I
A little girl appears in the scene of “ Nadja” and then disappears, with the mania of tearing away the eyes of her dolls just to see what’s there behind them. These silent mutilating activities lead us to that one question Breton asks: What is there that is so extraordinary in those eyes? Eyes that in, other terms-hanter, for example-come to say more than what they mean. Breton will write: "Nantes: Perhaps with Paris, the only city in France where I feel that something worth while can happen to me, where certain eyes burn all to brightly for their own sake (I noticed this only last year, the time it took to cross Nantes by car and see that woman-a working woman, I think, raise her eyes: I should have stopped"
Then, the eyes of a perturbed beauty will appear:Young, magnificent eyes that mingle languor with subtlety, cruelty,and despair. To the owner of these cruel eyes, Breton will send his inalterable words as designators: "I would have had to get closer to her…" The eyes that unlocked an entrance for Solange’s curse will close again, leaving room for the opening of Nadja’s eyes: "I have seen her fern-colored eyes open mornings on a world where the beating of hope’s great wings is scarcely distinct from the other sounds which are those of terror and, upon such a world, I had yet seen eyes do nothing but close…" And so Nadja advances, floating in a valley belonging to the night ("last year, a body was discovered in the well").
She moves carrying her head up high, unlike everyone else on the sidewalk, and her feet scarcely seem to touch the ground, a walk so characteristic of a queen of exile.
What is surprising too, is the opposition between Solange and Nadja. The blonde of Nadja’s hair contrasts against the black in the rims of her eyes, and she has defying eyes, eyes made for being nowhere but on the streets, the only region of valid experience for her. Solange doesn’t recur to make-up, but her eyes are only defiant on a theatre stage, and not on the streets. Nadja’s walk embodies that of a wonderful heroin wrapped in an aura that protects her and keeps her distant. At the same time, it is relevant to recall an exquisite sign that Breton distinguishes with the image of Caroline de Gunderode: That distressing expression of a promised summer night, because it was her then, the woman who killed herself at the Rhin’s shore, who started the order of the nocturnal ladies. Shadows carved by the force of black thunder, these nocturnal ladies cannot find shelter in the forest, but run into another traveler, instead, who joins them, gifted with the power to provide shelter. With her they embrace, and inside her they disappear like one who enters a cave, or an enchanted opening in a forest (…and you will not have in this life other pleasures but those that only children can promise through the idea of enchanted openings and deep wells.)
II
The October 11 entry of a short encounter with Nadja leaves evidence of the dissatisfaction Breton feels about that day, which has been lost to the hours that pass by without a reason. “ Besides, Nadja has come late and I expect nothing extraordinary from her.” She, who was the power to define those messages sent by silence, can also define time: “ Time is a tease, time is a tease-because everything has to happen in its own time.” Her need to find a meaning to time’s inevitable limits, and to judge time, isn’t exceptional or particularly memorable but it does offer a clue to the labyrinthic adventure lived between Breton and Nadja.“ Time is a tease, time is a tease because everything has to happen in it’s own time.” And what didn’t arrive (or happen) at the time it should have arrived (or happened)? The meeting between Breton and Nadja: Meeting that didn’t take place because Nadja arrived too late. “ Nadja has come late and I expect nothing extraordinary from her”…
Nadja arrives late, not on the annotated date Breton writes about, but on that other day, when they meet and Breton is amazed by her fern-colored eyes. Because she doesn’t show up when her presence is necessary and the encounter gets delayed, instead of an “exceptional encounter”, what happens between them is merely a “late reencounter”
III
Before Nadja’s disappearance from Breton’s life and from the book, the author declares, within his series of observations, a wish of his: his most unsteady and inseparable desire. This wish loses currency once it is transcribed, and becomes no more than another shadow: the reminder of a wish. “ I have always beyond belief hoped to meet, at night and in the woods, a beautiful naked woman, or rather since such a wish once expressed means nothing, I regret beyond belief not having met her…”
It is true that an encounter like this one would have (and should have) happened. But, also, the opposite is true: “ Dream in her, do not seek for more answers.”
If one night, granted by the grace of chance, Breton would have found a naked beauty in the woods (if the traffic from this wish towards a reality would have taken place) Breton wouldn’t have found himself writing “ Nadja.” in the first place. It is probable that the condition of the poet is one that leads him to adopt the role of a ghost. “ Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I haunt” One of the required duties of this ghost could consist in circling the gates of this forest without being able to get in, like if the woods were a restricted valley. “ At the end of the second quatrain, her eyes brim and are filled with the vision of a forest. She sees the poet passing near this wood, as though she could follow him at a distance: "No, he’s skirting in the forest. He cannot enter, he does not enter”
VI
Nadja, sitting at a coffee shop table with Breton, reads with amazement a poem by Alfred Jerry about someone (a poet) who doesn’t do anything else but wonder around a forest. Suddenly, Nadja is frightened by those words and shuts the book: “-Oh, that must be death!” It is possible that the one who is sitting with Breton is the same one who wanders endlessly inside the forest of his ancient desire.
Nadja seems to know that the real place in where they should have met was there, in that forest, and at night. She also knows that this meeting will be impossible now because it is late, and any kind of connection between them will never be based exclusively on Love.
Another kind of attachment will unite them though, a beautiful one without a doubt, but inferior to any “incredible” feeling such as love. It will consist of a chase inside their childish game that alternates between two movements: One will be luminous and illicit (like all true love is) and the other one will be the opposite: a path which will lead Nadja to somersault into the frontiers of the valley of death.“ Can you see what’s going on in the trees? The blue and the wind, the blue wind. I’ve seen that blue wind pass through these same trees only once before. It was there, from a window (…) and there was a voice saying: You’re going to die. I didn’t want to die, but I felt so dizzy…”
Even if the poet were able to manage unlocking the gates of the forest and entering, he still wouldn’t be able to get rid of his role as a ghost, and besides it would be impossible for him to escape those doors once in. But, then again, what other thing does Breton do in the entire novel if it is not to escape? He runs away from Nadja, of course, and for that he has more than enough motives: Nadja’s madness is one of them. Her delayed entrance in Breton’s life is, then, a precious contribution to the ultimate mystery in the novel.
V
One night they take a train. When Breton proposes to get off in Veniset, Nadja accepts and suggests that they take a walk through the woods. “ No, he’s skirting through the forest. He cannot enter. He does not enter” Everything becomes a sign that points out their inevitable delayed arrival.“ At Le Veniset, where everything is closed for the night, it’s impossible to find lodgings. The prospect of wondering through the woods is no longer alluring” Nadja’s suggestion has been rejected because of black lights and sunset, and because those locked doors point out to one lonely word “impossible” and to that one term belonging to destiny and to the irremediable claim made by disaster.
