Azuria #7

Recibí con ilusión el número 7 de Azuria, la publicación anual de Geelong Writers, en la que aparece una modesta contribución mía, una narración muy cortita titulada 'Elma Donna', en inglés.

Lo que era motivo de gran alegría se convirtió en decepción cuando comprobé que alguien había introducido un cambio - en apariencia nimio - en el texto, pero que lo reducía a una inmensa chorrada sin sentido. La errata introducida por el editor reemplazó "Franco", ese genocida fascista que parece cabalgar de nuevo, triunfal en su 155, por campos ibéricos, con el nombre del personaje principal del cuento, "Frankie".

'Elma Donna' es una historia de ficción basada en experiencias reales, pero cualquier parecido con la realidad es una mera coincidencia. Ja.

Elma Donna

I had not seen him for at least seven years; nor spoken to him for probably a few more. Once I had moved to the other side of the world, keeping up with developments in my home town had been difficult. Despite the quick uptake of technologies everywhere by almost everyone, distance has a way of imposing a veil of secrecy on other people’s lives.

I had arrived in Valencia a few days before Christmas. I had plenty of time to catch up with friends and family. My brother had asked me if I wanted to come along and pay a visit to Franky Rabbit. It was mid-afternoon, and TV shows were incredibly boring or stupid, so I said yes.

‘Is he still selling drugs?’ I asked my brother.

‘Sip. Still in the business.’ He shrugged his shoulders as if to mean that things may change from time to time, but certain people won’t ever change. I did feel like having a little smoke of hash, so I decided to tag along.

Rabbit Frankie had been a kid from our neighbourhood. We had seen him on the streets day after day, although he had attended a different school than ours. Our parents had wanted us to do better than most and had therefore enrolled us in a semi-private school. I had transferred to the local public high school as soon as I turned 14. Franco had died three years before, and switching to the state high school had been a blessing in disguise.

My brother was driving in the mid-afternoon dusk. The December air soon felt chilly and damp. The Mediterranean is great in summer, but in winter, soon after sunset, its humidity soaks into your bones and chills you down

Rabbit Frankie was renting a flat in the north-west of the city. Rentals were not expensive in those days, and he was certainly making a killing. Besides his drug dealing, my brother told me on the way there, these days Frankie had achieved honourability by getting himself a job as a public servant.

‘You must be kidding’, I replied incredulous.

‘Not at all,’ my brother quipped. ‘And so the public enemy became the public servant.’

So bloody typically Spanish, I thought. Apparently, Frankie had used his jet set connections to his advantage, and some obscure government official had picked him for a non-existent position within an even obscurer division in the Regional Department of Health. The irony did not escape anyone. It was like putting the wolf in charge of the herd of sheep.

We parked the car.

***

The bell rang, pressed by my brother’s middle finger. After ten seconds or so the door opened and Frankie’s face appeared behind it. And suddenly I wished him hurt, suffering. I could have even wanted him gone for good. Let this prick suffer, for goodness’ sake. He deserves it more than anyone else I know!

Elma. Seeing him after all these years had brought her back. A beautiful girl with a great future ahead, all the boys in the neighbourhood were secretly in love with her, or at least admired her beauty. Gleaming straight black hair, gracefully shaped, an enchanting smile beneath warm, fiery black eyes. Why she had chosen him, we never knew. Elma went out with Frankie for years – and was loyal to him even when he got first in trouble with the law as a trifling neighbourhood dealer. He was then a minnow dreaming of hitting the big time.

Seeing his stupid face after so many years stirred some bad memories. How Elma had jumped off the rear balcony of her 7^th-floor home. How had such a young life full of possibility been brought to an abrupt end? We never knew what drove her to such profound despair.

Frankie did not seem to recognise me at first. Then my brother mentioned I had only been back a few days, and that I’d be partial to some weed.

‘Oh, you’ve been abroad now for a few years, yeah?’

