Damned Words

There is a new story! At the end, new stories are always added to The Damned Words!

                                

Damned Words

These are stories inspired by events that occurred in my life in certain circumstances. Names and places may not be real, but the central idea, it is. I apologize to the people who really were present and helped indefinitely. For those persons, my eternal thanks and please I ask for their understanding.

                                 (all these stories have their Isbn and Copyright)

Chapter 1: Peaceful block.

              In the dark the imagination works more actively than in the light.

                Immanuel Kant.

          

Traducir al Español (Original)

The face print was there. Where was pressed the visage, where that white face appeared, in the wet glass.
That house was always on my way. When I was going to work or even during my days off, when I went to the store to buy something. I always took that route, because it had less traffic.
It got my attention from the beginning, because of its calm aspect, its comfortable appearance, its solitude and also by the splendid pool in its patio, where I never saw anyone bathe, but I liked it.
I imagined myself, with my family in that tranquility, taking baths of sun and pursued by my little angel, that is to say, my daughter, because although she was in Cuba, I saw her in my dreams next to me, with her trope of puppets and her artifacts of game. My daughter had grown up, she was ten years old, but I always looked at her like a baby.

The round and chimerical placidness of the place where the house was, made me dream. That is, not of the place itself, but just the house, because of that radiant quietness that emanated from it. For this reason I always looked at it, I watched the building with longing. In the days and during the nights, every time I walked along that path, at the side of Coral Way, the main street that was at one side.

Many occasions I went walking, giving myself the pleasure of walking slowly under the trees. A pleasure that few times I could give to my body, living in a city that lives running and that even sleeps running.

I walked under the branches full of leaves and I forgot the world. I did not even feel the shrieks of the automobiles, which instigated each other, attacked each other fiercely with clean klaxon for any reason.

I have lived in other cities of this country, in the state of Michigan, where there is even the danger of driving on the ice, but I had never heard such madness. This fastidious and voracious swarm of nagging aggressions that makes people live startled.

But the construction of my interest rose there, indifferent and arrogant, challenging the rushes and stridencies of the environment, majestically situated in its corner, ignoring with pride the discourtesy of the world. There was my illusion, on the edge of the abyss, but without falling into it.

Nothing disturbed its parsimony by refusing to participate in the whirlwind.

I looked at it as if it were mine. I already had some kind of affection to it. I figured my person walking down the corridors, its bathroom, which must have been a delightful room. I stared at its eternally closed windows, its pool, alone, but inexplicably cared. The small room that it had at one side, which seemed to be a separate room, with its staircase, its particular door and window.

Although many were my excursions to that place and multiple my observations of all the details, I never could see somebody in it. Someone told me once that it must be a house re owned by the banks. Something that was very usual at present times.

It was a curious coincidence that I could never have seen anyone, neither cleaned the patio nor pool nor the house itself, I never saw anybody there.

But, in spite of its implausible peace, its heteroclite aspect and its solitude; the house expelled a suggestion, an invitation.

That's why one day I decided to get closer. Try to look inside it. If it was a house re possessed, surely would neither have furniture nor would there be any indications of belongings or other things like that. I do not know, actually, what made me approach, but one morning, with caution and trying to be like someone looking for something, asking for a direction or in the worst case, someone who wants just to observe or inquire anything, I took its sidewalk, I crossed the fence of bushes that surrounded it and softly knocked on the door.

Nobody answered. Nearby there were other houses also closed and silent. I looked around to see if someone was watching me. I checked if I had a doorbell, checked if it had cameras installed, moved and examined at the other sides, nothing. Only silence. The noise of the world had subsided. The pangs and snores of the cars were almost imperceptible.

I knocked at the door again. A little bit harder, but nothing happened. The house was silent. It was obstinate in giving no sign of life. To treasure for it, that calm, the sobriety that enveloped it like a solemn mantle.

After several attempts, I had to leave. Follow on my way. Continue the daily routine of going to and coming from work, those wonderfully adverse daily things that allows us to live. That we have to have, that we cannot neglect.

That day I should start at 11.00 am, but because of my habit of always being an hour or at least half an hour earlier in my work, I had left home early and I could stop for a few minutes.

In the case someone came out to receive me, our interview, it would have been very brief. So I was leaving, I was several meters away when I thought I felt, heard, a call or something.

I turned a few steps back, looked around and said three or four times: "Hello," but there was no result. Then I continued on my way.

My brain sometimes plays these jokes. I walked and sometimes I looked back, so I was sure I heard a sound. Maybe there would be someone in the house and that person was slow to check who was calling. In short, I did not know what I was going to say, in case someone received me.

Maybe, just to ask if it was for rent the little room on the side, the one that had the staircase and the window to the street by where I frequently went through.

My convoluted brain can become a torture machine. When nobody or anything bothers me, then, my diabolical thinking structure begins to suggest and imagine situations, people, accidents and all sorts of entanglements that might make the situation different. Feeding back my imagination with what I should have said or should I have done in this case or the other. Wondering what could happen if I had done this or that.

I have never been able to define whether this is for better or for worse. If it is a tool that can produce self-improvements, or it is just something that I should still eliminate in myself. I have never been able to clarify it. Therefore I do not take too much notice when I have these feedback experiences. I only try to get out of my head this pantagruelic banquet of conjectures that my useless reasoning offers me.

I cast out of my thoughts any suggestion of what I might have done or should have said and to hell, I did as I pleased! And I remain, may be, at least in peace with myself.

The day, for my luck, it went agile. The hours ran and suddenly the day was over. I left my job without even going over the list of things I had to buy. Many times I do this voluntarily, because I don’t want spend money. I always have a thousand ideas and projects in mind, which require money.

I resign myself to dispense with what is not absolutely necessary to me. Only in this way I have managed to keep my economy out of the debts that cram people and those that far from providing happiness for having acquired what they wanted, leave them embarked on the concerns and consequent debts.

I will always remember the words of a writer whom I read many years ago: "Man always longs for a happiness that is beyond the limits that are bestowed upon him", wise words.

I left my job in a hurry. I got in the car and rushed home, although I certainly did not know why I was hurrying. There was no purpose in my haste. I had nothing else to do. Just to get out of sight. Simply for not to be reach by the fatigued hostility of the damn people.

It would not be fair to say that I have become a misanthrope, but I think I begin to notice a similar symptom in me. At the beginning of my life in Miami, I was amazed that I noticed aggressiveness in people. I could not explain it to me. I did not understand how in such a beautiful city, with innumerable places conducive to relaxation and mental distraction, people had that behavior. But the idea has become clear, I understand why.

Most people prejudge others. They consider others as potential foci of aggression. What I have not been able to discover is the method of peacefully moving between them, getting a kind of homocromy or better to separate myself, a mechanism to remain indifferent to this belligerence. Thus, like the house remained, immutable, unalterable and quiet.

It was late, about eleven o'clock, I passed the mansion of my dreams like a bolt of fire, but I always looked at it. I shot it a quick glance and it was perhaps another mischief of my nervous configuration, seeing, or believing to see, a light within it. Was it a light? Perhaps a reflection of the lights of the cars in its crystals? I was too tired to back out and check. Well, if it was a light, I wished its generators good night. Sleep well!

For a few days I did not have a chance to get close to the place. I worked hard. In addition, my address had changed. I had to move to another address, although it was even closer, now my way differed. I did not have to pass right in front of the house, but my new home was a few blocks behind. I could see it up close, but on the other position.

I no longer passed by the front of the room with the steps, but by the other side, where the main front itself was visible, but something more distant. Only it was from that angle from which the largest window was seen, where I thought I saw the light. From there I could not see the pool, only the main door, with its central window and a smaller window at one side. That view did not favor the house; it made it look rather sinister.

The darkness in the interior, which could be seen through its transparent glass windows, did not create a hospitable appearance. I could not say how, but the subtle and subliminal suggestion exhaled had changed.

It is curious to see how the darkness, which often brings calm, peace, relief, can also bring unfavorable and alarming feelings.

The same darkness that helps us to relax, to reconcile rest and sleep, suddenly, by a light touch to the door at an inappropriate time, could be transformed into an emergency factor. In help needed.

Of course, we all come to an age, where many emergency factors matter to us a horseradish. So, the first chance I had, I waited for the evening to be quiet, and I walked without hesitation to the place. It was a Wednesday of which I had no to work and from earlier the idea came to me in the following way.

During the day it was easy to notice that the house was empty. Even the adjoining houses seemed equally empty, something usual. As far as I could see, up to that moment, the neighborhood was of laborious people, whether by nature or necessity.

We all have to work. In case of working at night, we have to take advantage of the hours we are at home, close doors and windows, turn off the phone, give the complete idea of ​​absence and try to sleep. In addition to the night when I thought I saw the light inside, at another time, one of the nights of that week when I was very busy, when I went home, I seemed to hear distant sounds coming from the house.

It was possible that its inhabitants worked during the day and after the afternoon they keep isolated to rest.

I have had times like that myself. In which I am alienated from the world and my neighbors, if anyone knew about my existence, could have given me for dead. Because of the house was almost at the corner of my job, it was convenient; if possible, to rent the room facing Coral Way, I could go quickly and even walking to work.

So, well, that's how I had the determination to go there, that free Wednesday, after the afternoon. I left my room walking, so I did not have the worry and the delay in parking. Because, from what I had seen, from the view I could have, that is, the one I had had until then, the house only had apparently only one parking lot, which was closed.

I walked, enjoying the placidness of the afternoon, the singing of the snitches, that beautiful trill that reminds me of my homeland. It's amazing how those little birds sing at night. Even at dawn I had heard them singing.

It was close and the atmosphere was very propitiate, so with the most naturalness and imperturbability of the world I walked along the sidewalk, below the branches that at that time did not project their fresh shadow, caused by sunlight, but the dark spots in the yellow flashes of the bulbs.

The neighborhood seemed extremely quiet. I had barely seen the local people. Actually I was new in the area, but this detail was not important, because in all areas of the cities where I had lived, I have always managed to go unnoticed.

I do not like to excel, but rather to inadvertently integrate myself. I have warned that this can be counterproductive. In certain cases it is good that people know about you.

I like to be recognized, to be greeted and to greet my cohabitants. Instead, I do not believe leadership is one of my truths. So, if they saw me walking in the street, they saw only a simple man, nothing singular, a common passer-by, who did not intend to attack anyone, much less to be a stereotype to be compared with anyone, in an environment where comparison has become a determining factor.

I remembered favorite songs from my youth, my favorite rock bands, a song named "Logical song", as well as another one whose lyrics said something like ... "People live in competition", apparently other points of view coincided with my form to see the world.

When I get to the house, first I looked at it from a few meters away, from its sidewalk, without crossing the line of shrubs that surrounded it. It was about nine o'clock at night and I could not say why I waited so long, that hour when the night had already plunged the city into its shadows.

A few white lights illuminated its porch and the interior was dark. I repeated most of the operations the first time, only calmly now, since I was not in any hurry. I looked again at its outer drive way, its windows on the street. I tried very hard to find cameras. I stopped first to listen.

Maybe I could feel the barking of a dog, the start of the air conditioning machine, any sound that gave a sign of life, but no, just silence. Then I went to the door and I touched first softly and then another two times a little louder.

I waited in silence for the answer, but there was no answer. Then I had the idea of touching one of its side windows. Some houses have their rooms completely isolated, so that if someone knocks on the front door, those in their rooms would not hear anything. That is why almost always when people visit an acquaintance, many times they first make a call, so that they are waiting, but obviously could not do that, had no number to call.

So I took out my key ring and with the back of my car key, I hit the window glass where I figured there was a room.

After waiting a few minutes, I repeated the operation by the side which had the small room that seemed independent. This action from the beginning I thought it was inoperative, since it could be deduced that it was empty.

All this I did very carefully, because very well I knew the susceptibility that characterizes the environments of Miami neighborhoods, for much less than this, can call the police and you would possibly have to face charges.

After many unsuccessful attempts to get some response, I realized that I would have no choice but to leave. I turned around and when I almost took my first step down the steps, something appeared in the window. On the other side of the glass, only for a few seconds, came a hand that slipped, we would say better, It flowed down, to the part that already occupied the wall. Everything was very brief, barely half a second.

I went back to the window where I saw the hand and touched with the key a little louder. Someone had to be there. I had no doubt that I had seen a hand in the window, something or someone had shown signs of presence.

I moved closer to the window and tried to look inside, but there was only a resounding darkness. Nor I could see the lower part, to where the hand had moved, because it was obstructed by the wall. A sense of urgency seized me. I could not establish if it was someone in need of help, nor did I have concrete elements to dial on my phone and call for the emergency assistance. I knew many people would call them for less than this, but ... what had I actually seen? What could I explain when they took my call for assistance? Besides not having enough arguments, could I clearly explain my appearance there?

That event could result in a tangle of incalculable consequences for me. I had to be sure of things, what I had seen, how I had seen? Why had I seen? And God only knew how many questions I would have to answer, to whom and where I would have to answer.

I paused to think for a moment. The slightest sense of prudence advised me to simply go home. Forget about that happy place, its little room and everything related. Besides that everything I had seen was nothing more than a sudden and even uncertain vision, for at that moment I dared not even assure that it was a hand what I had saw.

At last, I went down the steps of the porch and when I came down, I turned, looked again at the window where I saw the fleeting image. Only the darkness of the interior was visible. There was no sound.

For a few minutes I stood below the dividing strip of bushes, staring at the window, but nothing more happened. Then I left. However, that incident led me to unexpected reflections and lucubration, titrations about my concepts, my character and about my way of acting. I did not want to think that I escaped from the place where there was possibly someone in need of help, but I valued my doubts as fear, or perhaps selfishness, by not wanting to help by simply not disturbing my tranquility.

I thought in turn that we all have to protect our stability, recognize and defend the balance between what is and is not our concern. Each one takes care of its things, it prevents its dilemmas, avoids conjunctures that can affect us.

The help of a neighbor belongs to all of us, but it was not enough, I thought, what I had seen, to consider that there was a neighbor in need of help. I imagined myself explaining the situation to people in the emergency service. The situation did not withstand even serious analysis. There are so many really serious situations in Miami that it seemed to me an exaggerated stupidity to occupy such services on that antecedent.

I left from the surroundings of house the same way I had gone; walking without haste, caressed by the cool of the night and planning some things to do the next day, I was decided completely not to think more about the house or the pretty small room, nor anything allusive to the matter. I managed, with a big effort, to put aside my reflections on "denial of help" or "calls to the emergency service" and achieved a "relative" peace.

I say "relative" because I'm definitely convinced that complete peace of mind is impossible to achieve, at least for the rational beings at present times.

Most factors and media that integrate our life, try frantically to move us away from the peace, making us to feel fear, doubt and suspicion.

To do whatever needed to get us to secure our lives against possible catastrophes that can happen, of course not for free.

Beginning with the mass media, from the dawn itself and even throughout the night, they publish and spread news throughout all the country and the world about crimes, accidents, fraud, robberies, attacks, wars that have occurred or are about to occur and all kinds of evil foreshadowing.

About how unemployment rates are going to increase, businesses will fail, or how the doomed ozone layer will be destroyed in a thousand pieces. How the tsunamis will begin to destroy new lands; in short, all sorts of unfortunate predictions to make us lose our poise and make us live in anguish, wishing that the damned apocalypse just come quickly and end by leading us each towards the way we will have to take.

Right, but I reached the peace possible. To which we are entitled at least to those who succeed in simplifying things.

Someone once told me: "Whenever you need to solve something, simplify it."

I do not remember from whom I heard that, but I remember when I was told that phrase, it seemed to me gross and if not gross, it sounded discordant with most of the daily situations that we must solve.

But I have applied it and in most cases it works. For example, I used to carry many notes and reminders about personal identification numbers (PINs), with notes on passwords and other data essential for accessing your virtual information and even accessing our resources. In short, I have simplified it to adjust it almost completely, in a way so stupidly simple that it is even dangerous to say.

In this case in question I thought: Do you directly affect me? Do I know what I should face and what can I solve? Do I have any real way of solving it? The answers were three consecutive "NO's" so I would not think about it for now. It did not qualify as a "soluble problem" and therefore was not a problem in reality.

I came home and sat down in my humble patio, to enjoy the beautiful part that has my loneliness, the smell of the grass, the quiet of the night, the sound of nocturnal animals, the symphony that run my neighbors crickets. For greater glory I could see from my old armchair the smoke of the Milky Way in a sky full of stars.

Was small my peace? Was it not another instance of "wanting more than we are given"? I had in mind my father's words: "We can be as happy as our simplicity allows." "We can achieve and enjoy life as much as our humility leaves us." "We can be happy and live in calm only if we know how to discover the way, if we can define what happiness we aspire to." I remembered his sentences, applicable to my life.

But sometimes the happiness I aspire to is too much for me. Not to achieve it, but after it is achieved, when I have what I was looking for, at least what is attainable.

Then new cracks arise in what I believed solid battlement of my happiness. Like ... Would someone finally be in that fucking house?

Someone screaming to me from inside: "Give me a fucking hand!" 

It was hard for me to get away about the idea that someone in need of relief or support might indeed be locked in there.

By the store where I worked, its parking lot and its surroundings frequented a man whom I called: "The man of the cats." He was a man who was more than sixty years old, with whom I already had a certain friendship. I saw him many times over there, even in the store doing some shopping; shopping cats’ food.

He had a motor limitation, which forced him to use the auxiliary electric chairs to be able to move inside the store. I never knew his name, but we were almost friends.

I liked to see how it fed the cats and wild birds in the neighborhood. I remember one day I asked about the house. I asked if it was habited and I asked him to please tell me if he saw any of its residents, I was thinking and wanted to rent the room that was seen from the street.

This man also had his eyes affected, a kind of hemorrhage or something. They had red veins and bleeding. I remember that he looked at me very seriously, with his purple eyes, gave me his consent and told me:

—If I were you, I would look for another place.

This intrigued me even more. I asked him why he was telling me that, but he only shook his head and left without explaining anything.

That man lived around, I thought and he was sure of what he was saying. But I could not get any clarification from him.

When I was assigned work outside the store, picking up the shopping carts that users left everywhere, I always looked for a way to get to the street or at least to the sidewalk and throw furtive looks in that direction, but always with the same result, the house was seen in total stillness.

I do not know how many times I repeated the routine of going out to Coral Way and looking slyly at the corner where the house was. I lingered while I was busy doing anything and watched as long as I could.

The store was busier than usual. From the same six in the morning, when it opened its doors, rows of people entered like a plague and devastated everything. They bought for vice and without the slightest scruple to realize their real need.

They did not buy things which could be at that time things of imperious necessity, such as bread or milk or other foods, neither personal use things that could be needed at any time, but anything, like clothing, jewelry, instruments, music discs and all sorts of trifles.

According to the comments and news that were handled, there was shortage of money; however, a different perception could be noticed.

One of the afternoons when my day was almost over, I had the light of my register turned off and I had finished with my long line of customers, when I heard the loud siren sound of the emergency services and I do not know why I related to the house. I supposed they would have discovered something or that someone had the courage to do what maybe I should have done.

So, when I got out, I did not go looking for my car, but I veered to the block where the house was and kept walking right to its front door. I stood in front of it and without even noticing the details I always used to examine, I touched it hard. Say like four strokes. When I had no answer, I repeated the operation insistently.

There was total silence. There were no traffic struggles or anything for me to hear. The people of emergency had taken another direction, had not been called from there apparently. I tried to look inside, from the main window, the large window that propitiated the view to the street. And just when I approached the window pane, which had my nose on the wide transparent glass, then a diffuse pattern, a turbid countenance emerged from the part occupied by the wall, a blurred and figureless face whose mouth opened and closed desperately. It was crushed against the glass and seemed to scream something I could not hear.

I panicked, not less; exact words. I cannot describe better the impression that the ghostly image had caused in me.

I took a few steps back and hardly noticed I was walking away from the place. Evolving without knowing why, from something I did not know what it was or what it was asking to me.

I just followed my instincts. But I stopped, could not just leave the place. Now I was clear about what I had seen and how I had seen it.

Without thinking, I turned around. I tried to calm myself, to appease my emotions and to act in some clever way.

I went back to the house, tried to hear groans or sounds seeking help. I stood again in front of the window. The face print was there. Where was pressed the face, where that white face appeared. On the damp glass still, it must be because of the breath of the mouth stuck on the glaze. There the unmistakable impression was marked.

The door opened. With a dry sound, which cooled my soul, the massive gate opened like pulled from the inside. I stood in from of the dark cavity for a long time.

Again the scream of the emergency service trucks, with its spectacle of lights, sirens and squeaks. I grabbed my phone in my pants pocket as I watched the rescue trucks and ambulances stop in front of the subsequent house, the other house which side was bordered by the line of small trees.

I saw from one of the adjoining residences go out an alarmed-looking man and explain to the young rescue people. Pointing to another of the nearby houses, it was equally closed. The group as a whole headed toward the place.

Soon after, it was over. The man swore and perjured, pointed to the oval windows from where he claimed to have seen a woman with a bloody face and no doubt heard shouts claiming for help. The guards came and went, making gestures of denial.

I went down the steps. The door had closed again. I turned around and left that demoniac neighborhood ... "too quiet."

Chapter 2: Luba.

   It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.

   William Shakespeare.

  Traducir al Español (Original)

— What is the new trick? — I thought jaded, looking at the mail and the photo. Apparently it was a hook or “tumbe”, as we said and was used an image of a girl, about 25 or 30 years old, pretty, blonde hair and athletic body.

The mail said or asked something like if I was annoyed according with what it seemed in my letter where I answered one from her. To tell the truth, I could not remember writing a letter in those days and much less to a girl like that, which I was not going to forget easily. But, as a joke, I replied her, arguing that I did not know which letter she was talking about and “how?”  I asked her, she thought I could forget a letter from a girl like that.

While it was true that sometimes in my rare moments of leisure, I surf the web and look at things, it is not usual that I take care to be writing letters for girls. So, the matter quickly went out of my interest.

The days passed slowly. I was planning a new trip to Cuba and a project like that occupied all my time, besides the time normally occupied by my work and some hours that I used to implement a small business about designing, publishing and printing postcards, which was just beginning.

My income was few and my plans were ambitious so I tried to reduce my expenses to a minimum. But even so, including the monthly money remittances to my daughter, I lived modestly, but well.

I received daily news of my family in Cuba and I told them about me. So it was already a habit to check the mail daily.

In addition I uploaded my new photos and put it up for sale; postcards, which although very little, was an income, somewhat symbolic. That helped me put faith in what I was doing about it. Well, nothing, everything was fine, so ... but another e-mail came from ... Luba.

She told me, she was grateful for my response and ignoring the little primary interest expressed by me, she told me about her life, her habits, her likes and sent me new photos.

Photos about her, where I could see she was a pretty woman, young and ... also she gave values to my words that had no intention of showing values. Then some interest began to stir up.

As accustomed to the buggers and stupidities of the women of the city where I lived now and had lived before, Luba's romanticisms was something unusual.

She lived in Uglich, Yaroslavl, Russia. She told me that the Russian men did not respect women and that this had driven her and determined to look for a man from another country. She used words and phrases that expressed minimal English, I would say basic, perhaps more elemental than mine, which meant very elemental.