For the two nocturnal wonderers there is only one possibility that remains intact and covered in irony: To return from nowhere and arrive back into nowhere. At the end of this impossible alliance, Breton will wonder about the “real Nadja.” He doesn’t forget the one who told stories of sad lovers and mercenary love, but he does dedicate his devotion to the other Nadja, her perfect opposition who “sometimes fell.” Breton’s comments about Nadja give her back her main role and make her the mediator, “the ever inspired and inspiring creature” She is an instrument of vision and, at the same time, the wonderer with violent eyes who chose the streets as her main educator.
And it is this Nadja who had narrated a story to Breton and led him in the walk through those woods. Her tale bears witness of the presence of a woman who doesn’t have room to fit inside this world. More than a walk with Breton, what she takes is the wrong path, even though it is nighttime, through Fontainebleau Forest, and with the wrong poet (an archeologist) in search of “ stone remains.” The stone and its unending representations, the word “remains” and the participation of this archeologist, in the end serve to compose a ceremony which lead to a “never more” between Breton and Nadja, such a perfect adagio dedicated to the melody of the forest and to that girl with the violently open eyes.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Of Cats and Men
Last winter in Beaufort, we used to receive the company of a huge tabby cat on the evenings, whom we named " Gato Gordo" in Spanish, or " fat cat." This cat tried to make friends with my cat Kissy, but wasn't very successful at it, he did win my family's affection though. My mother and sister would wait for him to appear from the trees each night, as he ran from the road into the front yard, with his white, immense, paws thumping on to the humid earth, expecting his plate of food ready.
We, also, got a new visitor last month: a grey fat kitty that entered through the back door of the house and stole all of Kissy's tuna fish. I assume that cat's love hanging out at our Beaufort porch by now, or that Kissy, with her stunning good looks and female cat-coldness, is a magnet to them, who knows. Maybe we just buy really good cat food.
The difference between this tabby cat and fat cat, was that Tabby wore a silver collar with a phone number engraved in it. My Dad noticed this and brightly figured that the kitty was lost, and that there would be a worried neighbor looking for it. So after the second week of continuous visits to steal Kissy's tuna through the back door, Dad grabbed the cat and wrote down the phone number to call the owners.
Dad dialed, let the phone ring, and left a message that said : " Hello, this is William Drake, your neighbor. I am calling about a cat we found visiting our back yard. Wanted to let you know that the cat is well and eats plenty of our tuna."
The next day we received a call back from the neighbor, who left a message saying: " Bill, I am calling to let you know that the cat is ours and is on a diet. Please do not offer him any more tuna. He is fat enough already and I set him free just to see how far he can go to get his paws on some extra food."
Apparently, this cat can go as far as our back yard and Kissy's plate of tuna.
But it gets even funnier. Last week, mom found a small article with a picture on the Beaufort Gazzete about Tabby cat, only that ,this time, he got caught stealing dog food!
This is what the article stated:
" On the Light side
Tubby Tabby gets stuck in Beaufort
Beaufort, S.C-A 20 pound stray cat whose girth got him stuck in a pet door while trying to plunder some dog food was reunited with his owner Thursday.Owner Geoff Ernest said Hercules went missing 2 weeks ago. Jadwiga Drozdek found the cat stuck in the dog door of her home a few days ago and helped free him."
(Associated Press)
Apparently, Tabby cat managed to gain too much weight during his afternoon walks, stealing from the food of other pets. Hopefully, this incident will motivate him to start a real cat-diet.
Oh, and his name is Hercules!
The Cutness of it all...
We, also, got a new visitor last month: a grey fat kitty that entered through the back door of the house and stole all of Kissy's tuna fish. I assume that cat's love hanging out at our Beaufort porch by now, or that Kissy, with her stunning good looks and female cat-coldness, is a magnet to them, who knows. Maybe we just buy really good cat food.
The difference between this tabby cat and fat cat, was that Tabby wore a silver collar with a phone number engraved in it. My Dad noticed this and brightly figured that the kitty was lost, and that there would be a worried neighbor looking for it. So after the second week of continuous visits to steal Kissy's tuna through the back door, Dad grabbed the cat and wrote down the phone number to call the owners.
Dad dialed, let the phone ring, and left a message that said : " Hello, this is William Drake, your neighbor. I am calling about a cat we found visiting our back yard. Wanted to let you know that the cat is well and eats plenty of our tuna."
The next day we received a call back from the neighbor, who left a message saying: " Bill, I am calling to let you know that the cat is ours and is on a diet. Please do not offer him any more tuna. He is fat enough already and I set him free just to see how far he can go to get his paws on some extra food."
Apparently, this cat can go as far as our back yard and Kissy's plate of tuna.
But it gets even funnier. Last week, mom found a small article with a picture on the Beaufort Gazzete about Tabby cat, only that ,this time, he got caught stealing dog food!
This is what the article stated:
" On the Light side
Tubby Tabby gets stuck in Beaufort
Beaufort, S.C-A 20 pound stray cat whose girth got him stuck in a pet door while trying to plunder some dog food was reunited with his owner Thursday.Owner Geoff Ernest said Hercules went missing 2 weeks ago. Jadwiga Drozdek found the cat stuck in the dog door of her home a few days ago and helped free him."
(Associated Press)
Apparently, Tabby cat managed to gain too much weight during his afternoon walks, stealing from the food of other pets. Hopefully, this incident will motivate him to start a real cat-diet.
Oh, and his name is Hercules!
The Cutness of it all...
Friday, January 19, 2007
Oh, Sister
Sadly, the only vivid memories I have of my real sister Valeria have been erased and obstructed by the new and more current memories of my fake sister Valeria: The Double. My real sister Valeria will remain a character trapped forever in the past, a character abandoned and left to dry in some corner only to be replaced by an improved and more mature version of that same being.
Real sister Val was sixteen when I was six and would take me to play in the fields of Arizona, where we would fly kites until nighttime, she had blond curls and frizzy tangled hair specially adapted to fit the eighties style,and would read “Seventeen” magazine and paint her nails in tacky colors, and smell like expensive perfume and leather and cigarette all the time. The sister I remember having, shared the same room as Diana and me when we were young, but would always leave the house in taxicabs at 2 AM as soon as Mom and Dad were asleep, to spend the night in someone else’s bed.
