No bags land

The postman brought me something today,

it was a bag with a picture of a penguin

riding a hen.

Oh yes.

Actually he failed.

Since I wasn’t home

he left a piece of paper instead:

The promise of a bag with a penguin

riding a hen.

No less.

And I felt sorry at night

when I realized the penguin

and the hen

would have to spend the night in a cardboard box,

surrounded by more parcels

and the notorious silence of the undelivered mail.

Riding and yet not going anywhere.

The penguin

and the hen.

Ownerless,

shoulderless.

I ‘ll pick them up as soon as I can;

post offices are no bags land.

The Kebab Queens

It might sound a bit silly, or greedy, or both. But there are songs that make me feel not only powerful but also power-hungry. I’m talking about a song by Coldplay called Viva la vida; not that I am a big fan of this band, actually I’ve always sustained that if a boiled hake had a voice, it would be Chris Martins’.
Apparently, this song was used to motivate the players of the football team that has won three cups after a historical season. (“I used to rule the world, seas would rise when I gave the word”) Not that I’m a big fan of football either, but this fact captured my attention, for it takes to a higher level the motivation you can bring out from certain notes or chords or lyrics.
I can easily imagine all those alfa males listening to the song and removing everything from their heads until the only thing they are able to imagine is winning. (I used to roll the dice, feel the fear in my enemies’ eyes.”)
I use music all the time to motivate myself when I head to the office at seven in the morning, or when I have to go to the supermarket and face up to dozens of old ladies armed with shopping carts. I use it when it rains and I forgot my umbrella, and when I miss someone but want to feel as happy as if they were around.
There was a time when I didn’t need to feed my confidence in order to succeed, I didn’t even think about it in those terms. I had to do something; I did it, I was the best, end of story. But living involves failing, too. And I’ve learnt from my failures that intelligence is not a blank check that guarantees that everything is gonna work out well for you. (“One minute I held the key, next the walls were closed on me.”) Things get even more complicated if your success doesn’t only depend on you.
Some days ago I was a bit worried because I had to perform that belly dance show I have been rehearsing since Christmas. Four years ago, when I moved to this outlaying neighbourhood where I live, I decided to join a dance group to feel I belonged here, maybe put down some roots.
The other women’s reasons for being in this group are also far from having something to do with improving their dance skills. For most of them it is a way out of their routine, a time to laugh or talk about their lives, complaints and miseries. But when they dance and focus on moving their hips and breasts they are just women. Nothing else. No less. And the sensual movements of that dance awaken their inner feminine power. After a couple of hours they go back home with a renewed interest in having sex with their husband (if they have one), or a sudden desire to cook spicier meals in their tiny kitchens. Once, one of the women of the dance group asked our teacher if it was possible to choreograph a dance with shorter steps.
“I have to rehearse in the kitchen, which is only two metres wide. I can’t take long steps or movements without ending up in the sitting-room, where my husband and son would laugh at me if they saw me dancing.” (“It was the wicked and wild wind, blew down the doors to let me in.”)
Obviously, that didn’t put our teacher off choreographing a dance with all its corresponding long steps for a sort of end-of-course party. The idea of performing it on a stage in front of the rest of the neighbourhood was definitely a bad one. I mean all those people don’t have no reason to see in us anything more than a quirky non homogeneous troup of working class women dressed up as odalisques, embarrassing themselves, showing, in some cases, their lack of rhythm and flexibility. They don’t necessarily need to be able to see those magical feminine connections I mentioned some lines ago. That’s why I decided I would take the Coldplay song to our last rehearsal before the show (I bought a couple of six packs, too. The song is powerful but, failing that, I knew the beer would do the trick.)
When I put the CD on and the first notes sounded, all the women in our dance room, as if powered by a spring, started jumping, and laughing and screaming and dancing to that song, dressed in those incongruent outfits and with a can of beer in our hands. (“For some reason I can’t explain, I know Saint Peter won’t call my name.”)
Then came another song and another beer, and another. And at some point I guess we walked to the stage and danced in front of all the neighbourhood, and that in some video recordings there will be inmortalized our tipsy look and our (still) sensual movements. I just remember that I had great fun, which necessarily means we were immense.
Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking about those elements I had to turn to in order to build some confidence in myself to do things I know I can do. Then I miss those times when succeeding was an accident, like being young and spontaneous, a time when I enjoyed an unstructured charm and the unintended soul of a leader. (“But that was when I ruled the world.”)

