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.

A mile in my mother's trousers

I'm in my parent’s dining room, sitting on a chair, in front of the dining table. There’s hot, thick green stuff all over me. My parents are sitting on the sofa, staring at me; their mouths wide open. None of us knows exactly where the cat is but, by now, he must have found the greatest hiding place ever. He knows he has been bad, though I don’t really think he planned to bathe me in spinach soup. But when he decided he would take a run-up to execute a great jump from the floor and skid on the table, he was clearly looking for some kind of effect.

My parents start apologising as if everything was their fault. They also start calling the cat, saying “where are you, you naughty thing?” as if they were speaking to a little child. No heads will roll, so I just say “It’s ok” and go to the bathroom to try to clean my clothes, but there’s no way. I decide I’ll take them off, stuff them into a plastic bag and put them in the washing machine when I get home. Then I go into what used to be my bedroom and I realise I don’t have any clothes to wear. I didn’t leave anything at my parent’s, not a single t-shirt. My mum comes into what is now her room, looks at me just wearing my underwear and a pair of orange and blue striped socks and says:

“I’ll get you something of mine”.

Uh-oh. The prospect of wearing my mum’s clothes is not especially exciting, but I don’t think I have a choice. Five minutes later she is passing me out a red top –very nice, I bought it myself and gave it to her last Christmas- and a pair of black trousers. As I’m trying to button them up and going through the humiliating process of accepting my mum is slimmer than me, I can hear her saying:

“You can keep them if you want. I never wear them.”
“They don’t fit you, right?”
“Oh, it’s not that. It’s just I only wear them at funerals.”

Brilliant. I sense some kind of bad omen behind this fact, which becomes a reality when I put on my trainers and everything starts to go downhill. The trousers are far too short for me, so my flashy striped socks show between them and the trainers. My green coat doesn’t go with the rest of my attire. My blue and orange socks weren’t intended to be visible. Apart from that, I can’t breathe with the trousers on, so I won’t be able to sit down on the metro unless I undo them. Saying that I look absolutely ridiculous is an understatement. But my mum looks at me absent-mindedly because her favourite tv quiz show has started and says:

“You look very pretty, love.”

But I know that if I go outside in these trousers I’ll be attending my dignity’s funeral. And I do it anyway. And I feel as if I have accepted a stupid bet and I’m just finding out that the reward isn’t worth it. And I feel slightly scared when I put my feet on the pavement, exactly like when I was a child and I had to walk to school in a homemade fancy dress costume. I pray that I won’t meet any friends or acquaintances, especially those that would judge me, either for my trousers or for my lack of confidence. It’s a long way to my place, so on the metro I discreetly undo the trousers and take a seat, in front of an old lady who stares at my multicoloured socks with serious concern, then stares at me frowning from behind her extra thick glasses and goes back to the socks again. I look at her and think “At least I don’t smell of pee”, but it doesn’t make me feel better. I look at my socks and suddenly feel happy to be wearing them today, because they’re an act of defiance to those trousers I want to get rid of. I can’t help but see them as a prelude to a life in front of tv quiz shows. And I decide I’ll throw them away and I’ll get my mum a pair of striped socks.

“Only wear them for funerals”, I’ll say to her. And she will smile, and know what I mean.

My Sunday Rest

There's a dildo living at the bottom of my bedside table draw. It has been living there for a long time, and I seldom take it out. It is average size, the usual shape, but I’ve never been very fond of its slippery texture, like that of a used condom. I’ve never been very fond of its colour either. My dildo is bright purple, looks like a penis from outer space. I know this is a totally arbitrary association of ideas, but that’s the way it feels. And I don’t have many fantasies about creatures from other planets. Sometimes I see it more as a complement for a toy I don’t have: the disproportionate member of a Buzz Lightyear. To be honest, this idea doesn’t turn me on either.

Leaving aside concerns about the colour, the great thing about it is that it can vibrate. It can keep the precision and the rhythm like nothing else. It can do all the work while you just go deeper into your fantasies. And just with the help of two small batteries which, unfortunately, last Sunday had run out.
It wasn’t really a big deal, I mean the fact that the dildo wouldn’t work, I can usually do without it, but, somehow, I had already planted a seed in my brain: the idea of using it. It was like, for instance, when I’m cooking couscous and I imagine it will have zucchini in it. Even if I don’t usually use it so therefore I know it’s not necessary, if I have imagined it, I can leave the couscous and run with the apron under my coat to get one zucchini from the greengrocer’s. Something similar happened with the dildo on Sunday. I had imagined the evening would be funnier with it, and I just thought going out for five minutes to get some batteries would be worth it.