I just nodded. My brother kept on: ‘Australia, man! My bro’ here went to Australia. He has kangaroos and koalas in his garden! Ain’t that awesome?’

‘Wow! Is that so? One day I’m gonna travel over there and have a swim at that pool where Crocodile Dundee took that American babe. Oh my, what a woman! Nice curves and even better legs, mind you. Yet my favourite is still Madonna, you know?’

‘Is she just?’ I quipped. ‘You know, I share something very special with Madonna! Something real special you will never share.’

Frankie raised his eyes and shook his head to one side to move that silly fringe of his out of his sightline. ‘And what might that be, show-off?’

‘We were both born on 16 August.’

Happy Birthday to you (and myself!). Fotografía de Jonas Bengtsson.

***

We didn’t stay long. My brother gave Frankie a couple of crisp €10 notes. We (or rather, I) had got what I wanted, so there was no point in humouring the despicable human being Frankie was. But there was no stopping him. That’s what coke does to some people: they talk rubbish nonstop.

He had been going on about AIDS and whatnot when he suddenly brought back the singer into the conversation. ‘You know what Madonna started singing at her last gig?’

‘Nope,’ my brother joined in.

Frankie switched to English. ‘Hey, you, don’t be silly, put a condom on your willy!’

I must have winced quite noticeably, because Frankie suddenly stared at me and asked if he hadn’t pronounced everything correctly.

‘Yes, mate,’ I tried to reassure him and said in English. ‘Queen’s English, jus’ purrfect!’

The idea sort of floated in the air, which stank of cigarette smoke.

‘Time to hit the road for us,’ my brother said. ‘Thanks, see you around, Frankie.’

‘Hasta la vista, baby,’ was Frankie’s rejoinder.

‘Great story about Elma Donna, Frankie,’ I said while heading towards the door. ‘I’m sure you will never forget Elma Donna, will you?’

I turned around as I reached the door and fixed him with my eyes. Whether he had got the message or not, I did not care. Elma’s name had been pronounced loud and clear enough to prick his conscience. If he ever had one.

El séptimo número de Azuria incluye piezas en prosa de Geoffrey Gaskill, Ross Jackson y Francesca Juraté Sasnaitis, y poesía Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke, Robert Drummond, James Gifford, Rory Hudson, A.A. Jonynas, Bernard Montini, Christina Murphy, Sarah-Rose Mutch, Elena Lilian Popescu, David Rabokidze, Francesca Juraté Sasnaitis, Edith Speers, Lidija Simkute, Justine Stella y Ted Witham, con tres reseñas a cargo de Ted Reilly.

Versos virales/Viral verses - Un cuento/A short story

Este es un cuento que advierte sobre el peligro de escribir poesía. No es pues una historia cualquiera, si bien podría decirse que reúne todas las características para ser una historia cualquiera. De entrada, digamos que cuenta con un personaje central, el protagonista, al que llamaremos Pen.

Pen está atravesando una especie de crisis que algunos llamarían existencial. El caso es que a Pen le ha dado por hacerse preguntas; su trending actual es la introspección, pero con los ciento cuarenta caracteres que acepta Twitter no tiene ni para empezar. Se pregunta Pen en determinadas ocasiones qué sería de él si no se hiciera nunca esas preguntas, pues sabe con certeza que sí existen personas que pueden pasar por este mundo y vivir toda una vida sin examinarse a sí mismas.

Pen se ha ido acostumbrando a experimentar la sensación, cada vez más fuerte, cada vez más evidente, de que para muchas personas el ser que él fue ya no existe, como si de verdad un poquito de su ser hubiera muerto – cosa que bien pudiera ser cierta, pero eso es algo que no vamos a considerar detalladamente. Decimos muerto, pero no muerto física o vitalmente, no, pues Pen sigue respirando, comiendo, bebiendo, defecando y orinando, incluso de vez en cuando, copulando, como todo hijo de vecino. Pese a todo lo anterior, Pen suele acudir todas las mañanas a la oficina a trabajar, o a fingir que realmente trabaja, o las más de las veces, simplemente a escribir.