The North Pole

There's a man and his canvas briefcase. He will sit on the metro every morning and spend there around thirty of the earliest minutes of his day, either looking straight ahead, where I usually am, or reading a book. I should know nothing about him for we are strangers and, nevertheless, I know so many things.
I know, for instance, that he can read. He can read, and reads, thus he understands and maybe gets intrigued too. And he focuses on that intrigue or understanding, though sometimes he doesn’t, and then he chooses not to read.
But when he does, he takes his glasses out of his briefcase, steams them up with his breath and rubs them with a lens cloth. He puts them on and, suddenly, the letters and I come into focus in his eyes.
Sometimes he chooses to look at me, or he doesn’t choose to and he just can’t help it, though he is very concerned about me not noticing. But the thing is I always notice everything.

I’ve noticed, for instance, that when he doesn’t read, he looks like any sad-faced fifty-odd year old man going to work, more aware of the way life has wreaked havoc on his face than of the world around him. He just sits on his seat, and grabs his briefcase firmly with both hands, as if it were the hips of a woman. Then I feel sorry for him because he looks as if he hasn’t been kissed for a long time.

On some occasions he wears a t-shirt that says “North Pole” and the potential connections between us just melt tragically. And I would like to ask him:“Have you ever been to the North Pole? Are you intending to?” And if he answered “No” I would tell him he must be careful with what is written on his clothes because it’s meaningful, evocative and should signify something for him, since he’s spreading those two words around the world.
In addition to those letters, on that t-shirt there’s an imprecise drawing of an arctic landscape, with the blurred silhouette of an igloo, and also something like the grid reference of the area, if my memory serves me right. And perhaps yes, perhaps he dreams about going there or he doesn’t dwell on the possibility seriously but he considers it a sort of Promised Land.

This I don’t know.

What I do know, however, is that he breathes and every two days shaves. I know that some days he must curse his luck and some other days he must feel joyful. I know that some things will make him smile, and some will make him cry a river. I know that once his hair was a colour other than grey, and his wrinkles didn’t stay in place when he changed his expression. And I know that North Pole t-shirt is, in fact, a resistance to what he is. Those exciting horizons claim freedom, courage, but his is just the kind of cheap t-shirt that some people will buy, at some point, no matter what it says, without taking into account the contradictory message they’re sending to the rest of us. Their inner beauty sinks under the North Pole waters and only remains visible to those looking with an open heart.

If I could only sit next to him and suggest him:

“Let’s go to the North Pole. If you don’t go, that place will always be a metaphor for your lack of identity."

He would stare at me distrustfully, but then I would say:

“… I can kiss you too, if you want. You look as if you haven’t been kissed for a long time."

If I wouldn’t, he would stay subjugated to the sad slavery of the letters on his t-shirt, totally unaware of the fact that his clothes are really important lessons about how we live our lives.
I mean his and mine.

A crack in everything

Watching a Jim Jarmusch film last night, I realised I kind of feel bonded to losers-I say losers in the aesthetic sense of the word-, more than to any other sort of fictional characters. The reason is plain and simple: as happens to them, my kitchen cupboards don’t close properly, my furniture doesn’t match, I don’t buy new shoes until the ones I have get worn out, and my house walls have cracks. Through these cracks, the winter slips in. I bet some things escape through them too.

I observe the cracks sometimes, though sometimes I forget their existence and I can’t see them. But occasionally I realise they have grown bigger and I know this is the result of a process that takes place every night. Because at night I can hear the house.
When I’m in bed, with all the lights switched off is when I can hear the creaking of my house stretching, coping with the changes of temperature, starting its day now mine is done. I kind of feel like I’m sharing my house with my own house, so to speak. It’s not so different from having a night-owl flatmate, except that in the morning you don’t find their dirty dishes and ashtrays in the sink.
On some occasions the house has gone too far and its noises have been more intense and deeper, as if the ceiling was about to fall down. Obviously, I can’t say I know what this means, but I interpret it as a complaint because the spring has come and I’m not painting the house, as most people would do. Some nights I’ve been about to get out of bed and shout to my walls: “Hey, house, I’ve got some cracks myself and I don't go making such a fuss about it.” But the house must know, as I do, that cracks are definitely an outstanding feature of losers. Maybe not the cracks but the lack of resistance to their existence.

