12/30/15

On love letters

It´s a shame people have forgotten the power of letters. I love letters, and, above all, the love letters. This year, I spent months reading the letters written by George Orwell. I can´t say he wrote love letters, but there´s one where he gets as close to that, where he proposes marriage to a young woman he had met. He is harshly honest about his health problems: he would die of tuberculosis (four years after he had written the letter), his possible infertility. He mentions he doesn´t care if she would have love affairs, because he believed the true fidelity, and the one he was looking for, was the intellectual one. He was a widow with a very young son, a man of slender means at that period of his life. In a way, he was always poor. His fame was posthumous one. I guess the answer to his proposal was a no, but he got to remarry again, days before he died of TB in a hospital. I guess the woman to whom he married truly loved and admired him deeply.
I haven´t written too many love letters, I guess. And I think I have received very few as well. That seems fare. Maybe, I should have loved more than I did.
Ever since I´ve seen this little girl performing, I couldn’t forget her.  Because, as much as I consider myself a letter lover, a faithful devotee to the power of words, there are times I think they are completely unnecessary.



11/17/15

A crack in the wall of everyday life: from Pink Floyd to Suzanne Vega

It´s been a while. I could say I was busy, I was tired, I was lazy, and that I was all those things, maybe all of them at the same time, and I wouldn´t be lying. As a modern woman, I am as busy as modern women usually are: always in a hurry, worried about many things, waking up and rushing in, having a feeling of physical and mental weariness from the moment I get up from my bed and face the mirror for the first time with the mouth full of toothpaste. I try to concentrate particularly on the toothpaste and not on the creases around my eyes or on the dark circles around the same pair of eyes. I am a sort of an old humanized panda, and that´s why I focus on brushing my teeth.
The modern life. A friend sent me an audio with the famous commencement speech to Kenyon College Class of 2005 written by David Foster Wallace. He knows I am a huge fan of his. I particularly like his essays and short stories, and I know some consider this speech bad, one of the worst things he has ever written, but there are many truths there, especially when he describes the everyday life almost every living person who happens to be alive and kicking in a modern society. We live in cities, we face huge traffic jams, pollution, violence of different types. We eat in a hurry, we´re bombed by information while we try to digest our food altogether with the news coming from the TV, or tablets or smartphones, or from all of them at the same time. 
And all of those things reminded me of a very old video that I never really liked from a song that was never among my favorites, but one of the terrible things about our memory is that we don´t really control what we do remember and what we do forget. Sometimes, we would love to forget somethings but never do, and that´s really unfortunate, but I remember a scene from a Pink Floyd video, The Wall: kids being grinded and turned into sausages. And this is how I feel: as I am being grinded, and turned into minced beef .
And another great aspect of Wallace´s speech is when he makes us realize that that´s the way the world is and that is nothing personal, since many others are in the same traffic jam with us. It´s nothing personal. In fact, it´s just the exact opposite: it´s all about not being personal at all! More than seven billion of us, trying to make a living, being turned into minced meat. 
But don´t you gonna be thinking that I would rather give up living in a city and having the comforts of a modern life. No way. I would just love having some slow motion moments in my daily routine, some starring at the wall moments, looking for a crack, who knows? A breach to a different world. 
  


9/2/15

When I reached 5 ft, 6.9 in

I spent almost my whole life with the feeling I was too small, too short, as if I had taken one of the potions or eaten one of the sides of the mushroom that were so conveniently available in the world of Alice. But I would always have the share that would make people shrink.


Growing up takes time, it takes years, and I guess it is like that because we need to get to know the surface and limits of our bodies. It´s funny, but, as I was reading a book, and this happens a lot to me, I find in a book something that I was thinking about, And I love this, the wonders of coincidence! Anyway, as I was going through Monsieur Test, by Paul Valèry, I came up with this:
"During our childhood, we get to know ourselves slowly, by discovering the space occupied of our bodies, by expressing its singularities through a series of physical efforts".
We get to conquer the height we reach inch by inch, by exerting great efforts to overcome limits of the physical world around us. Existing and thriving requires lots of stamina: By falling, we learn the principle of gravity. By pushing our limits, we learn the principle of inertia.
I don´t know if I wasn´t able to test and discover the limits of my body to its fullest extent as I was growing up, so I was always unable to feel I was 5 ft, 6.9.
Few days ago, it all changed. All of a sudden, I felt 5 ft, 6.9 in for the first time. As if my innerself had finally taken the entire area of my body, not a small part of it. I was fully 5 feet, 6.9 inches tall.
It took me 44 years to grow up.