But, what a way to talk! What a way to identify with me! What a way to seduce me her words! But, well, what words? This was a grave; I should not pay more attention to that subject. I had had my stories, which had already saturated me and from which I only got a good result: my daughter. All other things, it could be discarded.

Days continued to run slowly and I reluctantly plucked the leaves of my calendar, ras, ras, ras, without pity and I threw them into the muddy puddle of my solitude; where I was alone, with my work in the store, my photos, the chimerical plan of my business and my obligations to Cuba.

My job in some way incomprehensible, it helped me to distract myself.

I say somehow incomprehensible, because it distracted me and at the same time I was overwhelmed by the continuous conflicts with people. What had made me conceive the idea of ​​a new organic fertilizer, made from hash of human heads.

Apparently people hated each other not just for leisure, as I had always believed, but also for the sheer pleasure of hating each other.

At that time, I worked as a cashier in a store in direct interaction with users. At every moment was happening a conflict occurred between them, or customers with the prices, or with the products, with us; the cashiers, with the different prices at the shelf, etc.

I remembered a few words of one of my co-workers: "The day you need to lose esteem for the entire human race, get a job in one of these stores."

How much evil in people! And this was the point that made me thinking about… Luba, if she was real. But if she was, she was different.

It was a different little flower within the vulgar multitude of people, who envy, push and fear each other.

They crowd in their nauseating crowd, their proliferating variety. A disgustingly polymorphic heterogeneity of beings who being so close was at the same time so far.

The letters I received came from an atypical and peculiar human being. But until then, she became an uncertain image, something improbable.

It was very common in Miami; the city where I now lived, the paradisiacal city of the improbable. One more lie, in the city where truth is an obstacle. Where many iniquities are virtues, valuables things and virtue is obsolete and anachronistic.

Where lies flow in all directions, where traps are simply another way of living, a craft, a skill. Maybe that's why Luba was still in my head, for her wonderful simplicity. Her ability to see virtues and put faith in a man she did not know.

I have always believed that faith is the virtue of seeing, believing and trusting, without need of guarantees and in my opinion this can make us powerful.

Her e-mails kept coming and I continued reading them with increasing interest. Was it ... a fantasy or a truth? I did not know, I did not know it. It was, by what little, something that qualified my days.

When I got home and I read one of her e-mails my day began to leak dew and music.

I had begun to believe her, or may be, even to love her; I do not know whether to love her.

She treated me with tenderness, as if she had known me from ever.

She told me about her days and her preferences, which, to top it all, most of them coincided with mine.

I thought about her things, I imagined her weeks, her friends and her life. She sent to me pictures, where she always looked more beautiful, more attractive and more sensual.

Her e-mails, which were like letters, overwhelmed my day of happiness.

The end of 2016 was approaching, and everyone was partying, but the pain was growing in me, because Luba had told me that the Internet café from where she wrote me was going to be closed for a few days. I needed her letters. I wanted to call her, to speak to her, to feel her, to touch her with my voice. Make visible my need to have her, to listen to her, to infect her with the torrent of emotions that flowed from me vertiginously.

In the few moments where I could think about something else, I thought and wondered how that miracle had happened.

She was as crazy as I was. She was already planning a trip, from Russia to the United States to see a man she only knew by e-mail from a few weeks ago. That madness fascinated me.

I looked around me, my humble little room and only sometimes the small part of my brain that generates lucid ideas reminded me again that this entire novelistic affair could be nothing more but a "tumbe", but ... what could they knock me out. How could those clean, clear, romantic words hide a lie? Could there be behind that figurine of the pictures, beautiful and fragile something diabolical or fraudulent?

As a precaution, I searched for her name and photo on the lists of scammers and cybercriminals; Luba’s name was not there. Her simple and naïve way of speaking did not coincide with the examples quoted in the different web pages that I consulted.

If someone had invented that way of seducing people and getting information or something else using that metaphor called Luba, that person was undoubtedly a genius.

The end of the year was approaching, the hour almost was about to came. I could feel the fireworks filling the air with its paff !!, paff ! And I kept checking my mail every second, in case some luck sends me a new mail from Luba.

I pictured her in the arms of another man and the idea horrified me.

I had no choice but to go to bed and try to sleep.

Fortunately, my decision to stay at home at that day, that is, the end of the year was accurate. The next day at work my comrades were destroyed, because of the bad night of revelry, the hangover and all the usual excesses. But I was fine, I spent the day quietly.

When I got home, I checked my mail, in which there was news of other images sold, which was encouraging.

My business of selling images online was a basic expression of the approach I call jocularly: “Theory of the infinitesimals”, which consists, roughly, in the fact that the sum of many infinitesimal quantities may constitute a considerable whole. But certainly, the aggregate quantities were exaggeratedly infinitesimal. I would have to add many to make it big and a really considerable amount. This was another symbol.

But I had actually checked my e-mails looking for something else. The night before, I had slept soundly, like a few of my nights. I got up lively, hoping to start the year happy, with the purpose of beginning the New Year with hope.

When I left for work, closing my door, I stared at the beauty of the sunrise, the rays of sunlight were clear. They were entangled in the branches of the trees that surrounded my door and bound with the fresh air filled me with well-being.

I looked at the sun in front of me and saw a little silhouette descending by one of those shots of light, passing over the treetops, turning my corner, continue straight down my street, elude the branches of the mangos that block my portal, follow my hallway  and stand up in front of me: it was Luba.

I went to work full of self-pity.

The days passed with cadence that made me angry. I looked at my almanac full of fury and I was about to throw it away.

Time charged me by summing up the interests that malice adds. But my human being shone pure.

I was thinking of the ways that Luba and I would have to overcome situations that could arise. I had stopped seeing her as a trick of my city; I saw her full of hope, expectations about our future lives. It was then that I realized that I was also thinking about how much she might be spending or needing to be able to write to me from the Internet Café.

These places are usually expensive and people do not go over there just to write, they always consume something. I imagined some way to send her some resources, even if it was going to be just few money. Those were the first symptoms that would lead me through the swampy swirls of love; “The Acquired deficiency reasoning syndrome”.

In fact, just like many times I have sent all possible resources to my daughter, keeping for  me only with what was strictly necessary, to help Luba, I would limit myself even more. Although she had never asked me for help and she had told me she had resources saved for a long time to travel to know the man she was looking for, to know me.

This inspired something in me that unfolded in two sublime terms: love and admiration.

I decided to write that story. It was something that never happened in my life before. What had a good consequence anyway, it would remain in my life as something very beautiful. Although I had not written for years, the words sprang spontaneously and the story was easy for me to narrate.

My feelings were pouring out and I did not need parables. The narrative itself was so beautiful and magical that only as the story of what was happening, at least I, I saw it good. At the same time he wrote these chronicles as a guide.

Many times I cried, in front of my computer, the same thing in writing about what Luba told me, which also made me sometimes cry when I read it, because of its tremendous resemblance to my feelings and personality, than when I was to talking about my point of view and plans with that event.

Although she did not tell me, I understood that Luba belonged to a family of limited solvency. They did not have a telephone and they lived in a mountainous area of Russia, three hundred kilometers from Moscow, as I later learned. My anecdote was enriched, although at times it seemed a little sweet, in fact I was just telling what was happening.

I was thinking of my literary friends in Cuba, who, when reading that, they would say that it was a cartoon. Which could be partly true, but if it was a cartoon, then these specific stories actually occurred in the life of men.

My current status as an employee in a sales business gave me the opportunity to confirm a concept I had worked on before: The struggle between human beings is cruel, fierce and merciless.

People fight for everything. They compete for everything. People suffer for everything, but they didn’t gain in anything. The end remains unchanged, immutable. Everything is perishable. Ephemeral, even our existence is volatile, but there are things that surprise us.

And when some of these things happen to us, we revalue our opinion, we reconsider life, we look ahead, we forget the difficulties of the way crossed and we decide to continue.

Luba was a hope in my life. Of course, also my daughter was another, but my daughter would take another path inexorably. Maybe Luba will change my life. She told me in her letters that she wanted to have a family, to love and to be loved and that somehow she had the feeling that I was her happiness.

That was the way how I learned that between Russia and America there were eight hours of time difference, that Uglich was a small population but loaded with history. I learned to trace the e-mails and also I became skilled using Google Earth. I learned to use my cell phone as a Mobile Hotspot.

I had not talked about it with anyone. May be, because from the beginning I found it unreal and also because of my great attachment to the power of silence.

It makes you unique owner of what you encloses in it and protects you from mockery, tripping and bad intentions. But I told to a friend.

This friend was the owner of the house where I lived for rent, she was an elderly woman, who lived in Miami for many years and would undoubtedly be an ideal confident for my secret.

My way of telling her was in some manner involuntary. Another tenant was going to leave his place, which was better than mine and I asked her if she could wait and rent it to me. Also the fact if I could live in that room with another person. Thus began my confession. She, accustomed to seeing me alone, asked me some questions and I told her what was already exploding in my kidneys. I told her everything, about Luba, about her e-mails, about our plans, about my dreams, everything.

Flor, that was the name of my friend, looked at me full of mercy. She put her hand on my shoulder and said:

— "Come, I have something to tell you”.

Flor told me how her brother had been the victim of an equal deception. How the man, who was even older than I and who had just come out from family losses, was filled with excitement, as I was.

For several months that whole fateful affair had made him intoxicated and he had even sent money, she does not know how much, but a considerable amount and after long months of waiting, he realized that it was no more but a hoax.

I do not know what I felt. I felt a mixture of pain, disappointment, anger; I do not know how many more things and although from the very beginning I knew what I had to know, what was and what could be the result of that mess, I felt the little what was left of hope in human beings vanish in me.

I confirmed to Flor my doubts from the beginning and I thanked her for her alert.

I went to my room full of grief and gloomy thoughts, but the plot had penetrated my subconscious and it was impossible for me to stop.

I kept waiting anxiously for Luba's e-mails, imagining things, still loving her, even when I did not know if she existed. The positive aspects she had brought into my life were undeniable. She had made me to write again, my days were flying full of poetry; I felt love again.

The anxious waiting for her e-mails and the joy of receiving them awakened a dead part of my spirit. And it had not brought anything negative yet. Then, weighing the parts, Luba was winning.

Reading her letters, I also picked up words and ideas that showed love to family, friends, purity and many other things that made me an incredible woman.

Sometimes I thought that perhaps behind the name, image and the mails that had come to me, there could only be a party of thieves, who laughed about me when they read my answers and gave me already captured. They would wait for the right moment to take the next step and make me a request for money or God knows what.

But I had something very strong in my favor. I knew God would not condemn me for feeling love. Only something could happen to me, if I gave the opportunity, if I made myself vulnerable, if I neglected. I had to be careful and cautious in every action to take, in every word to say, even in my meditation on the subject, taking care of my mental health.

I told Flor:

—“If there are only men in this, at least, they cannot deceive me and if there is a woman in the affair, if the image, the e-mails, or the name correspond to a material woman, if she really reads my e-mails, let's see who captures whom”.

Although the truth was that I did not want to capture anyone, I just asked and prayed for it, for that to be a truth. I relied on the innumerable miracles that God brought before to my life, with its immeasurable power.

Years before, with the help of God, I was able to overcome the difficulties in my recovery from an automobile accident that I had in Cuba, then my return to the United States, the restoration of my legal documents to reside in the United States. To get a job that let me to survive, then my improvements in this job and the greatest of his miracles: my daughter. So, another miracle, it was nothing to Him.

I decided not to talk to Luba anymore about my doubts. I would continue, or rather, try to hurry the course of things. She had told me that she had her passport ready. That she only needed to get approve her “work visa” and she would buy the ticket. If they were scammers, the moment to give their next step was close.

I received another message, it was titled: "I love you", Luba sent me the address where she lived and she said excited that she felt that she loved me, that she could not explain it and that she did not know how or why, but ... well, I will write her textual words:

—"I can feel it; I cannot explain it, because I have not even met you. But it's true. I LOVE YOU with all my heart! You'll soon see for yourself".

This made me remember and think about thoughts that I once had: In the human being, there are hidden values, feelings and undisclosed powers that maybe one day the man will know better, use them and take advantage of, to his benefit.

I felt the same too, the same and I could not even explain.

Loneliness breeds dreams and fantasies which gave me fear, but my ideas were clear, and my conclusions based on real and solid facts.

My infinite faith in God, reminded me at every moment that for Him, there are no impossible and that faith suggested me to eliminate the doubts, just take care of me, be cautious and let Him to act.

In those days, I spent a couple of days without receiving emails. This was strange, but if they were swindlers, they might have realized that the fight would not be easy, because they were dealing with someone who had the means and resources that could make me for them a difficult prey.

On the other hand, if Luba existed, if she was the one who wrote those emails that made me overflow with happiness, as I had thought before, sending mails abroad would probably cost money and I did not know what situation she was in. In her emails, she had never mentioned the word "money," even though it was obvious that our project required money from both parties. Most of it would be after her arrival in U.S., but there she would also need money. But, anyway, I was not going to send her a penny.

She had not asked for it either. In other relationships I had before, I have always tried to make things easy for women, but to tell the truth, this did not work.

So I would let her face and resolve all her details and whatever, there, alone. To show me who she was and what she was capable of. That this was the woman I wanted.

If I would hear from Luba again, if she could overcome the innumerable setbacks she would doubtless have, if she could reach me; I would face all the obstacles here, assume all responsibility, love her without limit, I would dedicate my life to her.

I began to see things in this way: If the dream was true and achievable; we will fight, we would realize it, we would be winners, without doubt, because, love can do everything. Then if it was not, if they were scammers, they would not get anything from me and, at least, I would have to thank them by email, for helping me learn many new things, for making me write again after many years and for reviving my feelings which I already assumed for lost.

The mails became less frequent. I spent days without receiving any. Although, in some of them Luba clarified me, that she could not write daily, because she was truly busy. She did not give me details, but it was understandable that she was busy.

That was when I had a revelation. It was a hoax. It was just that, a hoax. I had that certainty. The days without receiving mail were nothing more than days when the evildoers who sent the evil plot to me dedicated time to capture other people and I escaped from their interest. Because my clarification of my humility or I did not know why. But, in truth, had it been hitherto harmful to me? No, it had not been. The potential spilled in my brain made me full of aptitudes.

OK, a hoax, but a delicious hoax.

There is no matter that is so devilishly bad, that it does not have a good profile. From some angle any labyrinth can be seen as a path to happiness. Whether Luba was material or not was no obstacle to not believing in her. The words that had been directed to me, the feelings that awakened in my soul, the delight that those phrases provoked in me and what she was saying to feel, were neither my invention, nor a creation of my solitude or my imagination; they were facts.

The way God has manifested Himself in my life is something similar and my belief in the existence of God is beyond doubt.

I have no material evidence of the existence of God, as I believe no one can truly have it, but I am absolutely sure of His existence, His power, His constant action in my daily life. It is not a comparison, but a way of expressing how something immaterial can be solidly believed and supported.

And it was not my need to support it. The words charged me with energy, they sounded alone after being read and even without reading them. The results were material, the intricate labyrinth supported itself; Luba lived in me.

It was during those years, when I was reading about Buddhism from which I learned valuable things.

If someone manipulates your mind, in most cases, it is undeniably counterproductive, it can make you suffer, but we can take into account that to people can only harm us to what we give importance, avoiding useless suffering can simply consist of take a step back, turn off emotionally and see things from another perspective. Suffering is a choice; it depends on us, our thoughts and our emotions.

Physical pain differs from suffering; suffering is optional. Only will make us suffer what we allow it. Even many times I have had the certainty that no pain can bend me. During the treatment and recovery from my accident, when I had many moments of acute pain, I could see it. To a man no physical pain can slant him.

So whoever it was that tried to manipulate my mind, would only obtain from me something that did not suspect, another result. And for me, there were several paths to follow.

But he preferred one:

I would conceive a kind of bondage and consonance with unreality. I would sail towards a world to which we can all have access. Another of the many dimensions in which entities can exist; a possible paradigm.

Something that I used to call "Positive Dimension", where there are only positive thoughts and ideas, where everything contributes and demands from you to be a better being, a higher instance and every figure, memory, experience, thesis of thought, is for good. And you only get or value the favorable contribution that each event has for you. If there was a favorable result, which we can and do know how to use, if it does not harm anyone and is in accordance with your ethics; we do not care how it was achieved.

In the midst of these analyzes I was imbued when I received another mail from Luba; Radiant, simply lyric, a beneficial gunshot of neurostimulants.

Luba told me that she was preparing her trip. She apologized for not being able to write for a few days and told me other things. Among them, she had to travel to Moscow the next day, where she would decide whether she would receive the work visa or not and that she was a bit afraid, as well as worrying about the final decision, she was also worried that Moscow as a whole Big city could be dangerous.

I answered her by asking to take care of her and sent to her my data again, in case she would needed them

In my state of mind and body a clear process occurred. When I received letters from Luba, my activity accelerated, my mood improved and my days passed agile.

I believed again in the miracle and enumerated as irrefutable evidence the earlier miracles I remembered. By the way, those miracles were not few. One more, it was nothing, for my great God.

In contrast, the days when I did not receive letters, my fears, my doubts, my fateful conclusions returned and as an undeniable result of the course of the hours, the outcome, whatever it was, was near. The moment where I could see everything clearly, was about to arrive.

I also imagined Luba lost in a strange city, complicated in small or huge situations, overcoming impediments. According to her calculations, she would be already in Moscow.

She had told me that she would write to me on her arrival, but I knew what it was like to be in a strange environment.

Not only when I arrived to the United States, in Cuba that is my natal country, I was also many times in unknown cities and I know what this implies.

My trip to Cuba was approaching. I should fly in three days. In all my previous trips, already for this date, I had everything ready and prepared. But this time, I had not prepared anything. That is, I had already bought many things, which according to my list, were my usual gifts for my daughter and family, but almost everything was missing.

Luba had told me that if the embassy gave her the visa, she would take the first flight she could. Not knew what to do.

I had talked to a friend to buy a car, he knew where and who had a used car for sale. In normal circumstances, I would have bought that car, which he told me to be in good condition, but I did not want to receive Luba in an old car. But my income did not really allow for higher expenses and the savings I had made were due to my determination that so far a car for me was unnecessary. This was partially true.

But if Luba came to me, I would not hesitate to buy even a new car, if she wished. I decided that if I met her, my torture was over. One of our first conversations would be how to face life here. I would tell her how much we had and decide how to use it. I would move to a better place and look for another job. Many of my colleagues have two jobs and I have had other jobs sometimes.

Besides, she might help me running my business. If she had succeeded in coming to me, if she had managed to cross all that land and the Atlantic, seeking love and hope, there was no obstacle to stop us.

I received a new message; the interview had been completed and it had been successful, although in this message she told me that the visa could take a month, two days later I received another telling me that her visa was ready. Another message loaded with joy.

I warned Luba several times that if she flew being me out of the country it would be more difficult for her. But she either did not read my warnings or enthusiastic about her progress, simply ignored them.

Was at that time, when Flor had told me about a conversation she had had with the person they cheated on and he had told her that I was in the “Fifth Stage”. This intrigued me greatly.

What did it mean, "The Fifth Stage"? Nor did I understand how a person of good feelings, let things advance until " Fifth Stage," instead of speaking clearly and tell me what was about to come and what happened to him, as I would have done.

I went to Flor to look for more details and she only told me things I had already thought of. That at any moment, with some pretext, after considering myself completely trapped, she would make me a request for money. I told her that I did not think anyone would consider me so foolish as to turn around or send money in any way to a person from whom I was not even sure of her existence.

With all this suspicion, I went to my room, meditating on a thousand variants of why, how, when and possessed by the disbelief that those puerile words, which Luba wrote me upon receiving the approval of her visa, the enthusiasm shown, were a ruse to provoke in me the same and to base the decision to send the money, when the request was made.

It was in those days when I received a photo with a copy of Luba's passport, that although several criteria I had read online said that all these photos of these documents and others that could be sent, were no more than copies of fake documents and gave me certain ideas of how to check if it was really an attempt to scam, I was definitely undecided.

At last the next day I had to fly. I sent to her a short and concise email:

“I am very happy about everything you tell me, but sometimes I think all this is not real and whoever writes me these letters, is an automatic task machine, because you do not make any reference to what I told you. You do not mention anything to me about it. I told you that I will be out of the country for several days, so that means that it would be good for you to travel after those days. Well I tell you, I'm full of doubts, and although I should be happy for everything you tell me, those doubts overshadow my happiness.

Kisses, anyway.”

It was not possible for her to elude my clarifications and doubts again.

I traveled to Cuba. I spent a few splendid days over there. I found my daughter beautiful, healthy, funny, more than expected and my wife, beautiful as always and calm, which gave me remorse, because a certain image shaded my happiness.

I half told my wife that something was going on in my life that I did not know the outcome and although I did not explain details, I was clear enough for her to understand. The danger to our relationship existed before. There were no guilty, only ourselves. For lack of maturity, clarity, nuances, in short; the lack of true love, which makes relations indestructible.

I think she saw in the explained, nothing to seriously consider. Days passed, and I returned home. Now I was doubly worried. Far from defining my situation, my relationship with my daughter's mother had revived and I also thought about Luba. Where was love and where sanity, ignored; impossible to establish it.

What would become with Luba? When I got home, I checked my mail. Only one. The only, short, clear and concise of Luba’s e-mails:

"I travel to your city, tomorrow."

It had been sent the day after my departure.

I felt something tremendous. I could not be clear on what it felt like, but an overwhelming feeling gripped me. I figured if the mail had been sent the other day of my departure, Luba had to be in Miami.

But she had my phone number, she had my address, where was she? Besides, I wondered how Luba had embarked on her flight without communicating with me, without telling me her flight number, the time of departure and arrival and many other important details.

I did not know if her flight was direct, if it would make a stopover.

I looked at the time on my cell phone; it was 3.45 in the afternoon.

I threw myself to the airport without even take a chance to think about what I was going for, what was I going to look for?

Where would I go? I was going to ask something? , What would be my questions? Where would I do my questions? and a thousand other details that I had to have thought. But he just could not think. I was guided by what strength, driven by an unknown and unquestionable energy that directed my senses and immobilized my ability to analyze.

However, I was able at least to arrive, park, pay the parking fee and go to the entrances with the sign "Arrivals", then I looked for the arrivals from Europe and gradually I was outlining my search, until I reached a logical point where I thought I could get some idea of ... it was then when I realized that I did not know what I was looking for.

I stopped for a moment and finally I could think about something. I made up a story in my own way, credible, about waiting for a person to ... But no, I would tell the truth.

I could find someone who seemed to me to be an authority at the airport. I told him frankly and simply more or less what was happening to me and I asked him for suggestions of what to do.

The man, a middle-aged man, looking serious, wearing uniforms and some manual equipment unknown to me, looked at me in amazement, not knowing what to say to me.

I looked him straight in the eye and I said:

 — Please help me.

With compassionate expression, he looked at some documents in his hand, then said calmly,

—How do you expect me to help you? Do you have any specific information that will enable us to help you?

I realized that no, I had nothing clear.

— Is it your daughter who you are waiting for?

I could not answer.

—Come with me.

