there was no news on television for those of us who were only following what happened through this news medium. Some time later, a journalist showed with a pride only comparable to the ringing and trumpets with which the channel announced the news, the rebellion of the dogs.

It was called that more as a sensational headline than because it responded to the reality of the facts. The truth is that the dogs began to escape from their homes, joining the few homeless people who had been left free, and after mutual recognition of body odors and wagging tails, they gathered to walk through the streets of the city with no other apparent reason than a walk or a simple and innocent laziness.

People went out to look for them, but after a curious meekness, where the animals returned to their kennels, patios or beds, after a not always affectionate reprimand from their owners, they escaped again at the first opportunity that presented itself. The same protests as before arose, but this time the defenders did not dare to go to the authorities to help them rescue their dogs, nor was the municipality willing to carry out the procedure, both out of resentment for the previous popular rejection and so as not to create opposing opinions in the face of the very soon electoral elections.

The dogs, then, stayed on the streets, and there were more and more of them. It is not known how so many appeared and in such a short time. It was assumed that by making an average of one dog per house, and taking into account of course those in which there were two or more and those in which there were none. A quick survey was made, and it was learned that except for the older dogs, with little mobility, and some puppies or lap dogs, all had ended up escaping from their homes. Later, even the old dogs managed to slip away, accompanied in their fugitive flight by the pitiful squeals of the puppies and the shrill barking of the lap dogs, which sooner or later, exacerbated the patience of their owners so much that they ended up being released from the leashes or the protective arms, and why not say it, the enslaving bonds of those who loved them so much.

The old dogs joined the great pack with slow steps, like elephants separated from the herd but not too far on their way. However, the dogs did not move much. They walked around the few blocks where they had always lived, so their former owners could see them every day, even talk to them with a caress on the back or the head as if nothing bad had happened in their relationship, and they returned the forgiveness with a somewhat shy but undoubtedly affectionate lick at the hand that touched them or at the face so familiar since they had been puppies. Some would stand up to rest their front paws on the chest or belly of their former owner, looking away with slight embarrassment, while wagging their tails as a sign of abandoning any kind of resentment.

And so things remained for a while. Strange to the rest of the world, who saw them from outside the limits of an ancient provincial city, like a body that has assimilated the changes caused by an illness, and that has survived with certain and palpable consequences, like scars on the skin of customs, but adapting to possible imbalances and adopting new forms, telling itself that forgetting is a necessary pain that brings with it the imminent and merciful anesthesia.

Those who were in charge of studying the case of the dogs of Dolores, reported over several months that the animals lived on the food given to them by the neighbors, since Now no one owned any of them. Spontaneous feeding routines were formed, as if everyone and no one had agreed at the same time, but the animals did not wait, contrary to their custom, at the doors of houses or shops or butcher shops. They wandered around, sniffing, running around, playing with each other, not even with the children anymore, and when they saw someone approaching with a bag of food, they wagged their tails and moaned with content, but nothing more. People began to feel a void when they moved away, turning around from time to time to look at the group of dogs who were eating the food brought to them with almost oblivious appetite. So it did not take long for the feeding to become less frequent, and the dogs were not alarmed by it, at least at first. They did not seem to be hungry, and neither did they show any gratitude for the food offered to them, so no one, starting with the former owners who did not forget the appearance or the names of those who had abandoned them, felt the slightest remorse when they stopped feeding them and passed by them without caresses or a look of minimal condescension.

There was alarm for two reasons. First, ten old dogs were found, dead and torn to pieces. It was said that the animals were killing each other for lack of food, but it was not possible to verify whether they had been massacred after their natural death or killed on purpose by their companions. The neighbors demanded intervention from the authorities, who now saw an opportunity to earn merits for the next elections. But this was the apparent reason, the most ponderable for its morbidity in the eyes of public opinion, not so much of the inhabitants of the city itself, who knew intimately the events and their motives, but of national public opinion.

The fact that worried the neighbors the most was the number of dogs. We had said before that they grew rapidly in number, but their number increased fivefold, at least in the few months since the phenomenon had begun. They occupied the streets and sidewalks, and did not let cars pass during rush hour, when people returned from work and children left school. They lay down on the cobblestones, turning around as is their custom before going to sleep, and they sat down almost like pillows next to the curbs and loose cobblestones. There was no way to get them out of there, not even with honking, shouting, or loving calls from former owners who recognized in the dog in front of the car and blocking traffic, the beloved animal that had been raised in the kitchen of their house, slept in their bed on winter nights, that had greeted them by jumping and barking when they returned after work, or had sunk into a lethargic sleep during Sunday naps after the barbecue, one satisfied with the bones gnawed under the table, and his master sprawled on a sofa or the deck chair in the patio, with the taste of the midday glass of wine or beer.

Memories that had only escaped in the midst of the confusion and the frustrating attempt to get the dogs out of the way. Many decided to beat them, but the animals responded only with severe looks and sparse growls. They got up and climbed onto the sidewalks, which were now occupied by dozens of other dogs in a few square meters, and while the cars resumed their movement, it was now the pedestrians who protested because they could not walk, trapped between the dogs and the walls of the houses, or forced to walk in the streets, which caused new incessant fights with the drivers.

One day, finally, at least as far as this city is concerned, the gendarmes arrived after the municipality asked the national government for help. One morning they showed up in two trucks, the armed soldiers. They got out and dispersed through the streets, making their way through the dogs that literally occupied every square meter of the road, without roughness or violence, even striding past them in great strides so as not to disturb them. The animals raised their heads and looked at them, sitting down again, or they got up and ran a few meters, stepping over some others. They did not seem hungry, they did not seem violent. So the soldiers did not dare to act, nor did the officers dare to give orders. Only when the inhabitants of the city looked at them in an unclassifiable way that combined fury and sorrow, only when the authorities, and especially the governor, gave their thumbs down, like Roman emperors in the coliseum in front of gladiators or a general in World War II to a firing squad, did they raise their weapons and aim.

Then the dogs noticed. Almost simultaneously they raised their heads and looked suspiciously. Through the sights of their weapons, the soldiers contemplated the many and diverse reasons for the attack. as, the countless shapes and colors, the trembling legs, the snouts steaming with morning breath, the bristling backs, the sinisterly lowered or erect tails, and they heard the howls. Not barking but howls of immense pain, and then the screaming of the pack fleeing through the streets, suddenly, like a single sea of ​​dogs suddenly raised in an unstoppable impetus. Not attacking or fleeing, but running in the same direction.

For those who had come out onto the balconies to observe the procedure, the streets became impetuous rivers of a surge that threatened to overflow if the banks had not been concrete buildings and houses. The soldiers resisted the attack, staying where they were, letting the pack flow between their legs, because they knew that nothing would be done to them, the dogs wanted to flee, they thought. But I wonder if it was really an escape or a call, or simply a realization, as it was when they left their homes to stay in the streets. This thought crossed the minds of many when at the end of the day the city was empty of dogs, and everyone who drove to the outskirts of the city, near the highway and far beyond, towards the fields of farming and grazing, could see that the flood of dogs had settled in the fields.