My sister Valeria locked herself inside the bathroom with me one summer when I was ten, and managed to murder whatever was left of my sweet ignorance by revealing the meaning of sex and the reasons why girls would bleed every month. She was in love with an Italian guy named Fernando, who broke her heart but always came back for more of her, and she would always run to him, again and again, whenever he called her. My sister; my big sister, would spend hours criticizing Mom in front of me, so that I would be on her side when the time to pass judgment arrived. She also tried to convince me that bands such as “Queen” or “Genesis” were really good bands when the truth of the matter is that they have always sucked.
The real Valeria would yell at mom for hours only because she could get away with it, and because “she didn’t have a Dad”. She would hide a yellowish picture album under her bed with photographs of her biological father, the one that died a sudden, unexplainable death one night during the dictatorship years in Argentina. My real sister Val found out she was pregnant one evening, and decided to go ahead and get an abortion by herself the very next morning, without telling anyone but me, and afterwards decided to go to work right from the abortion clinic as to not appear suspicious, pretending nothing had happened, nothing.
My big sister used to be a woman I looked up to, something like an example of what I should be in life, and someone I used to count on. But Val grew up one day, as it happens to everybody, and decided to stop being like the rest of us. She used her charm, and married a banker. Now there are only the remains of her former self and the birth of “The Double.”
The new version of my sister Valeria blow-dries her blond hair every morning until it is so straight and thin, it shimmers in static and sticks to her cheeks. She is obsessed with tidiness and loves the color white. My sister Val has money and a new life based on her new social class. My sister Val is “very, very happy” and brags about her summer house and her vacations all over the world, and her two maids and her beautiful china sets she has tea in.
She doesn’t scream any more either, and is never mad. My sister Val has a husband ten years older than her who never speaks to any of us and is the dullest person I have ever encountered. My sister Val is always very bored but has a talent for inventing pointless activities to keep her busy (like toning her abs, or remodeling her kitchen and buying art for her living room, or having kids.)
I have this big problem you see, I have the tendency to want to desperately rescue the people I love, and protect them from the terrible things life puts in front of us. And, with Val, it seems like she decided to mess inside a strange, tricky territory of wealth and pleasant surprises, and I know that she could be happier, deep down I just know. But my big sister does not want to be rescued.
So the point of this long entry is that I will see her again in two days, and we will probably “go shopping” together and there will be a lot of awkwardness and silence between each other, just like there is between strangers. I will have to chat and fill up the silence maybe, and lie to her by inventing some passionate story about how much I like guys.I will have to put on a mask and pretend I cannot see through her. But she will realize that I am making this effort, she will realize that, yes, I CAN see through her.
She will know that I know, and that I have only shared with her a quarter of my life, and that I am entitled to see through her because I know her. She will know that I was awake and looking from the window that gave view to the avenue, on those summer nights in Buenos Ayres, when she waited for the bus to come on a deserted street at 2 AM, and that I could see her solitary figure, her arm stretching to stop the bus, from the thirteenth floor. She will realize.
Oh, but let us leave the past alone, leave it to drown in the depths of a dark blue sea and not mention it: It is still there. Sadly, I will always look for that older sister who was so alive it scared me, and I will still yell at her every now and then from the insides of my mind and from the balcony that is no more: “Please Val, tell me it is you! tell me it is still you and not that other woman.”
But there will be no more response from her, I know this, except silence and the bland smile of that Double who has replaced her.
Real sister Val was sixteen when I was six and would take me to play in the fields of Arizona, where we would fly kites until nighttime, she had blond curls and frizzy tangled hair specially adapted to fit the eighties style,and would read “Seventeen” magazine and paint her nails in tacky colors, and smell like expensive perfume and leather and cigarette all the time. The sister I remember having, shared the same room as Diana and me when we were young, but would always leave the house in taxicabs at 2 AM as soon as Mom and Dad were asleep, to spend the night in someone else’s bed.
My sister Valeria locked herself inside the bathroom with me one summer when I was ten, and managed to murder whatever was left of my sweet ignorance by revealing the meaning of sex and the reasons why girls would bleed every month. She was in love with an Italian guy named Fernando, who broke her heart but always came back for more of her, and she would always run to him, again and again, whenever he called her. My sister; my big sister, would spend hours criticizing Mom in front of me, so that I would be on her side when the time to pass judgment arrived. She also tried to convince me that bands such as “Queen” or “Genesis” were really good bands when the truth of the matter is that they have always sucked.
The real Valeria would yell at mom for hours only because she could get away with it, and because “she didn’t have a Dad”. She would hide a yellowish picture album under her bed with photographs of her biological father, the one that died a sudden, unexplainable death one night during the dictatorship years in Argentina. My real sister Val found out she was pregnant one evening, and decided to go ahead and get an abortion by herself the very next morning, without telling anyone but me, and afterwards decided to go to work right from the abortion clinic as to not appear suspicious, pretending nothing had happened, nothing.
My big sister used to be a woman I looked up to, something like an example of what I should be in life, and someone I used to count on. But Val grew up one day, as it happens to everybody, and decided to stop being like the rest of us. She used her charm, and married a banker. Now there are only the remains of her former self and the birth of “The Double.”
The new version of my sister Valeria blow-dries her blond hair every morning until it is so straight and thin, it shimmers in static and sticks to her cheeks. She is obsessed with tidiness and loves the color white. My sister Val has money and a new life based on her new social class. My sister Val is “very, very happy” and brags about her summer house and her vacations all over the world, and her two maids and her beautiful china sets she has tea in.
She doesn’t scream any more either, and is never mad. My sister Val has a husband ten years older than her who never speaks to any of us and is the dullest person I have ever encountered. My sister Val is always very bored but has a talent for inventing pointless activities to keep her busy (like toning her abs, or remodeling her kitchen and buying art for her living room, or having kids.)
I have this big problem you see, I have the tendency to want to desperately rescue the people I love, and protect them from the terrible things life puts in front of us. And, with Val, it seems like she decided to mess inside a strange, tricky territory of wealth and pleasant surprises, and I know that she could be happier, deep down I just know. But my big sister does not want to be rescued.
So the point of this long entry is that I will see her again in two days, and we will probably “go shopping” together and there will be a lot of awkwardness and silence between each other, just like there is between strangers. I will have to chat and fill up the silence maybe, and lie to her by inventing some passionate story about how much I like guys.I will have to put on a mask and pretend I cannot see through her. But she will realize that I am making this effort, she will realize that, yes, I CAN see through her.