En realidad, son determinados lances de la vida diaria los que le refuerzan a Pen esa sensación de haber muerto un poco; la sensación varía según los días, pero por lo general ha alcanzado las máximas cotas de perceptibilidad en momentos específicos, a saber: cuando sus congéneres callan palabras que posiblemente debieran estar dirigiéndole o escribiéndole. La sensación puede sentirla en su interior (es decir, que Pen llega a sentirse como muerto) o puede sentirla como algo externo y ajeno a su ser: como muerto en la conciencia de otros.

Dejemos claro en este punto que se trata de una impresión, y que por lo tanto es una respuesta subjetiva a su experiencia del mundo que le rodea.

Pen se ha estado haciendo importantes preguntas sobre su identidad, su personalidad, sobre cómo le perciben, cómo es visto (o, por el contrario, no visto). Mientras mira por la ventana de su oficina – el lector debiera pues imaginárselo, hacerse ese dibujo mental que tanto nos recuerda a la fotografía – Pen reflexiona y medita quién es él en momentos perdidos en cualquiera de las muchas semanas que tiene un año.

Añadamos aquí una anécdota: con cada vez mayor frecuencia sus propios hijos se dirigen a él como a través de un intérprete, evitando el esfuerzo de hablarle en la lengua que ha tratado de enseñarles desde que nacieron. Como si Pen no estuviera físicamente presente, esto es, como si Pen fuera invisible o estuviera ausente, o en el peor de los casos, muerto. Y cuando Pen protesta (algo dolido pero especialmente frustrado) y se queja, no sin cierta ironía, de esa aparente invisibilidad o inexistencia suya, los pequeños se ríen. Eso sí, lo hacen sin malicia.

Es muy probable que, al fin y al cabo, los pequeñuelos vean este asunto como un juego, quizás otro de los muchos juegos lingüísticos que Pen siempre ha practicado con ellos, con la vana esperanza de instruirles o educarles en algo que, según todos los indicadores, índices y tablas habidas y por haber, no sirve prácticamente para nada en esta década del siglo XXI que ahora transcurre indolente y decaído mientras Pen mira por la ventana, y que bien pudiera ser de muchísima menos utilidad (por no decir una verdadera mácula en el currículo profesional de cualquier persona) en veinte o treinta años.

Es en el ámbito extrafamiliar donde esa intensa sensación de inexistencia ha venido cobrando dimensiones que quizá debiéramos calificar de francamente intolerables. Resulta que muchas de sus correspondencias (en su mayoría por medios electrónicos), surgidas a partir de contactos que en su momento le resultaron indudablemente interesantes, en ámbitos o entornos (llamémoslos así) no solamente profesionales sino manifiestamente humanos, se rompieron de forma abrupta, se interrumpieron sin él comerlo ni beberlo. Y lo hicieron desde el mismo momento en que Pen decidió (de manera bastante humana, podría argumentar un observador externo e imparcial) hacer partícipes a través de sus poesías a sus interlocutores y/o corresponsales del hecho de que, en el más recóndito interior de su ser (lo que algunos llamarían alma) vivía día a día con un insoportable dolor.

En efecto, el lector debe tomar buena nota de que fue el dolor lo que llevó a Pen (a su vez ávido lector) a escribir poesía. Esa necesidad simplemente sucedió (por circunstancias que, a las alturas en que nos encontramos de la estructura interna de este cuento, no vienen al caso), y terminó por transformarse en (auto)exigencia de escribir versos, poesías. ¿Le estaba dominando la voluntad algo ajeno y desconocido?

Lo hizo – lo de escribir poemas – y tras varias semanas de denodados esfuerzos, tras varios meses de revisar, corregir, enmendar y pulir versos, rimas e imágenes, metáforas e incluso hipálages, quedó ciertamente satisfecho del resultado.