At the end of the day, when the gendarmes had left, the people who worked early the next day went home to sleep and the municipal and provincial authorities had closed the matter for their electoral peace of mind, the few interested people could glimpse in the growing darkness the hundreds of dogs located in the fields surrounding the city. Hundreds, and I even dare say that there were a thousand or more because of the enormous area they occupied, according to those who commented on the event days later. I imagine that landscape, and I can't help but shudder now that I'm approaching the city of Dolores. I've come to see what the media has talked about so much.

The dog fields, like a sea of ​​sleeping animals that will soon wake up.

You can hear them barking when the sun goes down. You can hear their barking when they hunt and devour the cows. They howl at the moon and confuse it with the intense light of a helicopter that hovers around the area from time to time. They howl at it as if it were a god to be feared and venerated, but I sense, just as they know, that the gods have already changed their appearance, and that light does not necessarily mean power.

That's why they crouch at night, with the complicity of darkness, and their borders are getting closer and closer to the borders of men.

The inevitable clash is more of an affirmation than an omen.

 

3

 

Because there have been new episodes, I continue to tell this intermittent and yet continuous story of strange things and inexplicable events. It is to be assumed that there have always been such events in the history of the world, as well as anonymous spectators who have observed or been simple circumstantial witnesses. Some will have stopped to think about them, and spent time looking for them, attentive to the dizzying pace of things and nature.

There were many philosophers who emerged in this way. To observe, not necessarily with the eyes, of course, is to intuit and relate. From there to drawing conclusions is a much bigger step: a precipice of experiments and ideas that conflict, that fail and struggle with their own inertia and their own fatigue.

The result is rarely satisfactory, and almost always consists of a symbiosis of caution, conformity, resignation and fear.

So, when I heard this time that patients were dying in a Buenos Aires hospital, I knew that there, and in this way, the irreversible race towards destruction had begun. But I will not get ahead of myself or draw conclusions, since this is not a philosophical study but a review of events, which does not even pretend to be the light amalgam of journalism and curiosity.

In a hospital in any neighborhood of the city of Buenos Aires, patients had been entering, for two weeks now, and only leaving through the morgue door.

What was happening, you will ask? It was to be expected, in the case of accidents with multiple serious traumas, and even so, nowadays and with contemporary technology it was foreseeable that most of them would be rescued and saved. But on the occasion to which we refer, whatever the severity, the patients died.

Public attention was focused on the drama of the accidents, at least for a while. It served to make the hospital's medical staff ponder, after their astonishment, the causes of the deaths. Despite the scarce economic resources and the oversaturation of work, time and space, the patients did not present more serious pathologies than those usually found in such cases, and they had done no less. s than what they always did. The difference was that before the patients were saved, and now, against all explanation, they died. Cardiac arrests, hemorrhages, septicemia, respiratory obstructions, anaphylactic shocks, took the bodies to their side: the side of death, which like a redeeming and virginal lady, with an obese and flaccid body, pale skin covered with scrofula, waits outside every hospital, house, or office, cinema, restaurant, brothel or convent. It waits at the gates of every city and around the forests, on ships at sea, on the coasts for ships to return, in airports and behind the windows of airplanes, on their wings.

It has no weight, that is why no one notices it, it has no smell other than the usual stench of rot and secretions, of medicines and bleach, which have invaded the daily life of human beings since always. We surround ourselves with things to interpose something that makes us forget the intuition of their presence. Lab coats and scalpels protect us from the incipient arrival, from the call, from the ghost that flutters like a ridiculous old sheet covered in blood left in a corner of any office, accumulating remnants and fermenting memory after memory, until it finds the vital way to make itself present in the corridors through which the living pass as if in tunnels, as if in mobile shells, armor, tanks without any defensive weapons other than the simple hands moved by neurons as fragile as the brain of God.

Then, the patients admitted to the wards began to die. Some had been there for days or weeks, recovering positively, but just the day before they were to be discharged, they fell into a deterioration that increased hour after hour during the night, or there was the case of a cardiorespiratory arrest. Later, with only a few cases entering the operating room due to this background, no patient came out alive. The anesthesia worked but the patients did not wake up. The surgeons said that it was hemorrhages, torn viscera or that a process of necrosis had simply begun without any explanation other than premature deterioration, like advanced old age, a state of decomposition in which each body in that hospital had begun to develop prematurely.

The hospital was closed and autopsies were performed. There was talk of an epidemic and all the health centers in the city and surrounding areas were alarmed. The experts did not find causes of death other than those recorded by the doctors who had originally treated the patients. In many cases, especially surgical ones, visceral necrosis was the obvious cause of death, as if the air, after the incision, had caused it.

Infectious disease specialists and epidemic experts were brought in to examine the hospital's microenvironment. They found nothing after several weeks of study. The staff was analyzed medically, administratively and judicially. Few of them came out unscathed after the last two examinations. They were healthy, and could be content with that. The judges who intervened in the cases found no grounds for negligence or exoneration, and both the state and private individuals had to share the moral and economic responsibility for the deaths.

After the hospital closed, there were no such deaths for a long time. In between, the usual things in the world happened: earthquakes, economic crises, murders, robberies, disappearances and coups d'état. There were births that made up for the recent deaths, there were suicides and a large increase in psychological and psychiatric consultations in the city.

But one December, on New Year's Eve, the same thing began to happen in several hospitals, simultaneously. Two people stabbed in a nighttime brawl died in the operating room, while surgeons tried to save their vital organs. In another place a pregnant woman lost her child during labor, in another a twelve-year-old boy died in an asthma attack. The first day of the new year brought no suspicions, as they were common causes of death, but everyone was surprised when patients in these hospitals began to die one after another.

The health alarm immediately went off throughout the city, and debates took place at the national level, deputies and senators met with their health advisors in search of causes and possible solutions. The President of the Nation was extremely worried, to the point that one day, more exactly on his birthday, January 15, while he was meeting with his team of ministers in an informal meeting at his residence in Olivos, he suffered a sudden chest pain, and was taken to a clinic.

Two days later, the president's funeral was held, while the National Congress appointed the vice president in function, but everyone saw how the successor was sweating and his face was losing color, and not precisely because of the new responsibility assumed.

The national government declared a national emergency and a curfew. The International Health Organization declared a health emergency for the entire country and the neighboring countries. No one would leave or enter the borders by any land, sea or air means. It was decreed that all inhabitants of the city of Buenos Aires be examined, and long queues formed in health rooms and emergency posts on the streets. All qualified medical and laboratory personnel were called to offer hours free of charge under threat of jail.

Soldiers were placed on every corner. The highway surrounding the city and the entrances and exits to it were closed. The airports closed, international trade temporarily suspended until further notice. We all knew how the shortages, the looting, the theft, the crimes, the famine would arrive, little by little: another lady waiting on the outskirts of the borders, dry and emaciated, old and yet vital despite her fragility. Her bones are made of rusty wire and her face an Egyptian parchment.