After going through hundreds of corridors, passing dozens of doors, rows of people and premises filled with anxious passengers stuck by some abnormality in their documents or tickets, the officer slowed his walk and entered an office where, in addition to some things personal use, there were some chairs and a computer on a small bureau. After a few minutes in which he got involved in locating something in the computer, he indicated the screen saying to me:

—For example, this is the information about a flight specifically, with that origin and destination, but to access the list of passengers we would need more than this. According to the data we have and of course, with the required authorization, maybe we could have more details, but let's see, with what data do we count on?

I looked at the screen.

Flight: SU 0110, destination Miami, MIA, Departing from: Moscow

Model Maple

Airbus A330-200 Name of the board

E.SVETLANOV

Number of seats 241

Economic 207

Business  34

Embarkation Shipment status: Completed

Date and time of shipment commencement: 10:50

Date and time of termination of shipment: 11:10

Transfer: Ladder Door    28

Name of service, GSM on board Internet on board.

I had no data, perhaps after some deductions, only the date of departure, I could not contribute anything else, nor could find anything and I hardly remembered the full name of the person I was looking for. Evidently the man would take me for a fool if I confessed this.

I watched what he showed me. Nor could that information tell me anything.

I said thanks, I just said, that, "Thank you", I stood up and left the premises with the clairvoyance that my suffering had evolved into a mere idiot. I confused the direction and way to get out, I was guiding me by the word "Exit", which I sometimes found, but my eyes wandered lost. I cannot remember how I found my car, how I was sitting again in front of the steering wheel of my car, but without daring to start the engine, I was stunned.

I asked myself hundreds of questions. I wondered how I could find myself in a circumstance like that, how I expected or could have expected to find some kind of help, how somebody in their right mind, could have drifted without having the confirmation that someone was waiting for her.

However, I remembered at the same time when I likewise ventured to come to the United States, without even knowing the country either the city where I would arrive or knowing that someone was waiting for me. It was the same foolishness. Maybe worse, because somehow Luba did know that I would look for her. Instead, I had embarked on the adventure without any support, without the protection and patronage that, in this case, I could give Luba after finding her.

In that comparison I had the worst part. My behavior had undoubtedly been more reckless.

At that time, I had very limited resources, I think I remember something like two hundred dollars or less, but I dared to throw myself into a city that could swallow me unscrupulously, as one of the many who have been searching for the "American Dream" and they end up refugees under the bridges or at the bus stops.

Once I had a co-worker, who said to have spent almost a month in a cemetery, fleeing at every moment from the custodians.

Although Miami is a city where there are many types of help for refugees and newcomers, but you have to know which door to knock, where to direct your steps looking for help.

Finally I dared to start my car and miraculously I could arrive without causing any accident to my little room.

It was night, and after parking and closing the door of my car, I stared at the sky, which in the darkness of the parking lot was full of stars, right above my head, the image of Orion, and next to it my star of luck, Sirius. I stood silently for a long time staring at my star, staring at its blue-white flashes, asking for an explanation.

I was empty; I had no idea, about the time or anything else. My body ached, my eyes burned, my skin felt like fire, my hands and feet cramped, a terrible headache, and cold sweats ran my sword from time to time. I had to take something, something to help me sleep, to cleanse my brain from the myriad of noises that would not let me think, talk, or feel anything but those damn shivers that barely let me walk, open the door and throw myself into the bed.

The night was long, and my dream was unquiet. I get up several times to the bathroom, to drink water, to wash my face, to stretch my body that hurt everywhere. I was awake from five o'clock the morning of the previous day, but in truth, I was neither sleepy nor hungry and my head was roaring full of all sorts of nightmares. When I tried to sleep, I got entangled in hallucinations where a word resounded: Lack, lack, lack. I was not sure to understand why.

Suddenly I remembered a cure that a mexican guy, friend of mine, gave me:

—"Grab tequila, fill a glass, put two drops of lemon and drink it without stopping until you see the bottom, repeat it as many times as the severity of your symptoms require it and you will see; very effective. If you do not get healthy, at least you forget about it".

I did it, not with tequila, because I did not have that drink, I filled and I drank I think two or three glasses of Habana Club, which I had brought from Cuba. I do not know if it was taken away or I forgot, I could not know anything else, until the next day when the alarm sounded on my phone, reminding me that it was time to get up for work.

I stood up with an effort that would have made the Greek Titans pale. With eyes glued, and a taste and breath in the mouth that miniaturized the fire of the dragons of mythology.

I went to work ready to overcome everything, to concentrate on my routine and try to forget. I had no choice. It was the beginning of the week and I thought:

 “God will help me”.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”

But well, that was in that beginning, where God dealt with natural and pure elements. But now, so many years after man had the unfortunate idea of making decisions and acting in his own way, to fill his heart and mind with all sorts of fallacies and gadgets to achieve what he thinks is best and convenient for himself, Perhaps our God, In case of knowing the result of the new creation, would reconsider the idea of populating the earth with such a parasite, and let his Spirit wander quietly through the emptiness until a better idea arose.

The job was painful. At every moment the sirens of police patrols or ambulances, which are to me something very common in the daily sounds, aroused my anxiety. It was the same job as always, with their litigation and complains from people, their delays in the recess and the usual dilemmas. Only now they made me intolerable. Which was obviously against me, because my job was the only thing I had, the only thing I could count on to support my life and my family's life in Cuba.

At last it was time to take my fifteen minutes to rest. I grabbed my water bottle and went to the place for the associates to rest. I never go to that place. I do not like the jokes and comments that are heard there. I've never even used one of the machines to sell sodas and other trinkets that are in that room.

My mind was murky, I thought about nothing definite, and a thousand unrecognizable sounds roamed the paths through which clear and intelligent ideas once flowed. It was not the sounds I once rang with; the lament of darkness, or the triumphant shriek of dawn, or the soft murmur of the chords of my guitar, or the groan of hope in the song of the bird that climbs the trunk of the courtyard. Not even the inharmonic hiss of silence. They were deaf, dark and cruel sounds;

mechanical and hard.

Could the person imagine a sound never heard?

In the twinkle frame before me, poor in composition and asymmetrical, where my co-workers, my colleagues, my personal things and my hands, who broke a written paper; I thought I heard subliminally the sound of my loneliness. That reminded me of the people left behind, the truths I believed to be safe, the ways where I abandoned my steps.

In that same tunnel was to remain another memory. Another name was to be written on the stones of its walls where there were already dozens of engraved names, thousands of unfinished words and phrases. Where was written the oracle that a pythoness predicted in one of my transgressions of materiality:

"You will always be like a stream in the desert, but no one will drink from you."

I could never understand it, but these words always haunted me. Like a curse written on my skin.

I looked around the room with total abandon, without noticing or looking at anything specific.

People crossed in front of me and some greeted me. But I could not hear them or see them. I was quite far away from the reality of people. My thinking oscillated in a different frequency range. But my eyes stopped on the TV screen in the break room. Where is usually tuned in about fights and conflicts between families and vulgar beings, so I never pay the slightest interest to these programs. But on that day, they reported on an air accident, which occurred on January 23 of this year.

On January 23 of this year, a Russian Bhoeing 1X-777-300ERF aircraft with 192 people on board had been seriously injured eight hours after taking off from Moscow, bound for Miami. Although it had had time to land and there were no casualties, as far as a Russian news agency reported, all of its passengers were in transit hotels waiting to continue their journey.

They explained a whole series of protocols to follow in these cases. This was generally the new, which went on to explain that although all passengers had been transshipped to other flights and were completely unharmed, by courtesy of the airline, through some means, they continued trying to contact family and friends of passengers that needed it, so that they could reach their destination.

I jumped up in front of the TV. The names and photos of the passengers were presented. I could not explain what feeling dominated me. And I could barely contain a rapture of frenzy when Luba's name and image appeared on the screen. It was her, with her frightened dove expression, her beautiful gray eyes, her hair straight and shiny as ivory.

I rushed to the staff office and argued as I could that I had urgency and I needed to leave. They explained something to me about a possible "Incomplete shift" but that did not matter to me, but I cared that I had forgotten to write down the phone number to call. But I had something clear; I did not want to do the same foolishness of the previous time, when I jumped unthinkingly to the airport and I could not get anything.

I went first to my little room; I stood in front of my computer and could get a number of the customer service of Miami International Airport.

I called and after explaining what I was looking for and some lines’ transfers, I was informed that those passengers should arrive to Miami that day, about 15:45 and after the immigration and customs requirements, they could finally go home.

I had the necessary calm to inquire into which Gate I should wait. But only there, my calm was down, because I did not know or remembered what was the airline, or the number of the flight. But nothing, it was a small obstacle. I would be able to ask door by door, line by line, to each person, until I could find her. Find the woman who had traveled thousands of miles to me.

This was how, after walking the well-known passages, doors, elevated corridors, and other access routes to the arrival gates, I found myself with a group of people who apparently also waited for relatives or friends who were going to leave from some of those doors. From question to question, I had been directed to that place, but although I have been many times at the airport in Miami, I was not familiar with the place where I had gone to.

I was not worried about this, because I knew that the airport was immensely large and it was also the arrivals from Europe, which was something unknown to me.

I stood next to the people and I prepared to wait. I could see people of all types and appearances, all equally worried and anxious.

My habit of double checking everything, made me walk among them and look, hear, or try to hear a word or phrase that would allow me to make sure it was the right place, without needing to ask for a millionth time, and having to repeat my story .

It was at that moment that, without knowing where it came from or who had spoken it, if it was another hallucination, I heard the name of 'Luba', pronounced by a voice that reminded me of the Russian episodes I saw in my childhood, pronounced: "Lyuba".

I looked in a circle, all around me, I looked at the almost imperceptible speakers of the ceiling and I looked at the dim cliff of my uncertainty that no longer disguised its intentions.

I saw next to me a girl with her outstretched arms saying to me:

—“Why do not you hug me?”

—"Because you've kept me waiting too long. I'm going home again.”

—“And you do not want me to go with you?”

Then, the same voice made me wake up. Now he was talking about other things, but it was the same voice. It was very close to me. It was a boy, that is, a young man and a middle-aged woman. The one who was talking was the boy, evidently excited, grabbing the woman's arm and asking her about something I could not understand.

I approached them and asked him, in the way I could and making a tremendous effort to control my words and attitude, if they were waiting, like me, for one of the passengers on the flight from Russia which had had the breakdown or mishap. I do not know how I said, I do not remember what I said, but they understood. The boy looked at me with surprise and a big smile on his face.

—Yes Sir, we are also waiting.

He held my hand and shot me a rush of words, from which I could only get that they had been there for hours. He was asking me things but he did not wait for my answers. He was talking to me and turns to the woman and tries talking to her.

He took three or four steps forward and walked back again. I think he told me his name like four times, Alek, was his name.

—She is Tiana_ said pointing to the woman. It's her aunt, Oh! I’m sorry…

I wanted to say something, but he did not let me:

—"She must be about to come. She should exit from the door at the right, and yours? Yours will leave the same way there.

But something delayed them. I asked them to sit down and to my relief, they agreed. I could no longer stand. My knees were shaking, I think from exhaustion.

We sat down and Alek, without giving me respite to rest, began to relieve his torment.

The lady who accompanied him was the girl's aunt, that is, she was sister of the father of the girl he was waiting for. She, that is, the lady, like the girl's father and the girl, were Americans.

—They are Americans; she was born in America, but her mother is Russian. Things of life! And she lives in Russia at present, even when everything is difficult now in that country!

Women are stubborn, no one understands them.

The boy spoke and I watched his moody gestures and at the same time nervous. I heard his voice, the voice that made my senses jump, when he pronounced the name that brought the contagion into my life and I realized that he had the syndrome, there was no doubt. His thin hair fluttered every time he let out his words gnawed by the unmistakable symptoms.

He told me how, when he was a child, his family came to live in America and settled in North Dakota, but then relocated to a small russian community in Florida. At the beginning, they didn’t even have the legal documents of residence, but with the time, they got them, they made friends and they remake their lives here. There, he met Luba

—She was the first and only love of my life. If I did not go after her, it was because then I was only sixteen,

When I got to hear the name, I was not surprised; I already expected it and I knew he was going to say it.

Luba had been born in America, but she had gone to Russia with her mother after the separation of her parents, which she could barely understand. She was even younger than him. They became engaged and shared the marvelous rejoicing of youthful love from childhood. Even he was ill for many months, after her departure. He wrote to her every week. He begged her to beg her mother to come back. But her mother remarried and he never spoke again about coming to America.

But suddenly Luba decides to come to U.S.A.  She had written to him and without explaining why she was coming back, she told him that he could contact her aunt, who would tell him about the date of her arrival in the USA.

—She did not tell me the reason why she decided to come back, after spending so long times in Russia and with the tremendous attachment she has to her mother.

The woman said this with an expression of bewilderment and continued:

—But today everyone wants to come, there is war there and at least here, I will do everything what is possible from me, to make her welcome.

They kept talking, but I was not listening. I gave up all reflection, discard any analysis or conjecture. I did not even try any verification. Something rebelled in my quintessence and I did not need any of my other four elements to wait for the moment, for the opportunity, and to escape silently.

The oracle returned to my eyes:

“No one will drink from you, it is incontrovertible.”

And I snatched from me, all vestiges of the vile disease.

Chapter 3: Stripper.

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

Oscar Wilde.

                                   

                

Traducir al Español (Original)

She disappeared, but changed my life forever.

I locked myself in my room, grabbed my computer and threw to it the word: Stripper. I could think of no other way to call women dedicated to that lifestyle. I think I did it right.

"An exotic dancer or stripper is a person whose occupation involves performing striptease in a public place of adult entertainment, such as a strip club. Sometimes a stripper can be hired to perform at a bachelor party or other private event. "

This was part of what was found, when after seeing her dancing, I went home completely bewitched.

The interaction with that girl at the beginning was less than none.

She saw me as an upstart to the place, which had not frequented. We said each other two or three words, but it was enough. Once upon my arriving to the United States, a friend whom I have not seen again took me to that place.

I remember that I immediately wanted to leave, as they were other my concerns and I did not find the attraction that maybe those clubs have. I never went there again and that night, I stopped out of curiosity. The sign was the same as ever, so I quickly recognized it, and went into the cavern that would mark the beginning of the adventure.

I have always respected women, without matter about any the kind of life they could have, whatever life they could lead. You can never know at a glance who each of them is, what they are capable of doing, or what the reasons were for choosing one type of life or another, as well as the motives and purposes that lead a woman to take any direction. Whether they are right or wrong, whether they are better or worse, if decent or indecent, I  do not think it is my concerning, affairs, business, or anything personal.

This particular one, on which he inquired in the network, is a job. And I think the fact that men do not know to respect it, is a limitation of those men not of those women.

I have read about women who from that life have made careers as actresses and although I know it is not generality, it is something that must be known. I do not mean to say that these clubs are sanctuaries for prayer, nor that their dancers spend hours trying to learn by heart "The Sermon on the Mount", but about ethical and moral terms of institutions and merchants in general, it is better not to speak.

The night I speak about, It took me too long to sleep I was busy searching for information that would reaffirm my opinion. Which opinion? , It will be understood in my letters. Not only did I find out what was already mentioned, I read more about it. But I could not write words that clarified the idea considering the way the girl looked at me; I think she would want or would like to see a hope. I understood, although in truth I would have understood anything she would have told me and in the way she would have told me.

From the initial words, the slight serious inflection in her pronunciation, I recalled my elementary and old concepts of orthoepy and prosody on how to use and play with the human voice to achieve different effects.

She said to be her name ... I do neither think it appropriate to say it, nor important because I knew that they use names other than their real names, but I remembered her by her "artistic" name, that was the one she told me.

With time and some other very brief visits to the club, I knew she was called ... let's say ... Gina. When I went to the club, it was only to see her, who at first was elusive and I think not only with me, I saw her sometimes avoid many clients, which did not seem to be logical in that business.

The contact between us was improving and it could be said that not for my gratuities or any special donations, because it did not give her money, but because we spoke frankly.

I visited a friendship who lived in the area and when I passed by, I stopped at the club. When she was working, we talked two, three maybe a few more words, but if wasn't there, then I turned around and left.

If I stayed, I did not spend much, neither time nor money, I could not drink, because I was driving. I went in and out. It was like a sneaky friendship, from which I expected nothing, just increase my circle of relationships and extend my habit of six words a week, the five daily greetings of the days of work and an additional option for casual events, Of course, without count with my daily prayers at the beginning and end of the day.

So I got better; from six words, I proceeded to discuss complete paragraphs and suddenly I had become a conversational man.

Gina told me how she had spent her fortnight, I knew she had a daughter, that she was single; she was barely twenty-five years old and other details coming from our chats. No more. I think that a couple of times I let myself be tempted and I had with her what they called "private dances", in which I enjoyed caressing her delicious body, only slightly, although she granted me some privileges that I considered as "special."

But what I enjoyed the most was to see her laughter become sincere, her expressions abundant and her exteriorization ceased to look tired. I think she was glad to see me arrive at the club. When I succumbed to the temptation to dance with her, it was not by insinuations from her, in fact, but by my appetite. I told her about me, about my life, about my plans and if she did not care, least, she remembered it, because when we talked, she referred to those details. So Gina had become a friendship and one night, after arriving at the club and having a tiny exchange with her, she climbed onto the platform and started dancing.

She was dancing and kept her eyes on my table, watching me. I had the idea that she was dancing for me. I do not say that it was so, I say that it was what I would have been wanted.

When I met her that night, she told me certain things that plunged me into the sea of delirium. Some things that I thought was very personal, which only by special ligaments, a woman can tell you. In our conversations we touched on topics in which she also told me about her plans. She had told me she was studying and that she considered her work to be temporary.

I did not know what idea I could conceive with the girl. Nor could I formulate any plans in this regard. Among the things read, it said that ... "the general longing of these women is that after swimming for a time in the quagmire of doom, a hero appeared, or a wealthy gallant who take care of them."

I did not consider it that way and besides I was not that "Gallant" that was talked about.

In my opinion, many women, even if they do not have the courage to do so, would like to take for some time, at least while they are young, that way to proceeding and they are only stopped by taboos or social rules.

In our talks we had come to share points of view and found in Gina ideas clear enough to know what she wanted.

I was only disconcerted once, when I did not find her, I asked about her to another of the dancers who had seen us together several times. The young woman looked at me, winked one eye, said:

— I know that you have tried to put dreams and ideas in her head, but I warn you, that nobody can put dreams or ideas or any other thing that is not money in her wallet.

—Believe me—she said as she left—for your own good.

That's why I left. That night when I saw her dance, with her eyes glued to me, with a kind of promise. I slipped from her, not giving her a chance to tell me what I knew she wanted to tell me. I did not know what it was, but there were more words in her eyes than in the psalms.

I left and it took me weeks to return to the club. That night, when I got home I locked myself in my room and sitting in front of my computer, look for things related to this word: Stripper. What was he looking for? I was not sure, but I read about it. About the silly boys and men who go to those clubs, about how they try to impress the ballerinas, who often make fun about them. But it was not this that made me delay in returning, but it was because I did not consider myself prepared to face her, to apologize for my evasion and also for not preconceiving and having the appropriate answers.

She had given me a phone number and I also knew, by telling me herself, that all these girls have more than one phone, so I did not waste time calling.

Only the night of her performance before me and my escape, I sent her a message: "Forgive me", the one she never responded.

When I returned to the club, I had the good fortune to find her as soon as I entered. I greeted her with a loving and enthusiastic greeting. I told her that I was very happy to see her and I wanted us to speak as soon as possible, but she did not share my joy.

She looked at me seriously and she said:

—OKAY

I thought things would change later, but it did not change. I saw her dance again, but she was different, she did it indifferent. When she was by my table, she did not accept drinks or gratuities for her dance, something completely out of the ordinary. I tried to say something about my getaway and she said:

— You have neither to explain nor why to explain.

She got up from my table and with the artistic smile of the first few times, she returned to the stage, but not to dance. I saw her walk among the shadows and music like a sorceress without accepting propositions from clients who tried to speak to her.

That vision was going to persecute me for a long time and only months later was replaced by the elixir of her body, the fragrance that emanated from it like a balm, clung and penetrated in me like a magic breath; perfume that she would leave impregnated forever in my memory like the scent of my damnation.

Marco Polo said: "life is either an adventure or nothing." I think my life has been interesting to me and it has been bearable to live it because I see it that way. Every day new paths are laid out at my feet with promising and uncertain horizons.

Goals that are won or lost, traversals that complete or fail and teach us, but I always win in some way. The age does no matter. Thing, which is just a number, a figure, which may or may not be related to our dreams, abilities or limitations, with the wisdom gained.

I was willing to live another adventure, put another link in my chain of reckless adventures, campaigns that could bring the end closer. After all I knew that you never know how close or far we are to the end; this one can at any moment arrive, without warning, at any age, which is not even a marker or parameter, not even useful like that.

The praise and conquest of young girls has been my sport for years and at the same time a fraction of my art, if what I do can be called in this way. It is not ultimately conquering them what I see as my success, but to make them fantasize, dominate and pamper them through the power of complacency.

I am no longer the boy who I read about in the articles. Near my fifty years old and with or without the wisdom mentioned, I am always ready for another voyage; Gina was my new journey, like my fantastic trip. If anything was clear, it was that in that job that she performed, censored by many, she had to be brave, unprejudiced and know how to master self-control; three important points.

I dared not say that she was ready, or in agreement to undertake something with me, that was about to see. I would seek the way, I would try to have her tell me what I thought she once wanted to tell me and if she did not, then I would tell her.

It was not my usual sport, it was real interest, I was interested in having her for myself, having her by my side. Not only was I attracted by her beauty, but in our dialogues I was also struck by the maturity of her reflections.

Once, I dared to ask if it was what she was because of the earnings, or what made her choose her job. By way of answer she put me to make a comparison.

—I know a woman who is married with a man she knows is gay. She says they are happy; both have their lives, their relationships, sometimes together, sometimes individual, but they are "happy". She does not intend to part with him for the nothing in world; He earns more than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year!

Gina said this and smiling, she made a sign with her hands. At that moment I saw wisdom and sincerity in her comparison. When I was a young man I heard:

“A man is doubly wise, if he has a wise woman at his side”.

 I could add:

“A man is doubly wise and brave, if he has a wise and brave woman at his side.”

Weeks later our friendship had re-established. About the day of my escape, Gina never let me talk. I did not insist, nor did I immediately propose to her what I had been thinking, not because I did not want to, but because our relationship had become different.

Not only I had regained her joy at receiving me, but she had treated me affectionately, spending most of the time I was in the club next to me. I did not go there every day, only sometimes, but when I went, she spent most of the time with me. I was able to know when she would work, as well as know some specific things about that business, that the end did not seem as cruel as I thought.

Finally I was able to get us to spend a few hours alone with her, just us, together. Just four hours, but I think they were the most intense hours of my life. There were:  sex, jokes, stories, dreams, games, I think even a little bit of love. If it was not love, what the hell could it be? We had not talked about money, I would not risk hurting her, but I would not have been stupid. After copious and divine sex, with the air saturated with the smell of dopamine, progesterone, testosterone and others biochemical substances, I had to go to work. Could I? Well, I just had to go to work.

She slept, ecstatic and lost in the voluptuousness of her multiple orgasm and about me? Better not to mention! I could hardly stand. I took from in my wallet for four bills, of the best and pasted them in the two round and tempting parts offered to me as a reward for my accentuated tillage. No doubt, passion and wisdom are mutually exclusive.