She will know that I know, and that I have only shared with her a quarter of my life, and that I am entitled to see through her because I know her. She will know that I was awake and looking from the window that gave view to the avenue, on those summer nights in Buenos Ayres, when she waited for the bus to come on a deserted street at 2 AM, and that I could see her solitary figure, her arm stretching to stop the bus, from the thirteenth floor. She will realize.
Oh, but let us leave the past alone, leave it to drown in the depths of a dark blue sea and not mention it: It is still there. Sadly, I will always look for that older sister who was so alive it scared me, and I will still yell at her every now and then from the insides of my mind and from the balcony that is no more: “Please Val, tell me it is you! tell me it is still you and not that other woman.”
But there will be no more response from her, I know this, except silence and the bland smile of that Double who has replaced her.
Tales of a File Clerk
Mood: cranky
music: Morrissey "Every day is like Sunday..."
(I wrote this last week at work)
“Here I am, another rainy Sunday in Charlotte, filing dozens of insurance documents under the fluorescent lights, inside a stuffy office at Allstate. A new year; the same dead end job. Life couldn’t get more exciting than this. School starts again on Monday and all the philosophy classes were full, so I had to sign up for the useless Core requirement classes I need to take before I graduate.
These classes include subjects like basic Math, basic Biology and basic Psychology, which are interesting, but completely irrelevant to the needs of my Philosophy major. Yes, I know that these are “real easy” classes, I also understand that I should NOT have ignored them and let them pile up until the end, and I couldn’t care less if they are fun or boring; The point is that they are of no interest to me, and they are a waste of my money and time. Not to mention that these are the classes in where I get to realize how old, boring and fat I am, just by sitting next to the mob of bouncy teenage girls that surround me, all wearing the same pink sweatpants with the word “juicy” printed on the back, and text messaging their frat-boyfriends in class.
A new year, and I am another semester away from doing what I really want to do; which is to stay away from that type of people. I am another semester away from being a writer, and from being somewhat of an intellectual, from understanding Adorno and the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, and even Hegel. Time is not on my side -meanwhile I’m taking required classes such as basic Math, basic Biology and basic Psychology which will not help me reach these goals; they will push me further away from them. It’s 2007 and the person I want to be, the person I should be, stands far away from the person I am right now.
Cheers to that. "
music: Morrissey "Every day is like Sunday..."
(I wrote this last week at work)
“Here I am, another rainy Sunday in Charlotte, filing dozens of insurance documents under the fluorescent lights, inside a stuffy office at Allstate. A new year; the same dead end job. Life couldn’t get more exciting than this. School starts again on Monday and all the philosophy classes were full, so I had to sign up for the useless Core requirement classes I need to take before I graduate.
These classes include subjects like basic Math, basic Biology and basic Psychology, which are interesting, but completely irrelevant to the needs of my Philosophy major. Yes, I know that these are “real easy” classes, I also understand that I should NOT have ignored them and let them pile up until the end, and I couldn’t care less if they are fun or boring; The point is that they are of no interest to me, and they are a waste of my money and time. Not to mention that these are the classes in where I get to realize how old, boring and fat I am, just by sitting next to the mob of bouncy teenage girls that surround me, all wearing the same pink sweatpants with the word “juicy” printed on the back, and text messaging their frat-boyfriends in class.
A new year, and I am another semester away from doing what I really want to do; which is to stay away from that type of people. I am another semester away from being a writer, and from being somewhat of an intellectual, from understanding Adorno and the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, and even Hegel. Time is not on my side -meanwhile I’m taking required classes such as basic Math, basic Biology and basic Psychology which will not help me reach these goals; they will push me further away from them. It’s 2007 and the person I want to be, the person I should be, stands far away from the person I am right now.
Cheers to that. "
We are the Dead
This morning at work, an old lady from Florida called and calmly asked me to make sure I wrote a note under her file confirming that “ she was alive.” Because it seems she got a note from her Life Insurance agent in the mail last night stating that she had perished, and that there were $ 50.000 on the bank waiting to be claimed. “ But I haven’t died ” she insisted to me on the phone, “ I am not dead!”
This is just to say...
When I was a child I used to love ripping out the eyes of my dolls just to find out what was there, behind them. Now I have to stop myself from ripping out the eyes of others, just to find if there is something there, behind them…Now I have to stop myself from pulling out my own eyes…
Hairdresser on Fire
music: T. Rex : Your Children were Fair and had Stars in their Hair
When I was young, my Mom would be the one in charge of cutting my hair. No, no cute layers or symmetrical bangs, no adorable haircuts for me; this was hard-core chopping. Mom would use a ruler as a reference, and make me sit on the bed while she combed my hair strands and tried to place it over the ends of my curls. Then she would follow the ruler’s line with her scissors until I had three inches less of dry, tangled up locks.
She would do the same thing to my sister too, but Diana had straight hair, so sometimes she could get away with looking halfway decent.For me that was almost impossible, because what was funny abut mom is that, up to this day, she cannot follow a straight line (she cannot even use a camera without taking pictures that turn out cut in half, or focusing on the wrong things) so the ruler would slightly drop in the process, without her noticing, and instead of a straight line, I would end up with a diagonal hair cut- sometimes almost a triangular one, or a square shaped style.
I think that’s why, up to this day I am still afraid of hairdressers.
When I was young, my Mom would be the one in charge of cutting my hair. No, no cute layers or symmetrical bangs, no adorable haircuts for me; this was hard-core chopping. Mom would use a ruler as a reference, and make me sit on the bed while she combed my hair strands and tried to place it over the ends of my curls. Then she would follow the ruler’s line with her scissors until I had three inches less of dry, tangled up locks.
She would do the same thing to my sister too, but Diana had straight hair, so sometimes she could get away with looking halfway decent.For me that was almost impossible, because what was funny abut mom is that, up to this day, she cannot follow a straight line (she cannot even use a camera without taking pictures that turn out cut in half, or focusing on the wrong things) so the ruler would slightly drop in the process, without her noticing, and instead of a straight line, I would end up with a diagonal hair cut- sometimes almost a triangular one, or a square shaped style.
I think that’s why, up to this day I am still afraid of hairdressers.
Boots of Spanish Leather
I think it was last month, when I overheard my manager from Venezuela tell my other manager, that the reason why he came to this country wasn't because he wanted to fulfill some type of American dream, or because of the job opportunity, but because he needed a break from his girlfriend, who stayed back in Latin America and is still waiting for him.
And I feel bad for the poor Penelope, because she must be receiving no answers to her letters that beg for a response- letters that travel over the sea and that keep haunting my manager's sleep. So I discovered that my manager from Venezuela is here, partly because he got a job as my manager, and partly because he got scared of a woman he did not know how to, formally, break up with.