The walls of the house where I lived when I was a child were all covered with wallpaper, but I retraced it all over the hall and the rooms with my little hand and I could feel the cracks under the pictures of flowers on the paper. They made me feel uncomfortable, because they weren’t meant to be seen, but they were there, could be felt, threatening like a guilty secret. I promised myself that someday I would have a house as white and smooth as a wedding cake, but I’ve always managed to end up living in houses whose walls looked more like an apple crumble. Not only the walls; over the years I’ve found cracks in my skin, my knowledge and my convictions. Cracks in my lips, in my happiness and in my rejections. Cracks everywhere, that expose us to millions of influences, like love and light, and doubt and aging.
Anyway, eventually, those fissures that my little fingers traced over the walls of my childhood house became familiar to me, and touching them reassured me. Somehow I felt those cracks were more certain than the flowers on the wallpaper, where it was always spring, whereas through the cracks we had access to all the seasons. And certainties are comforting, no matter how hard they are.

If the house could see things from my point of view, maybe it would stop complaining. I am not perfect and my house is not a wedding cake. Covering our cracks wouldn’t change that; it would only turn us into real losers, in all senses of the word, except the aesthetic one, of course.
And we are not losers.

One breath away

Today I cried because I saw a boy who couldn’t breathe. He must have been fourteen, and was with a woman -his mother, I guess- standing on the pavement, waiting for a taxi that would no doubt take them to the nearest hospital. She was trying to calm him down, stroking his head, and probably saying soothing words to him. She looked worried but, at the same time, relaxed, possibly had been through this so many times before. I couldn’t hear her, could only hear him panting, putting a lot of effort in every exhalation but apparently not getting any oxygen in return. He looked tired, freaked out, and I couldn’t help but cry briefly and silently while from a distance watching his pale face and hearing his suffocated respiration and his moans.

Once I was told that crying is the physiological manifestation of this fact: something that has settled inside you in the wrong place finally finds its own place. In principle, I don’t have a very good predisposition towards this sort of explanation, but at the same time I’m totally prepared to believe them. Anything but keep on feeling like a jigsaw that can’t be solved.

Apparently, we tend to swallow our pain, which inmediately tries to find a quick way out without going through the heart. But it finds tempting corners, small cosy spaces, and decides to get stuck in there. I think I could detect some of those in different parts of my anatomy, it could explain the stiffness of some of my muscles, or even my sporadic resistance to being touched, as if sometimes the harshness of the sorrows under my skin couldn’t stand any contact. But sometimes I’ve thought that carrying, as I do, a scream and an imaginary dog, there shouldn’t be any spare room in my body for misplaced feelings of any kind.

But there is room.

And sometimes I can hardly breathe, myself, although I keep on saying “I’m fine, I’m really fine, I’m really really fine,” to prevent myself from collapsing. It works most of the time. But suddenly an old perfume fills the air and it becomes saturated with vain expectations, or there isn’t any strawberry ice cream left in the supermarket, a baby hippo is born in the zoo, or the wind blows the leaves I’ve been carefully sweeping, or even a boy struggles for breath in front of me and the bloody taxi doesn’t come.

Then a chill runs through my heart and I know that a bit of my raw unabashed sadness has finally reached the place where it belongs. Afterwards it will disolve in my tears.And my body shall breathe again. And at that very moment that sensation will be the greatest truth I can state about who I am.

Happy birthday to me

This is me, and the scream inside me. I’m watching myself in the mirror to see how I become one year older, in one second. I know it doesn’t really work like this but, somehow, it does. I practice this ritual every year; I expect to see a subtle change in me, a wrinkle around one of my eyes getting deeper, a hair turning suddenly white, a shadow falling over me. As nothing happens, I decide to take a picture of myself so later I’ll be able to study more intently how I looked at that very moment of my life. After that, I take my handbag and go to the market. I head resolutely to the fish shop and spend a fortune on the fish with the weirdest face I can find. I look him in the eye, I try to guess if it’s his birthday too; I don’t even know how long a fish can live, but it is quite certain this fish has had a life.

-Birthdays are overrated. - I say to him while I take him out of the bag and unwrap him.