Sus versos tenían ritmo y una rima impecable, y realmente – se dijo entonces Pen – desbordaban emoción, rebosaban ternura, manaban llanto desde el primero hasta el último verso. ¿Qué más se le puede pedir a unos poemas?

Pen había estado asistiendo a diversas conferencias y simposios en los que, haciendo gala de un candor invulnerable al desaliento, se empeñó en diseminar sus versos. Quiso compartir la dolorosa magia de sus poemas con todos, conocidos y desconocidos. Extenderse, o quizás hacerse ver un poquitito, o simplemente estar presente en la foto, pero sin llegar nunca a reclamar una posición predominante que no deseaba ocupar en ningún caso.

Un día sucedió lo imprevisible. Fue durante una visita rutinaria al médico de cabecera que la realidad se abrió ante sus ojos, de pronto, como una de esas puertas automáticas en los grandes centros comerciales.

El doctor le había estado haciendo las preguntas habituales sobre sus costumbres sociales, y Pen – ingenuamente, todo hay que decirlo – las respondía sin meditar mucho las respuestas. Mencionó de pasada que había escrito unos poemas, y que tenía la impresión de que a poca gente le gustaban.

‘Pero ¿qué ha escrito usted en sus poemas, buen hombre?’ La pregunta del doctor le sorprendió. Por pura coincidencia, Pen llevaba una copia en su maletín y se la entregó al médico, quien, antes de tomarlos en sus manos adoptó la precaución de ponerse sus guantes de látex; solo entonces los observó detenidamente, y finalmente alzó los ojos por encima de las lentes de sus gafas para estudiar al paciente.

No le hizo falta decir mucho más que la palabra ‘virus’. Pen cayó de inmediato en la cuenta de que había vertido tanta existencia propia interior, de que había puesto un porcentaje tan alto de su identidad y de su ser en esos poemas que, sin que fuera esa su intención, los había convertido en algo de mucho riesgo para la salud de los demás. El doctor le hizo ver mediante unos diagramas y unas cuantas expresiones especializadas que los versos de Pen, pese a ser sublimes y bellos, podían inocular el peligroso virus causante de la altamente indeseable introspección. Obviamente enojado por la situación de riesgo a la que Pen le había expuesto con sus poemas, el facultativo le instó a salir de inmediato de la consulta y a limitarse a leer sus poemas ‘en la más estricta intimidad’.

Nunca antes se le había pasado por la cabeza que la poesía pudiera ser un vehículo de contagio.

Fue así como se puso punto final a un periodo increíblemente extraño, que como ya hemos dicho parece haberse caracterizado por una suerte de inexistencia, de invisibilidad, de ausencia, o en el peor de los casos, de muerte, dependiendo de quienes sean los que se sientan la amenaza o perciban el riesgo de tan pavoroso contagio.

Y no obstante, a Pen le sorprendió averiguar que personas con las que hablaba todas las semanas – individuos ya contagiados sin duda, o quizá inmunes al terrible virus del que sus versos eran portadores – le aseguraban que eran muchos los que inquirían sobre su estado de salud, y le hacían preguntas sobre él, sobre cómo le iban las cosas. Escuchar esas palabras reforzaba la sensación de, si no haberse muerto, al menos estar como desvanecido del mundo.

En cierto modo, P debe estarle agradecido a su médico de cabecera, quien le conminó a poner sus versos a buen recaudo, lejos de las conciencias de amigos, conocidos y extraños con quienes pudiese en el futuro departir. La noticia, claro está, podría haber llegado fácilmente a las manos de periodistas sin escrúpulos de todo el planeta, y todo ello hubiera sido mucho, mucho peor para P.

Incluso a miles y miles de kilómetros de distancia debe haber quienes todavía teman el contagio, y es muy probable que de forma sutil hayan decidido que de momento deben seguir ‘invisibilizándolo’, o borrar su misma existencia de su confortable cotidianeidad, o en todo caso quizá mediatizarla, supeditándola a una cómoda aunque desde luego ya manida distancia de interposición.