And I think it was last week, when my Mom who is in Argentina right now, called me on the phone telling me that she would stay a few more weeks in Buenos Ayres and that I “should not worry about her, or about the exact time of her arrival”. But how can I not? I remember that, three years ago, my mother traveled to Mexico and left me, my sister and my Dad clueless about her trace and about the time she would return. And I remember my Dad half-joking and half-being serious about how, maybe, Mom had “ran away with Pancho Villa” and would not come back.
So the moral of this stupid entry is that, not only do people drive away, or swim away, or fly away from other people after deciding that things will not work out between them, but that people can also desert other people without a previous warning and without, even, a single
"Good-Bye."
And I feel bad for the poor Penelope, because she must be receiving no answers to her letters that beg for a response- letters that travel over the sea and that keep haunting my manager's sleep. So I discovered that my manager from Venezuela is here, partly because he got a job as my manager, and partly because he got scared of a woman he did not know how to, formally, break up with.
And I think it was last week, when my Mom who is in Argentina right now, called me on the phone telling me that she would stay a few more weeks in Buenos Ayres and that I “should not worry about her, or about the exact time of her arrival”. But how can I not? I remember that, three years ago, my mother traveled to Mexico and left me, my sister and my Dad clueless about her trace and about the time she would return. And I remember my Dad half-joking and half-being serious about how, maybe, Mom had “ran away with Pancho Villa” and would not come back.
So the moral of this stupid entry is that, not only do people drive away, or swim away, or fly away from other people after deciding that things will not work out between them, but that people can also desert other people without a previous warning and without, even, a single
"Good-Bye."
No nos une el amor, si no el espanto...
Alejandra Pizarnik (Argentine poet, 1936-1962) writes about Antonin Artoud in her diary entry dated October 19, 1956:“Artoud. Will write a page about is sufferings. His physical tension; his conflicts with thought, with words. But without rhetoric, please, without rhetoric. What scares me most is my similarity to A. I mean: The similarity of our wounds.”
Hilda D. and Imagism
(I found a new favorite poet)
"'Oread' is typical of H.D.'s work in many ways. 'I would be lonely', she once admitted, while living at the heart of literary London, 'but for the intensity of my . . . inner life'. And this became the subject of her work, from the early Imagist verse to the later, more oracular poems: the secret existence that cast her, in the midst of company, into permanent but willing exile, the ecstatic sense of inhabiting a borderline between land and ocean, outer world and inner, time and eternity."
"'Oread' is typical of H.D.'s work in many ways. 'I would be lonely', she once admitted, while living at the heart of literary London, 'but for the intensity of my . . . inner life'. And this became the subject of her work, from the early Imagist verse to the later, more oracular poems: the secret existence that cast her, in the midst of company, into permanent but willing exile, the ecstatic sense of inhabiting a borderline between land and ocean, outer world and inner, time and eternity."
The Notebook Transcripts ( a series of found pages).
I wrote this in a notebook, three months ago, but here is the transcript...
"Felt horribly nervous this evening. Was waiting for a few grades that I need to get at some point this week. I hate getting nervous because of grades. Took a shower and a sleeping pill I found in a pocket of a coat tonight, it was a coat I wore last winter. It didn’t do anything to me, so I washed it down with more coffee. I am working much less now and have more time to study, to sleep and to contemplate.
At times like this I realize what a difficult job life is. It is marvelous how one manages to go on and on and on despite all the fears and disappointments and all the other “Parts, bits, cogs, and shining multiples” we tumble upon. I think Sylvia Plath must have been in a mood like mine when she wrote that poem. I bet she was a woman who had plenty of guts, before she committed suicide that is. She wasn’t a dam sissy like I am. It takes guts and plenty of them to be an artist in this unartistic world, a poet in this unpoetic world. Especially when you aren’t even that into poetry, especially when you aren’t even a good artist."
"Felt horribly nervous this evening. Was waiting for a few grades that I need to get at some point this week. I hate getting nervous because of grades. Took a shower and a sleeping pill I found in a pocket of a coat tonight, it was a coat I wore last winter. It didn’t do anything to me, so I washed it down with more coffee. I am working much less now and have more time to study, to sleep and to contemplate.
At times like this I realize what a difficult job life is. It is marvelous how one manages to go on and on and on despite all the fears and disappointments and all the other “Parts, bits, cogs, and shining multiples” we tumble upon. I think Sylvia Plath must have been in a mood like mine when she wrote that poem. I bet she was a woman who had plenty of guts, before she committed suicide that is. She wasn’t a dam sissy like I am. It takes guts and plenty of them to be an artist in this unartistic world, a poet in this unpoetic world. Especially when you aren’t even that into poetry, especially when you aren’t even a good artist."
Another Cheap Memoir...
Again, I wrote this in my head as I was driving to work at 7:30 AM...
“Today I woke up at sunrise for the second time in the year. If I am up early it means that it was a forced imposition, and it means that I probably went to sleep only 3 hours ago. The only person related to me who enjoys mornings, is my Dad. When I lived with my parents, I would always run into Dad on Sunday mornings, and while I was ready to collapse in bed after returning home from a Saturday night-out, he would just be getting up, looking all fresh while preparing his corn-flakes with the daily news open on the table.
Never in my life have I looked fresh in the mornings. The only times I’ve been awake so early were those in where I had stayed up all night. I used to go out on Saturdays a lot, in Buenos Ayres, and the mornings had a different meaning to me.
Six AM on a Sunday was always the time when pigeons would gather in the exhausted avenue to eat from the crumbs left over from Friday night’s madness. It was the sun that rose out from the asphalt as a crippled child and kept growing over the roofs and stretched from the balconies of orange tinted buildings. Sunday at 6 am was me in my jeans and smelling like cigarette smoke, getting off the public bus that carried me home from the city, and I would be murmuring a poem by Charles Bukowski under my breath that ended with this line: “Yes, some lives were made to be wasted.”
Six AM on a Sunday meant coming in as silently as possible into our apartment, and locking myself up in the kitchen to eat out of last night’s spaghetti leftovers until the hunger that came from smoking too many joints had disappeared. Six AM on a Sunday meant spilling coffee stains on my Dad’s Bible that rested open in the kitchen table, its pages flapping with aimless rustle caused by the wind currents that filtered through the cracked door. Six AM on a Sunday was walking slowly down the hallway so that mom wouldn’t hear me, and grabbing my cat Tito in my arms so that he would stop meowing. Once inside my room, it was opening the closet doors, twice, so that the rusty nails would screech and help me to purposively wake up my sister, just to make her listen to me ramble about my night out.