6/21/15

short note

A fraud, that´s how I felt for many years.
I wans´t sure of what to do about it. It was a hard feeling to deal with, a permanent discomfort, something as  wearing somebody elses´clothes. Or worse: somebody elses´shoes, too tight or too large.
For many years in my life, I tried to find ways out of this. Of letting to be a fraud and become me, or something that felt more truly me or that it felt more like the true me.
The problem with this life we live is there´s always some sort or level of expectation we´re supose to reach or achieve somehow. We´re supose to fit a certain pattern that is usually too tight: the perfect family, the dream job, the dream house, so on and so forth. 
And I guess this some is an impressive number of people that spend their lives fighting against this discomfort.
"Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory", said Tenesse Williams, and I´ve heard and read similar sentences from different types of artists. I am not sure if every artist is always someone whose not satisfied with his/her life. I would dare to say so.
Once I understood life wasn´t satisfactory, that I had to find my way to deal with the dissatisfaction I had inside, I begun to change. It hasn´t been easier, though, but I could find my way to my own satisfaction. 
Now, I´m no longer  a fraud. I´m something else, somehting I still cannot grasp, but that doesn´t matter to me. As long as I don´t feel like a fraud, I´m all right.        

4/3/15

Seing things for the first time

I saw a very nice video the other day; a three year old girl is standing at a train station. Her father is filming her during their short wait. She´s overloaded with joy and excitement. Her entire face glows. She laughs and giggles,she cannot help to let her tiny arms go up and down. She opens and closes her hands many times, and then, her father tells her the train is coming... The train is coming! A real one, a powerful and huge machine, not a small plastic toy. She cannot find words to describe what she feels, she´s only three, her vocabulary is still incipient so as her life experiences. But the joy she feels! It might sound corny, but it made me think of the wonderful piece of music composed by the great Beethoven, his Ode to Joy. To me, this symphony is the close one can get, not to the idea of God, not in the religious sense, but to the feeling of divinity, to the realization of the miracle of being alive, seeing things, experiencing tastes, sounds, feeling one´s heart beating fast with exhilaration, what a wonderful word.
I was so touched because I realized that I´ve lost almost all this hability of seeing things for the first time. By thinking about it, my main excuse was that I have lived. Not for too long, but I kind of thought the things I could see for the first time were already few, which is a stupid argument, I know it well. Everytime we open our eyes to a new day, there are things we´re seeing for the first time. 
So I tried. And, as I was stuck in trafic, I looked up, to the bright sky and paid attention to a pack of clouds, and I was amazed, truly amazed with the extreme beauty right there, over my head, a live spectacle, since clouds are being constantly changed by the winds. 
I thought I should have taken a picture but I gave up, because, if I did stop to pick the cellphone, I would miss that instant. I don´t need a picture. The image is already engraved on my memory, as I believe the image of the her first train is in the mind of that little three year old girl.



    

2/18/15

The fortune at the bottom of coffee cups: a short story

* This is a short story I wrote for my first book. I tried to translated it to English. Here it is.