It was not to pay her, it was just reciprocity. Would she understand it? She gave me more and although I gave her everything I could, I gave her not only my body, it did not matter, I gave her my fantasies, my present, my past and possible future, my truths, thousand things forgotten and to be forgotten and I added that miserable money because I knew that it was still little, because of the enormous difference.

But she took it well. When I arrived at my work, I received a message, if she had not understood; at least she was amused about my occurrence.

For me it was not exactly a prank, my economic situation was humble, I told her before, but I had thought of it as a way to reduce inequality.

I never bragged about riches, at least of that kind of riches. I had even told her not to believe that a woman well-off to live on the income that her work provided her would become accustomed to living on a modest salary and doing hard work. I remember she did not answer me.

Sometimes the one who is silent grants and sometimes the one who is silent doubts, but sometimes the one who is silent knows that it is better to be silent.

We meet other times. After the first meeting, others happened. From that moment on she asked me to never leave her alone in those places.

I understood and although the time when I had to leave her, my account was already paid, that is, she just had to turn in the key in the receiving and leave, I understood her reasons and fears. But then it happened that when we left, and I was trying to give her some money, she rejected me. I explained that I wanted to give her some perfume and she answered me:

—I already have many perfumes.

I once told her that I wanted to see her wearing some specific clothing, which I had noticed her looking with interest and she said:

—To use that, I have to lose weight, better buy something for you.

Only once I got her to accept a toy for her daughter, the one she had not let me know.

She had shown me pictures, but she was extremely careful about her daughter. When we went out and I asked her to turn off the phone, because she was constantly looking at it, first she refused and then turned it off and kept it for a while, but then turned it on again.

—She is well cared for, I know— she told me—but I have to check.

At times she would leave the world, she would remain silent, as if she were asleep with her eyes open, looking at me from far away; she would put her hand over mine and caress me with her fingers. She was wonderfully strange, laconic but extroverted. What she did not say in words, she said with her features, or with a brief facial, puerile, or Machiavellian contraction, astonished or naive, but whatever it was, she looked brighter and everything enhanced her beauty.

I could not answer myself how such a woman was happy to dwell in those worlds. With all the delicacy I knew how to adopt, I asked her how she was content to live the shipwreck she was living. She answered me with her peculiar way of answering.

—You are a special man, talented, that you could earn a lot of money more than you earn and you have told me that you have to endure underestimation, also that miserable people whom you serve and help, sometime mistreat you. If you think better, you answer that question yourself and you will understand that you are as shipwrecked as I am.

This was another similarity between us, we were two castaways and in addition, we were lost in the wrong ocean, with a special disadvantage on my part. At least, she hoped that by saving her income and carrying out her studies, she soon saw the shore, the land was near.

Instead, unless I decided to change my job to a better one, for what I was perhaps already too old, or a blow of fortune would have prospered my illusory business, for me, the nearest peninsula was thousands of miles away.

Suddenly, everything went out, all was closed. I cannot explain how, or when, or why. The last thing I can remember is that I was in my car, slowly, because I am not a runner, I felt or thought I felt, like a blow and I could not know anything else.

I was going on a path without horizons, in dim light, where only a faint blue light let me see where it was and set my feet.

The luminescence was very poor and darkened as it advanced, became darker and quieter. I could hear sounds, which also became weak, like whispers almost inaudible as I entered in the darkness. The voice of my mother and my father shouted something from afar away and at the same time in my own ears their voices repeated old warnings that they once told me.

I was going and it was colder, quieter. My feet and hands were still, immobile, little by little, but it continued to advance as something that moved by itself and took me away.

Little by little, but it continued to advance as something that moved by itself and get me away. My body became fog, like in smoke, something intangible. Countless friends and disappeared people came to meet me, memories of my childhood, moments of happiness and misfortune that happened in my youth and throughout all my life. I remembered names that did not correspond or linked me with neither known nor unknown people.

My whole life was going by and let me see it like a spectator watching an old movie sitting from his box.

Suddenly a group approached to me, among whom I could see neighbors and acquaintances that I knew or believed dead. Someone interposed; was my father. I wanted to hold him, but I remembered that he had died many years ago. Then I asked him:

—"Where have you been all this time, that I hardly remember you?" But he only reached out to remove the others who tried to help me cross. There were fights I had, entangled in struggles and fights that he extinguished with his baritone voice.

My contenders appeared and disappeared when he erased them by pointing them with the finger. I did not understand why he did not want those good people to help me, to make it easier for me to cross something that was interposed, a surface that would not allow me to touch them or have them around. They greeted me with welcome gestures, shook objects they had with them, things of their trade that reminded me of who they were. Adrian, the neighborhood’s carpenter, who had died long ago, I seemed to remember, with leukemia, he was lifting a saw.

For a moment there was nothing left for me to fall into the shifting and unsteady mud that separated me from that people.

When I grasped the walls full of crevices, grooves and inscribed drawings, I realized that it was a tunnel, a passageway with eroded walls and full of written names, indescribable signs and ideograms, with engraved figures and words that I remembered ever saying.

I heard my mother to cry. I understood her words, her moans, she did not understand that it was just another adventure, only another journey that was going to end, that I was going to win.

I was sure of that. What I did not remember was how and why I had embarked on this trip. Why I was in that tangle of images and memories, in that damn tunnel interminable that seemed longer and longer.

Then the light was made. The tunnel became clearer, the cold less intense. I tried to tell my father, but he was gone. I shouted I looked everywhere; he had left without letting me to explain. Anyway he did not like explanations. And I was not going already anywhere, it had stopped moving me.

My hands and feet hurt, my whole body ached. I heard new, unrecognizable voices that said stupid things. "Does he have a normal pulse?", “Blood pressure?", "What is the temperature?", "Does he have an answer in limbs?”, "How's the breathing rate?” and others that I did not understand, my English was worse. It was ruined as well. I asked myself:

—Why do they speak English?

I could not move. My right arm hurt terribly. I felt pain in my neck, my head and my back. Everything hurt. I could not see them, but I listened to them.

I could hear the unrecognizable voices in the exhausting nightmare I could not get out of. They were coming and going, they did not wake me up and I had to be working, I was going to be late for work for the first time. Could I work with those pains? It was not important; they would be better with the hours.

What I needed was to get me up. Who would help me? I no longer listened to my mother, but it was better that way, I could not bear her wailing, it hurt to hear her cry. I could not distinguish any of the voices.

A woman's voice seemed familiar, a fearful voice that spoke to me closely and that for a moment she also cried saying something like:

—Oh, God, he cannot see me.

I heard her and it sounded familiar to me.

—“What the hell? Of course I cannot see you! I'm asleep!”

And another unknown voice explained her:

 —"Well, I told you, unfortunately could may have been affected some of his senses." I also listened like the sound of falling water, like a ... blus , blus, blus, on the background of the concurrent scene.

What a foolish people! They do not understand. If they do not just wake me up, I will lose my work hours!

Fortunately my dream became deep and I no longer listened to them. I slept with pleasure for some time, rested from the tired jargon for a little and woke up. With the same incomprehensible pains, but I was awake.

I looked at my surrounding and I knew that the blus, blus, blus, came from a fountain that was on the other side of the window, a large window with clear crystals, of a certain unknown place.

I tried to get up, but I could not.

I only saw a girl approaching, putting her face in front of my face, looking at my eyes, touching my lips, looking at me in amazement and I said a word, the first one I could hardly articulate, that I do not know why I said it:

—"Yogurt "

She burst out in an unbridled cry:

—He came out from the coma!—and I burst into tears.

I could not explain why I was crying, I did not know what I was feeling. I cried like a child, like a little boy who mourns because of his mischief. I saw many people grouping next to me, looking at me curious.

The girl stroked my head, wove my hair with her fingers, kissed me, covered me with the sheet, offered me water, which I drank in a hurry, I had a tremendous thirst. I wanted to talk to her, to know what was going on, what time it was, who was that affectionate stranger, who, to my liking, allowed herself to be touched by my clumsy hands, that is, by my left hand, because my other hand I could not move it. I had it tied up, held fast by something that held it.

My other hand moved clumsy, impractical and my tongue said nothing that could be understood. I listened to my rustic and slow language. I felt ashamed, the best thing I could do was fall asleep again.

When I woke up, everything would have happened and ended, everything would be fine and then I would go to work.

While I slept at last quiet, I felt the rain fall on my back, wash my body that was dirty from the tunnel, the heavenly rain that purifies everything. I wanted to open my eyes and see it, to watch the water fall on my sleeping figure. It cost me, I had to struggle to open my damn eyes, which were stuck, or maybe I had them open and was stunned with so much fuss. Yes was that, they were already opened. And it was not rain. What a disappointment! It was a ridiculous shower that poured its stream over me.

The girl bathed me with care, with pleasure and me, what a shame! I was totally naked letting her to wash my genitals and I laughed like a jerk about her jokes. I felt good, it hurt less.

She dried me with tenderness, combed my hair. I stood in front of a large and bright rectangle next to the shower where was a naked man with a shaved head and two marks above his eyebrows, who was looking at me with his silly face.

I was about to ask what the hell he was looking at, but I did not ask him, I seemed to me to know him somewhere.

I felt shame that he could see how that beautiful young woman, the precious stranger, touched me overflowing with her joy.

I forgot the grief and shame and tried to approach her, squeezed her against the wall, touched her blatantly, kissed her and she corresponded with me. When my manhood had risen, she pushed me and said:

—We cannot, doctors say we cannot.

—Doctors, rays to the doctors. Where the hell are doctors? Then they called her:

— Gina, can you come?

“Gina”, “ Gina”, “ Gina”. I felt dizzy. I grabbed the shower elbow so I would not fall. She got scared.

­—What's the matter? Tell me, tell me, what's the matter?

The voices became distant. They pulled me, they pulled me hard. They dragged me. I fell asleep again. I had the unfortunate idea to get me sleep; I could not go to work anymore.

When I woke up, Gina was sitting by my bed. She had her head resting on my hand, which she held to keep firm a serum that was on my wrist. Yes, it was a serum, something serious must have happened. I looked at my surroundings. It was a hospital. There were equipment and stuff from those places next to my bed. I touched her on one arm and I whispered:

—Gina.

She lifted her head nervously, looked at me as if she had seen a dead man. She pressed my hand and said:

—Yes, my love— and she fragmented and let me see the cracks of her apparent strength. It was the only time I heard her to say that word.

She pressed her face against the mattress that drowned her dull sob. It hurt less and I did not understand her tears. I tried to at least sit down, but she stopped me:

—¡No! Do not move, stay like that.

We talk, very low, but we talk everything. It had passed twenty-eight days, many days of anxiety, of uncertainty. In which it was not known if I was going to live.

Gina was exhausted and I had been more than dead. She spoke to me with difficulty, interrupted for a moment, suffocated and the tears ran down her face like thick drops of silver.

A doctor was coming. He greeted me cheerfully and took my free hand to perform I do not know what tests. I closed the hole through which I could look and saw her dance again, like a witch spilling her spell, the sweet enchantment that would make me remember her forever.

Minutes later, the doctor was going, he put his face in front to mine, looked something inside my eyes, clapped, laughed and said:

—Good news, everything is fine. Congratulations, we will baptize you as: "A dead - alive".

Fortunately these things happen, but keep in mind, from that deep coma, not many come out.

It took me a long time to fully understand. I made her repeat the story many times. Gina had to tell me what she knew may be ... I do not know, twenty times. It was fortunate that I carried her phone number in my wallet and had it saved on my cell phone.

Every time I asked her:

—Gina, please, say to me again, how did you... and she had to repeat the story. I forgot things. I never had a good memory, but neither like that. I forgot everything with impressive speed, quickly.

I also did not understand why I could not talk normally, why I felt dizzy, why I had to walk so slowly. My equilibrium was insufficient; I had to walk under her arm.

An accident had occurred. In which only found a car turned, with a side completely crushed and an inert man inside. This was what I could know for several months. Details were added that might have told me from the beginning and had escaped my volatile memory.

Five long months passed. I would add, twenty-eight plus twenty-one in neurosurgery, plus ...

I did not realize it; the sum was incorrect. I could not have spent all that time. Either way I had already lost my job, I had been away for a long time. It was better that way, I could not go to work with that shaved head, with the two holes on the forehead, that had had to make me to get two clots of blood that was in my skull.

On the other hand, the mentally retarded language with which I spoke, which according to doctors would take some time to recover its normality.

I had made friends in the hospital, that was my relief, because Gina could not be with me always, that is at all time, she had to attend to her daughter.

Close to my room was Alberto, another injured man that had been saved by a miracle. His legs were shattered, but he could walk better than me.

In his wheelchair, he could go to my room and we chatted but instead I could not move and if I did I had to call an army, that means many people to help me.

The nurses already knew me and when I got entangled in calculations, how much it would cover or not cover my insurance, if I had so, they consoled me by saying that the important thing is that I was alive, that everything would be fixed.

"Yes, I thought. I was alive, and in debt for life.

The paradox was that I was happy, calm. The stay in the hospital, if not pleasant, made me bearable. There were moments of pain, in the cures of my right arm, in the insertion of fixing screws in my right elbow. They used little anesthetic, because of the fragility of my brain, but nothing to die for.

We had social gatherings; we chatted and talked about music, movies and literature, say about stories. When my doctors mentioned me, they gave me hope about my recovery, which was happening faster than expected.

A little bird perched on the branches near my room and gave me the morning alarm every day and the delight in the afternoons of hearing its twitter watching the sunset, when through the glasses of my window I saw the sun fall on the city that was been colored with the bright lights, closer the length of the expressway with its small moving rectangles and still more closer my own nose, which already breathed as usual followed by blus, blus, blus, from the garden fountain.

About my way of paying what owed, I made a plan, which would take years, many years, but it would solve and would not affect my credit.

There are still marks left in me. In my neck, I have the scar of a tracheotomy that was necessary for my lungs to be ventilated, my right elbow, has a total ankylosis that limits me about flexing and extension movement. I may have some delay in the speed of my ideas and I do not know if other traces, which are just that, traces, allusions, grooves and strokes of another episode.

My adventurous temper does not bend. Follow the daily germination of other tempting contingencies. With each new day, I see different adventures unfold, new opportunities to succeed, to exercise the spirit.

My language is almost normal. Perhaps my pretensions have diminished in scope. I never aspired to be nominated for the presidency of any country and if I wanted to go to the cosmos it was when I was a child right now ... maybe a little bit late, with almost fifty ... I will not be enrolled in the school of cosmonauts!

The biggest label is perpetuated.

Gina disappeared. I searched her in the way I could not explain, as God only knows. I wanted to give her mi infinite thanks, but I did not get a trace that would lead me to her.

I am a humble man, all humble as possible without undermining my respect and that makes it easy for me to understand.

Gina was too big, too great for me.




Chapter 4: The Lake.

Abyssus Abyssum Invocat.

Psalms 42: 7

Traducir al Español (Original)

  The original version with all images could be read and purchased at:

  richardguerrabooks.info

—I could not do anything, just to take the gun out of his hands and let him die in peace. —he said ruefully and let his pupils to go from the dry fingers in his hands to the crystals that reverberated over the lake, like dragonflies.

They were crystals, or I thought them like that, like quartz dyed by the sun and the color of the pond; the blue settled in the prairie as if suddenly a sea between the vegetable of trees and rushes sprouted. The lake split in a thousand multicolored crystals, millions of waves, reflections and curves in the water that came, went away, were drowsed on the shore pushed by the wind. They were attenuating themselves until they became entangled with the wild ducks, among the tiny little hens that ran pecking at the water.

—"Let him go,"— my father said from the death and I let, but I told to, before I saw him again bending his bony and thin fingers:

—The dead weigh more than the living, and cannot be taken out from the memory.

I looked at the dismal face of the man whom I almost never managed to pull out more than four words and with which he now converged to see the jumbled pieces of liquid and foam painted in nuances. He got the peace the same I was; with the fragile transparencies of dreams that flew in bubbles and broke.

The lake was located in a nearby park and I went there to ease my confinement, to lighten the fatigue of work and distract myself with nature. I was always a passionate lover of nature. When I was a child, I made excursions through caves, rivers, hills and everything that would sound like adventure. I participated along with groups of fans of speleology and archeology in different events and trips through my native country.

In my new country of residence I had not been able to make any of those trips; all the time was occupied by my work. I had to fight to live. While most of my colleagues and acquaintances spent their free time buying things or making trips to places where there were only different conglomerates of the same frugal people and whose aim was only to squeeze people until to get the last penny, me, I usually used my time to appreciate the things that we could all see, however, perhaps nothing mattered to many others..

The lake was one of those places, my favorite paradise. I carried with my camera and my arsenal of stuff. I took pictures of everything; about the lake, of the animals, about the vegetation, about the children, in case they were present, about whatever, anything curious that crossed by the front of my lens and also photos that I would elaborate later to achieve the idea that had made me to take it.

I would not be able to remember all the wonder that gave me that landscape, all the magic and secrets I invented collecting the images and something from my creation.

I remembered my father and also used his suggestions, walked with his steps. I could never clarify if it was the same soul in different bodies. Could the human spirit bifurcate it self like that?

It was amazing how the lake filled me with serenity. I was feeling happy to see my mercy to grow while I watched the fidgety birds seek their food among the plants or peck at the larvae of the water. Once I was able to rescue a shipwrecked dog, that one that only God knows where he came from, the puppy was fastened to a log and  fled from me as soon as broughting him to earth as if following a familiar scent.

Then I discovered more. The lake at night. I think this was the best of my discoveries. I was revealed the new beauties that sprouted when night fell with his blind and rotund weight on over the lake.

Not only in the water appeared different reflections and colors, also in the night itself, in the sky, in the infinite; In its imponderable magnitude, in the setting sun, in the clouds, in the moon, in the people who went to the lake at night to various things, everywhere, everyplace, there were other great and different allegories, other universes. In the silhouettes of the palm trees, in the white dewdrops that flashed from the leaves of the trees. There were thousands of details.

One night I met Marcos, as at last I knew that this man was called, entangled in his memories and lost in his loneliness, caressing the little dog I had saved.

I got very few photos about him; One or two in any case. His muteness I could not hang it from my hobby. My photos were a part of me, his silence was all of him, everything he could conceive. 

Marcos was dead. A dead man who was not among the dead.

I walked the landscape with the cautious my father's footsteps  even with his eyes and with the part that allows me to migrate from dimension to dimension. From the real to the unreal; That thin thread. I walked with his footsteps that were sank into the grass like also his yearnings sank; The yearnings which life made me some later possible.

I found Marcos and a story was revealed to me. An unfortunate episode among the countless prodigious subtleties of the lake. There were many things to discover on the lake. Sweet and sad.

There were innumerable secrets everywhere that I could count on my camera and there was also a nocturnal population. Fishermen with their rods, people in love, with their fevers, drunk with their hangovers, homeless people looking for a place to spend the night and Marcos. All with the globe of their floating world above their heads. Marcos did not have his balloon, he hung himself from a very fine spider's web that united him to this reality and left him to remain in a sort of marasmus.

A part I especially liked , was the part where I rescued the dog. There was a log in the ground and I could sit. It always came when it was just dusk. It could also have besides a wide view of the lake, another nearby view of the expressway going nearby and a beautiful picture of the sunset. The rays of the sun shone brightly above the goblets and bounced off the indigo surface creating a brittle effect. I also saw the silent man many times over there. The log later became our meeting place.

Once I extinguished a fire, which was undoubtedly dangerous. With the lake so close I did not find it difficult.

When night dissolved the colors in its murkiness, then other delicacies were multiplied, other features, it gave me other spaces. I sat down on the log and took hundreds of pictures with the camera attached to my tripod. Sometimes I wrote. Not only the clarifications about the photos I wanted to achieve and how I designed them or how I will desing them, but also things that came to my mind about what could be described from a specific photo.

One day I found like a bed, it was before I found Marcos. In the undergrowth someone planted a bed with old cloths and things that he could lie down on. One was those solitary beings of the night who went to the lake seeking shelter among the trees had left there provisions and clothes to mitigate their helplessness.I dialogued it with my father.

So, that changed my goal in some way. It changed in the sense that now I was not only looking for the photos, I looked from then on how I could help those people, who walked like ghosts carrying bags of belongings, things that they had nowhere to drop. However, I could perceive that sometimes the best way to help these beings was to be away from them.

The bed turned out to belong to a very thin man, of speech with accent like oriental; Arabic could be. He was riding his bicycles with clothes and bottles. I had seen that man before, but I never imagined that he slept there.

I even made friendship with a man of advanced age whom I saw him first  fishing and who days after seeing me over the lake with my camera he let me take a picture about him and then invited me to eat some delicious cold and seasoned little fishes that he brought.

The old man was sometimes accompanied by another who presented laborious and severe aspect, the one who always wore a hat, whatever time it was. The other man, I never saw him spend the night in the vicinity of the lake, but he asserted that he did not allow himself to be imprisoned by the expensive rents of our city, what make me able to guess the rest.

I also met a very young teen girl who said that she often went to bath in the lake. The first time I saw this girl, I retired ashamed, because, she was practically naked. But without any shame, she came out from the water, she got her dry clothes, got her dressed and sat on the shore to eat something that she kept in her bag and had left out with her other belongings.

After a few minutes, I approached her and asked something I can not remember. She answered me very naturally, took off her long plastic boots full of water, emptied them and finished her diner, stood next to me and told me quickly four or five things interspersed without the slightest attempt to relate each them.

She emphasized her need to bathe and that our hospitable city had no public places to do so. It seemed to  me toremember that somebody told me yes, but she reaffirmed that her custom had already allowed her to acquire a kind of aphrodisiac element in its practice.

After we laughed and introduced ourselves, I shook hands with her, she put on other lightweight shoes that were in his purse, and left. Her name was Clara. I never saw her again.

"My crazy city," I thought. "The voragin inside the voragin".

Few weeks later, a very demure and circumspect gentleman whom I met by the benches near the lake surrounded by ladies, was making to a story in which I recognized my friend Clara, the aphrodisiac habit's girl. The gentleman, quite offended because of the "indecency" of the young woman, he was claiming for requirements to be taken in order to,  that "underworld" people did not frequent the park or the lake.

He said it, twisting his mouth with a gesture of contempt that denoted the belief of superiority, but in spite of being a crooked mouth, much uglier in my way of seeing that the one I remembered in the young girl, it was a single mouth, above which there was a single nose and two eyes already painfully covered with thick glasses and also were only two, two miserable eyes that were going to close forever some day like those of all the humble people he wanted to take away from the lake and the park.

I remember exactly that night; Which was the first time I saw Marcos, although we coincide in  many other opportunities. Unlike most other people of similar appearance with which I ran into.

It was curious that those were almost never the same people. Except for the man on the bed, the one who going with his belongings on the bicycle and the fishermen of whom he spoke, he had never coincided with the same person twice. Many stories also escaped to me. They vanished just like their protagonists.

On one occasion I went to the lake to take a picture of a tremendous moon that I could see when I arrived home, with which I imagined a magnificent photo. As I was leaving and I could see, near some bushes, a little girl, who seemed to be no more than fourteen or fifteen years old, crying low and quietly. I approached her carefully and spoke to him first in English and then in Spanish.