- You wake up one day and you have to celebrate the fact that you’ve been existing for, let’s say 33 years. I’m not saying it’s not worth celebrating; it is, actually it deserves something spectacular, like a trip to the Niagara Falls, or a whole evening spent on a big-wheel.

I stroke his shiny surface and my left hand gets wet and smelly. With the other one I manage to pick up a tray to place him on.

-You know, balloons and cake are not really my thing. I hate the tune of the “Happy Birthday” song and blowing the candles out (my wish is always “make this end quickly”), and people clapping their hands just because I’ve blown some candles out. I wouldn’t say I’m an embittered ungrateful person, but that sucks.

I cut some leaves from a lettuce to cover him and keep him fresh.

-Nevertheless, I can’t help feeling funny when my birthday is coming up, like when you reach a new level in a videogame, but before starting it you have to take your time to take stock of what you’ve achieved. But how?

Carefully, I slip a finger tip into his mouth. I like feeling his little teeth around it.

-I don’t know what I have to take into account, whether it is the words I’ve written, the potatoes I’ve mashed, the lengths I’ve swum or the bridges I’ve crossed.

Thinking about this, I feel the scream inside me, whose life I’m living too, getting bigger. It takes up so much room that I know I won’t be able to eat anything today. Besides, it’s a while since I’ve decided it is the fish’s birthday too, and because of this coincidence I feel too bonded to him to put him in the oven, so I cook an omelet, a birthday omelet, and hide the fish in the freezer together with the shadow of the scream he probably kept inside him too.

Every bread you make

It feels good. I mean creating something. Anything. A short story, a drawing, a baby, a brick wall, a turd. A loaf of bread. You pick a few things from around you and then produce something with a shape, a texture, a character. You can give them a name. Take photos of them. Buy them accessories. Take them out for a walk. Maybe these last proposals wouldn’t really work for the turd, or the brick wall, but even so. What I really mean is, I don’t think I can cope with a baby right now, not to mention I can’t draw. I can write stories but I don’t get my hands dirty by doing that. I started baking bread because I can’t draw. Yeah, that’s how it all happened.
I’ve made two decent drawings in my life, both on the same day: one of a guy and one of a seagull. I called them “Guy” and “Seagull”. Since them I haven’t been able to draw properly again, but I still need to do it sometimes. Some things you can’t describe, it doesn’t work, they lose all the spirit you’ve seen in them in that very moment, the art gets spoiled. Creating means projecting onto an object a sudden glimpse of comprehension of the world you live in. Sometimes writing can express this, but sometimes you need something else. Taking a picture, or shooting a film, composing a song, arranging a choreography, building a wall and ruining your hands doing it. Or drawing a picture. It’s clear that expressing oneself takes more than one skill. That’s why my notebooks are full of written babies, drawings and walls, detailed descriptions, useless as literary material, of things I will never be able to produce.
Then the bread machine appeared out of nowhere and I knew my frustrations had come to a provisional end. I took it off a shelf in the supermarket and, as I was holding the cardboard box, I already felt like a goddess. I understood it would be to me a top hat I could put feelings into and pull some bread out. They might not become a work of art, but the ideas and thoughts that are not meant to be written would have a shape, a body. And the smell of yeast invading all the corners of my flat would be their soul.
I just have to pick all the ingredients and leave the machine do all the kneading. Then I can talk to the dough for a couple of hours or so, or put some suitable music on. I can tell it jokes or cry a little. I can show it my boobs. I can do whatever it takes. Then my hands will give it the right shape and bake it. Three hours later I’ll be holding in my hands the warm result of that process, and give it a name. My first bread was a white ciabatta, with olives and herbs. I told it a secret and called it Renata. Then came Rita, which was quite a sad whole grain bread with raisins, that was raised listening to Portishead. Later I made a rye bread with beer and sunflower seeds and I called it Lou, and then a nut and chocolate bread and named it Thomas. I danced for both of them. And they have all existed just because I can’t draw, but they have done the trick as well as the drawing would have done. They stop all the noise of the world in my head for a while, and make me feel so good, just like washing machines in motion, or the embrace of a man in a flannel shirt. I eat them on their own, though most people insist on saying how bland it is to eat bread without oil or ham or cheese or butter. They could never imagine how good it tastes to eat all my affection.