It is June. It is the first year since all this began, but few remember that anniversary. I see the streets filled with filth, the garbage collection services have gone bankrupt because there are no longer volunteers who dare to approach the waste. There are corpses in the streets because the hospitals have been demolished. Their rubble lies like ruins from a very ancient time after a war of many years.

Mechanical shovels travel the streets picking up the bodies and throwing them on the outskirts, in the belt that was once General Paz Avenue, and now serves as a barrier to separate the death that on that side develops without impediments or obstacles.

I drive around the area in my car, like a dog circling a house in search of food. I look for the landscape that will serve as a backdrop for my reflections on the times that have come. I see the smoke rising from behind the avenue, the bodies and the burning garbage. I hear the screams and cries, I hear the sirens of the overcrowded ambulances struggling to make their way through the people walking and wandering the streets in search of help, of food. I see the gendarmes protected by insulating uniforms and weapons on every corner, I see the soldiers on the city borders on towers built on the perimeters like a refugee camp or a prison about to explode.

I want to observe this explosion of people who, one day, will come out through the now closed borders and invade the province to sow the forms of death on its land.

I want to witness the tide of locusts that will sweep through the provinces, leaving desolation, aridity, and the air filled with germ-filled dust, slowly settling on dead but no less vital land. Because from rottenness comes life that feeds on it. Science knows this, religion knows this. Humanity is aware of all this thanks to the intelligence of its mortal brain.

I could flee, or go away and hide behind the walls of my apartment. Close doors and windows, seal the cracks with cloth and insulating tape. Pull down the blinds and put bolts on them. Close the gas inlets, seal the taps so that not a drop of contaminated water can get in. But what difference would this make from what I am living now.

The future will be the same, and at least the present allows me to contemplate for a while longer the open fields around the besieged city. At least the cries tell me that there are still people beyond, warning me, and wanting to be comforted. I suffer and rejoice in the tears of others. I sing with them in cries like those of vultures on the battlefield.

I long for the vision of a human being emerging from the smoke and the barriers, to know, to confirm myself, to finally let myself be or to take flight like a pious soul, so that the woman or man who emerges from that crack calls me, pronouncing my name.

 

4

 

I do not know when those beings appeared, nor do I know what they really are. Many called them angels for lack of a better name, or perhaps because something, which I was unable to perceive, dictated that name in their ears, but of angels they have nothing but wings.

That's what the children called them, at least until the moment they saw them descend with their wings spread out, in a gently diversified flutter, as if caressing the wind instead of the wind caressing their wings, reveling like a cuddly puppy without a body among the feathers, eager for maternal warmth. They say that the wind has always sought its lost form, and usually finds it. among the wings of birds, and the time in which it manages to recover its form is so short that its successive lives make it irritable and capricious. Sometimes it becomes enraged and that is why it blows so vigorously and cruelly, other times it moves like a breeze of greater or lesser intensity, according to the category of its mood.

But the wind, this time, had fallen asleep in the wings of these imprecise beings who hovered, subjecting the air to their will, dominating it as if it had been waiting for them for a long time, and wear and age turned the force of the wind into a sticky monstrosity more similar to a spider's web than to the fluidity of water. As if the skeleton of the wind had manifested itself when they arrived, and the air was entirely a cyclopean structure over the world.

But I do not want to get ahead of myself. The first time I saw them was on a dark spring day, a cloudy and cold afternoon, when lightning peeked through the still silent clouds, and electricity consumed the air leaving a general, tired suffocation of humidity, and a sweet smell of rotting meat.

I found them perched on the electricity cables that hang from pole to pole on the sidewalk of my house. I went out the door in search of a light, lost breeze, with a mate in one hand and the thermos under my arm. There were ten, or fifteen of them, then it seemed more, then less, but every time I tried to count them one took flight or another descended. They had weight, of course, because the cables bent and the poles did not seem to be prepared to resist. However, they held on, at least for a while.

How to describe them, I wonder. They had wings, large even when they were folded. Their legs were thick and had strong claws. Despite the distance, which was not that much, I could see that the size of each of the claws was at least two man's fists, and the nails, closed around the cables, were long and thick like pliers. The peculiar thing was that the legs were covered with a material that I imagined were feathers, but that sometimes, depending on the luminosity of the day, looked like golden hair. The body was wide throughout its volume, both at the hips and on the chest, covered with the same imprecise material, but which on the head became real feathers. The latter was imposing for its presence, its haughtiness, erect with a pride that only left room for a sordid look when it deigned to lower its eyes towards passers-by. They had a short beak, strange for their physical build, short and wide, which almost suggested to me a kind of metamorphosis in process: a change that must be occurring over generations from a human face to an animal one, or vice versa. We, at least those of us who lived on the same street, were not afraid of them. They had appeared when we already knew from the news that they were settling on the wires throughout the city, and their arrival in our neighborhood was like a relief after a long wait, the feeling of not having been displaced or ignored. One of the times that I was watching them, sipping the mate from time to time, as if nothing was happening, because we had already grown accustomed to their presence, the sun came out very briefly between the clouds, and I felt a flash of its brilliance on the skin of those beings on my face. Not on the feathers, which moved gently in the breeze, but on the strange hair-like fabric that covered the animal's underside. Then I remembered something I had read on my sleepless nights, going from the bedroom to my library in search of legends that would attenuate the nightmares. Suddenly, I remembered what I had read about griffins, mythological beings that, according to some versions, were made up of an eagle's body in front and a lion's body behind.

I must admit that I did not find an exact correspondence between what I was observing at that time and the descriptions of the authors of my books, but as I said before, not even they agreed, in their bibliographies, on the true nature of griffins. What is exposed to the imagination of man undergoes mutations, and human imagination creates monsters that vary in appearance and meaning according to the times. And when these beings are seen by those who believe in them, among the trees of a forest, in the mist of the countryside, on the surface of a lake or among the nocturnal vapors of an urban side street, they take different forms, but all the versions agree on the same point: that which unites and fuses them when a single cry of terror is heard.

That was the word, I suppose, that came to mind when I saw them perched on the wires, dropping the strange feathers that began to cover the streets like dog hair. We heard their squawk one evening, when the gloom of the approaching summer was a strange memory of last winter, a surviving echo they had forgotten. charged with carrying it hidden in its wings, to let it fall like a tear of rocks on the ears of the inhabitants of my street.

It was a roar that only a wild beast could have emitted in the middle of the jungle, and then the croak that followed was immediate, more a continuation than a perceptible change, which made us forget what we had heard a few seconds before: the cry of the lion that disappeared into the street, frightening the dogs and the old women, content with that for now, and leaving in the air the croak that could have been more pleasant if it were not so forcefully ancestral.

(Why dogs and old women, I don't know. Dogs are understandable, they are related to the ancient wolves that feared the presence of the big cats. And perhaps the old women in the neighborhood also understood, for other reasons, the call of the cat that lies unharmed among the bones of each predator. They say that women, the older they are, the wiser and more rapacious, more aware of the strength and power lost and not used. Witches are born at an advanced age, and those who discover themselves like that are no longer capable of dying.)