And this is when I realize how old I’m getting. Because time does crazy things to people: If I am awake in the early hours of the morning now, it’s because of my job and the monotony of a routine, or because of some exam I didn’t study enough for and have to catch up with, or because of laundry. And whenever I do stay up until later than 4 AM for some party, my body feels like it’s been run over by a train the next day. Oh, but who can take away my days. And this, although not as exciting as the past events, this, is my life now; and it’s no worse than the other lives I’ve lived.”
“Today I woke up at sunrise for the second time in the year. If I am up early it means that it was a forced imposition, and it means that I probably went to sleep only 3 hours ago. The only person related to me who enjoys mornings, is my Dad. When I lived with my parents, I would always run into Dad on Sunday mornings, and while I was ready to collapse in bed after returning home from a Saturday night-out, he would just be getting up, looking all fresh while preparing his corn-flakes with the daily news open on the table.
Never in my life have I looked fresh in the mornings. The only times I’ve been awake so early were those in where I had stayed up all night. I used to go out on Saturdays a lot, in Buenos Ayres, and the mornings had a different meaning to me.
Six AM on a Sunday was always the time when pigeons would gather in the exhausted avenue to eat from the crumbs left over from Friday night’s madness. It was the sun that rose out from the asphalt as a crippled child and kept growing over the roofs and stretched from the balconies of orange tinted buildings. Sunday at 6 am was me in my jeans and smelling like cigarette smoke, getting off the public bus that carried me home from the city, and I would be murmuring a poem by Charles Bukowski under my breath that ended with this line: “Yes, some lives were made to be wasted.”
Six AM on a Sunday meant coming in as silently as possible into our apartment, and locking myself up in the kitchen to eat out of last night’s spaghetti leftovers until the hunger that came from smoking too many joints had disappeared. Six AM on a Sunday meant spilling coffee stains on my Dad’s Bible that rested open in the kitchen table, its pages flapping with aimless rustle caused by the wind currents that filtered through the cracked door. Six AM on a Sunday was walking slowly down the hallway so that mom wouldn’t hear me, and grabbing my cat Tito in my arms so that he would stop meowing. Once inside my room, it was opening the closet doors, twice, so that the rusty nails would screech and help me to purposively wake up my sister, just to make her listen to me ramble about my night out.
And this is when I realize how old I’m getting. Because time does crazy things to people: If I am awake in the early hours of the morning now, it’s because of my job and the monotony of a routine, or because of some exam I didn’t study enough for and have to catch up with, or because of laundry. And whenever I do stay up until later than 4 AM for some party, my body feels like it’s been run over by a train the next day. Oh, but who can take away my days. And this, although not as exciting as the past events, this, is my life now; and it’s no worse than the other lives I’ve lived.”
The Green Card
I got a marriage proposal today.
Not exactly from the person I would ever want to marry, but a proposal at least. It came from my Colombian workmate, Liliana. Yes, a girl. And it also came with the offer of $6.000 upfront if I agree to give one lucky person my citizenship ( lucky?.)
Because I sell insurance to the Spanish-speaking communities all over the United States, I work surrounded by Latin people, and should know better by now. Half of the employees in my department have temporary passports, half of their friends have expired green cards and the other half reside in the country with student Visas. Once, I was doing over time at Allstate, and an officer came up to the building looking for a guy who worked in the sales department, who had received plenty of deportation notifications that he was ignoring. They took him to the immigration police and after that, we heard that he had moved to Canada and was working as a cab driver. My co-worker Sue Ellen received an offer last year, only that it was for $10,000, to marry a lawyer from Ecuador who had a business in this country but lacked the citizenship, and I heard that Melissa kicked up that offer to $ 15.000 once, and was planning to marry a Colombian until the guy got deported before they could make arrangements.
So I don’t even know why I acted surprised today, it’s not like I never get any marriage proposals from Latin people who only want me for my citizenship. This is what Liliana asked me as soon as I sat at my desk today.
“Caro, would you marry my best friend for $6,000?”
“$6,000 is too little. Maybe for $10,000 I’ll do it”
We sat there for a while trying to rise up the offer until I remembered something.
“Nah, I changed my mind. Can’t do it”
“Why?”
“Marrying a guy would totally ruin my reputation as a serious Lesbian. Sorry.”
As I lost my only opportunity of a lifetime to instantly collect $10,000 from the pockets of a really, really desperate Latin guy, we started brainstorming. The plan was to find someone else who would be as smart as me,to instantly accept a marriage proposal from a complete stranger. Donye, my roommate and coworker from Panama, who has a citizenship, happened to walk by:
“ Donye, would you marry Liliana’s friend for $10,000? You wouldn’t even have to live with him”
“Huh,uh, maybe. I kinda need to get a new car, and pay credit card debt. Is he cute?”
We had one potential candidate already, until Elsie passed by. Elsie works in the Service department and is from Nicaragua, but has a citizenship from her first marriage. I figured that, because she had already married once, she wouldn’t mind doing it again, specially for $10,000. (In my opinion, she would probably do it for free too, because she acts really desperate around guys, but I’m just guessing).
“Elsie, would you marry a guy for $10,000?”
“Has he ever been deported before?”
“ Nah.”
“Hell, yeah! Give me his number and I’ll meet up with him this Friday”
So that’s how my only potential husband, whom I know nothing about, ended up becoming Elsie’s new fiancée, all in less than 20 minutes in the exciting world of illegal, or half-legal, immigrants in the quest for a Green Card.
Not exactly from the person I would ever want to marry, but a proposal at least. It came from my Colombian workmate, Liliana. Yes, a girl. And it also came with the offer of $6.000 upfront if I agree to give one lucky person my citizenship ( lucky?.)
Because I sell insurance to the Spanish-speaking communities all over the United States, I work surrounded by Latin people, and should know better by now. Half of the employees in my department have temporary passports, half of their friends have expired green cards and the other half reside in the country with student Visas. Once, I was doing over time at Allstate, and an officer came up to the building looking for a guy who worked in the sales department, who had received plenty of deportation notifications that he was ignoring. They took him to the immigration police and after that, we heard that he had moved to Canada and was working as a cab driver. My co-worker Sue Ellen received an offer last year, only that it was for $10,000, to marry a lawyer from Ecuador who had a business in this country but lacked the citizenship, and I heard that Melissa kicked up that offer to $ 15.000 once, and was planning to marry a Colombian until the guy got deported before they could make arrangements.
