Janis. Photo borrowed from http://gravitando.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/janis-joplin-0.jpg

It may be the geekish look that I find particularly adorable, the straight out of bed hairstyle with excessive make-up and round metal spectacles, like a dolled up Janis Joplin. Or the absurd clothing, a sleeveless turtle-neck woolly jumper in a hot day, a see-through summer dress with a thick scarf in winter, a rescued nightgown from a dead old woman turned into a skirt and worn with cowboy boots… It could also be their weird fashion accessories, the recycled beer cans transformed into mini handbags, the rings made of hand painted plastic water bottles, the home made paper-mache bracelets, the urban-ethnic jewellery in sum. But it is their behaviour what really does me. Their metaphorical discussions over a 20 second video loop of a schoolgirl jumping in slow motion against a fuchsia background- hair floating like tentacles on a jelly fish- or a monochrome painting of a red square on a piece of irregular canvass. It is their sitting for hours in the always uncomfortable chairs of the Modern Art Museum, copying still-lives and watercolours or sketching sculptures in red chalk, with their backs straight on their seats and their heads high, like models that had switched places. It is their stopping in mid movement, pouting their mouths with lips slightly parted to admire a work of art or to muse over the dust particles floating on a beam of sunlight that enters through the wooden slits of a Venetian blind.

Once I made friends with this gorgeous art-school girl from Sweden. I had come across her on a few occasions by chance and my face must have been familiar to her. I think she took me for a connoisseur of sorts and I let her think so. I was standing in front of a bunch of contorted rusty iron rods that were a sculpture called “The angel” by someone I do not recall the name, when she came next to me and started this talk about a philosopher by the name of William Benjamin (or Wolfram or Walter) and the angel of the future looking at the past of our history and so on. I nodded a few times and said “yes” and “certainly” on a random basis with my deepest voice. It did the trick and we exchanged telephone numbers.

I called.

She took me to photographic exhibitions and video performances. She watched around and I watched her watching. She was beautiful. It was perfect. I was always a split second close to lean over her and kiss her, but some way or another, something always happened that ruined the moment.

One day she turned up all excited about a poetry reading of a Romanian author, by the name of Gabor Tindazs. I had never heard about the guy but from her words he was some sort of revolutionary, a visionary of the new summits of enlightenment that were to come for modern literature.

It was early autumn and the evening was warm. A soft breeze carried the smell of freshly cut grass and salt from the nearby see and the scent of flowers and dry figs from the dreadlocks of her hair. She was wearing a thin tartan-patterned dress, flip-flops with socks and a woollen hat. And definitely no bra. I could see the regular round shapes of her nipples point clearly through the criss-crossed lines of the fabric and I though of casting them in stainless steel and setting them in a marble platform for everyone to worship. I kept the though for myself while she gave me a condensed seminar about Mr Tindazs and the meaning of his work, on our way to the venue.

The reading was a in small garden at the back of a church, dimly lit by yellow rice-paper lamps and candles. The place was packed with literature and art-school students, the female kind, notebooks open on their laps, pencils and paper-notes at hand. It was a heavenly sight, but risking to appear impolite I tried to give my undivided attention to my Nordic cicerone. After all she looked like a goddess amongst goddesses.

Paolozzi. Photo borrowed from http://www.art-madrid.com/prensa/imagenes/15

She glowed like a dandelion seed blown against a shinning mid-summer sky, her frock brushing gently over the stone walls of the enclosure as we made our way through the rows of chairs. The thirty or so seats were almost full by the time we arrived and much to my delight we had to cram ourselves in a corner. She wanted to be at the front and I wanted to be nowhere else.

