What a cunt she is. I have always loved the word cunt, rather sexist but so diminishing, and the way it fills your mouth every-time you say it. Cunt. Starts off with a sharp ‘K’ sound, from the top of your throat, clean and crisp; followed by an opening ‘A’ that expands and rises into the air to only rapidly descend and become the once again blade-like sound combination of ’N’ and ’T’. Precision. I’ve always admired precision and wit, and she had plentiful of those. She carefully threads her word. I don’t know if I hate or admire her, but certainly has some qualities I do not possess and I wish I had. But trust, some things are genuinely hateful, like the way she ties her hair up thinking it’s so cool and unseen before, nonchalant, or how unaware she is that spits while speaking, or even that sometimes – and this is perhaps not entirely her fault – she oddly smell of carrots. Someone told her she looks nice when she ties he hair up like that and she believed them, because her intelligence doesn’t erase her innocence.
The floor of an office building, at night, diaphanous and with pillars scattered throughout the floor in equal way, is painted in a clinical blue light. Each time the snow storm blinked in its quarrel against the city, the lights of the street reflect and refract into white and blue lights that cross the window walls of the building. Snowflakes crash against the glasses, and the pillars project oblique shadows on the floor. There’s an impassivity in the office that strikes as stoic when compared to the ferocity of the storm. The vacant, almost free-furniture floor is covered with a heavy silence, sepulchral and monastic, with the exception of two mattresses arranged in front of the west line of window walls. The left mattress has blue stains; on the other one lies a woman. She’s almost naked, has brain fog and a line of coke set next to her. ...
He showed up, this little Devil, for the first time when I was a kid of no more than 10 years, with a contract in his hands...
From the office building, and looking out the window at the titanic battle of lovers, in the building in front...
On a journey today to a neighboring town. The geography is sharp like a blade. In spite of what seemed to be a journey full of wonders, this trip would soon prove to be an ill-fated one. I have a tendency to sit at the back of the bus; because it has one's back. From here I am a watcher of all. I look up to the sky and behold a white sun behind misty clouds that traverse the sky; getting stabbed by ferocious winds. I'm in a train that goes through pine and eucalyptus forests. Everything is white. I look up again. Take a glance at the sun. The mist has different tonalities and volumes, but I can see the sun has become slightly whiter. I see it wider than before. The more I stare at it, the bigger it becomes. Looking at it closely, I’m able to catch a glimpse of the pulsaing fire of the solar storms. Snakes of the solar flame slide out of the sun’s disk, coiling before diving into the flaming sea. I start sensing a lack of comfort, all sound has been taken out; I reaccommodate myself on the backseat of the truck.The sun gets bigger, I think it’s approaching the train while no else seems to notice. It’s like a volcano in the sky about to explode abruptly and burst. The train gets warmer and warmer, and I fix my eyes on the airco above our heads. It’s been turned on, probably automatically. People are still either looking ahead or in deep slumber. Meanwhile, the sun manages to smuggle in between some of the clouds. Parts of the sun start shining directly unto the bus. The plastic starts melting by the sudden high temperature. And fuck I start sweating. I hate sweating. Sweating so much I feel my back becomes a waterfall; my shoulder blades rocks, my hair the origin of the cascade. I have a sudden desire to scream. The melted plastic turns solid due to the cold air getting out of the bus ventilation. The warm temperature makes it melt again, and it solidifies again, and remelts, and resolidifies, turned into an endlessly fluid changing form. One drop of melted plastic falls on my head and gets mixed with my hair. Again the desire of screaming comes back but I don't do it because there’s no sound. The people in the train start to melt along with the bus, their bodies merge with the walls. The windows shatter. The melted plastic keeps falling on my head, drop, by drop, by drop, by drop, by drop, by drop, and as the sun approaches relentlessly, the top cover of the bus disintegrates. A crashing wave of plastic and metal falls over me. I’m left in the middle of a hill, with a gigantic white sun in the sky. On my head the plastic and metal have turned into a big crown. Around me, the once-verdant land, has become a barren white desert. The waterfall on my back has increased into a stream of sweat running behind me; a very long and wide river that falls down an abyss left after the plane crashed. The river of my back is falling down this abyss. I start walking, elongating the river, and amidst this sterile landscape, the fertile salty water of my river brings new life. I see how, around the riversides, there’s a strong scent travelling through the air all the way up to my nostrils. What I smell is a mix of clove, cardamom and star anise. Bits of these begin to emerge from the soil. The now gone pine and eucalyptus trees are being quickly replaced by a new forest of warm spices. No plants. Only the spices. Big chunks of cloves, of between one and two meters of height, start covering the riversides, like trees and bushes. Out of many branches of the higher clove-trees I see growing flowers. Takes me some seconds until I notice these are not flowers, but big pieces of star-anise, that once in full bloom start releasing a burgundy pollen that floats in the air; next to them, cardamom shells pop out the ground, some of them as big as cars, some others like shoes. Some of the shells are cracked, and the seeds inside fall out it, rolling towards the river's water that carries them all the way until they fall down the abyss where the plain where I was had crashed. With a crown and a water cape, I feel a king on this new-found territory. I still don’t comprehend the full extent of this journey. It is only by the end of it, days from now, that I understood. At this point, I simply observe the consequences.