So I don’t even know why I acted surprised today, it’s not like I never get any marriage proposals from Latin people who only want me for my citizenship. This is what Liliana asked me as soon as I sat at my desk today.
“Caro, would you marry my best friend for $6,000?”
“$6,000 is too little. Maybe for $10,000 I’ll do it”
We sat there for a while trying to rise up the offer until I remembered something.
“Nah, I changed my mind. Can’t do it”
“Why?”
“Marrying a guy would totally ruin my reputation as a serious Lesbian. Sorry.”
As I lost my only opportunity of a lifetime to instantly collect $10,000 from the pockets of a really, really desperate Latin guy, we started brainstorming. The plan was to find someone else who would be as smart as me,to instantly accept a marriage proposal from a complete stranger. Donye, my roommate and coworker from Panama, who has a citizenship, happened to walk by:
“ Donye, would you marry Liliana’s friend for $10,000? You wouldn’t even have to live with him”
“Huh,uh, maybe. I kinda need to get a new car, and pay credit card debt. Is he cute?”
We had one potential candidate already, until Elsie passed by. Elsie works in the Service department and is from Nicaragua, but has a citizenship from her first marriage. I figured that, because she had already married once, she wouldn’t mind doing it again, specially for $10,000. (In my opinion, she would probably do it for free too, because she acts really desperate around guys, but I’m just guessing).
“Elsie, would you marry a guy for $10,000?”
“Has he ever been deported before?”
“ Nah.”
“Hell, yeah! Give me his number and I’ll meet up with him this Friday”
So that’s how my only potential husband, whom I know nothing about, ended up becoming Elsie’s new fiancée, all in less than 20 minutes in the exciting world of illegal, or half-legal, immigrants in the quest for a Green Card.
Writing Group anyone?
(I got this e-mail today from this guy I know, and thought that, maybe, somebody else besides me could be interested in this online writing group...)
"Hello,I was in a creative writing workshop at Cooper Union with all of you people in the summer of 2005. That's how I have all of your email addresses. It's not my style to send unsolicited emails to people I don't really know, but I thought some of you might be interested in a website I just started. It's supposed to be something close to an online creative writing workshop. It seemed to me that all the fiction writing websites on the net were geared towards sharing work and not towards discussion, help and encouragement of work. The idea is to give a topic or assignment and allow people to post responses to that assignment. I figure the fact that every writer who posts is working within the same constraints will make everyone more interested in the techniques other people use to fulfill the requirements of the assignment. It will provoke more discussion and bring out more engaged critiques. Everything's free. There are no ads.The URL of the site is http://www.whativefound.com/I hope everyone is well and I apologize again about the unsolicited email. Max"
(Feel free to join!)
"Hello,I was in a creative writing workshop at Cooper Union with all of you people in the summer of 2005. That's how I have all of your email addresses. It's not my style to send unsolicited emails to people I don't really know, but I thought some of you might be interested in a website I just started. It's supposed to be something close to an online creative writing workshop. It seemed to me that all the fiction writing websites on the net were geared towards sharing work and not towards discussion, help and encouragement of work. The idea is to give a topic or assignment and allow people to post responses to that assignment. I figure the fact that every writer who posts is working within the same constraints will make everyone more interested in the techniques other people use to fulfill the requirements of the assignment. It will provoke more discussion and bring out more engaged critiques. Everything's free. There are no ads.The URL of the site is http://www.whativefound.com/I hope everyone is well and I apologize again about the unsolicited email. Max"
(Feel free to join!)
The Life of Our Objects
(A series of pointless writings about our ignored Domestic items)
The Fridge
Living with three carnivore roommates is a problem when it is time to stock up The Fridge, it can also become a problem if you are a vegetarian, and it becomes a bigger conflict when there is not enough space in it. (Correction: Living with three roommates is a problem. Period.)
We all got paid this week, so, obviously, it was a Wal-Mart, or Food Lion-shopping spree day. Personally, I gave up on grocery shopping months ago and switched to eating at gourmet drive-thru diners such as Taco-Bell,which help me in my mission of becoming a healthy, responsible adult. All because trying to store my unfortunate bag of frozen broccoli in between my roommate’s seven pound chickens crammed together with her various dead cow parts, has become one hell of a challenge. When everybody decides to go grocery shopping at the same time, it's asking for trouble. I will find my poor soy burgers asphyxiating under a box of chicken wings, or my innocent cream cheese shoved into a far corner that is hard to reach because of the other obstacles placed in front of it, such as the bottles of tequila, or the strange packages of hot dogs labeled “Joe-Dog.”
Also, I am in the process of making a sign that says: “Be careful of what you put in the fridge: It might just fall on top of you when you open the door.” Last month I came back home at 3 AM, halfway drunk and sleepy after one of those exciting nights spent “ partying” in Charlotte ( please, note the cynism, specially placed on the word "exciting") and I went into the kitchen to get some soda: a heavy pitcher full of iced-tea spilled over my leg instead, and landed on my foot, it still hurts to think about it.
Last week was the turn of an open can of tuna that was balancing itself on the edges, and it fell to the floor. It missed me, but I still had to clean up after it.Tonight, I wanted to look for some left-over ice cream in the freezer, so I opened the door slowly, ready to deal with whatever piece of food might decide to attack me…Until a frozen fish fell, gracefully, in my arms.
Correction: I was not ready to deal with whatever piece of food attacked me. A heavy, dead fish, fresh out of the ocean was staring at me like if it were Poe’s Raven singing “nevermore,” a huge salmon saying
“nevermore” as it haunted me with its lifeless eyes still open and its metallic fins, trapped and frozen inside a zip loc bag: The poor soul. No more frozen animal bodies. I’m getting a mini fridge for my room next week, even if I only store my cream cheese inside it.
Such is the life that goes on, inside The Fridge.
The Fridge
Living with three carnivore roommates is a problem when it is time to stock up The Fridge, it can also become a problem if you are a vegetarian, and it becomes a bigger conflict when there is not enough space in it. (Correction: Living with three roommates is a problem. Period.)
We all got paid this week, so, obviously, it was a Wal-Mart, or Food Lion-shopping spree day. Personally, I gave up on grocery shopping months ago and switched to eating at gourmet drive-thru diners such as Taco-Bell,which help me in my mission of becoming a healthy, responsible adult. All because trying to store my unfortunate bag of frozen broccoli in between my roommate’s seven pound chickens crammed together with her various dead cow parts, has become one hell of a challenge. When everybody decides to go grocery shopping at the same time, it's asking for trouble. I will find my poor soy burgers asphyxiating under a box of chicken wings, or my innocent cream cheese shoved into a far corner that is hard to reach because of the other obstacles placed in front of it, such as the bottles of tequila, or the strange packages of hot dogs labeled “Joe-Dog.”