And that sound stayed in our ears throughout the night, and the following nights, without knowing if they were repetitions of memory or real sounds emitted by those beings at those early hours of the morning. Because we had always seen them take flight at dusk, after having settled just after midday, hovering from some point in the sky, emerging like another spot from the clouds, or as if they were coming from the sun, since their feathers, or their hair, shone with blinding flashes in their beating of wings, until the moment when they settled on the wires. We never saw them at night, but it was also true that few of us dared to look out into the streets at those hours: the sight of the creatures as still shadows was too threatening. Those who said they had looked out said that they did not come at night, but many did not believe them because they clearly heard the squawking and the flapping of wings just above their windows, although they admitted that they had never dared to raise the blinds or draw the curtains. Therefore, everything that referred to their presence was halfway between truth and invention, the latter being a recruitment of deductions that attempted to use logic as an instrument, but whose operating instructions had been forgotten and lost. The municipal, provincial or national authorities seemed to have fallen into the same errors, accentuated by the usual and deep-rooted bureaucracy that obstructs and envelops everything like weeds and vines inside and outside of every governmental structure. We were accustomed to it, so we prepared ourselves, like spectators who sit in their seats, to witness the spectacle of the failed attempts of the state employees, who with their folders and briefcases, their city maps, their lab coats and models, precision instruments, chemical weapons, speeches and discussions, entertained the neighbors from very early in the morning. (It is curious, let us briefly note, the mania that official institutions have for opening their doors so early, as if they had many other things to do in the afternoons or feared that the day would disappear before its time, involving ordinary citizens in their obsession, thus interrupting their dreams, the drowsiness of the early morning and the morning fatigue that unfolds and flows afterwards with the characteristic exaggerated and bad mood.)

It was thought of expelling the creatures with various methods, first using ultrasound devices, then with toxic gases, but since people refused to leave their houses and the neighborhood was full of children, this last measure was cancelled. The birds dirty the sidewalks with their excrement, but the peculiarity was that it had no smell, it was only a shapeless mass that quickly hardened and could be lifted like paving stones, although more fragile. Then a white ash remained on our brooms and shovels, similar to crushed limestone. Where did they come from, we wondered, more on our own initiative than in imitation of the debates that filled television hours during those days. Some claimed that they came from the mountains, escaping from climate changes caused by the greenhouse effect or the breakdown of the Antarctic ozone layer. Others declared them to be messengers of the apocalypse. Many more said that it was just another invasion of the city, as we had already suffered from mosquitoes, bats and other similar vermin, not counting, of course, the human ones in their various ethnographic and cultural manifestations. In this way, the debates became propaganda and platforms for ecological, religious, political and even social ideas. to clarify racial and/or discriminatory points of view.

However, these creatures, which never received a scientific name, not so much for lack of agreement among specialists as for an unrecognized reminiscence of the fear that we all feel, even the most rationalist, in the face of the landscape that they make up along the streets of the entire city, settled on the electric cables, unscathed by the danger of being electrified, and without their claws, despite their crudeness and strength that suggest anything but a delicate use of their edge, destroying the cables.

That fear was what I felt one night, when they were supposedly not outside, while I was watching a video recorded from a helicopter that had flown over three quarters of the city. I saw, as we all did, each one in his house in front of the television, safe in our isolation, protected from what was outside and at the same time invisible to any concern or fear of our fellow men, the spider web that we ourselves had built. Cables that carried electricity, telephone communications, television networks. It was something we could no longer get rid of, in fact, something we were already subjected to even though we believed ourselves free inside our homes. But it was the simple sensation of a snail that believes itself safe while another animal holds it in its mouth waiting for the right moment to grit its teeth and break its shell.

The cables were not the threat in themselves, but the instrument that the creatures could use for their purpose. Now I wonder why they were given a target, as if they were rational beings, but it is inevitable that everything unknown awakens susceptibilities numbed by daily routine. Voices of alarm were raised from all sectors and areas of society. The creatures were a danger to the population, an invasion that damaged economic productivity and debased the already established customs of the average inhabitant. They were a danger that had to be put to an end. Then happened what I had been so afraid of since the night I had seen the squared image of the creatures on the cable network on the television screen. One night in September we heard the simultaneous squawks for the first time.

It was a call to arms, a war cry, and a scream of immeasurable contained fury, of that anger that is the result of justice always unsatisfied and of an intense compassion that finds no object.

A few seconds later, we were left in darkness. The city was completely darkened, sinking into a gloom that we had never known because it had never been so complete. The absence of electric light expelled us from our usual spaces, the lack of radios and televisions plunged us into a silence that made our thoughts stronger and almost strange. We only had matches left, batteries that would eventually run out, and the gas lighter, if it still worked. Even the water in the pipes would soon stop running, and that sound of belonging to the rivers of our ancestors would fade away as if we were actually the ones leaving. Dragged away from civilization and life by these creatures who one day came to visit us without permission, imposing their presence as if they were claiming a land that had been taken from them. Messengers of the original owners, or owners themselves, they came to stay.

I know they are out there right now, as I sit in my chair in front of the dead television buried in the darkness, as I am buried too. Waiting for the electricity to come back on, for the specialists to fix the fault, for the short circuits to be repaired and for the power station to give light just as it did so many times, like a god invented by man, small and familiar, and for that very reason certain that it will act in our defense. We have laws, we have weapons, we have all the technology based on centuries of moral philosophy. All this cannot be interrupted by the whim of strange creatures.

Unless they act, as I said before, not on a whim but for a purpose. I try again and again to imagine it, to deduce it, to invent it with all the prodigy of my imagination, while I wait in the darkness and the silence only interrupted by isolated cries of despair interspersed between the croaks. Try as I might, I cannot imagine the cause of what is happening to us, nor the identity of the creatures. Whatever name I give them, it always seems insufficient for the measure that their actions have granted them.

I guess that all this is happening in many cities of the world, and I console myself with the idea that I am not the only one with the same doubts and the same fear. But the consolation is ephemeral, and false in reality, as the noise that I can now hear from the street the crash of broken wood and glass. And I know that soon they will be breaking through the shutters of my windows like a horde.

 

10

 

a spear goes through your head

you are on your back on the wet earth

but the sky is a city sky

you smell the manure

the aroma of ripe fallen fruit

and from above comes the heat of worn tires

 

in your ears there is a threshold

below which you hear animal footsteps

the wind in the branches and the call of the owl

but above you are deafened by the honking of cars

the screams of an angry man

and the crying of children in a hospital

 

an ambulance arrives and parks in the mud

but its whiteness is stained with smog

a man will come down to assess your condition

he will see a hole in your forehead, another in the back of your neck

maybe he will touch the mud when he lifts your head

but he will also see the blood on the asphalt

 

what cannot be explained

is why the path of the bullet remains intact

as if something else occupied it,

if the man in white were to feel your forehead

with more care for once at least

he could feel with his fingers the spear

that pierces your head

 

VIII. ADAM RESURRECTED

 

1

 

There is a theory of time, by Henry James, which tells us that Adam was conceived at thirty-three years of age, exactly the age at which Jesus died. According to this theory, Jesus had to die so that Adam could be born.