A dream in silence is a dead organism.
By a sudden breeze of air, the spiced-covered meadow starts to shake, and with it, the first sound comes in. The sound of a Harley Davidson motorcycle, driven by a nun dressed in white, approaching from the far distance. Her face is shaped like a moon and wrinkle, with long eyelashes with droplets of water that never fall. Her two hands on the motorcycle, zig-zagging through the landscape. This motion is in sync with a song by Mina. The nun is wearing high heeled black leather boots underneath the white cloths. Another face had taken the place of what should have been her back skull. A grown woman’s face, similarly shaped as a moon, but younger. Her hands holding two big bells, shaking them furiously while fighting and screaming at her counterpart. The front lad is more vividly upset that the one in the back, although the latter is viciously shaking the bells, adding noise to the hurricane of sounds that surrounds me.
At sunrise our little hero resumes his journey. The water from his shoulder-blades has turned the landscape into a myriad of rivers. Contemplating the waterland he sees Joan of Arc. She’s crying on her knees, her neck is purple and marked with bruises, and when she crosses looks with him, she stands up and cheerfully waves her hand until he waves back at her. She sets off, runs across the lake wiping off her tears and rippling waves that disturb the surface of the swamp. Standing next to him, she greets him but no sound comes outof her throat. She is in silent shock but internally screaming. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake the 30th of May of 1431, having claimed seeing divine visions more relevant than the power of the Church. After retracting and pledging allegiance to the Church, she was given a life sentence in prison, under the conditions of not violating and confronting the Church beliefs ever again. Authorities changed their mind when she was found wearing masculine clothes. By rejecting the feminine ideals of her time, Joan of Arc became a cross-dresser by divine design. Heresy and witchcraft was a crime to be paid over bundles of firewood composed of beeches, the Latin name is fagus, a name that evolved into the word faggot.
All the effort and dedication put into the tasks, leaves me exhausted. This sensation finds shelter in me, and as sun pushes through the horizon and tints everything in orange and ochre, the wind that pushes through and drags dust with it. And for all the time that it blows, the wind curtains the landscape with dust that eventually accumulates in layers as sediments. I extend my hands and touch the layers of dust, I feel them grainy, loose but solid. I open the layers, like pages of a book, and I wrap myself with one of them. My water cape dissolves the dust into damp soil, which I have turned into a bed. I feel even more tired. The temperature of my actions drop, icy cold, and in sonic discretion I surrender to sleep, my body fusing with the moss of the evergreen trees and golden dust, discomposing in infinity in the wet pleasant dirt. The lipstick remains.
Can legends be rewritten?
As of lately I have been carrying a heavy sense of guilt. It is for that, I wish to apologise to everyone. I ask forgiveness for the absence. I am submerged in a state of unawareness and alienation, immersed in the wheel of action fuelled by a past I don’t relate to anymore. I am in confusion, an endless displacement I seem to have no way out of. I go back and forth, I show up and I leave. I am the embodiment of a hermit and an errant. My hair grows grey and the silver ribbons as the years of life. When I feel wiser, I stumble upon accidents. I’m crippled with doubts not knowing what’s good for me, which leads me into an immortal anxiety: one that swims around in circles waiting for the right and precious point in time to perform a fulminating attack, like a shark. I’m performing all the time. I’m a bad performer. I’m proud. I’m a coward. I’m the baby with a nurturing mother and I’m all the babies that have cried with no one to heed their call. I’m highly individualistic. I’m weird at times. Some people bring that out of me more easily than others. Some people remind me that I am weird, and despite not sensing a judgement on their words, I do become my own judge. I need to stop many things. I need to be in communion and speak up more often. I’m afraid all my actions will come back to me in the shape of ugly consequences that will put me in question. I think I have a weak identity. All will fail. What’s the source of my despair? Am I acting from abundance or from scarcity? Am I establishing my relationships through the medium of an impoverished love that cries for help silently? Here’s the silence. I’m ashamed. ‘Mother-of-pearl I bring a palace inside of me’ she says.