After a couple of minutes a tall man in his mid forties appeared on stage. He cut an imposing figure, dressed on a dark and tattered three piece suit, wearing a red tie in a withered knot, like an old dry rose, with a black and thick mane of hair tied in a pony tail and a tuft of white hair across his forehead. He looked like a bereaved nobleman or a disinherited prince. He surely had something royal about his presence, a certain dusty sadness, like a recently dug up funeral chamber. In silence, he took a small moleskin book from his inside pocket and opened it ceremoniously. He then started reading in a down-reaching and distant voice:

“Goddar, Boggar, Moddar, Torntup,

Biggar, Diggar, Millar, Centrup,

Pedlar, Fountain, Undimentur,

Sandidieu…”

He pronounced this last word accenting each of the syllables with a strong French sound, which made me think that I mistook the language of the reading and the poems were going to be in a parlance I do not understand. Thus the previous string of incoherent words. I looked around me to see the reaction of the audience. The lovely young and arty faces were contorted in a rapture of compete pleasure, chiefly amongst them my companion. The reading continued:

“Asparagus, Spartacus, Aspergillus, Nimbus…”

Not wanting to disrupt the progression of the poem I tried to steal a look from an open booklet on a woman’s lap just in front of me. The letters were big enough so I could read it clearly. It was the same verses I could hear, a poem named “Ubiquitous Nostalgy”, by G. Tindazs. It went on and on like this for pages.

I looked closely at my Swedish muse. She seemed to be in a faraway place. I realised I could stare at her for as long as I wanted without being noticed. So I did, accompanied with the murmur of Mr. Tindazs voice in the background, like a soloist Gregorian chanter slightly out of tune. I followed her face slowly, from the hair line to the chin, breaking down every line and curve, composing an sculpture with each shape, a Paolozzi with her eyelids, a Giacometti with the sides of her mouth, a Henry Moore with her ear-lobe. Suddenly she started crying softly and the moment reached its climax. I leaned over to embrace her at precisely the same moment the poem concluded and everybody -including her- stood up to applaud the performance in an ovation worth of the heroes of the Roman Colosseum. Then she made off quickly to the stage. She did not notice my hand around her wrist, barely touching her skin.

I saw her moving away from me and I thought of her as a boat in the sea, sailing in flames towards a sinking red sun, unknowingly carrying inside the body of a dead warrior. I saw a tear-drop in her cheek and a spark from a candle lamp reflected on it. I saw the hem of her dress caressing the stone gently and her dreadlocks waving on her back with the sway of her hips. I saw her touching Mr. Tindazs shoulder and talking to him. I saw her taking his hand and bringing it close to her bosom. I saw her smile to him. She was lost, I thought, like the floating seeds of a dandelion in a gust of wind, lost from me and into the incongruous verbiage of that Romanian charlatan.

Dandelion Seed. Photo borrowed from http://stevehickey.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/dandelion_seed.jpg

My heart shattered like a solid glass cube hit by a bullet. I felt dejected, sorrowful, forlorn… I could have added a thousand sad adjectives to my mood and still fall short of explaining how I felt.

Then she approached me. A gorgeous dark skinned girl, with carefully unkempt hair, thick colourful make-up and round plastic-rimmed glasses (a pop elaboration on the Joplin theme). She held a poetry book on her hand and I could notice an intricate pattern of henna tattoos on her left forearm.

“Mr. Tindazs readings always make me sad too”, she said.

I had to agree with her. We made friends and exchanged telephone numbers.

I called.

We agreed to go together to an exhibition of flower paintings.

I was living in an Escher drawing, the next ring of my ladder started exactly where the last one ended.

Foto borrowed from www.flickr.com/photos/algedeon/148959732/

I walk down the streets of an empty town on a Sunday morning. Pigeons and seagulls fight for discarded fish suppers and chip wrappers and pizza boxes. Their cries mix in my head with a repetitive bass line and drumbeats and the high pitch beep that the decibels of the nightclub sound-system have left ringing in my ears, creating a weird, haphazard, anarchic melody that accompanies the soft pounding of my footsteps on the cobblestones. I let my memory fly like an escaping bird with a piece of garbage and suddenly I am in a rave in BCN or Ibiza. Everybody around is high on MD and ecstasy and revere the monotonous house flatbeat of the DJ like a heavenly anthem. And they dance, like wild, spastic robots, clonic movement over clonic rhythm, sweating heavily, their faces contorted in a false display of sexiness and pleasure.