I asked her what was wrong and if I could help her, but she just standed up and ran off. Either way sometimes the best help is not trying to help. Not to try interfere or been involve in others' concern.

That anecdote was lost to me and I related it to one in which I wanted to help a bird fallen from its nest or maybe it was that the parents was instructing him to fly. The case was that I grabbed it and when I was trying to put it on a fence from where I could better try the flight, The parents, who saw the little bird held in my hand screaming, attacked me fiercely, screaming and pricking on me, and threw me a jet of their excrement.

It is not always understood when others want to help and not always help is achieved when help is needed. The human intention is like the smoke, it is dissolve, it is confused and lost.

The night I found Marcos, I had gone to the lake called by some mysterious reflections that illuminated the sky from time to time, causing something that in case of being able to capture it with my camera could elaborate a thousand ideas with the photo. I looked for the best angle, or the most favorable view from where you could see the flashes better. I left my car under the pines of the park and tried different positions.

Finally, I stood almost in the water, in the solid part where I could still put my tripod and took many photos. When I thought I had enough, I kept my things in my backpack, although I left my camera by hand and I was leaving, but I noticed the desolate man at one of the tables under the pines.

The idea that ran through my mind was to take a picture of that image in the dark with the lake in the background. To get a silhouette using the backlight reflexes. I approached him and greeted him soberly. Since no different idea came to me, I asked him if he had something to light my cigar, I Kept a new one in my backpack.

I had the impression I'd seen him before, though I could not be sure. Sitting on his legs he had the dog that I took out from the water, the one that was attached to the log. He barely answered. He shook his head, not speaking, but I noticed that he pause his watching in my camera. I was close and he touched the lens lightly, denied again without words, quiet, like if he was extracting a memory from the most remote forgetfulness. Did you understand me? Do you speak Spanish?

—Do you have any lighter?— just in case, but the same, immutable.

I wondered how this elusive trope could exist in a society full of friendly people, who dominated with excellence their fluid sarcasms, whose eternal smiles made us suppose situations where they would beg you with delicious urbanity: — please, let us to rip your head off.

I did not know how to adopt the proper way, or establish any conversation and less ask him to let me take the picture. With my camera hanging around my neck, I walked away in the way I had approached. I did not dare to ask anything of that being who clamored shouting out from his mutism.

The dog barked at me as I walked away, it launched from the first position and came almost to me, barked twice more, and returned to the place that was before. The night absorbed the barking and the echo followed me as I walked towards my car.

The sophisticated and generous modern society has turned the protection of the helpless beings into a mere sophistry, I was thinking. It is preached everywhere for it; There are countries and cities that take action and create programs to help, but destitution and helplessness persist. It is the generality; it is promulgated, but that's all.

The photo I had thought was only one, but if I saw him again, it might happen that I designed a group, that is, several photos where I would represent this theme, about I felt attracted before :

Homeless people. A sensitive subject.

On my way to my car I stopped for a few minutes in the group of ladies and the gentleman; The one with the crooked bosa with its eloquent oratory. His speech disgusted me. I continued my trayectory, still thinking of the human shadow I had seen under the pines. The solitary being was already occupying a fragment in the cavity of my musings.

Days later I found him again in another place of the park. A bend in the lake, like a small pier where several boats were floating. I greeted him from a distance, but I do not remember if he answered me. Another afternoon when I got to my log, Marcos was sitting there. Incredibly he recognized me.

—Photographer— he said, "and I knew he spoke my language. I greeted him and he let me sit on the other end of the log. I was encouraged because he was able to  recognize me, even if it was as  "Photographer", I did not know his name, but he inspired a minimum of confidence. It sounded to me curious me because he called me "photographer",  everyone could has a camera. I got up and talked to him about various things.

I asked where he had left his friend, I meant the dog, but he just shook his head and gave a slight smile.

As I spoke, I noticed that he was without anything. That is, belongings or bottles like the others homeless who used to walk in the park. I imagined that maybe he could had a place.

I left my things there. My backpack, the case of my fundamental instrument; That I carried it around my neck, my bottle of water and other useful things for my task that I had brought to the park that day.

It was easier and comfortable when I was carrying some auxiliary devices like other lenses, filters and my other camera with its remote control. Anything that would allow me to do whatever shot I could think of.

I entertained myself taking my pictures and when I returned to the trunk Marcos was gone.

Finally after several casual simultaneities where we had been able to see each other,  and even exchange greetings, we started a tiny and first word.

The afternoon that there was a soccer tournament in the park and I wanted to take some photos. After I finished and went to my favorite place, we found in the log. Marcos was like drowsed in it, reading something.

I have the habit or the custom about to introducing myself talking regarding what I think was the craziest and Homeric of my adventures: my decision to come to another country, to emigrate to a culture, society and idiosyncrasy that are not the ones that saw me to born. That; the same hilarity of monochrome words that no longer bring me argument.

The greatness of my new country of residence and its generosity towards me, did not surpass yet the temerity of facing, only me, by my self a new life, in an immense and unknown land, without possible support, without resources, without the required mental preparation and really without the great need.

It may indeed be that change and its risk is not such a thing; Now I think so and it seems silly to say so. Now that I know how to walk the new ways, I know how to open doors and lean on things I did not even know existed. Ingredients and parts of the mechanism that I was not able to mesh.

Anyway, I understand that I ventured to do something that I did not calculate its size. Nor was I aware of how close I was, because my disinformation, to becoming one like those homeless beings. But luckily my arrival in my new settlement was full of beatitudes, I believe now; definitely.

I told him almost funny, how sitting on the air plane I wondered what action would take on my arrival. Where would I go and what could be my occupation. I knew that my titles and categorizations would not be useful. In addition to the most basic: where I would live.

I told him about my naive idea about with that meager money I brought I would be able to live until I got a job. That I thought I was going to rent a room in any hotel near the airport and the next day I would start the search that would allow me to find something to do.

My mother had secretly conciled with an old friend of her to come and pick me up. Mothers, whatever age we have, they always take care of us.

She did it without my approval because she knew that I would not consent to anyone bothering about things that were only my business. Then, the thing was not so serious; Nothing to unearth buried cities.

The testimony I said to Marcos ended the way things ended. Maybe that's why it seemed to him intrascendent. I followed my narration to the end and when I finished I saw that my interlocutor was paying me an empty attention. I realized that he was gone from our world.

—"So it was," — I told him —"how I left my roots and my dead behind. And we returned to silence. To the stillness under the pine forest.

It was the same afternoon like every afternoon, after which I would come another night like every night. There were no rainbows or luminous birds flying over us. We were just the two strangers, facing each other; the possibility to arise the nexus between two entities, to split our lives into two, like nuts.

He had not said a word. I stared at him. I had not been able to see him clearly. I calculated him about fifty years old, but that because of his athletic configuration; His hair was white and his skin eroded by calamity and contingencies.

He got up and went to get a seed of the pines. She came back and bent on disintegrating it into pieces. That was the beginning of his revelation. Then he said to me:

—"Interesting." And he just finished to broke his seed.

I wanted to ask him, but I understood that he would not tell me anything. I am used to talking and seeing with my camera, which is an extension of my eyes. With these eyes I took the picture of his blackened hands, his pores and gray hair, his frequent sitting position, his shabby look, his possible culture but little wordiness, his neat appearance against everything usual in These walking people. The best, when he said within the impenetrable breadth of his reservation:

—You left your dead behind. I brought one alive that is now my dead, —he said under his breath. — I could not do anything, just to take the gun out of his hands and let him die in peace.

There was the entrance to his crypt. He said so, and keep astonished in the distance, looking at the blue of the lake with the bright and colorful splashes that jumped like broken glass.

He folded and extended the fingers of his hands from the ones who seemed to want to pull something out. He changed his posture by standing in front of me. I supposed he was going to tell me:

—"I'll tell you,"—when he'd told me enough and nothing else.

—"The dead weigh more than the living," I said, stealing the phrase, "and you can not get them out of the memory."

He told me what he could tell me, I thought and I did not know who or how or why. I knew what he wanted to tell me and what I needed to figure out my story. It was not the matter I wanted to work on, but a more interesting one.

There are things that appear that at last end up being difficult to illustrate, at least with photographs, with vector images created, I do not remember if I tried before. If someone discover a way of portraying the subjective, it will be easy.

If it had been so at those times , would it be "La Monna Lisa" the same or would it be better?

That afternoon I took pictures about the tournament and others, but not about Marcos. I left to my house, busy, with my mind on more than about my project. I recorded the words, and the gloomy silence that followed them.

I like knowing how to respect the silence of others. Only the person himself owns his silence.

I stopped to think, who he was talking about, what gun I was talking about, and what I thought I understood. Marcos reproached himself for not having done something.

The trance to take the photos would be presented, but I wanted to be clear about what was going to tell and detail the images in what I would work. I started with a photo, one that ... I'm sorry to say, I hijacked it covertly.

The photo I was able to get was ... "regular". I do not think he says much. I shot the moon, I did not even know if it is focused. The gloom of the main motive repelled me. I could not achieve the correct framing, nor adapt the horizon line, because what I would have liked to take, I needed the strong immobility woven by the song of the crickets.

I do not like it as I did, it was incomplete. Was it possible to complete it?

My vision traversed the retina and hypersensitive nerves put it in the brain that did assemble the complete photo.

My humble lens transported an image to a cold sensor that could not knew how to make a fable with it.

It was a miserable idea, a syllable of an untold story. The tip of the ball of yarn that used to unwind in relationships. It was always like this. My models are my friends, my clients are, Marcos would be too.

Then something happened that helped me to understand who and how was the man who could become a friend.

One afternoon, I had gone to the park looking for pictures of people. Were images for a sporting event. One of the sites on the internet where I sold my photos was looking for pictures of people doing sports. I would use the ones I could take in the tournament, but I wanted other variants. I walked the park. It was near the lake but I could not see it from where I was.

I went around the basketball field, then down the tennis courts, took pictures and then went to where there were children, almost all with their parents, but some ran alone on the grass behind balls, with kites and toys .

The plain was full of young people, of boys who frolicked and shouted, of people walking with animals. Something distant saw Marcos. He walked stooped as he usually did. I sat there, from where I could see it surreptitiously. I saw him walk to where I was, but he had not seen me.

Suddenly a child threw a ball high and ran to catch it. There was a roar and I saw a black figure who ripped his leash from his ownter's hands and shot himself to the  the boy's direction.

The ball rose and the boy stared at it, paying no attention to the unbridled dog running toward him. I watched the scene from my position but in truth I saw no danger. I forgot Marcos for a moment and I became aware of him again when I saw him run and catch the dog that was already very close to the boy.

The dog did not have the proper protector in his mouth that prevents these animals from biting, but Marcos grabbed his jaws and kept it that way until his master reached them and put the protector to the animal. In a somewhat inadequate position he addressed some words to the man who left the place without replying.

But this was not all. The worst thing was that a woman, presumably the mother of the little boy, left her entertained conversation and went desperate to the group that had gathered around and she directed several insults to the man of appearance like a homeless who was already distant.

She shouted and pointed with her finger, grasped her beautiful hair, composed her slender figure and sent all sorts of insults to the intruder who nearly ran over her child.

She greeted, presented herself very flirtatious and apologized to the owner, who caressed the innocent pet softly; who fortunately already had the protector well secured.

The whole group talked about the need to eliminate these individuals from the city or at least remove them from public places.

The reaction that this event made me to adopt should have been based not only on the event itself but also on my judgment on the majority of most of my cohabitants.

I got up and headed for the area where I had seen Marcos go. I thought I knew where I was going. So I met him in our log.

He was curled up in the hiding place. I greeted him and as soon as he raised his head I told him that I had seen what had happened. I clarified that I meant the dog and the boy. I asked if I could take a seat and he gave his approval. I told him about what seemed unfair to me, and that his action seemed to me to be cautious.

He shook a newspaper that he carried like saying: "Forget it"

I commented according my disagreement with what happened and offered him a bottle of water. By then, when I was going to the lake, I carried a plastic bag with several bottles of water. I had them ready and cold and left them new without uncovering in the sectors where I supposed my protégés to be. In the park there was water, but hot water and not in all its areas.

Marcos accepted my offer. Step forward; In our population it is not known if you can or when or from whom you can accept anything.

I put my hand out and told him my name. He did the same and said:

—Marcos— I knew then that this was his appellative.

They were two tremendous advances: a little trust and his name. It may seem implausible, but there are those who have at hand several, different to the real name. I have verified it, however I have not been able to establish the true purpose in it. I did not know if it was one of those cases. I did not think so.

He grabbed the bottle and drank without hesitation until he emptied it. Although I was curious to be told something about what had already outlined a minimum, I knew how to control myself and match his reserve. I have made it one of my premises: "explain me if you want and you think you can explain and when you want to explain."

He kept his isolation. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye, as if a doubt assaulted him. I felt that it was time to leave. I said good-bye without another word. With those two words that I do not always pronounce well: "bye, bye".

I will be a misfit for life. Not only does it sound strange to express myself in another language when it is not necessary, I use English as a tool, when I need it. Equally I think it unacceptable to avoid modesty or invade even my friends with questions.I think that the modesty and discretion in my new habitat can turn out to be unfavorable.

 Talking with my friends, they, in some situations, tell me:

—Why did not you ask him this? Or "you should have clarified that you are very good at such a thing"

I do not know, I do not think I'm very good at anything. I can live in a quiet "mediocrity". One of my friends says: "My greatest success has been that I became nobody".

I also see how many to whom advice could be good, hurry to give advice to you, no matter if you ask them or not, if they are sure of what they say or not. Without evaluating the level of trust between the adviser and the advised. They do not suggest or propose you, rather they impose you.

I noticed that there were buses that circulated through our distribution, that they went to the park and also tour over completely. But I would tell Marcos about it if there was a propitious opportunity, if the scope of our friendship increased. On the other hand, what could he not know about the park or the lake that I knew?

Marcos looked like an intelligent man. I did not balance the homelessr way that adsorbed him with what in truth his person could result. I met a lady, who lived or resided almost in time at an omnibus stop.

This lady carried her belongings in the markets' shopping carts. I was able to talk to her once. Several things surprised me. For example, she spoke different languages like: French, English, Portuguese, he said that something German besides his main language; the Spanish.

It seemed to be true, because we had already spoken English and had a word with her in French, She spoke better than I did. She also uttered phrases in Portuguese and German. According to what I could know about her, she had degrees and qualifications, but for some reason she lived as she lived. I never knew the reason, but I had the suspicion that she was not very sane. Logical if you live years in the explained conditions.

A Polish gentleman, who walked with another shopping cart carrying his books and gear, was an accountant and helped me without charging me to declare my taxes.

Difficulties can happen to us regardless of our condition, preparation, knowledge, training or ability. In addition to an important agent or factor:

The link between knowledge, the ability to work and obtaining a job, is now adulterated at present.

Our planet has a population that surpasses the seven thousand million inhabitants, this number has years, now must be greater. I have not been able to obtain the data on how much of that population is active and qualified labor force.

The cost of living in most nations is high and the global unemployment rate is enormous, according to recent data, but homeless people in the world are ... well, I will quote a consulted article:

"It is very difficult to determine the number of homeless people in the world because the countries have different legal definitions of the homeless. Natural disasters and sudden civil unrest also complicate the situation. The best there is is a conservative United Nations estimate of two thousand five, which indicates that the number of homeless people is one hundred million".

That means that about one in sixty people does not have decent housing.

This data seems to me a hyperbole, but I got it from reliable sources, if any online source can be. I give the above illustration by the obvious relationship between having a job and living in a home.

But, without getting entangled in statistics, the issue of housing is one, very serious indeed, but what I want to refer to is that many ready and qualified people cannot get a job and are forced to live in whatever posible way.

We can question our self whether it is the ability to work or the viability to obtain them or the management of citizens or what other factors imply that a kind of funnel is made where occupations, now speaking of the best paid, circulate in small groups. I believe that in the generality of the countries happens thus.

Good jobs are handled in cliques. Regarding the other jobs, it is generally not easy to get them, but is more likely.

The tumult of speculations I was handling was a product of a question that was at the polymorphic root of the subject which I wanted to understand and try even if it went beyond my project:

“ What determined or established, where was the due to point  because of that those ambulatory people could existed?”

This concern was strengthened in my brain, it got rid of the project and made me study.

In agreement with essays and books read, I can write this brief review:

The components are different. They can be the loss of employment, debts, family problems, housing shortages, some are disabled, others affected suffer mental and physical problems or addiction, especially alcohol.

The homeless women, most of them have abandoned their husbands, either fled from them, been driven from their homes or engaged in prostitution. Of course the whole set is not considered to cover the hundreds or thousands of species and cases.

The content I wanted to address is, as I said, sensitive, even legally sensitive. At least not all the agencies that market photographic material accept works about homeless people.

I really did not know if Marcos was one of the ... "homeless", but he looked like. In addition, my doubt encompassed other people I met in the recent past and others I have seen without being linked to them.

The story about Marcos could give rise to other works with the same substance as a base, but I needed to understand it, to know about the delicate point regarding which I was going to express myself.

As if that were not enough, the subject intrigued me, it went out from work itself. The human who identifies me, asked for answers.

He said he had brought someone.

—"I brought an alive one who is now my dead" —he had said to me.

Bringing a family member or anyone else to another territory is a big responsibility. If that person dies or a certain mishap occurs, it will be an imprint difficult to erase.

It was, in my opinion, something like that what dragged Marcos to the precipice of despair and destitution.

It was an assumption, but sustained by a personal experience: the death of my father.

The world came over me, but for the first time I said a phrase that I would repeat in many other catastrophes:

"When everything seems to be lost, it's a good time to start again."

I wanted to give my key to Marcos. To give my words to him. To share with him the prophecy that helped me to change the setbacks into experiences.

I say prophecy because that was the first statement my father gave me from his other dimension. And I realized that he was still with me.

In a few days I went to the lake and walked to where the half-rotten tree log crushed its voluminous mass on the grass. I sat down, somewhat tired and lamenting that my friend was not there. Few people frequented this place. I took out one of my water bottles and drank anxiously.

I had gone to the park on my bike. It was better, at least when I was not carrying my photo auxiliary things. I had only taken my camera and my bottles of water. When I was riding my bike I did not have to waste time looking for parking.

The day before it was drizzling. Over the log was a wet paper. I picked it up and watched at it. It was a diary. Ads, offers, classifieds, merchandise in general.

In one paragraph there was talk of a regrettable incident in I do not know in what park where a dog had attacked a child. Serious injuries was caused. Several bites that still maintained him hospitalized. About how the insurance I do not know what, and the administration and management of the park warned that ...

My thought turned back. I remembered Marcos reading and then shaking his newspaper. That newspaper he left lying there, the one that shook when I got to him.

I thought, but my thinking was not just that. An idea that the air took away. It was also a note about that man.

I was around the lake almost every day. I was trying a wide-angle lens that I bought online and had no practice in its use. As well as another Macro lens that I found very useful to take pictures about insects and plants or small objects. I could take details about the bark of trees. Overall, photos that I found interesting.

Minor and beautiful mushrooms grew in the park. Small flowers and curious animals. I had work for a while.

I did not have meetings with Marcos during that week. I did not even see him in the park and I even thought I would not see him again. As usual. Another trail of smoke lost in the lake.

But I saw him again. I went to the park because I had agreed with some clients that we would meet when I finished my shift, that would be about two in the afternoon of that Tuesday. We were in the early dark months, so I had to make the photos in a hurry if I wanted to take advantage of the sunlight.

The sunlight gives me better colors and it avoids the noise in the images. I got to my room, dropped my stuff and took what I thought useful for the photo shoot.

Was about a pregnant with her husban. The rest was the family. It was not difficult to accommodate the details. I took the photos and came back,  when near where I live, or almost on the same block I saw Marcos leaving a house. With his usual slowness, he closed the door of a side hall that surrounded the house and went down the same street that I came.

I stopped, greeted him very cordially and asked him if he lived there. I did not have time to think about what I was asking, I just asked the first thing that occurred to me.

To my astonishment, he pointed to the house from which he was leaving and said,

—There.

I was glad. Then, it was all my mistake. Marcos was not a ... "Homeless." He had where to live. And it was a house that looked comfortable.

I continued my way home thinking:

—What the hell is he looking for around the park?

I realized that the people who frequently saw me in the park, around the lake, with my shabby appearance; because my clothes are the usual, I do not use luxuries of any kind, my hair without trimming, carrying a plastic shopping bag; full of water bottles, in my old junk car, if not by bicycle, with my old work backpack , my tripod's bag, the  camera's faded bag and my other stuff, would not see big difference between Marcos and me.

In truth there was no such difference. And if Marcos lived in that house even if he was rented, it was very possible, not to say sure, that his room was better than mine.

A big tall, thin man who was walked around our block. That he no doubt had an illness that made his lips tremble; may be Parkinson's, I think a disease called that has a similar symptomatology.

The fact is that this gentleman, whom I always saw walking laden with jabas and even provoked me the idea that it was something silly, on one occasion when we stumbled, he invited me to enter in a house that was like a mansion and told that was his house.

He called his wife, we had a pleasant conversation, and I rectified my belief that the guy was a  street man , and if he had succeeded in getting that house as well as maintaining it, he was not fool at all in any manner.

Horacio said: We are deceived by the appearance of truth.

One of my favorite entertainments when I'm not inventing and designing algorithms that speed my methods to produce money is to read phrases from celebrities.

I learned that Rabindranath Tagore said:

You do not see what you are, but its shadow.

Also,  Charles Louis de Secondat, Lord de la Brède and Baron de Montesquieu or in simple name; Montesquieu said: I have always observed that to succeed in life you have to be understood, but to appear like a fool.

Ovid: Men do well with a sloppy look.

Charles Churchill, however, said:

Strive to keep up appearances, that the world will give you credit for everything else.

And we go back.

Charles Dickens argued that: Great men are seldom excessively scrupulous in the arrangement of their attire.

Phrases I like to reason and think about. I find contradictions and agreements, but the important thing is to think one's own point of view. To structure models for my thinking.

Ideas to introduce myself in society with which I have no choice but to mix myself if I want to advance my life, my work, my projects. I've taken a lot of time in that and I never stop learning.

I have photos with which I only express ideas, others with which I want to get closer to details, others of my city, other photos that speak of the past besides the ones that I do for sale and the small ordinary projects, but what I consider the success of my Work is when I manage to tell a story with a sequence of photos. When I achieve that  those whom look at it, they could experience a feeling.

The word  "sequence" is not correctly used, if you analyze what that means in the photograph, I should say better: "tell a story with a group of photos", as I suppose I counted part of my daughter's childhood, when I had her by my side. Her pranks, costumes, games and the main thing: her feelings.

I have a very simple picture that I like to see and remember about when my daughter was small.

I think this photo was titled: "Love and innocence". Although I sold the above photo to one of the sites where I publish my work, that was no the real goal.

The polyglot lady who was wandering and living in a bus stop, I had the idea of taking a picture while she slept huddled in her rags. I thought about that photo all winter. Every time I folded her corner and saw her wrapped in her bedspreads.

I wanted to name the photo: "Once upon a time in America", like a film that I liked very much, the one I saw in my youth.

I never took it. It happened to me at that time as it was happening with Marcos. It hurt to me that photo. I was not going to take it without her consent and I would not ask for her approval either. So, I would not do it. I did not.

