Category: Parent

The old man searchs his old pipe in the pocket of his frayed jacket, but it’s not there. He looked more carefully, now surprised, in his other pockets. On one of his hands there are some dirty springs that had been attached to his slightly sweaty skin, but not the pipe. It was neither in any of the multicolored pockets of the shirt, nor in the pants, where he ends up looking in distress. The pipe remained nowhere to be found.
He was sixty five years and for twenty years he had been dragging the same pipe from his lips to his hands, from his hands to his lips, with brief stays in the depth of the right pocket of his jacket, which strongly smells of nicotine, a rough old nicotine smell. In all those years he had changed jacket four or five times, not more, and with every change the smell would install there, unchanging and persistent. Only he had gotten used to it. Not his young daughter. She had not been able to get used to that ocre stench that would stir her guts every time. Not very often, she would take the jacket for a was. The stench did not fully go away, but the piece as a whole was more presentable. Not that it mattered much. That was above such things. His temper was naturally philosophical and when, later, due to health issues he had to stop working in the construction business to become a gravedigger, this innate disposition grew accentuated by the imperatives of the trade.
He took the episode of the lost pipe badly, despite his philosophy. It was an old friend that would not be easy to replace. Buying a new pipe was easy enough, but it took time to get used to it, to get it used to him. First it had a certain taste or aftertaste of wood, something extremely unpleasant only removed by the days and years. There was nothing like an old pipe, blackened and burnt. He had lost it, it was evident. He returned early enough, retracing the path that he had walked an hour before, to the foot of the niche, and there he began to think about the circumstances of his departure, the gestures he had made, the moment he had put the pipe in his pocket for the last time, since it was not there, when he had removed the pipe from the mouth to leave it in a place he could not figure out. He could not remember it well.
He went out of the cemetery, crestfallen and melancholic, because only there he could have lost it. One last time he went back, as he came to think that he would say the keeper that if he found a pipe of its kind it was his. But the keeper knew the old man’s pipe by heart, and no descriptions were needed. He wasn’t very concerned anyway. If he found it by chance, fine, but if he didn’t, he would not think about it that much.
Later the old man thought about whether to also warn his colleagues, but they were already far ahead. He would tell them tomorrow. It would be strange if the pipe wasn’t recovered. They would certainly not understand his anxiety. None of them smoked a pipe, and they did not know what such an object could mean to someone after twenty years of uninterrupted use. He would warn them anyway. And if they found it, they would give it back to him. He was sure about that. But they would not spare a joke or two.

Lord,

Can you hear me? Can you see me? When I am falling, when I am crying. On the floor. When I am trying my best not be get angry. When I am wondering how I will manage not to explode and break everything in sight. Can you hear me Lord? When I am asking to make the pain go away. I don’t want to let the pain drive me crazy. I don’t want it to creat rage and make me break everything in sight. I don’t want to let it make me be somebody else. I don’t want to be pain. I want to stand up and fight for peace.

Give me strength so I can stand up. Give me courage so i can fight. There is so much pain in my heart. So much pain in my life. They say slavery is over. They say black and white people are now good friends. There is so much pain in my heart. So much pain in my life. I remember the bilge of the boat and our blood in the sugar cane field. There is so much pain in my heart. So much pain in my life. They say nowadays we do not suffer anymore. Things that happenned in the past are far away and dead for good. They say nowadays we do not suffer anymore but look! Today black folks, my family is in pain.

There is so much pain in my heart. So much pain in my life. They say slavery is over. So much pain in my heart. They say black and white people are now good friends. So much pain in my life. Look at my children’s tears. So much pain in my heart. Look at my brother’s endless fight. So much pain.

Of Walls & Beasts

Of all the things she could have said to him she chose the one that made less noise of all. That short, lousy combination of words rushed out of her mouth, through dry lips that he would never kiss again; for all the beautiful things in his life were cruelly destined to disappear.

“I think you should…” she started in a broken thin voice.

The air around them froze, so the rest of her words had no way of reaching his ears. There was no use for it anyway, as he had already lost the will to listen when he saw what her eyes were saying. He turned his gaze away –the ice around them cutting every single inch of his skin –as the world fell apart without him expecting it.

As he slowly walked towards the wall, he could barely hear her remaining words; she sounded like an echo of the person she once  had been, her voice alienated by the unbearable look in her eyes. He reached the cold surface with the palm of his right hand, before leaning his head towards the whiteness, until his right ear was flat against the wall.

He heard nothing. There was no last advice, no comforting song coming from the heart of the bricks, not a single wise whisper to be heard. He trembled as he grasped the first handful of gypsum and brick out of the wall. He did the same with his left hand, tearing apart another piece of the white cold wall. His fingers would come first, penetrating the wall as a knife stabbing meat, followed by tense hands that would easily tear off chunks of debris. By clinching his fists, he turned the pieces of brick into dust, following an almost mechanical ritual.