And Adam was born, according to some, with telescopic and microscopic vision, which he later lost due to his original sin. From being a giant he became a pygmy.

All these seem to be conceptions of the rationalist imagination of a Borges dedicated to scrutinizing and unraveling the intimate knowledge of each book, of each line, of each phrase read once, then heard in the voice of a woman at the end of some class on English literature, on a winter Friday afternoon, in a spectral Buenos Aires arriving in foggy London or peaceful Geneva.

It is not difficult to imagine him in his last days speculating on the twists and turns of time that arose in the imagination of poets. At the end of life, God is an inevitable totem, a myth that is made concrete with the elements of fear, and sometimes also of love.

For the old man, in his last days, the figure of Adam as a continuation of Christ must have been logical, reasonable also from the compassionate point of view. For someone who says goodbye to the world, a pitifully paternal look at humanity is as inevitable as facing the idea of ​​God, even for someone who has been explicitly atheist or played more with skepticism than with faith.

Skepticism is another form of faith: faith in one's own doubt. Trust in uncertainty as a life preserver that protects us from the waves of fanaticism and ignorance of the waves in the dark and always turbulent seas of the Western world.

So Adam was a prodigy, as is to be expected for being the first man. He must have seen the stars with his own eyesight, explored the constellations, visualized the galaxies, visited the strange worlds in the night skies of his then solitary life. And lowering his gaze back to the earth, he must have also gone deep inside, first digging into the clods, seeing with his microscopic vision the smallest elements that make them up. Then, penetrating the earth, seeing the growth of plants, the life of insects, the death of animals.

The first man, the wisest because he was the favorite, the firstborn of God. The first son of God. But let us then correlate this last idea with the theory that brings us together. We ask ourselves: what if Jesus died so that Adam could be born? Time, then, has been reversed, it has made a turn of one hundred and eighty degrees.

Time is a circle, or rather a spiral, since after Jesus time has continued, on another plane perhaps, in another ellipse, in other circles measured with references that we do not know now, but that will surely be easy to find if we think about what we usually call, for lack of a better name, coincidences.

Time is a spiral.

Time is a plan lying in the mind of God.

Not created by Him, perhaps, since if He is infinite, the plan was always there. Everything that is on earth, that which turns and melts and is recreated in the universe has always been present.

Adam was a superman, more powerful even than Jesus. Christ healed the sick, walked on water, resurrected the dead. Adam, on the other hand, received not the force of life, but the passion of knowledge.

Then, by exclusive merits of religion, of the beardless old men who try to teach men as if they were children, it was said that Eve was the one who, tempted by Satan, ate the fruit of the forbidden tree. Out of vanity, say those who fall into common places: the symbols that religion insists on creating to make things easier for the minds of those who believe in children born deformed or retarded.

It was Adam, who knowing everything he could know, wanted to know more.

He was not content with intuiting the number of stars and all the worlds, with seeing the inhabitants of space walk through their streets built in countless ways, with multiple or solitary moons, with rings of luminous gases surrounding the equators, with comets colliding, destroying, and then life reborn from the destruction, from the hecatomb, from the nature of the dead that feed the earth that he, Adam, had studied with his privileged vision.

Knowing all this, he thought, he suspected, that God was hiding something else from him, that his father was protecting him from something that really distinguished him, because a father must maintain his authority, and to do so he needs to know something that his son does not know. Like the sneer or the hidden smile when a man talks to another about sex, in the presence of his small child, about sordid things, about encounters in the dark, about a peculiar smell that the child senses but does not yet know.

What was it that God knew and hid? Adam never came to know, because he forgot everything he had seen and felt, everything he knew was lost somewhere in his mind, hidden as effectively as if he had died.

Since then, Adam's life was a search so slow that it has lasted for millennia, a recovery that needs much patience, enormous effort, repeated failures, suicides, wars, deaths and births to exterminate the ill-born knowledge and regenerate it in new and more subtle, purer forms of consciousness.

But knowledge is translated into religious apologies that undermine the foundations of churches, fill extermination camps with red mud, cause plagues and diseases to proliferate, demolish buildings and explode bombs over hospitals and schools.

We therefore wonder if knowledge in itself is evil, or if it depends on who uses it. God has total knowledge, and he has created us, therefore we must deduce that in his hands knowledge has a beneficial effect. But when we think of man as a generator of destruction, and he being a creature in the likeness and image of God, we deduce that God has also used his knowledge incorrectly, if not negligently, or deliberately cruelly.

Here we must introduce what the chair of dogmas taught us: the existence of evil as an entity, something that has its own life, its own definition, capable of being incarnated in beings of flesh and blood or symbolic beings, such as Satan, the Devil, Lucifer.

The fallen angels, the ambitious angels who, like Adam, wanted to be on a par with God, perhaps not in knowledge, although a boss, like a father, must also keep certain secrets to himself in order to distinguish himself from his subordinates.

Heaven as a company, or rather as a government office.

What role did evil play in the fall of man? Evil as an entity, we mean, as an external agent to which man had never been exposed. And here the theory splits into three parts.

First, if we are inclined to think that it is something as simple as a war between states, it is too easy, too unsubtle for someone as intelligent as God is supposed to be, as is one of his best students, the fallen angel. If this were so, the war would be endless, it would constantly feed itself, and the monotony of this story would be as inconceivable as its own existence. Life is exhausted, life is capable of becoming bored with itself, it weakens and dies, like the matings between members of the same family caste. Pale, anemic, sterile monsters are born, who soon die in the cold of the first winter.

Second, everything is already present in God's infinite plan: the creation of man and his execution of evil. Evil, then, is already present in God as a certain possibility. An instrument that he will use according to his conscience, his work plan, his daily agenda. But is God his own creator, and therefore the creator of all possibilities, of his eternal plan? If he has always existed, if he has no beginning as a Being, he has not created the plan either, because this would be subsequent to the presumed beginning of his existence as God. Just as we are born with body and soul, has God been born, has he always been, a being and a mind? But man develops his primitive consciousness so much that it is reasonable to say that he creates it. Therefore, the mind and its plans, thought as a consequence of language, is a creation of man.

This brings us to the third path: evil is born with man. It is present in it, not as a parasite waiting for the weakness of the

 

Good and evil are futile differentiations of the same substance.

Good and evil, perhaps, do not exist as such, and man is an unexplored region, incomprehensible even to the one who created him.

God created man as he created the planets and the star dust, without any further merit or desire.

Man created himself, his place, his space, his time are works of his thought.

God is a plan without conscience, a programmed machine that does not even have self-consciousness.

Man has created the entity, the universe, the eye that watches him, and the refuge that protects him and hides him from that eye.

But that eye is at the bottom of his substance. The watchful eye that explores everything, that needs to know everything, that will use intelligence, the only thing most similar, perhaps, to the true God, to kill himself in the desire to discover himself immortal.