About my current idea:

The initial project I conceived, would consist of only three or four silhouettes, so I would not need what we called "Model release", that is, the authorization of the model to publish the photo, but in reality I was not going to publish it ; I would keep it for me.

If it was the sketch, the silhouette or any other plan, it was already almost ruled out and if it was what always happens to me, that is, I place myself in the life of my characters, for that, it was necessary to rectify my concept about Marcos or leave the Empty space. I really did not care anymore.

The inspiration escaped from me, and left me no choice but to give up. Leave the segment unused. A hollow without content, without idea, like another trail of smoke, but instead I was glad.

The smoke escaped from the tube of colors, from the jumble of forms, pigments and shades that fortunately did not have, if we looked at it well.

I compare my work in general with a kaleidoscope. To this tube is given turns and appear alternate colors, figures, nuances. When I open any of my forgotten photo folders, there are innumerable feelings, propositions, allusions, besides what I said before.

My opinion or point of view from which I thought to tell, had been grounded in the appearance of that man, in his seeming, but it was not the truth. About Marcos I could make up a story if I wanted to sell the pictures, but I was not interested. I do not think that I decide to lie and less with things like this.

Anyway, I always knew that I could be completely wrong. Better, not completely. There was no doubt about his inner struggle and his grief. About one thing: some tremendous and fatal event had happened to him; neither doubt regarding that. The mistake was that I had confused him with the walking homeless beings who was already familiar to me.

If I avoided the confidence, I could take things like someone who has a bad time, and the photo I had made could say the same thing. It was a variant. The project was synthesized in that, but there were words in between.

A note came when I least expected it. I went to the park on my bike, one Friday that I could finish early and decided to go to the lake to entertain myself. I took my digital machine gun or as I call it: "my abstract palette", a bottle of water and walked out without even riding my two wheels.

I arranged my things so that I could ride and almost did when I realized that I was in front of the house that I had seen Marcos to leave.

I stopped my hurry and stood for a moment watching the house. A very handsome and well-dressed young man came out from the side aisle and, without giving me time to talk, he got into a car. An expensive car, something common in my city.

If we are going to have a car, it has to be an expensive and new car. Whether it works well or not is less important. The main thing is that it has to be beautiful, new and pricey. It is not a car that could transports us what we want, that takes us and brings us; No, that is not the sense. Nor is it to stop us in considering whether we can afford that luxury, if our income of money allows it. That will be resolved later. Oh!, another thing, it has to be solved without giving the minnor occasion to affect the costumes, that is, our look and personal appearance.

We can diet, eliminate things and superfluous tastes and make some trapdoor, any little trick.

Do whatever is necessary to live and to do like others; "If you are in Rome, behave like the Romans."

I did not have time to speak to the elegant young man, but two houses later I found a woman sweeping her sidewalk and asked her concerning Marcos. I thought a neighbor so close should know about him.

The woman was thoughtful.

—Marcos, Marcos. No, I do not know him.

Then I pointed to the house and said,

—I think he lives over there.—and I described him.

Then she said:

—Oh, the photographer's father, yes, but he does not really live there.

I remained silent for a moment and the woman continued:

—"It's criminal." Criminal, sinic and I do not add other things because I do not know you. The real owners of that house were them; The old man and the son, the photographer boy who shot himself.

My perplexity must have been noted, because the woman, holding my hand, spoke piously:

—Forgive me, son, I do not even know who you are.

I hurried to introduce myself and half numbed by my stupefaction, I said my name, I clarified that he lived in the block when turning, that I saw Marcos leave the house that indicated to him but that by where he saw it very often was by the park, By the lake, that he had come to think that he was living there, that he was homeless.

—Well, you thought right about him, he has no home, they threw him out from his house.

My bewilderment had to be flashy.

—I am Maria, count on me the day you try to help that poor devil. Come, let's talk for a moment.

She made me to enter her garden, which was well fenced, we settled in both chairs and she began to straighten some plants that touched her knees.

I stopped to watch, to look at the woman I was talking with. Her face was excessively made up, but she was not ugly. She was not an old woman, really. Her hair complicated her curly shape and was covered by a black handkerchief. His lips were painted with little care, and his green eyes were the caricature of what were beautiful eyes. She managed her terms without giving the impression of who intended to gossip. Her mouth vibrated nervously with elusive slips that harmonized to say:

—They threw the old man out from the house, from his house. Before the young man died, she had managed to leave him adrift.

I asked her who she was talking about when she referred to her.

—The blonde—she deciphered as she straightened and settled into her chair.

—She's to blame, she is the guilty. You know that under this sky nothing is hidden and I know that she and her litigation ended up causing suicide.

I did not inquire about who had committed suicide, I already knew. I was calming a barrel of shrapnel in my brain, with the spark at less than a foot. I wanted to go to that one damn place to the house from where I had seen Marcos going out and to clarify to myself what kind of muddle mess that was.

Maria said that Marcos had a son about thirty or thirty-five, who was a photographer and worked for some magazine and newspaper. That he was a man who was passionate about his work and he lived attending to his father, taking care of him.

But, nothing is perfect; He seemed to suffer from an addiction: women and something else. Something that made him crazy and sometimes manic and insomniac. She watched him walk down the street at dawn with his camera in hand and talking to himself, like a damn.

I laughed to myself, thinking that she probably would have seen me, too, in an identical way, circling the hamlet at the same time and discussing how could I better portray something.

As for the other addiction, I also suffer it. But something else besides his passions took the photographer to end his life.

Marcos always looked the same was; as a crazy, a vagabond and he was not. Marcos was a good man. He liked serving others. According to Maria, he arranged his garden many times without charging her. She offered him coffee.

—He loved it!.

He adored his son. He admired him, he gave him everything he could give, even passed the house to his name. But Rene, who was the name of the photographer, fell in love with one of the many whores with whom he became embroiled, and she forced him to take it out of his own home.

—René also gave him things.— Maria went on, pulling up or rolling up her shorts. Maybe too short. I had the prosaic idea that she wanted me to look at his thighs, which were not bad at all. A delicate and appetizingly white and shaved skin.

—He gave him a car, which did not last long. Maros is epileptic.—she said, leaning back over the plant and I realized that the intention was not the plants. Despite her age, her breasts were round and firm.

Maria checked her flowers and suddenly pulled her tight blouse down to expand the field of vision.

I kept quiet. It is delightful to be silent looking at a woman who offers herself. Maria was my age, apparently, but she used to call me, “son”. She was pulling her blouse down and showed the top of her sturdy, solid breasts.

The talk was pleasant, but I had things to do. I gave my explanations to Maria and I I agreed with her to return. I asked if she liked the wine, if she liked that I brought a bottle to share it while we talked.

She blushed and with a mischievous smile:

—It should be while my husband works." When you see the parking lot like now, do not  could be parked a silver BMW.

But she vindicated herself ashamed:

—My husband hates all those matters that are not our business." No, he could not be here.

She gave me her number and I left.

The park became insipid to me. I had it riddled. There was no place anymore, or anything that would have gone unnoticed. I got into the habit of walking. I was going by the lake, there was always something new and I was walking down my block.

I called my friend and I brought the wine. We drank a portion, we talked a little. It was early, about ten or ten and something in the morning. Maria was restless and I retired quickly, leaving the bottle. I told her we would finish it later, but we did not finish it.

In another confluence, although we exchanged words, she believed that I had gone only to inquire about Marcos. And he shortened the meeting.

She explained that she had lived there for more than fifteen years, and when she bought that house, Marcos already had his own. Then his son came to live with him and then brought the blonde, after bringing four or five sluts that did not stay long.

She never sympathized with the poor old man, who in three or four months was already walked the street, as if he were an indigent.

Maria watched them chat in the parking lot in the mornings. René looked embarrassed, gave him money and then, Marcos was leaving. "I do not know where," "I called him occasionally and gave him some coffee." René went to work and the "prostitute" stayed in their rooms to sleep and receive friends who came to comfort her melancholy.

—But the pain of René was not for this, but for his father. The shot was given by remorse. I can not imagine how, but at last the house was fucked up, was tricked up. The "cute girl" is the owner.

Suffocated, she added:

—He shot himself. I could not say if he deserved it.

The woman said so and wiped the sweat from her face, still without makeup. She stood up as if to say that the interview was over.

I said some kind words to say goodbye and I went on my way aimlessly, but it occurred to me that I could visit the... "cute girl" and after checking that Maria had stayed inside, I rang the bell of the other house.

What the hell! I wanted to see her! I would not leave to see the cause of the cataclysm. I thought the bottle could have been useful. At least take and have it in my backpack.

I rang the bell three or four times. The "sleeping beauty" opened its door and a wave of fragrance of woman rushed from inside as if emanated in jets. A provocative and insinuating breath was shuffled with the brightness of the morning that was on my back and surely caused a contrasting effect on my face.

She was a young woman. I calculated it twenty-eight or thirty years. She looked at me seriously and curiously. I detailed her too much, it can be. She was really beautiful and her voice reminded me of the December bells and the crystals on the lake.

She placed a hand under her chin as if to say:

—"Well, what the hell do you want?"

Some men, we have the defect of letting us to be overwhelmed by female beauty. It annihilates our intelligence. As if that were not enough, a slot in the bedding she had putted on her emanating body, showed two legs that the devil must have carried in his carry-on baggage when he was assigned the management of hell.

I explained that I was looking for Marcos. That I needed to see him for... I do not know what folly I had within my reach to say.

She lowered her hand and put it on the door frame, as if to close it.

—I do not know who you are talking about, I do not know Marcos at all, and much less here in my house.

She lit up with the smile that the executioner had made when asking to the condemned man:

—"Would you be so kind to let me reach that hygienic saw to saw off your neck, please?"

Then, with the same fraternal gesture and like singing:

—"Thank you!

So, she said:

—Goodbye!— and closed the door in my nose.

That afternoon, when the dusk was already dropping its spots like black snow, I went through the park. I wanted to see my friend. I did not think about the project or the photos, I thought I'd  something to say to him. Somehow, to let him to know I wanted to help him.

But I did not see him. I walked by the park benches, by the log, by the boats, by the places where we were from time to time. Without any result, I could not find him.

I spent almost three hours in the park. I used one of the soda machines to quench my thirst, because I had not brought water. I went by the sports grounds, by a large shed where people sometimes sit. Wherever the solitary walker might be, but nothing, I could not find it.

About nine or ten at night, it began to rain. An icy rain that began when I was in the part of the park where there is another cabin. Close to the tree's log. Not too close, but I knew the log was on the other side, behind the trees risingin front of the small building.

I sat down and waited for the rain to subside, to go without getting too wet on my way home. Next day I had to start in my job at six in the morning to work and when I started at that time I would get up at about four-thirty to clean and dress calmly.

That's when I saw him. When I saw the distant silhouette of the head down. He was walking inside the water. I stood up startled and rubbed my eyes to make sure. I stared at the shadow, as the figure penetrates the lake, impassive as if walking through the queen's gardens.

I could not be sure he was Marcos, But it seemed to me. I took, migh be, too long to decide to run to him. I screamed at first, once, twice, three times. There was no one else around. I grabbed my phone and thought to dial and ask for help, but it would take me a long time.

I darted myself towards the dark figure that was already distant and interned in the waters that I supposed deep. I shouted at him many other times, when I was closer.

But I no longer saw him, he sank or disappeared or I can not explain where the fuck he went the trace of man that was lost in the quicksand, in those murky and shifting waters.

In the following days, I crossed the park, explored the lake from top to bottom, I asked park workers for something transcendent that had happened. I figured that if it was as I imagined they would discover the corpse floating. But no, I could only hear about a woman to whom was shot in the park and other common things.

Sometimes, I took the street and repaired carefully in the related houses, but I could not even see Maria or contact her and after calling her and trying to talk without answering me, I did not call anymore and erased the phone.

I do not just adapt my mind and that's it. They are daily, normal, ordinary things that happen every day. People are like the crystals of the lake; Appear, shine and disappear. They come and go.

The people whom we see no more,  it is just that, events that crumble, volatilize in the human mass that delights with its internal combats, struggles and contradictions, nothing to be alarmed for, neither to worry about.

Life goes on and we can not be aware about everything that takes away the blizzard.

Even It will take myself away  any day and God grant that no news concerning to be left that can sadden my daughter.

About Marcos, I never knew anything that would reaffirm or deny what I saw. He got lost and did not leave a trail either in the wind or in the water, nor even the smoke trail.

The lake swallowed him.

Chapter 5: Transference.

   

       

     "And even if I were a misdirected beast, unable to comprehend the world around me, there was a sense in my senseless life, something inside me answered, I was receiving calls from distant higher  worlds, in my brain had been excited a thousand images.”  

   Hermann Hesse.

     Traducir al español. (Original)

       The original version with all images could be read and purchased at:

       richardguerrabooks.info .

—It was taken away by the tornado—I thought, seeing that there was barely the sand and the edge of sea that became hard and bluing as it approached to the horizon.

I had my clothes, three or four dollars, my camera and my banger. Nothing had happened; it had only swallowed a part of the coast, with its palm trees, some old trunks, my discolored kayak and some other imprecise thing.

What a shame! My Kayak served me to enter the sea and enjoy the spell that causes in me its odor, the breath of the ocean. That intoxicating and captivating effluvium that hydrates nourishes and spices the wit.

Then, I could return. So, I lay down on the fluffy awn I had left and I got slept without thinking.

It is possible to live without thinking, I've heard. And I say that ... It is possible to sleep without thinking.

I slept peacefully for a few hours.

When I awoke, I looked without startling that the tornado before leaving definitely, it had taken another part of the beach, but that was not transcendent, my car and the few things that remained of the first usurpation, were where I left before I immersed myself in the narcosis.

My redoubt seemed unalterable, and if it was not, I did not care. Except for my camera, that was next to my head and my car to return, the rest was unimportant. It was time to go. With total and pleasant abandonment I placed myself in front of the steering wheel and undertook the return to my periodicities.

On the way back I looked at my city.

First, the beach; the part of the city I prefer; with its striking landscapes and idyllic places.

If it were not that, to be honest, I know that nothing really matters to me; I would say that the beach matters to me. I am glad to bivouac in its surroundings and periphery. To stay until the sun submerges, watch the last rays sink and lose the waves in the stillness of the sunset.

I did not stop to take pictures; I already had some, some for sale, and some for me. That’s enough.

So, I saw the beach go out in the distance.

Then emerged what is the city's downtown, with its steep buildings, towers of dreams. What is in itself, my prism of head, the populous pendulum; which would cost some difficulty that any tornado or cataclysm could engulf. Although, of course, not that much as in the case of trying to absorb every financial, legal, fictional, passionate, and many other kinds of entanglements and machinations that come and go within it.

But, this is not important either. I drove calmly and returned to my place. I slipped into my hole and went me back to sleep.

I let myself roll to the ravine of unconsciousness without leaving even a truth to hold, an angle in which I could put a safe idea.

I had heroic dreams, where I saved people who were going to be swallowed and disappeared in the same way that the coast disappeared, but luckily they were only dreams. I could not in any way see myself involved in other people's affairs. If they were swallowed, disappeared, exterminated or something like that, were only their business.

Meddling into other people's issues never brought good results. It is extremely healthy to preserve discretion and respect for individuality.

It might seem selfish, but it is not selfish. Selfishness is not thinking about others, but before thinking about others, we have to think about ourselves. To take care of our affairs and our integrity, for which it is fatal to be considered meddlers.

In fact, it was curious how the placid slope where I used to rest had simply disappeared. It was like the mouth of a small river or channel that I had discovered and I loved to go there.

I watched the seagulls as they lay quiet and confident. It gave me a view of the distant city. The air was clear, fresh, without the harshness of the sea’s wind; the one that was too violent and shook my memories with outbursts.

It revolved the enduring ones, the impossible to erase.

Luckily I had kept some photos, not from my place, but from its surroundings. My corner was not to remember what interested to me. Was it worth remembering? Did that make any sense?

Before, I liked to remember, to see me when I was another. When I lived in my country, in my humble village and fraternized with my friends. I think life mattered. Some things were true.

I had with me my daughter, my wife and also my economic calamities, my dilemmas to survive.

But I cannot allow my thoughts to roam with debauchery to go back and forth. It is not productive. Therefore, any evocation, mention, or memory of the past does not mean anything. They are reminiscences devoid of practical meaning.

Our living cells and neurons available to store data, assimilate changes, and implement algorithms designed to produce cash cannot be used lightly. No sentimentality. I already lost a lot of time. I have to go fast. If we stop to think, we can lose the exact moment to be in the exact place, doing or proceeding in the exact way we should proceeding.

We have to be ready; by other hand, no philanthropies, each one to the own business. It was also utilized too long before.

To live focused on our goals, with moderation, without excesses and with the new skill to stop feelings at the slightest sign; Click and follow. Time is money.

Shakespeare said it concisely: To be or not to be, that is the question. It's that simple. Emotions hinder the correct execution of projects. 

Years ago, when leaving my town, thrilled by the fact of leaving my daughter, I was separating from her until I did not know when, when I boarded the car that would take me to the airport, I had to tell the friend who was transporting me:

—Let me talk. Do not pay attention to what I say, just let me talk.

It was two in the midnight and I was talking the first thing that came to my mind during the whole trip. Almost for three hours I did not stop talking. My eyes was gushing I do not know if blood, sweat or tears, would pouring a liquid , a salty and painful liquid that began to sprout the moment I kissed my daughter while she slept, unaware that her father was away from her, perhaps forever.

Luckily it was has not been like that, I'm going to see her every year, so that memory also makes no sense. I think that the combination of effects due to emotions can make us to fail.

The day I discovered my corner at the beach, the first time I sat under its trees, I traced on one of them, in its bark, her brief name: "Lea." I did it without knowing, that is, without thinking what I was doing and I cast my eyes to the waves, to the luminous silver rays that came down from the magnanimous iris.

Zero disturbances. I was surrounded by a singular and genuine tranquility. I could let myself a moment, nothing to err in sight. There were no dinosaurs or scorpions crawling through the sand, all I had to do was to settle me in and go on, but my armor retained the engraving; the inscription that many times would look again, the footprint like a crack. The sweet gash through which would escape the love I could give.

Over the blue undulations I saw my other life burn. Hours before, the highway drove my tribulations across the gateway. In the semi sphere another light was being born; the substance to which I had to adapt myself.

There, I left my memories, at the other gateway's side and I became what I am, a practical man. Although ... I would avoid further excursions until I made sure that I had enclosed those recollections in the most inaccessible forgetfulness.

But, I did not omit the tours where I could take good photos. I went through the city's downtown. I take buses, for not to worry me about parking, which is difficult in that area and also expensive.

I went in the summer and in the winter, in the dry season and in the rainy season. There were no tornadoes, but the city also changed from time to time, from hour to hour. It changed when the lights gradually began flourished as if it was splashed the cones with watercolors.

It changed under the rain; it changed with the passage of time. It changed with the fog, with the flashes of lightning and thunder, it changed if a rainbow was drawn, changed with the sounds, with the wonderful influence of the moon, with the moving lights of the cars.

It is indescribable how each element is modified, only time remains. Time is the cornerstone on which our material life revolves.

I say "material" because the immaterial part of our existence is independent of time. We think back and forth. On what we call "past" and what we call "future". We have parallel thoughts. We can experience different experiences and conjunctures in unison, at the same time.

When I was younger and writing verses, someone asked to me: "What is poetry for you?

—Poetry is like time— I said, not wanting to give definitions, but I was forced to explain.

—For the common or regular people— I said— poetry is a way of saying, of constructing sentences by ordering words, by measuring metrics, assonances and consonances, using figures and resources. For the most imaginative, poetry is a way to reflect, to paint, to think, to suggest.

For us, who live is this other dimension, poetry is like time; the rail on which the motives should roll and the catharsis of men should happen.

No one asked me, but I told myself in secret:

—Are not you an ordinary person, a normal people? What dimension do you speak about?

With sadness I had to answer to me the only unchanging statement:

No, I'm not a normal being. I am of those like the prince lost in an insignificant planet, who could see a sheep inside a box and not any sheep, but just his sheep, the sheep that he wanted to have, the little prince who loved a flower; with thorns, but a unique flower in the universe.

But ... sorry, the comparison is not valid, it is pure waste.

It would be appropriate to say, "I was not a normal being." I can become ... "normal", if it is that I am no already. It has its advantages. 

I am sometimes interested in the design and implementation of applications. I speak of applications developed in programming languages, C, C ++, C #, Visual Basic, Delphi and other programming languages. I learned the efficacy, speed, and effectiveness of those that have a direct structure, without Loops or repetitions.

I learned the usefulness of the questions: "What do you have?", "What do you want?", Also to see the things of life as black boxes. If they work, you do not need to know how or why. Use them and that's it.

In university, I studied electricity. If we stop to think of what electricity is, in its nature, in the particles and electromagnetic waves that conduct and transmit the energy, in its frequency, power, voltage, its mathematical formulas, laws and other details, can be considered complicated, but If we only see how to use it, the benefits it produces, when, how and why to use it, is nothing but wonderful.

To stop thinking about the whirlwind on the beach, it was useless. In contrast, the constant mutation is interesting, the transformation of the city was undeniably useful, usable. The images changed and changed the ideas expressed and suggested.

From the same place, we could take photos that say or show different things. In the same way, even with the same words, different messages can be extracted.

Every place, every motivation, has a thousand expressions, of subtle suggestions.

After several pilgrimages through the center of the city, having taken photos of many places, I concluded that the beach was more fertile. I always cultivated useful photos, but I was almost determined to return by my bend. 

I felt a feverish longing for its stones, its sandstone, its birds, and it’s calm.

The downtown of the city had its beauty; it was interesting, but not comparable.

In the constructions there was art, beauty, colors, but at the beach there was a secret.

When I was going to my bend I was feeling like I was expecting something. In the timeline, in the infinite and countless series of events that happen like numbers, in the cosmic diagram of lives, two ellipses were to coincide.

We are full of crossroads. I have a belief that these crosses follow us to what the Buddhists call: Nirvana.

But something stopped me. I could not say what. An inexpressible idea made me hesitate.

I entertained myself by taking pictures of other places. Photos in what I did not find any relish at all and would had to gut those images out to see what was pretended.

To appease the thirst to create, to stop or to calm the imagination, can become an arduous work. From simple postures, we can analyze creation, abstraction, imagination or whatever we want to call our power to invent, as a simple recombination of the known. Connect, combine and build based on what has already been seen, understood and mastered.

But that's where the point is. In order to advance, to create and to transcend to the new form, we must go beyond the known. It is not a question of devising once and for all, that is, proceeding suddenly and going to new forms. It would try to gather elements, details, conclusions and direct our speculation looking for different results.

For example, for decades man has explored the universe. It would be incalculable the time, resources and effort used. There have been discoveries, but although there have been multiple possible proof or evidences of extraterrestrial life, man does not find life in a perimeter that is increasingly larger.

The question is: What kind of life does the man seek? When we speak of "life," does this expression encompass or contemplate all the possibilities that this idea expresses? Then, does man seek only the kind of life known by him what conventionally or maybe even scientifically man understands by: "life"?

A question comes to me: How blinds people conceive the colors? But in turn I think of the greatness of men like that genius who composed a wonderful symphony that he could not hear.