The Fortune at the bottom of the coffee cups



Jumping, running, pretending and climbing. The adult males were all together, pretending to be serious after the Sunday meal, digesting and discussing serious subjects comfortably seated in chairs around the porch, while the adult females served coffee and desserts. Joanna killed two big chickens for the supper. The chickens were alive and noisy just before their necks were broken. Right after that, inanimate objects, almost as if they were pillows. Large, quiet feather pillows resting in the morning sun.  Having  witnessed  the occurrence of death, felt me with disgust.  I couldn´t eat the roasted chicken. I feared I would swallow death, or that I would end up the killing, tearing up the meat fibers with my milk teeth. I had mashed potatoes with those round and green things… peas!  And there were also roasted pork, huge, its skin turned into a crispy surface, its open mouth holding an apple, its eyes turned into hard pieces of charcoal. And then, the desserts. My mother´s delicious pudding, creams, cakes and fruits in syrup: peaches, plums and sanguine oranges. The garden´s lawn was deep green; the sun was always there, over our heads. Don´t stay in the sun after eating, my mother yelled at me, I can see her by the porch, her hands around her mouth. It was winter, my uncle took a nap at the hammock, my grandfather smoked his old pipe, I do remember. Women served desserts and coffee. My grandfather looked so old! He read the future in the coffee powder that rested in the bottom of coffee cups. “Where is he, my grandpa?” Dead; I can see him inside his casket, old and wasted, but, no, he is alive, reading people´s fortune in the coffee powder that rested at the bottom of coffee cups.  Once, he told me: you going to live many, many years.   “How many years, grandpa?” “Many, many years. Many more than I would live”. So I asked if live many years was a good or a bad thing. He laughed, showing his ugly teeth.   It´s so bright today, isn´t it? It´s the sun, always there, over our heads.  Grandma Henrietta was older than grandpa. She had a mouth with no teeth in it, her tongue danced around as it could sense something her eyes couldn´t as lizards do. The difference was she had legs she couldn´t use, and a blanket covering their uselessness. And there was Cousin Joachim, such an evil creature. He used to kill birds with a slingshot, targeting the most beautiful ones because he was so ugly and he hated being condemned to a live standing in his both feet, unable to fly. He knew, he knew that even though he could climb the tallest trees and pretend to be a bird, he would end up as all the other humans; we belong to earth, to the soil we have under our feet. Life is made of some ups and some downs, most downs, mainly once we reach the old age, and then there is the moment we end up under the soil we once have under our feet. He would kill the birds in revenge. But, this Sunday sunny afternoon, there was no trace of death and the old ones were my grandpa and grandma Henrietta with her legs covered with a sad blanket.
Cousin Joachim, I hated him, but I also admired his ability to never miss one single shot. I would beg him not to, beg him to spare the little sparrow, but he wouldn´t listen, he never listened, and the result was I had a dying bird in the palm of my hand and wanted to cry and wanted to kill my cousin for having killed. My hand would tremble, my body would crumble, as it does tremble and crumbles today. He also killed ants and snails with the help of a magnifier. The sun light and the sun heat would be magnified by the lens and the ants and snails would burst in flames, what an awful death.
He challenged me saying I would never climb the old guava tree. I said I would, so we made a deal. If I didn´t, he would have my collection of stamps. If I did, I would have his collection of butterfly wings.
I was scared, but would never have him have my collection of stamps, a present from my daddy.  I thought about my dad and a dull pain pierced my chest. My dad, where is he? A salesman making a living from selling things around the country far, far away from us, from everything. When he returns, it´s like he had never left. He always brings us presents. For me, stamps and adventures books, for Lao, a knife or a magnifier, the one that Joachim later used to kill the ants, for Leah, a nice ribbon for her light brown hair, for my mother, a nice piece of cloth, a perfume. My mother, where is she? I do remember a ceremony at the church, a closed casket with someone inside.  I was so scared.
“Cut it now, stop crying. Don´t you see? It was meant for him to die”.  I recall my father´s voice and the image of his long legs in front of me. Why, I asked. “That´s life. He gave his life so we could have what to eat, that´s why we raise animals. Tomorrow is Easter”. A bunny or a lamb? A lamb. So tiny, so fragile… I was responsible for caring and giving him food. But now, the lamb is dead, my father killed my lamb. “No, dad, no!” I yelled at him, I hated him. He killed my lamb, and I yelled at him, I called him murder, and then I run away from him, away from the sight of the butchered lamb. I climbed the highest tree of my aunt´s garden and I stayed there, I would have stayed there forever, but I came down because she begged me to, or because I was tired and needed to go home. When I got home, my mother wanted me to tell me father I was sorry, but I wasn´t, so I wouldn´t. She hit me hard, five times. But I didn´t say I was sorry because I wasn´t.  I remember my father´s eyes at me. He was sad, I was furious. The next day, it was Easter. I was grounded and didn´t have lunch. And then, my father travelled. I didn’t say goodbye, I couldn´t forgive him. After he left, I almost felt happy with his absence, but time passed and passed, and he wouldn´t come back.  I started to wish he would come back.
“It´s about time to get inside, dad”. 
Dad? The sun light is so bright I can´t hardly see.  Daddy ´s back! But my legs hurt, I can´t move them. Joachim and I, we were there, high up there at the highest branches of the guava tree . And I fell. My legs hurt so badly, I couldn´t move. My dad came to rescue me, took me in his arms and then to the doctor who lived nearby. Don´t you worry, son, everything´s going to be all right, he said to me, looking into my eyes with his good old eyes. His hair has grown gray, so gray. Dad, I am sorry, I didn´t know, I was mad at you, I am sorry, can you forgive me, daddy?  My legs hurt, I cannot move. The lamb, the roasted pork, the snails and the ants. You going to live many, many years, the coffee powder at the bottom of the coffee cups.
 No, I don´t want to! I want my dad, my dad is with me right now, taking care of my broken legs. I feel the pain, I feel I cannot control my legs, my life. Where is my life? Where are my brother and sister, my cousin, and grandfather, my mother and my father?
 Father?
 “Ok, daddy, that´s enough. Relax now. Let´s go inside. You´ve got to rest a little”.
My grandfather used to read people´s fortune by looking at the coffee powder at the bottom of coffee cups. Once he told me: you´re going to live many, many years.
“How many, grandpa?”
 “Many more than I would live”. 
       
        

11/23/14

Signs

My oldest daughter is starting to show the first signs of puberty. It is time. If I think about my life, I can remember I was about her age when I realized I was growing old, I was becoming an adult. Up to that point, I guess I only thought I was growing up, getting taller without actually thinking my height meant something else than being able to look my mother straight into her eyes.
She is still my girl, a sweet child who loves to play with her favorite toys, but, little by little, she´s changing, she´s being changed by the passage of time. In a question of months, she will be bloming into a beautiful young woman. 
In a very short period of time, she will be looking at me straight into my eyes, as an equal.  
I just hope I will be wise enough in helping her in making some sense of what it means to be a woman.