 

2

 

All this brings us to talk about time. A continuity, a line formed by a succession of points, a circle, a spiral, or parallel lines? According to some, the future is inevitable, but, following the line of Borgesian thought, it may also not happen, since God lurks in the intervals.

God is a regulator, then, a tax inspector who not only walks the streets and shows up unexpectedly at the door of our business, but is on every corner, at every toll station, at every airport or bus terminal. Time, seen in this way, is not a straight line, but a succession of points and lines, interspersed with empty spaces, where God waits, charged with making us disappear for an instant, erasing our footprints, and leaving his own, invisible to our sight, but with the mark of his fingers: emptiness and silence.

According to John Donne, there are infinite dimensions of time, all occurring simultaneously, mostly parallel, oblique, and often perpendicular as well. It is at these points of intersection where the collision of two or more different times produces a rupture in one or more of them. Nothing is the same for those who were the protagonists of that collision, whether they were aware of such an event or not. Someone who dies is not simply the cessation of life due to old age or illness: it is the confluence of factors that are concentrated in a certain moment of the times that make up the immense network. Nor should we imagine it as a mesh of microcircuits or cables on a panel, but rather each line with which we try to simplify the image is a space with its corresponding volume and dimensions. Some are larger, others smaller, and therefore the interweaving does not necessarily occur in all its thickness or size, but can happen in a part or a sector, and the rest of that same time continue unscathed, until the shock waves: the consequences, the aftermaths, change it as well.

What is the duration of each time? Can time die, can it end? It is, perhaps, an energy that runs out like a battery. Or simply as a biological body that ages and progressively slows down until it stops, and remains in the middle of the network like a scar, a roughness, a small hill, which the other pedestrians and vehicles of time will flatten until they level the surface and leave no gap or mark of its previous existence.

Saint Augustine says that everything that exists presupposes a past, not only the one that corresponds to its creation, but before creation: the first time of the world. This leads us to think that the multiple connections of the network we are talking about do not necessarily produce immediate effects, products or conceptions that can be marked as can be done with radioisotopes in human blood. The slightest contact of one time with another generates a spark, a slight shock wave that generates a by-product barely sketched, latent for a long time, until generating its eventual birth: everything prior to its concrete appearance is the pre-time, the prehistory of things.

These straight lines, which twist and change direction at every collision, often constitute multiple parallelograms, and what are these but interrupted circles, still imperfect, whose breaking points are remnants and wear and tear that the economy of time will slowly file down until they form the circle. The ancient mathematicians, such as Galileo, already spoke of the horror of emptiness: as if the corners of a house were zones of death, of immeasurable terror, which must be abolished. The universe fears emptiness, its whole essence is a struggle to fill it, an obsession that stops only with the abolition of useless space.

Therefore, time is a space, and space is made up of the infinite points of time. Each point of any line, whatever the quantity into which we decide to divide it, from the unique to the infinite, is the same as the infinite. This subdivision contains all possibilities. It is the infinite, the point that contains all possible points.

In these interstices God is found: the nothingness that the universe rejects is the presence of God

The watchman, the inspector, the policeman, the lawyer, the judge and the executioner.

From all these considerations, it does not surprise us then to reach the conclusion that Jesus lived before Adam, that there was a clash, so to speak, in which Christ died, and Adam was born. They are not the same person, nor did they have nor should they have had the same objective. Each time follows its rules, if it has any. You will tell me that both were concrete beings who lived on our same earth, both subject to the same conditions of space and successive time. But we have already considered the possibility that time is not one, but many that should not always be unknown or connected at certain points. Parallel times are not lines like those that mathematics tells us, which never join. Times are conglomerates, vast empty spaces yearning to be filled, a desperate longing if there ever was one, like that of a drowned man, an asthmatic, or someone who dies by hanging, under the weight of a pillow pressed against his face or under the edge of a thin strap made of any material stronger than flesh.

Times are almost always immersed in one another. They penetrate each other like desperate lovers: one yearns to be filled by the other, the other yearns to fill the emptiness that he cannot bear to see.

You will tell me that it is a Freudian interpretation, I know. But what else is the world but a series of couplings with the sole objective of filling an empty space?

An unborn child is a void that existence abhors.

An accident in the line, one more deviation in the parallelogram, one more corner to be covered before illness and monsters breed in the image of God.

A circle is a full time, without beginning or end, rolling over and over without consciousness. Perhaps that is happiness, or absolute bliss.

On the other hand, a parallelogram is an imperfect entity, made up of empty corners, a conformation fit for wear and death. The scar we spoke of earlier, because every emptiness will sooner or later be filled.

If not with the product of the clash of times, it will be with the anomalous cells of a cancer: the product of the accumulation of waiting, fermentation of anguish, fluid that thickens and transforms from the original dust of nothingness.

Absence is God, and God is the point of infinite possibilities: the absolute, contrary to life.

 

3

 

When Adam lost his condition of absolute, he lost all his knowledge, and with it, the capacity for logical distinction between good and evil. He also lost will, because volition is a force necessarily attached to the clarity of thought. He who poorly distinguishes the colors of things and phenomena, doubts. He who doubts too much, hardly chooses. Without consciousness, Adam saw the ideas of good and evil mixed within him in a single substance that he decided to call soul. He could no longer distinguish in it the essential nuances to separate the waters, as they say, between good and evil, right and wrong, justice from injustice, kindness from cruelty. In his first days after being expelled from Paradise, every time he tried to do something good, his hands were directed by something deeper than thought, and the product of his work failed, and he felt frightened, sad, angry with himself.

He was less than an ant, or more ignorant than flies, at least they act so correctly that they never fail, even if they do not know the reason for their actions. They only depend on external factors, something that now also stood in Adam's way. Outside Paradise, the climate was changing and uncertain like the vicissitudes of his soul. His body was weak compared to the previous one, he began to get sick even though he saw himself healthy in the mirror of the waters of a lake.

The absolute is total knowledge, that is why God is the absolute, that which cannot be modified, that which does not get dirty nor require understanding or the touch of a hand, that which does not crave pity. Some call this state of things happiness, for others it is the closest thing to a de facto government.

Life, then, is the opposite. It includes death and illness, recovery and the slow-paced care of the dying, violence and caresses, crying as well as hysterical laughter and angry cries of pain and triumph.

In the midst of the desolation of his new world, Adam sowed and cultivated his lands, lost more crops than he could gather, remained in his bed for many days, burning with fever after plowing behind the oxen in the rain. His wife had to raise him or from the fields in the evening, while his sons Cain and Abel held back the animals that had been dragging him since morning. He recovered and fell as many times as a man can live for years.

He raised cattle, drove cows and goats, sheared sheep, milked and carried milk in large jars for his children.

He built houses, put up fences. He armed himself first with stones, then with spears.

He went out into the open countryside riding horses that he caught, tamed and raised for many years.