I put on my jeans, my trainers, and a coat and I buttoned it up to hide the fact that I was not wearing a bra. I tied my hair back in a ponytail; took the keys and my purse and ran downstairs. When I got outside, the silence, the isolation, the shop doors closed and that Sunday sensation made me realize that it was, indeed, Sunday. No problem. There’s plenty of convenience stores around, they are everywhere, they sell a wide variety of things, they will have batteries.

Course they will.

I just have to walk a few meters to get to the closest shop, open as usual, with the manager sitting back in a chair, watching a Bollywood film. It’s what he always does, at any time, no matter when you go, sitting in the same position without any alteration. He must be in his early forties; his skin is dark brown, and because of the poor light of the shop you are always surprised to see his eyes floating in the darkness. He doesn’t say or do anything, just stares at you for a moment, like a cat that mistrusts the visitors. Sometimes he lets his beard grow out, but he looks hotter when he doesn’t. I’ve never seen him smiling, though I know he must be able to. I know he must be able of lots of things, but it feels like he’s saving all the emotions for later, collecting them for the right time and place; but you can feel them, beating, holding their breath behind his eyes, about to explode but still waiting.

When I got into the shop he averted his eyes from the telly and raised his head with a quick movement to say hello. I said hello and went in. I slowly walked along the only shop corridor. He sells plungers, baked beans, drawing pins, rubber rings. He must have batteries. But the corridor ended and I had to retrace my steps sceptically. “They must be with the sweets, behind the counter”, I said to myself, so I asked him:

“Do you sell batteries?"

“No. No batteries.”-he answered without taking his eyes of the screen.

“No batteries?” I repeated instinctively. Because I couldn’t believe it. It would have been so reasonable and perfect that he would have had batteries. It’s like when you love someone who doesn’t love you; your first thought tends to be that the feeling must be hidden somewhere inside them, very deep, it’s just they can’t see it. I have a quick look behind him but there’s only chocolate bars and chewing gum.
I was about to leave the shop when I heard him asking behind my back
“What kind of batteries do you need?”

I was thunderstruck. I felt he knew everything about me and the dildo, but how could he? I looked at myself to check if there was something that was giving me away. Obviously, there was nothing. Suddenly I remembered he keeps an iron stick under the counter, to protect himself from hypothetical thieves. He showed it to me once, I don’t know why, as if he had felt like telling me a secret. That day I tried to look very impressed but I felt sorry for him and I don’t think I could hide it.
“Just batteries. Small ones, I guess.”

"Go to the shop on the corner, they will have batteries there."

“Right. Thank you.”
And I disappeared from the shop feeling ridiculously embarrassed, as if I had been caught stealing something. It would have made much more sense to go to the shop he had indicated to me on the first place. They sell cell phones, watches, calculators… that sort of thing; but I never thought it would be open on a Sunday. The man that runs that shop always wears a white coat, like a doctor or a chemist. He also wears a pair of big specs with tinted lenses. When I went into the shop I saw him sitting in front of his computer. He looked serious, focused. Immediately he raised his head to say:

“Can I help you?”
I tried to find a couple of eyes behind those glasses but without success.

“Yeah. I need some batteries. Small batteries.”

“Small?” I sensed in his tone of voice a subtle recrimination for my lack of rigor.

“Yeah. Like this.” And I showed him with my fingers the rough size of the batteries I need.
I must admit it wasn’t very accurate but, what the hell? How many different kinds of small batteries exist?
He stood up and sighed and walked slowly up to a shelf. He mostly devotes his life to selling phone cards and calculators, but with that coat and that efficient air he looks like he works on the particle accelerator, and I respect him more for that.

“Like this?” he said showing me a for pack of batteries that would work for my tv remote.

“No, smaller.”
He looked at the batteries in his hand and suddenly I heard the question coming from his mouth, without prior warning.

“What are they for?”

Jesus Christ.
No time to feel sorry for myself. Think. Fast. Say anything. Anything.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”
He clearly didn't’t believe what I was saying. Tomorrow all the neighbourhood will know I’m a slapper. Soon they will burn me at the stake.

“No. Somebody else asked me to buy them. But I don’t know what they are for.”
I tried to look convincing. I think I did fine.

“Well, I don’t have any smaller batteries, unless you want watch batteries.”

When I got out of the shop I was carrying a little plastic bag with four batteries for my remote control and a waterproof radio for the shower. I didn’t need them, but I was trying really hard to do something about that emptiness I felt.
I got home; left my shopping on the kitchen table and only then did I wake up to the fact that I wouldn’t be able to use my dildo. But thereupon I opened the fridge and I realized there was a zucchini, and that was my salvation for it meant I could cook couscous.
A proper one.