Y así, P sigue preguntándose, mientras mira por la ventana y finge estar trabajando, quién es, o más bien en qué se ha convertido. Y cuando el sol, poco antes del mediodía, brilla en el reluciente capó del 4x4 que alguien a quien no conoce aparca en el exterior de la oficina e irradia con sus destellos sobre la sombría mirada de P, surgen de sus labios inescrutables rimas contagiosas, temibles cadencias cohibidas, virulentos versos heridos, líricas preguntas sin respuesta.

ΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩ

This story is a warning about the perils of writing poetry. It is not just any story, although it might well be said that it has all the characteristics to be just any story. To start with, let us say that it has a main character, the protagonist, who we shall call Pen.

Pen is having a crisis, of the kind some people would call existential. The thing is, Pen has taken to asking questions of himself; his current trending is introspection, but the one hundred and forty characters Twitter accepts are nowhere near enough for him. Sometimes Pen wonders what would become of him if he would never ask such questions, for he positively knows there are persons who can live in this world and go through their whole lives without examining themselves a single time.

Pen has been getting accustomed to experiencing the increasingly stronger sensation, more and more evident, that for many people the self he used to be no longer exists, as if a little bit of his self were truly dead – which might well be true, but that is something we shall not consider in detail. We say dead, but not dead in the physical, vital sense, no, since Pen continues to breathe, eat, drink, defecate and urinate, even copulate every now and then, just like any Tom, Dick Harry. Despite all of the above, Pen keeps going to his office every morning to work, or to pretend he actually works, or most of the time, simply to write.

Certain events in his daily life actually reinforce in Pen the impression of being a little dead; the sensation varies from day to day, but generally speaking it has reached its highest marks of perceptibility in specific moments, namely: when his fellow human beings unsay words they should likely be addressing or writing to him. He may feel this sensation in his inner self (that is to say, Pen ends up feeling like dead) or he may feel it as something external and alien to his self: like dead to others’ conscience.

Let us stress at this point that this is an impression, and therefore it is Pen’s subjective response to his experience of the world around him.

Pen has been asking himself important questions about his own identity, his personality, about how he is perceived, how he is seen (or the opposite, unseen). While he looks out of the office window – the reader should now imagine him, make that mental picture that reminds us so much of photography – Pen reflects and ponders on who he is during lost moments of any of the many weeks a year has.

Let us add an anecdote here: his own children have been increasingly addressing him via an interpreter, avoiding the effort of speaking to him in the language he has been attempting to teach them from the moment they were born. As if Pen were not physically present, that is to say, as if Pen were invisible or absent, or in the worst-case scenario, dead. And when Pen remonstrates (a little hurt but mostly frustrated) and complains not without some irony, about his apparent invisibility or inexistence, the little ‘uns laugh. True, they do so without malice.

It is very likely that, when all is said and done, the little ‘uns see this matter as a game, perhaps just another one of the many language games Pen has always played on them, in the vain hope of instructing them or educating them in something that, according to all indicators, markers and graphs currently at our disposal and in times to come, is practically useless in this decade of the crestfallen 21^st century that sluggishly goes by outside the window, something that might turn out to be even less useful (not to say a real blemish in anyone’s professional curriculum) within twenty to thirty years’ time.

It is outside his familial setting where his sensation of inexistence has been reaching dimensions we should perhaps call frankly intolerable. As it happens, many correspondences (mostly via electronic means) developing as a result of contacts that at the time were undoubtedly interesting, in settings or environments (let us put it this way) not only professional but also manifestly human, were abruptly broken, were interrupted for no apparent reason. And they were so from the very moment Pen decided (in a very human fashion, an impartial or external observer might have argued) he would through his poetry share with those very interlocutors/correspondents the fact that in the deepest recesses within his self (what some would call a soul) he was living, day after day, an unbearable sorrow.