Nothing makes sense.

All around me there are people looking for people, mixing with people. People kissing people, licking people, sucking people, fucking people, in a great communal organic exchange. People drug-dependant on people, finding other people and using them as a quick humanity fix. People living their lives to the break of progressive dance drumbeat, going up high and fast, reaching a quick zenith and suddenly dying, no reverb and no echo.

Nothing ever made any sense.

I am starting to have a feeling of emptiness in my stomach so I decide to return from the land of memory into the so called real world. I keep walking in a world made up of parked cars and traffic cones and empty bus stops and wet pub flyers stuck to the ground. I reach my apartment and go straight to bed. There I lay awake for hours.

I cannot sleep.

Foto borrowed from www.guerillapoets.wordpress.com/

I, too, dance to the tune of the techno world, my life drifting from one hour to another at accelerating speed, the days cross-fading like songs in a mixing deck. I, too, am fuelled with incoherent and seemingly unprovoked rage and anger. Drugs do not reveal me any metaphysical secret on this respect. They do not answer any questions but I take them anyway. I snort powder, swallow pills, suck on crystals and for an instant I have a hint of sense that vanish before I can grasp it.

I get up.

I drag myself to the toilet. I shower and wash away the piquant smell of smoke and sweat and alcohol and perfume –the smell of clubbing humanity- from my skin. I look at the water spinning and swirling and disappearing into the drain and I try to see in it a metaphorical image of my life in this meaningless rat race, but I am just too stupid to make it out. I try to shake off laziness from my bones like I dry off water from my back. I throw a t-shirt on and a pair of jeans and I am off on my way to nowhere, dancing again to this god-damned noiseless tune that conditions my every thought and my every move.

I am out in the streets again.

Foto borrowed from... shit! forgot to copy URL...

The sun shies away behind a thick layer of clouds and all signs point to another dull day of milky-grey skies. The streets are full now and all of a sudden, the people I cross do not seem that different from the scavenging pigeons and the seagulls of earlier on. I feel like I know something that they do not. I am unsure what this something really is, but I am not going to spend my time trying to find out.

I hear music around the corner.

From my distance I can discern a faded clarinet and maybe a trombone or a trumpet. I wonder what the hell it is. The answer is a few steps in front of me: the 125^th corps of the Salvation Army is playing to an audience of an old man and his dog and a couple of children. Old plump men and women in plastic uniforms, red-cheeked and smiley, bring to all of us the word of the Lord Almighty through their chanting and singing of pastiche anthems and marching songs.

God bless them!!

Sometime ago I read somewhere that every person has a killer psychopath inside and I wonder if I will soon find mine. This would be a perfect start. Unfortunately for the tabloids I do not have the guts to kill anybody, not even myself. So my own private serial killer will remain within the domains of my desire and my imagination.

I need a chewing gum.

I find that chewing gum is a purposeless exercise similar in nature and energy waste to dancing like a maniac to a floor-fi ller, which I also do. There are no clubs open at this time of the day, so I head for the next kiosk. On the door, a publicity poster of my favourite musical magazine displays a full front page with the photo of Sid Vicious. I hate punk music. I hate manufactured, overused, démodé icons like this one. Let his rotten corpse lie quietly in hell. I hate punks. I hate their cheap, destructing, deprecating, constant complain about a society that feeds them, clothes them and has to see them and their derelict fashion complements hanging out in the streets, drinking beer bought with the so much hated mommy’s or daddy’s money. I hate their trash can politics of make up left-wing. I hate their tribalism. I hate their dirtiness and their hair style. I am so full of hate right now that I am starting to sound like one of them. I will never buy this magazine again in my life.

