Back when we were ingénue

I haven't written in here forever. And I haven't written something for you, dear husband of mine, accessory to my many crimes and the most fabulous of my arch enemies.

The other day someone asked about the times when we lived in different countries and relied heavily on the written word in order for our love to get by. Now, we may lie adjacent but our dreams are thousands of miles apart.

How sad. Once I wrote a daily kilometric letter to you in the wee hours of the night. A letter you would wake up to. And you'd write back and I'd read you then when it was time for me to get up.

I wanted to tell you that lately I've been seing and reading blogs of young couples in love, and I think back when we were that ingénue. Before health care, child-rearing and huge life changes made us cynical.

I mourn the loss of that lovely naiveté, of all those bubblegum kisses, your silly songs and my long-lost idealistic romanticism. But know, now more than ever, that you are here to stay. That I can bicker, and yell, and curse, but I won't be storming out anymore.

I know the precise moment a certain innocence died for me. We were leaving the hospital to get a shower while a little super hero lied under the fluorescent lights, and we crossed paths with a couple just like us a few days before, walking stupidly enamored with their soft pillows and their yoga mats under their arms. I remember looking at them and thinking "Fools!".

We had crossed to the other side and I'm glad to be here with you.

But then, from time to time, I miss being stupidly naive with you.

Itching and wondering whether to get him copper or wool

Rumor has it, it takes seven years for one's cells to be renewed. If this is true, this body I dwell in is completely different from the one from seven years ago.

I suspect this is all bull. On the top of my head I seem to remember that brain cells don't get renewed.

But taking that piece of urban folklore at the metaphorical value, it is interesting to think about us being renewed after a seven-year span.

I've always thought one's life is nothing but a chain of lives, of variations of oneself.

After seven years is hard to think of something new.

Last night you recited Beowulf to me in old English.

After seven years we've managed to find something new, things still unsaid.

Thank you for Beowulf, thank you because it was neither copper nor wool but the promise there will still be new things to learn.

Lost and found

A couple of weeks ago I lost the ring you put on my finger seven years ago. One afternoon my hand felt cold and naked and the letters of your name were nowhere to be found.

It saddened me not because I would lose you, but because of all parts of us that get infused into everyday objects. If one day you were looking for my voice, you should know I keep a stash hidden away in the belly of my guitar.

I didn't cry for my lost ring because I was actually happy to think that at least I still had you. But I felt melancholic thinking about it, and I wondered if in twenty years someone would find it at the bottom of a drain, or perhaps I'd find it when I gutted a fish just as I had read about in a children's book.

But I have never gutted a fish, and I suspect I never will.

Today the ring came back to me.

And my hand doesn't feel so empty anymore.

Escapism act

Houdini has nothing on me.

Ladies and gentleman, I'm about to perform an act of escapism.

Please be assured that I have nothing up my sleeve.

No key under my tongue, no fake chains or rope.

Nothing is ever what it appears to be.

A - B - R - A - C - A - D - A - B - R - A
A - B - R - A - C - A - D - A - B - R
A - B - R - A - C - A - D - A - B
A - B - R - A - C - A - D - A
A - B - R - A - C - A - D
A - B - R - A - C - A
A - B - R - A - C
A - B - R - A
A - B - R
A - B
A

I'm gone

Letter to all the things I've lost

To: All the things I've lost over the years
at a random Lost and Found or maybe, the magical land where rogue socks escape to be free from their evil twins

From: Your former owner who misses you terribly

I hope you are well when this message reaches you. I thought about sending a letter when M's black school shoe went missing. We looked everywhere, but we couldn't find it, so we sent the kid to school in sparkly leopard print flats.

Retainer, I thought of you first, you were, perhaps, the one I was the sorriest to lose. Not only I missed you (I know we didn't have the best of relationships), but I was terrified to let my parents know I needed a replacement.

Books I lent and never got back, I hope you found good homes, I imagine all of you in beautiful dark wood home libraries, next to first editions. Or maybe in the hands of a young kid passionate about reading. I just hope you didn't end up as kindle.

Glasses I left on a plane. You were my favorite, and I have not replaced you, I can't. I rather have blurry sight.

My late grandfather's magnifying glass. Your departure was violent. It was my second grade teacher's fault. I believe now, looking back, that she had mental problems. That year was bad. She would tell seven-year-olds scary stories (that later I found out where Horacio Quiroga's and horrible apocalyptic movies,) and she told us about life just plain sucking. She took you away even though you were a family heirloom, along with one of my favorite books. But I'm better, I hope you are too.

And dear, dear old socks.

Rock on.

Reading on a plane

Travel Literature

On a plane you can only read celebrity magazines, tabloids, sensationalism media (only if they don't cover air disasters), bad crossword puzzle and sudoku magazines.

Read anything that doesn't take itself too seriously, the one par excellence is the in-flight magazine, What would you expect of a publication whose readers have nothing else at hand?