He killed animals in forests and jungles that he thoroughly explored, as if it were his own body, dominating it, making it sweat until he felt his flesh strengthen and his bones reverberate on the ground. He knew that his family, now very large, listened to his steps by pressing their ears to the earth.

He met other men and fought with them. He lay with many women, but he always returned to the body of Eve, the body of that woman who captivated him not because she was the first, but because of her noble figure crowned with the greatest intuition. As if the lost wisdom had been transformed into a burden of sorrow and divination. She knew so many things that she could not, nor did she really want to, transmit to him. At night he listened to her sleepless, thinking, and sometimes he stayed awake trying to perceive words in Eve's short dreams.

And so he continued to work. He raised buildings and built cities. He invented so many things that he had already lost count of them. Men came from distant villages and took them with him. He knew that far away, his inventions would proliferate, but no one would remember the name of who had created them.

Adam drove in a car across the continents, crossed the seas and flew in airplanes over the plains where his descendants sowed and harvested. He was flying above the clouds, looking at the clear, blue sky, and he thought of God, whose real name he did not know either. He had recovered much of his wisdom, but he still did not remember the essentials.

When he returned from one of his trips, carrying a briefcase and a computer, leaving his belongings on the dining room table and going up to the top floor of his house, he saw, through the windows, the rise of the rockets fired towards the space stations on the moon. Or perhaps, he told himself, they were the new rockets exploring the luminous Mars.

In his children's room, the television was emitting noises and intermittent words: wars in Asia, revolutions in South America, guerrilla warfare in Central America, terrorist attacks in North America, riots throughout Europe, tsunamis in the Pacific, melting ice at the poles.

He changed the channel, seeing how Cain remained lying in his bed, pretending to sleep, but his father could distinguish the slight flicker that the dizzying images caused in his pupils. Where is your brother? he asked.

In response he received a hostile look from his son, his elbows resting on the bed, his long hair covering his forehead, hiding his ears, dressed in a striped t-shirt and impeccable jeans that the boy had faded at the knees. Adam told him a thousand times not to do it, Cain simply kept his mouth shut and left the room. Adam followed him to the bathroom, saw him open the medicine cabinet. Adam repeated: for the last time, don't do it, son.

Cain undressed in front of his father, knowing that behind the door were his mother and Abel, watching him. He grabbed a rag soaked in hydrogen peroxide and stained his new pants. So, in his underwear and sitting on the toilet lid, he acted as if he lived alone, and Adam knew, with a clarity so rare since he had been expelled from paradise, that Cain would always live alone, that his essence as a man was unbreakable solitude, and isolation the only gain of his young life or the only treasure received by inheritance.

And he knew, Adam, that solitude is the only attribute of man.

God is unique and alone, why should it be strange that his son yearns, despite superficial contacts with beings similar to him, for that solitude that brings him back to himself, that identifies him with his own essence: his thought.

The knowledge of himself.

That is why Cain enjoyed solitude. And somehow he would manage to be alone forever.

The afternoon when his father came back from a trip and asked him about his brother, the boy looked up, left the television remote control on the bed and answered: in the garden, dad.

It was the first time he heard that word from Cain's mouth. He had, once again, as if in recent times the memory of ancient ages were returning, as if God were granting him rewards, or taking pity on his old age, the realization that the language he had invented, the sum of all the language that allowed the distinction between him and his beasts, but that above all allowed him the capacity for thought, was also the richest instrument with which he could elevate himself. above all other men, to form the barrier that distinguished him in his self-awareness: to be alone and unique.

The word son he had invented with much wonder, and a small part of love, no doubt. The word father was Cain's first contribution, a word that was born from the mud, the blackness and the resentment of his indivisible soul.

He went down the stairs and went out to the back garden. He ignored his wife's call from the kitchen. He searched, ignoring the dogs that jumped at him, wagging their tails. Then he noticed that they, instead of celebrating his arrival for a long time, immediately moved away towards the tree that bordered the neighbor's. He walked towards the shade of the leaves. It was the waning afternoon, and the shadow was long, surrounded by an incipient penumbra full of freshness. He heard Eva's voice, calling him, and a hint of anguish broke her voice.

Surrounded by the dogs, he stopped five steps from the trunk.

Protected by the shadow was his other son. Abel had his head resting on a large root that stood up like the arm bone of a long-buried giant. His body reclined, one hand under his right cheek, the other lying on the grass. He had his headphones on, so Adam felt a brief relief, and smiled. He approached Abel, squatted beside him, touched his arm, caressed his hand. Without waking, the boy seemed to sway in the last breeze of the afternoon, which would later bring cold and sorrow. I will let him sleep, Adam told himself, but it will be better to take him home for dinner. He moved closer to pick him up in his arms. When he did, he stood up and put his lips on Abel's head.

He smelled blood. He put him back on the ground and moved the hair aside, looking for a wound.

The wound was the crack of a nail driven into the back of Abel's neck. From the tree he heard a hiss, from behind him came the bitter laughter of a woman, and from further away the croaking of a window opening.

Adam knew, for an instant as long as infinity, that he had finally returned to the old lost garden.

He had recovered the absolute, but as a sentence.

 

4

 

That night he had a dream. He was not the protagonist, not even a secondary character, nor did he make a brief appearance without dialogue, nor a cameo in which the great movie stars hide their imminent decline. Because it was like watching a movie in reality, sitting in the darkness of his now useless recovered paradise.

He would have time to analyze himself with Freudian interpretations, the infinity of time belonged to him. He also considered himself a dream dreaming another dream, and everything he had lived and invented in his long years of exile came apart and came together again like birds in a flock migrating from region to region. Fragments of films, or rather pieces of celluloid cut by scissors to be reassembled in multiple ways.

These are dreams, and it was curious that among so much possible material the starting point of his dream was a verse by Mayakovsky, a poet so realistic, so political. But is politics a tangible, objective reality, was the struggle of such a poet not also a dream?

The truth is that in this cinema where he is alone, occupying a seat of cut leather, surrounded by the dark void where some fans blow from the walls of the abyss, he is watching a film from which he senses smells, breezes, and without touching them, he can feel the skin of the actors. They are not professional actors, perhaps it is only a reality show, a hidden camera. That is, every dream is a hidden camera, without the possibility of lawsuits, claims, subsequent protests, only the unavoidable fulfillment of the final sentence.

With the impunity of a voyeur, he watches with tears what follows. It is not a novel or a Mexican soap opera, nor an American film for television, nor a game show where the questions are unanswerable and the prize is nothing in numbers. He will not be easily moved. The tears come only from his own lost ego, from the unhealthy state of his soul. And as the credits begin, he looks at his hands in the dim light of the screen: they are burnt as if under the desert sun. The Jordanian desert where the film takes place.

Two men are sitting on the ground, on either side of a chessboard. They are seen concentrating, silent, with their gaze fixed on the pieces. One has a large build, tall, with long dark hair, somewhat curly at the ends, partly covering the left side of his face and falling over his white tunic. He has his left hand on one knee, the other on his chin, while his fingers play with his beard, accompanying the game of his thoughts. He has dark eyes, which are revealed only when he raises his gaze towards his opponent.