I get my chewing gum and go about with the rest of my day, moving aimlessly from one street to another, trying to gather a bunch of reasonable thoughts from quick passing images of life around me, like a wino searching phone booths for forgotten pieces of petty change. But today does not look like my lucky day and the sound of passing hours from a tower clock bell tells me that I will be coming back home with a heavy soul and empty pockets. And the promise that tonight it will all start again.

Foto borrowed from www.ulsu.wordpress.com/2009/03

I can’t hear what he’s saying. Too much noise with the radio booming from the speaker on the ceiling and the clinging of metal on the moving rails. No need to hear it either. The boy talks nothing but shit. He can’t keep his head down and work away like everyone else. No. Not him. He just can’t keep quiet. He talks and talks and laughs out loud with that stupid mongoloid laughter.

Me? I get pissed off from time to time, but then I think of something else and work away my day. I’m too old for this. Not worth the hassle. But Skull is a different story, with that temper of his. He’s been kinda restless since his wife left him a couple of months ago, not turning up for work most days, getting into fights at night, being too hungover to get out of bed in the morning. We call him like that because of the skulls he has tattooed on his chest and on the back of his neck. Nasty tattoos, they are. Got them in jail too.

Now that Darrin boy is getting on his tits. Skull’s been mumbling something to the collar of his boiler suit, swearing between his rotten teeth, eyes gleaming under the shade of the slaughterman’s hat. The men are getting nervous too. There’s too much kill before they finish and nobody wants to be late for the footie game. Someone shouts something at the boy Darrin, but he looks back and smiles with a sort of fuck-you-all attitude. A classic. Then he makes a big show of washing his hands slowly, carefully, like a surgeon on an operating theater.

Skull grabs an oncoming lamb carcase and pulls the hanging guts with both hands, only too violently and too fast. They burst and send blood and grassy shit all over his face.

Blood on the floor

Everyone stops.

He drops the guts on the floor and passes a hand over his mouth, hairy forearm showing across his face, the other hand holding the hilt of his knife so hard that is getting white on the knuckles. He looks slowly at the pieces of shit and blood clots gathering in the palm of his hand. He spits awkwardly on the floor, a long, dark blob of dribble that comes slowly out of his gob, lingering on his lower lip. He looks around. His expression carries about something of an upset child. For a second even the radio goes silent.

Then he walks away leaving footprints on the congealed blood around his working station.

Everyone get back on with the job.

He’s softened out, Skull. A few years back he would have knocked a few teeth out of that boy’s face without giving it a second thought.

He’s softened out. He’s getting old.

The guts

Ruby

Suddenly the car veered off and shot through the left side of the road, tail-spinning. He barely had time to drop a gear and hold the steering wheel as hard as he could. The car missed a tree by a few inches then bounced on a wooden fence before crashing on a thick bush and finally coming to a stop, warning lights pulsing like a fast heartbeat.

A guitar rift marked the starting of a new song as he tried to free himself from the hug of the full blown air-bag. He seemed ok, just the trembling hands and the dizziness that follows a shock. The car held well and he had been very lucky: a few meters away the tall metal frame of an electric tower warned of a danger he had just missed.

He took a few deep breaths, trying to control the mounting nausea that was crawling up his stomach and unfastened the seat belt. He made it out of the car and started inspecting the damage to his vehicle, assessing his chances to get it back on the road. It soon became obvious that with a bent front axis that would not be possible. He looked for his mobile phone and found that the screen had been smashed against the dashboard during the collision and it was now useless. He discarded it and looked around, to see if there were any houses nearby where he could get help.

The place was a desolated grassy bleak upland running from the road upon the side of a steep hill, peppered with bundles of red heather and thistle, and wedged between two forests of pine trees. A similar landscape could be seen on the other side of the road and further ahead. Civilization did not look close by. However, he could not help noticing the sheer beauty of the spot: nature in full autumn regalia.