The desire that invited me to go by my bend in the beach was not to look for photos or rest as it was before nor was what stopped me the feeling or the doubt of not being able to get the pictures or not to be possible to achieve the desired rest.

It was only an external factor what conditioned my attitude. It was not yet the time. One of the most interesting stories I could tell was about to come.

But, let’s go back to our history.

One free Saturday, I started my archaic running machine and half an hour later was on the beach, walking on its sand, lulled by the swaying of the waves and the birds’ trill. I walked into the water up to my knees and plunged my hands to the bottom to feel the cold soil that the morning tide kept close. In the mornings the tide is usually high, at least where I used to go, but that Saturday the water level was meekly low.

I did not go too far, because when I got into the water, I left my camera in its bag, my tripod and other things I had taken.

So, like if I was walking for my entertainment, I went to my usual post. Things were in place, nothing had changed. There was the coast, my rocks, my palm trees, the old mossy logs, there was not my Kayak but there was something new. In my hidden corner there were two white bundles. Stretched exactly where I used to lie down, they stretched out like two sleeping bags covered in white sheets. One was bigger, almost entirely occupied, and another was deflated by a large percentage of its volume.

I watched carefully, making no noise and cursing the mad birds that screamed in the vicinity. The smaller bundle was stirred with uneasiness and tried to stick to the bigger. I made no sound. The little bundle crawled trying to keep itself attached to the larger bulk.

I bent down and put my camera bag and my things on the sand. I was a few feet away from the two scrawny shapes. I stayed about five minutes or more waiting, I felt the rhythm of my breathing with the waves crashed against the rocks.

I jumped to my feet, as soon as I saw to come out from the small volume, a foot, a small white foot, a tiny little boy's foot rise out from under the sheet.

A huge drop of ice fell on my nerves, where I thought there was nothing, in the space I need to have available, where it is incredible that some parasitic feeling survives my practical approach.

Then I saw how a small hand came out and grabbed hold of the bulky part and then a little head of curly golden hair rose and rushed over the neighboring bundle saying something in a language unknown to me. Was a girl, I could not move, I was frozen.

The larger body shifted and I realized it was someone else. A woman's voice whispered something in that strange language, to which she found no similarity. It was not English, or Spanish, nor French, nor Russian, I do not speak Russian, but I recognize it, I identify its pronunciation. What gibberish was that?

Without noticing my presence, the little girl shook the neighboring mass as urging her to get up. It said something like ... Mam!!

At last she got the demanded attention. Equally without noticing my presence, the woman came out of the sack and clung to the girl. It was a sharp face, very white but somewhat red. With very thin hands he clasped his head and caressed her. It had to be his mother, only a mother caresses like that, in that indefinable way.

She spoke to her in a low voice, something that, besides not understanding, she could not hear clearly. Then they saw me. The woman threw a ... Oh! and tried to pull the sheets over her body.

I was standing motionless, gone from the world, staring unseeingly, motionless as the rocks on the shore, pretending to expel the allegory, deaf, dumb, unable.

She got up decisively and came to me, though unsure, with slow movements, but courageously approached me and said in English full of accent:

    —What are you looking at?

I couldn't answer, could not talk. My senses saw her execute her actions, her movements, but were petrified. I was a stone, a block of ice.

— Do you hear me? — She shouted, but just the same, I heard her distant, in my village, she was my wife and in the sand was my daughter, waiting for the answer.

She approached and stared as my eyes dripped that stupid liquid that characterizes my imbecility, which makes me seem or do not know if I believe that I am a weak being.

Her voice changed. She told me:

—Are you OK?

I woke up.

—Yes, thanks, I'm all right.

I do not think it useful to tell what happened next, that is, how it happened. I'm ashamed to say that my legs folded in the sand, I grabbed the bag from my camera and I could not stop crying.

It was a cretin's cry, the cry of the madman that I must carry inside.

She gently said something like...

—Calm down, what's wrong with you?

I shook my head, but I could not stop.

She went to her sack and came back with a bottle of water. She offered it to me. I drank and regained control. I thanked her, I think more than ten times I said:

—Thanks!

I grabbed my camera’s stinky bag and escaped.

I ran away without knowing if I was fleeing reality or remembrance, but I escaped without direction.

I was rolling by the city, without deciding to go to my car. The parking meter should still have coins. I really did not want to leave. I needed to recover myself.

I entered to McDonald's and I ate something. I calmed down and thought. The separation between my daughter and me, between my wife and me, had been an emergency resource. We were going through difficult times. My pain was natural, but I did not have to torture myself or evidenced it that way.

In addition, philosophically thinking, emerging solutions must be seen as what they are: solutions after all. I did not want to resort to this last variant, but I had no choice.

I was forced to adopt the practical mechanics that had helped me to resist, enduring contingencies, ruptures, losses and limitations.

It was another unidirectional route. I had to continue.

I thought the invaders girls of the bend could be hungry and I decided to bring something. He was recovered. I felt good, it had only been a moment and we all have moments. Buy some sandwiches, some drinks and I came back.

As I approached, I saw the intrusive couple running along the shore. I approached them and greeted as if nothing had happened.

The skinny woman greeted me cheerfully; it seemed she knew me forever. She accepted the sandwich, and called his daughter. They were evidently hungry. They devoured the food.

She told me their names. Her name was Anne, and the little girl’s Kayla. They were Irish. I introduced myself and talked as much as possible. What we were able to understand. They had come to America brought by the girl's father; it was less than a year ago. In Ireland the girl had been diagnosed with a disease that could be cured in the United States, but after two months of them to be here, the father had died in a car accident. They were alone.

Some Church provided them a shelter after having to leave the place that the man had rented, as well as a food stamps card. She had not been able to properly arrange her documents, but she was about to do it.

In short, that was what I could know after a brief conversation where there were many manual signals and exchange of questions, which had to be assisted with suggestive gestures.

I told to her about me, my life in Cuba, my wife and daughter, my trip to the new country. About how much I thought that something like that could happen to my family and my tremendous fear that they would be unprotected.

I assured her that her situation would undoubtedly resolve, that the United States was a country where children were cared for and protected, and she, as a mother, would also be taken into account, something I did not know at the time I came.

I did not ask them why they were in the bend, but she anticipated me, she read my idea.

    — In the place we live, we cannot be all day long, we are not allowed.

I told them that I would share my hiding place with them. Nobody would come here, that it was a quiet and safe place to relax, that I would come more often and we would see each other in the case they returned. Which I did not think was very true, because my work did not give to me a chance.

I asked if they had a phone.

—No— was her answer and I felt annoying about not to bring with me the phone that an agency gave me for free because I was low-income person and it was working perfectly.

I thought there was a way to get a phone from the government; I was surprised that the Church had not been told about this.

I was surprised to see how she again referred to what I was thinking, explaining that in the Church there were several public telephones and that they had already helped her a lot with the shelter, food stamps and the girl's medical appointments. She had not wanted to insist about the phone.

For a long time we talked. We barely understood each other, but what were not understood were were words, ideas flew from one mind to another. Anne read my thoughts.

When I did not decipher something, she quickly explained as she could until things were clear. If I tried to say something that I could not find the way to make myself understood, she said:

—OK, OK, I know—and gave me details that showed that she knew in clear terms what I meant or tried to say.

It was painful that this virtue had not allowed her to foresee the terrible catastrophe that had befallen her in America.

A few days later, I returned, on a Wednesday, about the same time in the morning. I was very happy to find them at the same place, playing on the beach. I was impressed by the intelligence of this woman on respect to make that little girl to believe that nothing serious happened.

After greeting us, exchanging words and giving some things that I had brought them; An inflatable doll for Kayla, one I had intended to use in my photographs, bread, some cans, water in bottles, and biscuits, Anne ran away laughing, went to her sleeping bag, rummaged, and lifted a phone in her hand.

She looked cheerful. It was hard to believe, but it seemed like that. She shouted from afar:

—I knew you would come today!

I was happy too. I told them, feigning a full confidence, which was a proof that everything would be solved.

Although my performance indicating confidence, what I believed it was necessary, the truth was that I saw many loose ends, which I could not think of a way to tie.

On that day I knew that Anne, at dawn, had to carry her little daughter still asleep in her arms, with her other clothes, and go to the bend, which was the quietest spot of the inspected ones, after traveling around dozens of times, to go through hundreds of public places, as well as the entire close margin of the sea.

I knew it was true. My bend was one of the sites, if not the only one peaceful site of the outline.

I had also traveled the area, in search of calm, tranquility, security and tranquility. It was a difficult place to guess.

Before reaching it, there were rocks that seemed impossible to cross, you could think that only was the raw coast with its rocks and reefs, but unexpectedly arose the channel and the bend, where palm trees rose over incredible white sand. A narrow little beach where you could walk out to sea without the water goes rising above your knees.

The transparency of the water allowed to see marine stars, shells, snails and small fish. It was incredible that he had survived that tiny paradise.

The extermination and devastation caused by man on the natural elements and the environment, do not subsist the beauties that nature provides. The city and the world, for the most part, take measures to force people to care for and protect nature, but man's influence on the environment remains fatal.

I accompanied Anne and Kayla to a market in the area where we bought a small shopping cart, which would facilitate the morning task, because the girl fit perfectly in it and she would not have to carry her daughter in her arms.

At the beginning we had doubts about whether would be allowed to them to have it in the place where they slept, but we finally decided that we would try and buy it. It was not expensive, and we could give it back, so it was worth a try. I tried to give them some money, but Anne did not accept it, she said have it for the necessary things.

Anne was grateful and told me that no one had ever had any kind of attention to them before. She insisted me to buy milk or something I needed and that I could buy it with her food stamps card, but obviously I did not accept it.

We returned to our site. The morning was astonishingly beautiful and rested. I was able to know that the following week they would have a first session about I do not know what radiations the girl had to be treated with.

They had transportation that would take them and bring them back, plus the lunch was insured, everything was under control.

We stood under the palm trees, ate something we had bought, while Kayla played and had fun with the inflatable doll I gave her.

She was teaching it to swim, to pronounce words in English, told to the doll about the Cuban that Mama had known and she was telling to the little dummy tenderly that there was nothing to worry about, that the Cuban would help them. It was very funny to hear her alternating her explanations of the pronunciation in English and the other jargon that was her language.

How sweet and difficult it is when someone has confidence in you! And ... how much more difficult is that someone in a child!

We did a summary. First, they had a roof. Second, they had food. Third, they had with what to dress and not get cold. Fourth, treatment would take place. Fifth, they had phones for what might happen. Sixth factor, they had a friend who was willing to help them, I had already given them the number of my cell phone, besides having the

help that until now the church had provided them and they had some money. Well, then, Kayla told the truth to her doll, nothing serious happened.

We laughed and I think this time it was Anne who said like ten times: Thanks!

She stared at me in silence. For a few minutes I heard her heart beating and she must have heard mine. I felt her inquisitive look enter through my cornea, reach my pupil; the one that contracted by the tremendous brilliance of the question, the crystalline one of my eye to project directly the well-focused interpellation on my retina and then of there the question jumped in drops of doubt, fear and supplication to my blood; like a sublime request.

I felt like kissing her, but I just squeezed her hand and said:

—Everything is gonna be fine, trust me!

Anne was not pretty; she was a woman with hard, angular features. His face was the color of the rain when the sun crosses it. It was white, very white and partly reddish. She was not ugly, either. Her body was well formed, though thin. But since I'm not very keen to notice physical peculiarities, other traits might have escaped to me. What made her beautiful was the love to her daughter.

We spent a happy Wednesday, full of emotions and calm, watching the girl play entertaining.

I returned almost nightfall and returned a few days later, another Wednesday. I wanted to know what had happened to the Irish.

I found them, to my satisfaction in my hidden curve. The first radiation session had taken place, but all was well, another day of pleasure, joy and tranquility.

As I was leaving, Anne approached me. I asked her to look at the time on the phone. She looked at the cell phone, stuck to my face and said: 

— It's six o'clock. You're leaving now?

I had collected my things and was arranging them to take them to the car, which was far away. But I let go of my stuff and I looked at the woman who breathed on my face.

Her lips were thick, how had he not noticed them before? They were swollen, moist lips that made me capsize.

The girl was away in her things.

A hell of hooded devils spun across and swaying in rattles with the sound of the drum. The devils' sabbath swallowed us like the whirlwind had swallowed the coast, but now I did not know to remain indifferent.

I felt in my neck the lustful bite of the witch of lust drawing my desire.

She grabbed my fingers.

—Why did you come back? Is this love? —she whispered— nobody loves me before.

The silence walked like a centipede on the rays of the sun that was beginning to set. I looked into her gray eyes and could not answer.

— May I kiss you?—she said.

I could not answer. My jaw trembled like it was fifty degrees below zero. She did not wait for my answer, quickly kissed my trembling lips and ran off. From a distance her voice tangled in the palm trees:

    —Go away!

I did not know if it was love. Loaded with my things to the car, my ideas were spinning. I loved my wife, I adored my daughter. Time in solitude had its influence. I stopped for a moment and a Machiavellian idea flowed without giving me an opportunity to think.

I went back to where they were preparing to leave.

—Anne, just wait for me here, all right? I need you to have all your things ready, when I return. OK?

She nodded. I ran to my car, which miraculously was in its place, because the parking meter had already exhausted the coins.

I got into my car and cleaned it up a bit. My car is a clear expression of what has become the abandonment to which I have consecrated. I went back. I drove to the nearest passable spot to where they were. Without even knowing if I could park there, I left my car and went to look for them. I asked them to come up.

Anne was giggling madcap.

—What are we gonna do?

—Let's go, let's go, quickly, please.

That was how I allowed myself something that I had not dreamed of allowing myself. We went to a hotel. Anne called the place where they slept and explained. She said a justifiable lie, though anything could justify the fever that woman spilled into my life.

I do not know if love can be divided, I believe that true love is indivisible, but if it was not love, something similar circulated and shone making our existences shareable.

We had a frenzied, devilish, redundant sex, but the most important thing was the words. We do not sleep, we talk until dawn. With words, with signs, through the curious telepathy of Anne, but we speak until the weariness.

We speak about our lights and our shadows, about the suns and the moons lived, of life and of death, we speak until we believed each other.

I was able to know that her husband was an American citizen, an older man, in a relatively comfortable position. Anne believed that he never really loved her, that her daughter and perhaps even herself, had been an accident and a love affair to him.

After her daughter being consulted by the doctors, it became clear that coming to the United States was the only and possible way, within the reach of the woman, that the girl could overcome her illness; otherwise she would never have come to America.

Her indefatigable insistence practically forced the father to decide to bring them. She had to contribute with the amount of the trip, which meant using almost all her resources. She said that he washed his hands of other responsibilities that he really should not, but anyway, she did not blame him.

I think I remember the name of illness. If my memory does not betray me it was Hodgkin's lymphoma.

I told Anne about my opinion that the man had not done it in the worst way, that in the end he could have eluded many of the things he ultimately assumed.

—That he could have eluded? — Anne said in astonishment.

—I mean, legally— I clarified.

But, for her, only real responsibilities mattered, just as much for me. But in today's life, there are different ways of understanding what these "real responsibilities" are.

I explained to her that I  legal matters was not very known by me, that I was not clear on how it might have been, but that if I even knew cases of fathers and even mothers,  who might act differently.

I explained to her that I  legal matters was not very known by me, that I was not clear on how it might have been, but that if I even knew cases of fathers and even mothers,  who might act differently.

—I know, after telling me what you told me about your family, daughter and your trip, now—she said at last—I understand your feelings, I know you do not think in that way.

I knew her age. Anne was 29, the age my wife had when we first met. When I believed that my God gave me my definitive companion woman. Kayla was eight, the age of my daughter, the time and its marks.

Anne read my thoughts again.

—I know, after telling me what you told me about your family, daughter and your trip, now—she said at last—I understand your feelings, I know you do not think in that way.

The sun was cropping out. A round and orange sphere glinted over the sea, rolling over the waves.

The devils thundered again. The confused shuffle threw us to the ground and we became entangled over in a satanic sex.

I have no words to say what happened next; would be a shallow paraphrase.

And there came the calm. We talk again, new stuff.

I started the dialogue. I told her about the years I like to talk about, the university, my partners, before I started university, when my father died.

In particular, she was impressed when I talked about a story we had studied in a literature class, I think. I told her almost the anecdote in full.

It was a story of the war in Greece, the ancient Greece. A people threatened by a larger and better armed army received a message, full of warnings and intimidations; an ultimatum.

The brave people sent a note with their answer: If...

Anne was delighted with the story. She praised the intelligence and audacity of the Greek people and eulogize my narrative.

We remember the name of the town: Laconia and she continued the colloquium.

— Even though I also like to be laconic sometimes, today I won’t; I'll talk enough.—she said.

She told me that in Ireland the girls studied in unisex schools, that she had been had her first love affair at seventeen, that she was not sure what love was, nor that did she even feel it for someone other than her daughter or her parents.

I asked her if she had not loved Kayla's father.

—The relationship with Robert, though it was exciting at the beginning, could not be love. It had a good result; my daughter, but there was no love between us, if the love is what people say.

I wanted to know why she had decided to have her daughter with a man she was not sure she loved.

—I told you, first it was emotional, sweet, interesting, promising and about the girl, I had even thought to get pregnant artificially. I wanted a daughter.

I understood why she did not blame Robert.

She talked about her parents, her friends, her work. She worked, like me, in a store, where clothes and other things were sold.

I realized that I was thinking again. Things became difficult for me again. The practical man was ruined.

I was hearing her and I was thinking. I thought about how roads intersect. How God designs our lives, lets us prove who we are, evaluate our ideas.

I was thinking about what people could look for. Just as man found the atom, the electron, the black holes in the universe; Man could search within himself, within what makes us the same and different, in the unknown zone where our lives coincide and repeat themselves like mathematical series.

Men could devise patterns for different characters to reach their goal. Being happy could be considered the great achievement of every rational being, but its complexity is not equal to differential, integral calculus, the exponential and logarithmic equations or fuzzy mathematics.

It is necessary to look for new ways - I reflected - focus and direct the telescopes towards the metagalaxy of the human spirit and behavior.

We are like lost stars in the universe of life. Would man be able to model systems that allow our ellipses to pass smoothly?

Anne paused.

— Are you hearing me?

I smiled ashamed. I stroked her hand, but I lied.

-Yes, I am.

I told her that after we left the hotel, we were going to eat something somewhere nearby, she to be ready first and then wake up the girl. 

She stopped in front of the mirror and put on her makeup. On her face, her thin body, her hands and beautiful legs,

Anne constantly loaded with her makeup instruments. She told me as always, when they had to come back, she looked among her things on the sand, a special little box where she kept her brushes, crayons and other products she used, grains of sand were sticking to her creams, which annoyed her and make her wasted time.

She looked like a big girl, not even very big. It was less than my height, which is one meter and seventy. Her hair was blond and very delicate.

She said she brought few things with her.

She got dressed in a very short, half-squeezed skirt that she pulled from somewhere, and although I liked it, I told her that it was not usual and that she preferred to wear the jeans I had seen before.

— Are you kidding?  But well, if that's what you want, I will.

We went to a Latin food restaurant. We ate a lot. I took them to the place where they slept. I met the person in charge of the place, a lady of about seventy, whose face moved continuously like if saying "yes."

It was a funereal-looking condo, but for Anne, it had been like the spring.

The woman chatted with me for a little, her name was Gretta. She told me that she had made arrangements to rent a separate room to the Irish, which until now slept in a room designed for building’s maintenance.

I commented that rents over there were expensive, but she clarified that the government had plans that were not costly and that she would take them to an agency where they would provide them with cash.

I said that I lived in an extremely small room, but in case of not solving about their room; we would see what to do or reconsider it.

The woman looked at Anne seriously. She looked at me and takes a glance to my old car. I understood.

The lady specified that such aids were applicable to single mothers in general and that it was a point in her account maintain the status of widow of an American citizen.—But still—said the old woman —would you live with him?

Anne looked through the question and through me, like if I were the one that should respond.

Days went by without seeing us. Kayla had another appointment with the doctors. They gave her more radiations. We talked daily by the phone. The rent was achieved. They were on the way a day care for the girl and a job for Anne, who already got a work permit. Paths were opening.

I went to see them and to congratulate them because of the successes. I wanted to take them back to the restaurant where we had gone. I arrived at almost five. I rang the doorbell and dialed the apartment. They already had their apartment.

Anne came down to meet me and I was speechless in wonder. She had shaved her head. She had peeled her hair, her beautiful, blond, fine and bright hair.

—What's that? What did you do? "I asked.

—Come in, come in, I'll explain. 

And my astonishment reached its limit when I saw already in the room that she had shaved the head of the little girl. She had stripped the little girl of her cute, curly golden hair.

—But, what the hell is this? —were my words; the words later I would have wanted to erase.

Anne explained to me, when we were alone, that in the clinic had been told to her that the radiation would cause hair loss. That would be gradual, but inevitable.

Anne and Kayla wanted to join the city, where many women use shaving as fashion. I would not notice the effect. They shaved their head. Coupled with the fashion of the city where they lived.

—Why does not Richard shave his head too? — Kayla asked, intrigued.

— Because I am like Samson, if I cut my hair I lose my powers.

Kayla looked at me thoughtfully.

—Yes, I know. I knew that all this; all we have now is because of your power. It has to be due to someone's power.

I felt love in her words, the innocent tenderness of the children and also a tremendous intelligence that was making her mother to believe that it was she who dominated and manipulated the situation.

— Richard, do you know what a tornado is? — said the girl— it’s like a hurricane, it rips things off. A tornado took my hair off, but things return to their place, my hair will come back again, you will see.

I nodded. I said "yes", with a simple gesture and biting my lips, tongue and memories that came back, without being asked.

— Yes, Kayla, everything will return to its place again, but it is God’s power, not mine.

I looked at the mother, whose eyes now were the ones that were spilling the liquid that makes me believe and disbelieve.

There is much more to detail.

The story with the Irish did not end there, there are other things to say, but I do not like long narratives.

Despite the transient metamorphosis, I have to be a practical man, know just how to click and go.

Anne did not adapt to living in the United States. She told me wonders about Ireland, she told me of the kindness of her parents, of cheap rents, of my possibility of getting a better job than I had. She made hundreds of innuendoes, but I traveling to Ireland was out of analysis.

Kayla and her mother returned to their home country after their illness was resolved. I think they have to go back to America, but I do not know the details. My effective, utilitarian and pragmatic proceed had to be resumed.

But, I left an unintended cleft.

Days before they left, after meeting us countless times, I gave to Gretta a note. I asked her to give it to Anne at the time of farewell, when she would be going to say goodbye.

I explained to Anne many things, assured her many others stuff, apologized and asked to her what I think it is not necessary to say. 

After they left, I went to the condominium, I saw the manager. She seized me with emotion tears and gave me the answer.

I redesigned algorithms in which my practices and usual skills had gone to the hell. The black box method, usable and reusable instances was not applicable. I could not determine what he had or what I wanted.

Anne is fine; she works again in another shop of products and cosmetics. She lives with her parents, who are happy about the miracle.

Kayla has her golden hair again as beautiful as always, she's already thirteen. They call me and they both write to me in their scabrous English.