The other is a man with a dark beard, ... He is shorter in stature, but of a stocky body. He wears a black jacket over the tunic of the same kind as his opponent. His hair is shorter, but extremely curly. His beard is brown, a little lighter than his hair. His eyes are light brown, changing in the light of that afternoon. The sun illuminates him better than the other, his hands moving more nervously, his eyelids fluttering with each sound of the birds that fly very high without stopping.

Both are in the shade of a tree with a wide crown, a broad trunk, which sinks its roots profusely and too longingly, because many are still at ground level and some stick out forming a framework around the players.

The tree is losing its leaves, and looks very old, but it cannot be said that it is dead yet. At least it still has enough strength to support by one of its branches the body of a man who is swinging from the gallows. The player closest to the tree is called Cain, and his obvious nervousness may come from the constant swaying of his body in the breeze, because you can clearly hear the rope rubbing against the branch, as if it were going to break at any moment, and the warm wind passing through the clothes of the corpse, which has already dried the last of its sweat.

The other player also glances at the tree from time to time, but he seems calmer. However, his eyes convey sadness, perhaps melancholy, as if he misses the past time when the dead man once lived. He was his friend, no doubt, because his name was Judas.

Now he points with the index finger of his right hand at his opponent, and says: it's your turn. The other nods and gives him a look of weariness, but his silence characterizes him more than Jesus. Because this is the name of the long-haired man who is patiently waiting for the move.

If we look at the board, we see that both have lost the same number of pieces. The half that corresponds to Jesus is systematically arranged, pawns protecting the queen, reserved in her square, the king guarded by the knights. Cain's half has no system, and has brought out his queen in a game that threatens to slowly exterminate Jesus' pieces. Both lost three pawns, Cain a bishop in the hands of a pawn in a distraction that is unforgivable (he blames the oscillating body near him). Jesus keeps his important pieces, but he realizes that he is becoming cloistered. How to get the queen out of the arc of fire of his knights, how to use the bishops behind the barrier of pawns. He will have to take risks, and he does not know Cain's strategy, which is characterized precisely by its lack of strategy.

In the Jordanian desert, the birds do not have many trees to perch on. Olive groves, some, next to the river, many thorny trees, like the one next to them. The shadow of the birds when they cross in front of the sun brings a fleeting square that seems to duplicate the board in the sky. They both look up, but soon refocus, as if they thought that such a moment of distraction was an opportunity for the other to cheat. But in chess there are no cheats, they know that.

Jesus moves one of his pawns, and Cain's only bishop eats it. One of Jesus' knights finishes off the bishop.

Without a doubt, they are inexperienced players. Even though they have been playing for centuries, their minds do not concentrate, they are lost in memories, in philosophies, in dead people, in failed projects, in irreversible events. Perhaps they would play well if they knew that their stay in the desert is temporary, but they know that their time has passed, and the condemnation to which they have been subjected is for half of their soul, while the other half spins in the web of time.

A double consciousness annihilates them for life: men and gods, myths and realities divide their souls into two fragments: the consciousness of themselves latent in the infinity of the game in the desert, and the life of the body that regenerates itself in each cycle of time, in each arbitrary crossing.

While Jesus withdraws the bishop, Cain looks at him with anger, but an almost imperceptible smile immediately forms. His hand moves a knight to eat the opponent's. Jesus laughs at his carelessness, scratches his beard and changes the position of his left hand on his knee. After these two moves, many minutes pass, impossible to calculate.

The body continues to rock, with more noise because rigor mortis makes it rock like a piece of wood on which the wind draws blows instead of caresses. No more birds have passed, and the barking of many dogs can be heard in the distance.

(Adam falls asleep, wanders through more homogeneous dreams, perhaps the sedative he was prescribed is taking effect. He doesn't know how much time has passed. From the dark waters of dreamless sleep, he returns to the lush light of the desert.)

The board is now different, too different to reconstruct. The moves are to be made one by one. The situation is as follows: Jesus is checking Cain's king. Cain has two options: to lose his only remaining bishop protecting the king, or to take the queen with his rook, also the only one. He chooses to take Jesus' queen, and he eliminates the rook with a pawn.

 

Cain's king is unprotected, and he knows it. He has only two pawns, but the bishop and the queen play a waltz in front of Jesus' inextricable barrier.

 

One takes no risks and locks himself in his own trap, the other exposes everything in a total advance, but finds no cracks to penetrate. One protects his father, the other exposes him without finding anyone to eliminate him.

 

One commits suicide, the other murders. But which is which, they both ask themselves. A role-playing game that has lasted too long.

 

They both look tired, and dusk falls. Night is falling over the place where they are sitting. It has cooled down under the tree, and the wind makes the remains of Judas crackle. They smell the sweet smell of the decomposing body, but they know that the desert dogs will not come until late in the night. They hear them approaching, their barking is more even, louder. Cain turns and looks west at the cloud of dust that rises, hiding the silhouette of the setting sun.

They have forgotten, for a moment, the game. No one will move the pieces, not even the wind. Only their hands have the strength to lift them. The board seems to be made of stone, but it is not, it seems carved from a single piece, but each figure is simply supported by the weight of his own body. The weight of each man with his dead weight.

Then Cain yawns, and suddenly stops, his gaze fixed on the west. Jesus wonders if it is not a ploy to move a piece on the board without him seeing it. He clears up his doubt like someone who knows in advance that his opponent is an honest murderer. (Jesus likes to see himself as Hamlet sometimes, he has often imagined himself dressed in Danish fashion in old castles populated by incest.) He turns, facing the line of dust on the horizon, and expects to see the eager dogs approaching quickly.

But someone approaches faster, and yet he does not run. The man walks and the dogs remain on their immanent walk, as if stuck in a sector of time.

The figure approaches, taking on clear shapes. He is tall like Jesus, but much thinner, his emaciated figure is noticeable, his long, dry hair, covered in dust, his haggard face. And above all his pale skin, no longer swollen, but drying out, cracking.

He walks clumsily, with effort. He limps, his hips, knees, ankles seem to hurt. He stops for a few seconds, breathes deeply, straightens his back, bent from the fatigue of the walk, and resumes his step. In one arm he gathers the torn toga that he drags along, too long. It is the remains of a shroud, in fact.

When he is ten paces from Jesus, he stops and waits in silence.

Behind him, there is a single dog. They had not seen it until then, hidden between the legs of the walker, it was like seeing it suddenly born from the body of the man. The animal stopped to one side, looking at the players. Then it walked towards them with a threatening attitude, circled around them, and pounced on the board. Some pieces flew out, others just fell. The dog remained standing there, with one paw on a fallen king.

No one seemed to regret the event. Jesus stroked the dog's head and it then walked away to take refuge in the shade of the tree. Cain, with a sigh of tiredness and resignation, straightened the board and began to arrange the pieces carefully, once again.

Jesus then addressed the newcomer.

Lazarus, he said, just for today, lie down and rest.

Ilustration: John Singer Sargent