Little travel novels bought (at an inflated price) in a tiny stand crammed between the duty free and the public restrooms at the terminal.

Read anything than might prevent you from thinking, from remembering your phobias and terrors, nothing intellectual, not high literature, nothing introspective. And no chaotic narratives either, no Rushdie, no Goytisolo, no Donoso, no Lispector, no Bret Easton Ellis.

In the claustrophobic reality of a plane cabin there is no place for the embarrassment of being caught reading Vanity Fair, Cosmo or a romantic best-seller.

Lately I prefer historical fiction for plane rides, exotic tales of by-gone eras, fictitious romancing.

On a plane, no one would believe, by seeing me, that I'm capable of good reads.

It doesn't matter.

I only want to hypnotize myself and forget about the terror of imagining me on a free fall.

Literary dogmas apply only on firm ground.

In defense of the native interpreter

In the height of British Colonies a term was coined for the native women who lived with the colonialists: sleeping dictionary.

A sleeping dictionary because they provided a very useful service.

Through their foreign and voluptuous flesh the foreigner could learn the native language.

Their bodies rich and spilling with lexicon, with meaning, with knowledge.

A knowledge locked away, unreachable for them.

A sleeping dictionary always in need of the mighty pen of the other.

A treacherous body.

But more than a sleeping dictionary, a woman's flesh is a savage glossary.

A huntress patiently at prowl.

Of a translated me

A friend made a comment about translation.

And that comment took me back to a day when we talked for hours at Tanglewood, and a skeptical me worried that you liked only a translated version me, but not the "me" I knew, not the one that gave me meaning.

I asked you that day if you thought personality was translatable. I don't know what you answered, but you probably laughed it off as a pseudo-intellectual snobism of mine.

The question haunts me.

I worry you'll never read me raw as I am.

The science of dreams

Some days ago I was watching The science of sleep by Michel Gondry, a film where wakefulness and sleep are completely permeable. It's certainly worthwhile to watch it for the imagery ad the aesthetics, and in a personal level I love the idea of a multilingual film (English, Spanish and French), it is a small Babel in itself.

I've talked before about it, this translator dreams about a multilingual world, Martin Puchner says, when talking about the Communist Manifesto, that one of the successes of the avant-garde and the revolutions that produces manifestos, was to use the displacement, the question of exile, and thus, all these manifestos and movements were presented as multilingual phenomena, liberated from nationalisms.

I'm not wandering off, but let's go back to dreams. What more universal language but that of dreams?

The film includes a recurring dream of Gondry himself, a sequence in which Gael GB's hands grow to enormous dimensions.

I have a few recurring dreams, disturbing specially in that immediate moment coming out of a dream, and I believe that they are not only mine, I believe that it has already been said what subconscious ideas they represent, but I'm writing them here: the dream of falling, plummeting to the abyss and the dream, less metaphorical and more mundane of having all my teeth fall out, and the sadness in it is that in my dream I place them back again on their sockets wishing that in some miraculous way they will root themselves back.

But I would like to know what dreams you have.

Tell them to me.

A protocol for rage

There is a type of rage of mine you need no revelation signs: no burning bushes nor odd bird formation patterns.

More often that I'd like to accept, my rage is natural disaster, it comes with the pained roar of the Earth.

You avoid my rage just as you rather avoid a thunder storm.

But sometimes, sometimes you'd gladly take my thundering rage.

Times like now, when my hidden rage, a rage not caused or directed at you, is the most cryptic arcane.

Just below the surface a universe is going through a violent destruction and you can't even tell.

This is not a blinding rage.

Days like these days burn my throat raw, and I expect too much for you to hear my unuttered words.

Rage ought to be, like true poetry, an out loud affair.

The Conquest

You were not looking for God’s unspeakable name on my body,
the skillful stroke of his ideogram on my face.
It was not my blood the spelling charm,
nor the ability for creation of my word what you were looking for.

For you I was only the ship
that soon you’d give to the fire.

You were only looking for
scented cardamom and ginger routes,
silky mulberry paths,
green tea-leaves and aji treasures;
and to hoist yourself proud
not fearing the fall from Earth’s precipice,
like a child who believes that the world burns out
when he closes his eyes.

You needed my tongue:
divine breath that on the first day
they blew in my mouth,
to open the scroll of secret routes
that ancient shamans hid
in each one of the thousand maids.

It was necessary to learn my speech,
but you only learned suckling from my breast.
Only under my sheets during the torrid nights
your sweaty fingers learned to decode hieroglyphs.

And you were suckered into believing
that only your mighty pen
would awaken this savage glossary.

You believed that only your ardent kiss
would ignite the gunpowder
that I,
silly me,
used to mix with water to make ink.

That only your hands would know how to open the book.

And that only in your land they give a man spade and quill
and they command him,
as Adam before,
to name all the new things,
that only two steps ahead are created
for his selfish wonder.

But they didn’t tell you that silent volcanoes don’t sleep,
they remain boiling,
always on the lookout.