Also, I am in the process of making a sign that says: “Be careful of what you put in the fridge: It might just fall on top of you when you open the door.” Last month I came back home at 3 AM, halfway drunk and sleepy after one of those exciting nights spent “ partying” in Charlotte ( please, note the cynism, specially placed on the word "exciting") and I went into the kitchen to get some soda: a heavy pitcher full of iced-tea spilled over my leg instead, and landed on my foot, it still hurts to think about it.
Last week was the turn of an open can of tuna that was balancing itself on the edges, and it fell to the floor. It missed me, but I still had to clean up after it.Tonight, I wanted to look for some left-over ice cream in the freezer, so I opened the door slowly, ready to deal with whatever piece of food might decide to attack me…Until a frozen fish fell, gracefully, in my arms.
Correction: I was not ready to deal with whatever piece of food attacked me. A heavy, dead fish, fresh out of the ocean was staring at me like if it were Poe’s Raven singing “nevermore,” a huge salmon saying
“nevermore” as it haunted me with its lifeless eyes still open and its metallic fins, trapped and frozen inside a zip loc bag: The poor soul. No more frozen animal bodies. I’m getting a mini fridge for my room next week, even if I only store my cream cheese inside it.
Such is the life that goes on, inside The Fridge.
Friday, January 12, 2007
Week-End
Once, in a far away city called Buenos Ayres, I spent a Sunday in summer at the shores of the river, with my best friend Jasmine. We had brought bottled soda and cigarettes, and had folded up our tank tops so that our flat, teenage, stomachs could roast under the sun. The weather was dense and humid like it always was in Buenos Ayres; and people seemed to be somewhat happy to spend their week-end at the shore.
Parents were playing Frisbee with their kids and teenagers splashed water at each other, passionately, like if tomorrow there would be no more leisure, only the boredom that comes with a summer of general unemployment and crisis of a decaying country. A group of young men from the project housings nearby had brought their tambourines down to the river, and were beating drumsticks to the rhythm of a carnival song.
People gathered to see this show and even the teenagers had stopped splashing water at each other to go dance and shake their legs to the violent beats of that music. Little kids would run around, kicking at the sand dunes and looking for their parents who had ,ingeniously, planned to lose them, letting them play free for a couple of hours. It was a dazzling Sunday in the river.
I was complaining to Jasmine that evening, because my head had started itching after three hours of lying on the sand. I couldn’t stop scratching my scalp, thinking I had gotten some kind of scalp-burn from the sunlight, and kept on complaining about how it bothered me. Eventually, she paid some attention and sat down on a bench, pushing me towards her. She grabbed my head without even asking, and placed it on her knees to start inspecting my hair. After less than a minute she came up with the verdict:
“You have lice” she said.
“Oh! Take them out! Pleaseeee! ” I answered.
“We need vinegar or Kerosene” she said. “That’s how my mom used to get the lice out of my hair”
“Kerosene?”
I debated what would be better: To have my hair smell like Italian dressing, or to have Jasmine light up my locks in flames by throwing kerosene on my hair, while forgetting to throw her cigarette out.
“Vinegar?” I answered.
Hopefully we didn’t use either of them, because I had a better, more civilized idea, and went to the nearest pharmacy to get lice medicine. It was a thick lotion that smelled like bug spray and I had to leave it on my hair for the next six hours. Everyone I ran into that night, would talk to me from a distance and I felt, somewhat discriminated.
“We should have tried Kerosene” Jasmine insisted.
“It would have killed them faster.”
She just had to keep on bragging about it.
But the lice medicine worked and after that incident, I never went back to the river again.
Oh, except once, later in the year when Jasmine had already left me to go to Art School in California, and I had decided to stay studying in the National University instead. But it was winter then: I sat at a bench staring at the water, thinking about arrivals and departures, and about the harshness of the rising tide over the land. There were no more tambourines playing, and I only saw a few boys who were left smoking weed on the shore, but no families, besides it was about to rain.
Parents were playing Frisbee with their kids and teenagers splashed water at each other, passionately, like if tomorrow there would be no more leisure, only the boredom that comes with a summer of general unemployment and crisis of a decaying country. A group of young men from the project housings nearby had brought their tambourines down to the river, and were beating drumsticks to the rhythm of a carnival song.
People gathered to see this show and even the teenagers had stopped splashing water at each other to go dance and shake their legs to the violent beats of that music. Little kids would run around, kicking at the sand dunes and looking for their parents who had ,ingeniously, planned to lose them, letting them play free for a couple of hours. It was a dazzling Sunday in the river.
I was complaining to Jasmine that evening, because my head had started itching after three hours of lying on the sand. I couldn’t stop scratching my scalp, thinking I had gotten some kind of scalp-burn from the sunlight, and kept on complaining about how it bothered me. Eventually, she paid some attention and sat down on a bench, pushing me towards her. She grabbed my head without even asking, and placed it on her knees to start inspecting my hair. After less than a minute she came up with the verdict:
“You have lice” she said.
“Oh! Take them out! Pleaseeee! ” I answered.
“We need vinegar or Kerosene” she said. “That’s how my mom used to get the lice out of my hair”
“Kerosene?”
I debated what would be better: To have my hair smell like Italian dressing, or to have Jasmine light up my locks in flames by throwing kerosene on my hair, while forgetting to throw her cigarette out.
“Vinegar?” I answered.
Hopefully we didn’t use either of them, because I had a better, more civilized idea, and went to the nearest pharmacy to get lice medicine. It was a thick lotion that smelled like bug spray and I had to leave it on my hair for the next six hours. Everyone I ran into that night, would talk to me from a distance and I felt, somewhat discriminated.
“We should have tried Kerosene” Jasmine insisted.
“It would have killed them faster.”
She just had to keep on bragging about it.
But the lice medicine worked and after that incident, I never went back to the river again.
Oh, except once, later in the year when Jasmine had already left me to go to Art School in California, and I had decided to stay studying in the National University instead. But it was winter then: I sat at a bench staring at the water, thinking about arrivals and departures, and about the harshness of the rising tide over the land. There were no more tambourines playing, and I only saw a few boys who were left smoking weed on the shore, but no families, besides it was about to rain.
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