A Scottish Moor

He gradually became aware of the music still echoing loudly from the car’s stereo and the incoherence of the electrified sound against the backdrop of the surroundings made him feel as an intruder on a guarded land. He started having the disturbing sensation that the noise from the car would unsettle some delicate balance on the wilderness which in turn would bring some danger to him. He felt vulnerable. He felt the blood pumping hard on his veins and a cold shiver running down the length of his back. He felt weak on his knees. He felt as defenseless as a naked child surrounded by a pack of wolves. He panicked. He closed his eyes and wished the music to stop with all his heart.

Unexpectedly, the music stopped and there was the silence. A silence as only nature can produce, with the hues and shades and nuances of a colored painting. A silence as soothing as a balm.

An eagle flew over the nearby fence. A light breeze rustled on the heather and shook the pine trees smoothly, amorously. He felt it on his hair and caught the scent of damp earth and dead leaves that it carried.

He felt calmed and inspired by nature. He though his accident had a meaning: it was some unorthodox ritual that had brought him close to a source of life. It was his day of atonement. He had been summoned to be in communion with his true roots, to answer the call of the spirits that were being apparent to him in the smell of pine resin, in the bark of the trees, in the rocking movement of every blade of grass in the wind…

He became aware of life in the purest form he had ever imagined and for the first time in his adult life he felt complete. He gradually gave in to an overwhelming feeling of love and joy. He felt alive and happy. He looked at the sky and opened his arms, trying to gather the whole of the universe in a huge, deeply felt hug.

The blast of the fuel tank sent bits of his body a few meters around the car, sealing off the embrace.

The blast

While not the intended effect, the outcome was surprisingly satisfying.

Colours hues and expression lines mixed in patterns to what she thought it was the best work of her entire career.

She contemplated it slowly, holding her chin with one dirty hand: a green plastic bucket, a mop, a roll of toilet paper and several heavily stained towels, splashes of red all over the room, over the navy blue boiler suit tied half way around her waist and on her sleeveless white cotton top.

She thought of her husband and the way he would have shouted at her in rage and desperation at the sight of their brand new light-brown woolen carpet covered in blood. But he couldn’t.

His arms, open in a square angle, formed the top part of an improvised frame. His legs, cut off from the rest of the body, formed the bottom part of it.

Through the window, the last rays of a summer sun gave the whole setting the atmosphere and quality of light she so long had tried to capture.

A sheer drop

The sea is troubled and heavy and it’s battering the coast relentlessly. Huge waves are crashing against the cliff, sending clouds of water and moist over my face. I’ve been here for a while now and I’m getting tired. My legs are cramped and my hands feel cold with pain. I keep holding to this wall of sandstone, but the thing is crumbling under my weight. I got my toes firmly pressed against a tiny crevice, my fingers digging deep in a small hole.

It seems ages ago. But it wasn’t that long and I was ready to jump and finish it all, get over and done with it. I had it pictured in my mind, crystal clear.

I had to see her.

I went to her place and I would have knocked down the door if I needed to, but I had to get her in front of my face. Then I would get it all out. I’d grab her hard by the shoulders and I’d tell her how I feel, how she made me feel. How she made me feel nothing but fucking misery and shame and humiliation. For she refused to talk to me, didn’t answer my calls. Even phoned the police that time I went to her mother’s at night and all I wanted was to talk, just a little talk, that was all. And she refused me like a pest. Then she would go out with her friends, making fun of me, walking around with a new man by her side, showing off like a peacock, telling everybody that it was my fault and that I deserve what I got. Right…

I had it all pictured in my mind. I’d let everything out right on her face. Then I’d beat her up. I’m no man to be playing with. Hell, no. I’d show her who I am. Nobody laughs at me like that. Nobody. I’d killer her. Yes, I would. I’d strangle her. I’d kill her with my own two hands. I’d grab her neck and press it hard until she would bleed from her eyes and her face would turn as black as the heart she left me with.