Indeed: the reader should note that it was sorrow what prompted Pen (a very keen reader himself) to write poetry. This need simply happened (due to circumstances that, at this point in the internal structure of this narrative, do not matter), and ended up becoming a (self)-imposed demand to write lines, poems. Had his will been subjugated by something alien and unknown?

He did it – write poems, we mean – and after several weeks of tireless effort, after several months of revising, correcting, amending and polishing up lines, rhymes and imagery, metaphors and even hypallages, he was certainly satisfied with the results.

The poems had rhythm and faultless rhymes, and they truly – Pen told himself – overflowed with emotion, they were bursting with tenderness and oozing tears, from the first to the very last line. What else could you ask of poetry?

Pen had attended several conferences and symposia where, showing candour impregnable to dejection, he made sure his poetry would be disseminated. He wanted to share the painful magic of his poetry with everyone, those who he already knew and those unknown to him. To spread himself around, or perhaps to make himself be seen a little bit, or simply to be in the picture, though never claiming a leading position he did not wish to occupy in any case.

The unthinkable happened one day. It was during a routine visit to his GP that reality opened itself up suddenly before his very eyes, just like those automatic doors at the shopping malls.

The doctor had been asking him the usual questions about his social habits, and Pen – rather naively, it has to be said, too – was answering them without thinking over the answers. He did mention in passing that he had written a few poems, and that he got the impression people did not like them.

‘What have you written in those poems, you poor soul?’ The medico’s question took him by surprise. It was a coincidence that Pen had a copy in his briefcase, which he handed over to the doctor, who, before grasping it in his hands took precautions and put on a pair of latex gloves; only then did he glance at them studiously, and finally he raised his eyes above the glass rims in order to consider his patient.

He did not need to make mention of little else than the word ‘virus’. Pen immediately realised he had poured so much of his inner self, he had staked such a high percentage of his own identity and being into those poems that he had unintentionally turned them into a high-risk source to others’ health. The doctor made Pen understand by means of some graphs and some specialised jargon that his poems, despite their sublimeness and beauty, might inoculate the dangerous virus that brings about the highly undesirable introspection. Perceptibly annoyed by the hazardous situation Pen had exposed him to with his poems, the clinician urged him to leave the practice and to restrict himself to reading his poems ‘in the strictest privacy’.

It had never crossed his mind that poetry could be a vehicle for contagion.

This put an end to an incredibly strange period of time, which seems to have been characterised, as we already said, by some sort of inexistence, invisibility, absence or, in the worst-case scenario, death, depending on who it is that feels the threat or perceives the risk of such frightful contagion.

However, Pen was surprised to learn that people who he talked to on a weekly basis – individuals who, no doubt, had already been infected, or were perhaps immune to the appalling virus his poems were carriers of – assured him that many were the ones who enquired about his health and asked questions about him, about how he was faring. Hearing these things reinforced the sensation that, if not dead, he was at the very least vanished from their world.

Somehow Pen must be grateful to his GP, who ordered him to put his poems in a safe place, far from the consciences of friends, acquaintances and strangers with whom he might converse in the future. The news, this much is clear, could have reached unscrupulous reporters all over the world, and that all would have been far, far worse for Pen.

Even thousands and thousands of kilometres away there must be those who still fear contagion, and they are likely to have subtly resolved that for the time being they must continue to ‘invisibilise’ him, or delete his existence from their own everyday routine or in any case to hamper it by subordinating it to a comfortable albeit by now obviously hackneyed interposing distance.

And so, Pen keeps wondering, while he looks out of the window and pretends to be at work, who he is, or rather what he has become. And when the sun, just before noon, shines on the glittery bonnet of the four-wheel-drive someone he does not know keeps parking outside his office and flickers on Pen’s gloomy eyes, from his lips pop out contagious rhymes, frightening bashful cadences, virulent hurt lines, lyrical unanswerable questions.