DESTINY AND ORIGIN

I know, Bing it´s cruel with metaphors. After the cries for a proper translation of the first two pages of the novel, here you are. It starts with a letter to a lover, which is a short story in itself. I am eager to know what does the British gang think!

 

Dear one,

I have the same feeling with you. After making love with Conrad, I was high. Drugs have never done much for me, I haven´t used them a lot, but sex, when it´s narcotic transports me. It rises my temperature and I see a thousand tones of leaf in the willows, rain in Neptune, shapes in the wind and above all, the first light´s mist, shy, when buildings, before washing their faces, wear their white soft gown, made with tarmac steam.

After making love, Conrad went to work, to forge souls at University, and I went to my parent’s house, to write and dig foundations. When I arrived at the Frenchmen´s Bridge, where the road stops near the river, I reflected like an animal. This traffic light has been red all my life. Haven´t you got one of these traffic lights near your house, one that is always red?

Animal reflection is a way of thought without words. It´s quiet, like a silent movie, and it´s also blind and delicious. Only poets, with their butterfly nets, are able to catch these words that we feel but that never land. I call it “my interior train” because it´s the way that my feelings travel from the heart, which is “my Neruda”, to the station of intellectual thought, which I call “my Borges”. When the interior train climbs the steep hill towards the shoulders, I fall in a trance, at this crossing. To my left: stationary cars. To the right: motionless vehicles. A motorbike zig-zags, like a bumble bee, killing the flow. The rain hits the windscreen. I wait at the traffic light. I am a fish in a fish-bowl, but the water is outside. Every other second, the wipers mark the pace. Swish-swish. The rain markes circles in the river, like invisible words on the newspaper, attracting my attention to it´s waters. I look up. My train is coming. It rushes down the tracks. Over the Frenchmen´s Bridge I see the real one. Track-track, track-track. Hundred´s of reflexive trains travel in its coaches. Swish-swish. I hear the music and I see an intense refraction. Swish-swish. Red water drops on the glass. A strange rainbow on the windscreen, or the aurora borealis. I do not exist. It´s very peculiar, this morning, at first light I made love. My day hasn´t started yet and it is already happy, but I am in transit. The traffic light is a friendly moment. Whether I come or go, no matter from which point in Madrid, I have to pause at this light. I have been at this crossing for twenty years. The Frenchmen´s Bridge is my crossing. Mummy, who are these Frenchmen? I asked inquisitively, as a kid. I still don´t know. I love this place. All my life I have been here, waiting. As if I am sitting in a cafe, departing with my country´s gods. As a child, I was in my mother´s car. At this minute, I am in an old Renault. Tomorrow, my children are the ones that, on the way to their grandparents, ask: who are this Frenchmen, mummy? I feel, I look, I go. Coming back from Uni, or from a date, or a party, always on the way back, at this traffic light, I wait, and under its red gaze, my excitement cools down and I understand all the fakes. I feel, I see, I go. I stop at this old friend. Swish-swish. It´s the red eternal light. Today I am twenty years old again and I am returning to my parent´s home, which might still be my home, though I have a foot in Conrad´s flat, and all my body in his bed. But I haven´t got a bread-earner which is the funny way I call a butterfly net. During these two eternal minutes, I reflect with no thought, like the poet before the verse. Swish-swish. Red. Swish-swish. Red. Swish-swish. I am hypnotized by sex, love, wipers and the red eye of the traffic light. I am on a journey from a man I adore, to the future, which doesn´t exist yet because I am only digging foundations.

Two knocks get me out of my trance. Knock-knock. A beggar, perhaps? No. Swish-swish. It´s a woman under a middle class umbrella. She looks into my world. Knock-knock, again. This is a true event. Swish-swish.The woman waits amongst cars. I wind down the window, like a guillotine in reverse, and she moves forward her neck, by the edge of the glass, and she waits. I imagine that she is lost, but she says:

-Sorry, I am doing a poll about “The Destiny and the Origin”.

Wauuu!…What a moment! Motionless by my friend, the train goes by. “The Origine”. The cyclop, anxious, looks down at me. I am gonna turn green!! I have no answer. Quick!, Your destiny!, he shouts. I haven´t got a bread-earner nor a butterfly net. Answers are flapping their wings. A verse it´s eternity in a condensed form, I think. I would love to be a poet and answer her question with a verse. My God, at last, the prosaic it´s beautiful!

She must have seen a train crash on my face, since she rephrased the question:

-I mean… which street are you coming from and to what street are you going?

She was clutching a pen.

As you can see my Darling, she made everything perfectly clear to me this time… and this is the story of my life. Luckily, it is not the story of my love.

M