But she wasn’t at home. She had gone out. I waited all night hiding by her door until I realised she wasn’t coming back. She was probably fucking with someone, anyone, somewhere. Do I care? Do I fuck!

But I do. The simple though makes the blood freeze in my veins.

I had to see her and she wasn’t there. She wasn’t even coming home.

Then it all became clear, something had to be done. Fresh water wouldn’t do. I needed the sea and big breakers crashing on the shore to invite me in. I needed a high top and a big drop and rocks to welcome my fall.

I left the car with a clear head and a bad intent, nerves soothed for the first time in weeks, calm, cold, aware. I got close to the edge of the cliff and looked down to check the place. It was perfect. I turned back for a last time and a last look, to the sky and to my car. Then I slipped.

The cliff

The fucking edge was crumbling. It went down and took me with it. But I didn’t fall. I just slid down a few meters until I reached a tiny foothold, too far from the water and too far from the top. And here I am, hanging from the side of a god damned sandstone cliff.

I’ve got to make a move. I can’t hold here for much longer and the rocks below don’t look as attractive anymore. I’ve got to move. I’ve got to go. There’s no more she and me. Now it’s only me and the waves and the drop and the rocks and the wind that blows clouds of water over my face.

I move slowly to the side. I can see a small platform and a few branches and if I manage to get there I could probably heave myself up to that spot and then up to the top and then go home and forget all about it.

I keep going, just a wee bit more. My legs are aching and my fingers are sore and my toes sting with the effort. But I’m almost there…

Then I see it, right on top of the platform. A bundle of dirty clothes and mud and dead leaves and branches, all mixed up. And a head popping out from it, hair all tousled up across the face. A bluish kind of face. A dead face. Her face.

Her face

“Oh boy! Those were the times. Those really were the times…”

The man closed his eyes and tilted his head back, as if exhaling the thick smoke of an expensive Cuban cigar.

“It was something like a soldier’s life: simple in its own way. The idea was to make time run away as fast as we could. We would party as hard as possible, drinking, dancing, scoring drugs…”

“We would jump from one week to the next, barely noticing the passing of time. Life was flashing in front of our eyes like shooting stars. You would try to focus on something and by the time you would get there it was too late, it was gone and something new would grab your attention. It was a bit like watching a merry go round at top speed: one could not focus on any horse in particular, you see?”

I nodded in agreement, but was a futile gesture on my part. By now he was deep in his own memories. He wasn’t looking my way and for all I gathered I might as well being gone. I had nothing better to do, so I kept sipping at my drink and listening to him anyway.

“It was on the sheer emptiness from commitment that life took a meaning. Nothing was more important than being alive. And to celebrate it, we would go to the extent of risking the very purpose of our celebration by exploring the confines of our own bodies, the limits of our strength and endurance. We would go cold on ecstasy, stiff on coke, blank-stared on alcohol. We would touch the edges of existence with the tips of our hands and come back empty-handed”.

“It was the acceptance of life being void of content that would give significance to our actions. Nothing got us closer to life itself that the regular attempt to finish it at our own hands. By doing so we would sacrifice ourselves to a greater knowledge. By persevering in our detachment from anything but self-indulgement and excess we would become martyrs of our beliefs and masters of our destiny. It was a way of enlightenment”.

“That was what we thought. Or at least that was our attempt to give an explanation to what we did. It was an infantile philosophy, a fool’s choice of credo. We did not die and therefore we never closed the circle…”

He let his last words float into the room like a big soap bubble, a burrow forming on his brow. Then he stood up from the stool, polished off his drink in a single go, slipped a ten dollar banknote on the bar and left without even looking at me once.

]]> http://alfonsofelipe.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/h/feed/ 2 TT A drink to soothe the spirit