When I was by the sea, I stood and saw her. High above the cliff I witnessed; a silhouette of jetblack curls and burgundy scales reflecting like armour in the sun. I had never seen a siren before. For a brief moment I couldn’t do anything but stay still and observe, struck. I remembered Franz Kafka’s The Silence of the Sirens. Ulysses sees them, watching their throats ‘rising and falling […] lips half parted’ and believes them to be singing when in reality they were silent. There was a look of bliss on his face, but what made him struck was the self-acknowledgement of his own cunning plan to resist their damage. Enraptured by himself, his face shocked the Siren's under a spell so deep they forgot to sing. Don’t they want him to perish? Were they resisting the common idea that something that holds so much beauty has to be so forcefully dangerous? Nature here proves to be malleable, and the nature of its creatures, by the principle of causality is malleable too. The spirit of the siren is resilient, even arrogant, and perhaps dangerous; but she’s also just minding her own business. Keeping it to herself. She’s subtle, with her fluttering soft hair like waves suspended in water like sensations do. These free-floating sensations often descend all at once; and as a way of experiencing reality, they sediment creating memory. This funny thing, memory, builds over time. But it also fades away until it can no longer be retrieved, leaving behind a cold trail; a vague shape; an echo; a stain. Memory builds over time I said, right? Builds, what? Well, builds a palace. In this palace where sensations, experiences and life happen. Where memories dance, and fuck – or do they make love to each other? They give birth together to a slippery, whimsical baby. This baby grows into a creature, the aforementioned trail or echo, that stays dormant until new life forces it out of the palace. Intuition. Intuition shows up to the party of our well-beloved and highly-celebrated life. It’s a bit like the fool at the court, because no one really takes it seriously, but it’s always there. The fact that memory and experience, together like a king and a queen send intuition out as a emissary, as Hermes, implies that intuition is pretty strong. We should pay attention, or look closely, or listen carefully, which not many people do, because when it comes, it does it in silence. Speaking up, or singing, takes too much space for the innate fragility of intuition.
I wake up standing in the shower, with a body notoriously heated and a veil of water droplets on the shower screen. I open it and step out into the brume the bathroom. From the ajar door, I hear my neighbours' voices rising through the building's interior courtyard, deep in their now-regular argument, growing angrier by the second. The bathroom is always the best spot in the house to eavesdrop. I must have fainted from the emotional overcharge and the temperature. I leave the bathroom, disoriented, and walk across the room toward my bedroom. In his usual bout of psychosis, I witness their quarrel — one of many. One of them, the quick-tempered douchebag, had placed a plate of oysters with dill on the kitchen counter, planning on eating them after a night event. He was accusing the other man, a sweetheart, of having it thrown in the trash. I almost threw up. Immediately afterward, I hear him accuse the gold-hearted man of a family inheritance issue, of not being smart enough to keep more money than he should have after his mother's death. I vomit. I feel cramps in my stomach and legs, and a sharp, stabbing hunger, similar to when a balloon runs out of air and twists around itself. Coiling insidiously like an eel, with a heartbeat that sounds like the noise of wet gunpowder in an attempt to be shot from a ship's cannon. I find myself obsessed with the very condition of my body and its contortions and jerks, with the shivers, spasms, and tremors of my legs and fingers that are close the breaking and snapping point. This happens frequently, now that I have joined the club of those who can not see their mothers again. Both of us were brought here by an ocean current, that promised me the absolution of a sadness and its transformation into something that would provide with grace and freedom: rage. Álvaro Cunqueiro mentions in his Fables and Legends of the Sea that the ocean is a beast that breathes twice a day, the fluctuations of tides that mercilessly swallow. The ocean is a beast, with blood and memory. With a kind of salt that heals wounds quickly.
Logic dictated that I should sail away, and so I did. I reached the coast, closer to the belly of the beast, where its waves caress, where it smells of whale ambergris and foam. As time passed by I have realised that I remained captive to the longing for him; the route of his shoulders, the density of his hair, the anchorage of his hands and the celerity of his thrust. This time intuition has failed me.