During all this time she had been looking past him, her eyes aiming at a point beyond his figure, apart from the things he had always known; somewhere too far away for him to reach. Only once she dared to look at the huge hole in the wall, just in time to see his silhouette disappearing through it. The rest of the time she just kept on looking at someplace beyond that room.

That is why she could not see the beasts coming.

(13)
And her lips trembled with the tears that distorted her face where he had slipped the muzzle, and hands, bent, still scratching the wood where it was losing bits of nail and that little warm voice also wept and said, at his side –
– And mother, Alba?
Dídac had followed her from the pond, where she had crossed the street and was visited by death, she had jumped mountains of rubble, and the maze of alleys.
– Because we lived there, along with Margaret, years ago, who went out to serve herself and was left pregnant by a black man.
Alba hugged him, pressing him against her in a desperate gesture, but she interrupted his cry and went to straighten the sharp body of the nine year old child, who begged a cry:
– She’s not dead, right?
(14)
And they had died. They found it (death) at the foot of the stove, after having penetrated into the house through a hole in the roof, and she still had a spoon in her hands with which she must have been ready to stir the pasta that could be seen in the an intact, clay pot.
The boy embraced her with a beastly cry/the whimper of a bug and called out to her as is if she was sleeping and just wanted to rest, while Alba stroked his curly hair and left him to vent, now with dry eyes, though her heart inflated as if tears sprouted there, in the crevices of the arrhythmic beats.
After Dídac had clung onto her like a castaway grips wood and wet his cheeks with his tears all the while babbling nonsense words. She said:
– They must have killed everyone.
(15)
When she was explaining to him what had happened with the aircraft, which he hadn’t seen because of being under the water, they heard an unexpected trill that makes them turn towards the courtyard’s window that still had its windowsill, and they saw the intact cage straightaway, with the bird flapping its wings.
The goldfinch!
Dídac got his hands off Alba’s neck and straightened his back.
It’s Xica…
The young girl, feeling hopeful, was squeezing her hands against her breasts to calm her unbridled heart.

(10)

And everywhere, half buried by rubble, inside the parked cars, on the streets, there were corpses, a huge amount of corpses, all their concrete faces had a strange sneer and they had yellow-rose hair.

They hadn’t been beaten by either stones or beams of lights, some even resting in clean spaces and lying whole, without any visible blood or wounds, simply fallen as if struck by lightning. Others, however, hung from open soils or everything had been removed but one limb, or at the end, between the debris that imprisoned them. She knew almost all of them; they were neighbours, friends, people she was accustomed to seeing every day.

Also there had to be her parents.

(11)

And then she ran again, puffing under a shred of her blouse that she had wrapped in her face like a muzzle, because of the dust that made her cough. She moved towards the main square, where the belfry’s higher part, practically untouched, erected straight over the church’s ruins that closed the entrance to the back alleys, which were sufficiently narrow to make her climb piles of furniture walls and corpses, and to make her descend by embankments with its surface rolling away down her feet.

She was orienting herself in a city’s geography now unknown, she crossed a slope on the ground floor of a building that collapsed and nearly hung her. She jumped a high wall, her shorts got caught and tore in half, fastened only by the waistband and then she continued by a short and deserted street which had been flooded running towards the bend in the road where her house was.

(12)

And the house was no longer there. The two floors of the building had fallen over the low ceilings, which must now also have been demolished behind the door, the wall slightly  inflated with pressure, closing the tomb where her father lay, her mother, her sister who would have married next month..

She raised her hands, flattened against the solid wood, letting them slide slowly along with her, her whole body sagging on her disadvantaged legs until the laps touch the ground that was full of studs. All of her, indifferent to the physical pain, curled up and muttering:

– Mother! Mother….

(7)

And then she saw that they were lying down on the ground, flabbergasted and with their features contorted, as stunned as if they had had a stroke that had left their faces the colour of jaundice. The basket was upside down and all the figs were scattered around, although they hadn’t eaten them, because she saw their lips were clean. Dídac, who was recovering, asked:
– What are they doing, Alba?
– I don’t know… C’mon, they don’t want you.
– You mean they aren’t dead?

(8)

And then Alba, who turned in realization that she had a large tear on her blouse, lifted her head to the village and opened her mouth without making a sound. In front of her, about 300 meters away, Benaura seemed to be something else, flatter; below the dust that hung like a distinguished and persistent fog, the houses crowded on top of each other as though they had been crushed by a crude hand. She closed her lips again, re-opened them, and exclaimed:
“Oh!”
And then, without remembering that the blouse no longer covered her breasts, she ran off down the road.

(9)

And there was nothing left standing in the town. The buildings had been crushed, as if suddenly the walls had wavered above the debris which had fallen through the roof. All the stones and the roof were scattered on the streets and they covered, completely, the sidewalks, but the collapse was so severe that it had left the wider roads impassable, where the water ran though the broken pipes, in some places, spouting raging geysers between the dust.
In many places, the low walls continued right, as if the inside contained runoff from the piled high flats, in some cases, between walls that, completely cracked, had resisted the fierce impulse of an annihilating attack. Why those mysterious devices had done all of that, Alba was unsure.