Any day a tornado will tear me from here and maybe from the world forever. It will not let me go back and it's not to Ireland where I'm going to go.

Sometimes when I receive their letters the fissure inevitably opens. I think about them in our lair on the beach, in the whirlwind that transferred the environment of my bliss to the dimension in which I believe to live and in what followed; the fortuitous transference of what is left of human being in me.

I reread the answer she left me with the old lady. Perhaps Anne also divined my idea that even with the same words, different messages can be said.

  I look at the sheet of paper where only one word appears:

—If ..

Chapter 6: Devil's earth.

The original version with all images could be read and purchased at:

       richardguerrabooks.info .

Traducir al Español. (Original)

— Still remains the ghost of what has already gone and the shadow of what is soon to go—he said, without listening to me, concentrated on the smoke that came out from the earth.

That, he must have said, sentencing "smoke that must go".

—Do you see what's in there? —He said again, pointing to a ruined building rising about a hundred yards away.

—That was the church. Look at it! .There was God in it. That God who people say helps men. There is nothing left. No one here ever believed in that God or any other. They did not believe in anything.

The man spoke without looking at me.

He was a man of about sixty, according to my calculation, with his dark skin, beaten by the sun and time. Undoubtedly he was a man who had walked many roads, looking dismal. His mouth deflected one of its ends as who thinks and later, does not reveal what could wander his judgment.

I had arrived there by pure chance. I stopped to buy water, to put fuel, refill my tank. I stared at that desolate town, where the wind was crawling with a wild sound.

I went into a ramshackle station where this man was, he told me that there was no water bottles. We went out to pump an old well of which at least I could drink water that had a strange taste.

I was just quenched my thirst. In front of the station was a street in which the stones shone, on the other side a rustic place where people seemed to have sometime gathered.

At one of its side was another construction in bare blocks, inside which were tools, bits of tin, nuts and bolts on the floor.

The sun roared, like all the suns of July, drawing things with colors, but that sun was not the one I'm used to seeing.

I sat in the coarse park, shortly the man sat next to me. He stared at the smoke that silently emanated from the earth.

— There's no water— I said— by miracle there is fuel yet.

Then was when he said that there was nothing left, about the ghost and the other things. Anyway, I was not going to fix the world. Also, as circumstances indicated, I should have to be strayed,

I had gone to look for some photos, that is to try to make some pictures of a certain place that someone described like "very picturesque".

I left very early. I drove about fifty miles. I was thinking that it was not smart or economical to look for any photo that was so far away. I noticed that I had run out of gas. I grabbed the first exit I saw to fill the tank.

I needed to get some water, because I had a burning thirst.

—Where are the people here? —I asked.

— Somewhere, over there around.

I looked along that street of white stones. I thought I saw people crossing from side to side, but I realized that it was an illusion, because I'm always full of illusions.

—What else there is here? — I inquired again. My words rolled alone.

The man got up, went to the station. He came back with a newspaper.

—This was the village, the same.

I looked at the newspaper, which was streaked with gray spots. It illustrated a village with moored oxen and old cars, so I noticed the date. Nineteen twenty-one.

—This was almost a century ago! — I teased astonished, thinking that this document could have some value.

I was going to take a picture about it when the man snatched the newspaper from me.

— There is also the cemetery. If you follow the street, you will find the cemetery. It is not the same. It must be empty. The dead already are gone where they had to go. The others do not need to die, they are already dead.

I thought about my cohabitants, those who are close to me. I remembered their empty smiles, their paradoxically cheerful simulations, their false truths, their paths to success; as misleading and deserted as that street of stones.

I was tired. The time I had been driving had left a chill pain in my knees.

I took the camera. I began to walk up the street to stretch my feet, which took some effort. I felt as if that damn smoke had gotten me tangled up to not to let me walk.

After a little bit of walk I looked back. I did not see the man, he possibly have gotten into the cabin again. I walked hearing the dry stones tracheateing, like if a warning came out, like if the steps I was slopping on that path were unearthing a message.

I woke up early. At the time to leave, the steering wheel of my car was frozen. I had to be rubbing my hands for a while before I started driving. I do not usually get up so early in the days I have to rest. Maybe that's why my head was full of foam.

It seemed to me to hear voices, which was illogical, because no one could be seen at least five hundred yards away, I cannot say more distance, because that diameter was all I could see clearly.

The road led to a skeletal forest where the leftovers of the cemetery were, lying in its solitude.

I could not explain why my sensory perceptions announced danger.

Over there was more intense the reverberation of the sounds. I gave no importance to it, but I stopped to listen, where the shouts came from.

Could be people hiding among the rickety trees. I would have liked to have some other dialogue, because although it was not the place that I had been described, it was a singular area that afflicted territory.

The area had everything less than picturesque, but it was curious.

The steam wobbled lethargic, enveloping the echo, intoxicating the atmosphere that liquefied into the clamor.

It was not my weariness, from these ruins came voices, opaque screams that were interwoven with smoke.

I seemed to me I saw a woman crouched at the end of the road and I shouted:

—Hola, Hello!—She only disappeared.

I took out my camera and got a couple of photos, it is a vice, a custom of taking pictures of everything, to tie to my memory anything that may seem flashy. Reality is divided into several levels, I call them dimensions. One of them can be booted from the images that come to us occasionally.

Images, like dreams, reveal secrets if we know to discover them, can help us to interpret life, which seems incomprehensible.

It is hard to understand. We do not know when or why we came or when or to where we leave. The best we can do is try to live without pretensions, without harming anyone, without waiting to receive more than what is given, or better, without expecting anything.

In any case, to be prepared for the end, that can at any time to comes, inexorably.

It is laughable how big we measure ourselves and how little we are.

It would be good to know if small animals really do not know the world or if they consider their self the main axis on which the reasoning revolves.

If they give thanks without thanking, they ask forgiveness for looking delicate, if they triturate their bones, each other, with gallantry, phlegmatically and decently.

I was walking distracted in my recurring philosophy. I crossed with a bird that fled quickly making a ... yeck, yeck, yeck, beating its wings like if detaching from something, seemed to want to shake, to open a gap to get out of that red sun which was beginning to cover its stain with clouds.

I heard the distant whistle of a train, there should have been a railway line somewhere. I walked to where there were no graves, but remains of an abandoned building. There were rails, old lines on the ground. Those evidently could not be the rails from which came the sound I had heard, the Puff, Puff, Puff. It sounded miles away.

The sky had been closed with dusty clouds. Up to them rose the smoke that even there came out of the crossbars, the grass, of the dry land. There was nothing else to see.

I turned back. I crossed back the way. For a stretch I found myself in a tangle of weeds where it could be seen as a piece of road or concrete trail that was lost in a thicket of fallen branches. I could not see beyond. I could not cross, or know where the cement shortcut leaded. It ended in a green impassable rot.

I looked for the way to go forward, to surround, to see that there could be behind that knead of branch and leaves. It was difficult.

Men had done that path, but they did not use it any more.

It is good to know the end of the roads, especially if we think about abandoning them, although it is not always wise to follow a path that it is shown to us as inaccessible.

I bordered the dying vegetation trying to find a route that would let me cross. I tried to make a complicated detour from which I had to give up, I could not follow.

"All roads lead to God," someone said, but I had already been told me that God had gone from that village.

Since childhood I have kept the habit of persevering in my things. I do not give up easily. Always finding options to accomplish what is planned, even when life has taught me that it is not good to be infatuated in carrying out every plan we think.

However, I chose to leave it that way.

Behind the shrubs blocking the passageway, clarity could be seen as a hope. I would not go looking for such an uncertain promise.

Hope is not imaginable at a point that does not suggest hope.

I avoided the complicated route. I passed through the cemetery again, through the crosses and mossy moles that preserved ancient engravings.

I approached and tried to read. It could not read, it was a script in an unknown language. It looked like Eastern cryptography; my fertile fantasy imagined that it could be a dead language.

With my lens for that type of photography, I took one or two photos. The engraving was...

I copied: मेरे पास आओ, जब आप धुआं की तरह हो

I went on, not understanding to what the hell spot I'd been going to.

I took the photos not only to capture the image of the tombstones, but also planned to investigate what the epitaph said.

In spite of the primitive appearance of the sepulchers, the signs protruded, detailed enough to specify the characters.

I made my respective notes. I continued my exploration.

Then, I saw her, like a flash or the sound of a harp in the most absolute silence, that girl was lying in the middle of the tombs that had no color or anything other than the rough texture of the stone.

I saw her looking at me as if she were looking at a specter, but without fear.

—Hi!—I told. She smiled slightly.

It was a different smile, without the brightness of the art, genuine, different from the ones I usually see, normally accompanied by tender expressions, a lyrical gesture of pain with the words: "I'm sorry; I have to slice your neck."

A noble smile I could believe.

The language of men has no words to explain certain things, but I have no doubt that what I felt when I saw that angel on the dead earth could not be explained by any system of communication that might exist.

She stayed like that, folded, kept in my memory, with her faint smile, enigmatic, with her incredible sporting clothes that contrasted with the surrounding murkiness.

I feared it was another illusion, so I came close to being in front of her. I asked her if she spoke Spanish. She nodded, folded her hand holding it on one of her shoulders.

I took my camera. I doubted that I could say exactly what I meant, so, I suggested that I wanted to take a picture about her.

She stood motionless waiting; I took the picture, kept my camera; closed my eyes.

I cannot explain why my dimensions are linked, combined.

I must be in the wrong world; I do not know who I am, due to too much walking I've forgotten where I was going.

I could not go back either, I do not remember where I come from. From what I lived in other former life, where infamous mirages revolved hallucinated by cracking the reason into pieces of glass.

The images are piled up, confused, making me doubt about what real space of the unreality they proceed from and proposing me to merge into the miniature universes that encapsulate.

I opened my eyes. She was there, in the position where I had left her, looking at me in silence.

It seemed to me she expected me to explain, with the calm and naturalness that I no longer believe they exist, seemed to wait.

But I have forgotten how to explain, it is no longer useful or understandable in my world of models.

— I hate who i am— I told my dead.

I have to have lived too many lives, that are why they overlap, mix with each other. I must also have to have died too many deaths.

The air was liquid; it ran avoiding the branches not to move them, to don't discover the stillness subject to a static mantle.

I was going to ask her what she was doing in that sad place, when another bird with the shrill sound; the ... "yeck", "yeck", "yeck", tugged my eyes away with its flight to the sky that had turned gray.

The zigzag bird was lost in those grayish blue stained cumulus.

I've always liked to see the stars of the day. The morning star at dawn or in the sunset, when there is still light and its presence looks implausible.

Over there was Venus, between the fluffy clouds, even in that forgotten nook could be seen, reflecting its radiant truth over the earth.

Was it dusking? It could not been that late. It could not have been passed that much time.

I got down the look. I did not see her.

— My brain is fatigued.

To make sure, I went rounding between those tumulus, the cold stone hulks. I found nothing but smoke, absence, yet I was sure I had seen her.

I looked at my phone; five and forty minutes. Amazing!

Time to go back; time had passed in a surprising way.

One of my friends is an expert researcher specializing in dead languages. I sent to him this message:

“Joe, please, could you tell me which language is this and more or less tell me what it means?”

It took a few minutes. The response was as follows:

“It's an Indian language, it means something like this: ‘Come to me, when you're like smoke.’

From where the hell did you get that?”

“Come to me, when you're like smoke.”

I went down the rocky street to the rough benches were. I found the man at the station dozing in one of them.

He got up. After talking a few irrelevant things, he went to the booth. I thought he was going to bring me another memory of what that settlement without houses or people had been in the past, but what he brought was a beer.

— Miracles happen— I said, pretending calm while the old man pulled out a cigar. He offered me another that I gladly accepted.

I drank anxiously. My thirst had not gone out at all.

— Ease, ease, there's no more! — He said patting my shoulder, just like any ordinary person on the planet.

— I'm sick of seeing mock-ups. — I talked to my dead— I hate the stench of hypocrisy.

I was going to tell him about my pilgrimage, about the girl, about the writings on the tombs, about the strange inscription, but I did not do it.

I told him I had not been able to see a person. He added:

—You saw them, sir; you have to have seen them.

I told him there was only smoke coming off from the ground. I wanted to ask why. He anticipated.

—Smoke, sir, they’re smoke. I was going to follow you, to alert you about not to fall in the swamp, in the shifting sands that are hidden by the thicket.

I thought that man was crazy. That I had ran lucky. I looked at the phone. No signal.

— What I have to do is to go. It has become very late; I cannot explain how the stars are coming out already.

—Time helps, sir, it's the only one that helps us, to end quickly.

I did not say anything, I saw him throw away his empty bottle, to sit down. Say:

— To leave? I do not know if may. Long ago no one was coming. This land of the devil welcomes those who come. Then they leave when they are smoke.

I was looking for where I had left my car, which did not appear. The street was longer than I suspected, as if spinning, going in circles.

The birds that emitted the "yeck", "yeck", "yeck" that was sounding to me dull, crossed me without revealing the way to escape.

I was dizzy, stunned, hallucinating.

I saw crosses, graves with rare inscriptions, coming, going away. I knew they were false, they were mirages, illusions; the girl in the tomb.

—You've always been lost—my dead said.

I wandered around for another hour. I passed by five times where the old man had settled back on the bench.

I was able to find my car. I threw myself in. I ripped it off and shot myself in a sincere escape.

I had to lower the car windows. The interior was filled with smoke. They were the dead who wanted to go with me.

— Crazy shit! — I said, turning on the radio.

That fateful day I was predestined to succumb to dementia. I heard the lyrics of a song from my youth.

“Last thing I remember, I was running for the door 
I had to find the passage back to the place I was before 
— Good night— said the night man— we are programmed to receive 
You can check-out anytime you like, but you can never leave”.

— Damn! — I turned off the music.

I had an instant of reflection in which an idea I came up to me. I stopped.

It occurred to me to check. I took out my camera. I checked the photos taken. In the images saved I found one that verified to me that it had not been a mirage, I had actually seen the girl.

The speedometer marks ninety miles. The endless street goes round again, again, again. It has begun to rain.

If all roads lead to God, He estimated that my conformity should be... diluting me in the rain without knowing the end of this road. Another life piled up, another useless existence.

I watch the big raindrops falling.

I threw out the phone, in case some hiker finds it and it occurs to him to inspect, to see what I recorded before I convert, to rise in spirals.

Chapter 7: Cashier

 ISBN: 9781370018512

Traducir al español. (Original0

In October of two thousand and twelve I was able to return. It had been six long years. It would be cumbersome to explain why. I will say that I was back in the United States that year.

I had no job, no way to generate income that would allow me to support myself. I began an indefatigable search which resulted in me getting a job as a cashier in a supermarket.

My situation did not allow choosing preferences. I already had experience in working in stores, having lived and worked in Michigan, years ago, where I worked in a similar job.

The work in the cash registers of a supermarket is something serious. Not because of the effort itself, but because the interaction with customers, fundamentally, is complex, especially in a city like the one where I had managed to settle; with an influx of people from many parts of the world.

In direct contact with different idiosyncrasies, cultures, mental and educational levels, stereotypes; the devil with twenty hells together.

However, it was an agile job, without giving a chance for boredom. The hours flew. Like suddenly, the day was over. 

At the end, we laughed with sincerity. The smile of the rest of the day was to stretch our lips.

Our boss oriented us regarding our eternal smile, about showing an unconditional smile facing any event, formulating the established questions or statements.

—“Did you find everything you were looking for?" “Can I help you with something else?”

" Thanks! "," The same for you! ", sketching a beautiful smile.

I remembered a humorous play seen in my childhood, in which a director taught his actors to always smile.

It was a scene in which they had to carry a big trunk, but it had to be with joy.

He showed them, with his director's pointer, while jumping happily, how to load the trunk with joy; only that the pointer was ten thousand times thinner and lighter than the trunk that the actors had to carry; represented by three clowns.

—Did you see? With joy, to load the little trunk truncheon—He said while jumping nimbly holding the pointer with one hand and giving his bright smile.

The actors, who could barely carry the trunk, were panting, lifting the weight of the voluminous wood. They could not laugh.

I'm not exaggerating, something like this was happening in our team. It is an exact comparison.

I speak of an exact similarity because in addition to the perennial conflicts, the recesses were delayed, the lunches arrived half an hour later, in such a way that it was difficult to keep the good mood.

However, there were situations that are worth to tell. For example, I remember one occasion when a man of mature age came to my register with an object I had never seen before.

He threw it on the mobile mat and asked:

—What is this?

I took the object with care, I observed it in detail.

— I have no idea.

—Huumm!, what could I use it for? , how could I use it?

I kept silent. He pushed it towards the scanner.

—Check the price, please.

 I scanned the article

—One dollar twenty seven cents.

—Very well I take it.

I could say about many examples.

We listened and we saw all kinds of things. Protests, attempted robberies, robberies already done, bargaining, the cashiers women had to brook love's declarations, indecent proposition and even men had to be careful.

Any girl could turn out to be a man, and vice versa. Any look or misplaced expression was a possible problem.

In the same way there were kind customers, who want to help. They understood the worker's position.

Our store was not a bad place to work. Everyone worked hard. It was also a quiet area and it was very close to home. I got used to live with a modest salary. I rented a tiny room two blocks away. For several months I simply used a bicycle, saving the expenses about the car, the insurance plus the other associated expenses.

It also had another point in favor. It was a simple thing what was required, something easy and mechanic. I came home and I began to write, or to work on my photos, listening audio books; complete tranquility.

My free time was enough to feed and exercise the spirit.

I bought an old guitar. It sounded good. It tuned. It was enough for me.

Although I no longer composed as in my youth, I entertained myself in playing chords and melodies.

My room was less than small, just the necessary thing. Carrying out my subsequent projects, added to the help I always send to my family and my monthly expenses, would require resources. I needed to save as much as was possible. My room was extremely modest, also all my belongings, a modern hermit.

I had no silver cutlery, no decorative pictures, no old sculptures or bronzes, but I had a dream. Isaac Newton conceived the Law of Universal Gravitation under an apple tree. My modest laboratory was sufficient for what I intended to do.

It is not my intention to compare, but to explain that, even when my conditions were humble, my goals were ambitious.

My main plan was to write, publish a book; to share ideas with my fellows; ideas that, in fact, were almost never related to those fellows’ ideas.

My free nights gave me space for work and the meditation. I played my arpeggios in the guitar, thinking.

Sitting in the deaf darkness of the courtyard, I heard the sound flying the bright night, breaking it in notes; to penetrate the domain of the silence.

To make matters better, near my room there was a park with a large lake, animals, trees, wild plants; territory for my photos.

My photographs and my writing are reciprocally supported. They allow me to complete what I want to say, to transmit it without needing to use dozens of inaccurate sentences.

For me these are photos that call, ask or tell a story; stories which propose and urge to illustrate them with photographs, an interlock.

It is not a scholium, it is abbreviated technical clarification of an operational principle.

With the photos, texts, chords and dreams in my pocket, I was going to stand in front of a cash register, dealing with the beasts, eight hours, five days in the week, to supply my survival in its material dimension.

I understood that the presence of "the beasts" was the raison d'être of my work; my economic support and in a large extent, my family's.

There are sorrows that we have to suffer; a challenge learning to adapt, to live with them. Adapting our reactions, accommodate behaviors, measure words. Complete mastery of the conscious and subconscious.

I educated myself I moderated anger. I made friends, among my colleagues and among the customers. I came to love my work. I met people from all parts of the earth. China, Europe, India, of all the countries of Latin America, Canada, Japan, Arabia, Alaska, of countries that did not even know that they existed, of the islands of the Caribbean and other islands that scarcely appear in the maps.

I talked to them. While scanning their products and after asking them the formal questions, I streamlined the process and even made it less boring. I asked them about their countries, I accumulated data that would be useful to me, of course, without stop, working diligently, carefully, joyfully, with a sparkling smile, jubilant loading the trunk.

Four years passed. I did not notice them, they rolled through the cash register mat, and they stuffed themselves into the shopping bags, on my backs, into my hide that was no longer young.

They left without telling me anything. They left forever.

It hurts not to understand what it is that hurts us, to feel that something is missing to do. Seeing that we are late, we do not discover what life expects from us. Which is the north indicated by the compasses.

We can be a resource, a link or a tool. We are all instruments of God. That was my tranquility.

The only thing I had to do was to be fit, available, to let my being be used, at the moment that it would be necessary to let myself to be used and do it well. Then, my pain would disappear.

In my childhood I saw an old man who was dying. He seemed satisfied. His last hours flowed calmly, serenely.

—I did what I had to do— he said.—my function was fulfilled.

I did not know what function he was talking about.

He passed away, life escape from him like the dew from the plants with the rays of the sun, the same way it is going to escape any living being.

I decided to persevere, wait, trust, believe.

Successes, satisfaction and triumph are for those who persevere, trust and believe.

I will clarify before continuing, that my years have been rich in dissimilar curious events. I have taken hold in the belief that every second counts, every door we touch could open; give us a secret, let us germinate in new lands.

But, I see this with realism, the solid part of the magic. I do not let my convictions muddle.

I am not interested in divination, astrology, predictions or paranormal phenomena. I have never visited a chiromancer, I do not believe in occult phenomena, telepathy or forebodings, although I do admit the possibility of undeveloped powers and capabilities in modern man.

I am not an atheist, I believe firmly and indisputably in God, but my idea of God is beyond any explanations.

I remember a text read. Carlos Darwin stated: "In my opinion, this whole matter of the emergence of life and man, is beyond the reach of the human intellect."

I cannot say exactly. "What Darwin actually said" was called the collection of magazines, I'm not sure about the legitimacy or seriousness of the source, nor the date of publication, however if I remember the small booklets that formed the compilation and I believed the publisher was reliable. This phrase has made me think; I consider it a conjunction.

The validity of the comment will be seen.

One night, at the end, when charging a client, his total was $ 11.11. A number, the very strange thing was that the next two, bought a total of $ 11.11, likewise.

My shift was over. I went in search of my car to the parking lot to some place that I did not usually use. My usual place is in the back, where almost all the employees park. I left through one of the front doors following the direction of the right side of the parking lot. I came across a gentleman, I asked him the time; he answered:

—Eleven with eleven minutes.

I got in the car and was going to close the door, the moment someone called me.

—Sir —was the call.

I looked towards the place where the called came from.

I saw a boy approaching with a box in his hands. Nobody was in the parking lot.

The boy approached to me.

—Would you like to buy some chocolates?

I had no answer within my reach. I had no cash with me and it was absolutely inexplicable the presence of that child at such times, selling chocolates.

I remembered that I brought a couple of dollars. I took them out, I handed them to the boy. He started running with his money. Then a girl appeared at the other side of the empty parking lines.

She shouted to him:

—Do we have enough?

—No, Andreé, we have only two dollar and we need five to get the bus.

I called them.

—Hey! Come here.

They came closer.

—Do you speak Spanish? — I asked them. I wanted us to understand well. (I will write in English, but from that moment on, we speak in Spanish.)

They affirmed, looking at each other.

— Can you tell me, what the hell are you doing alone at this time around here?

They got scared.

— Mr. we sell chocolates, but if you do not like them, you return them to us and we will refund your money.

The boy spoke Spanish well, with an accent that denoted that it was not his language.

I smiled, in the middle of my perplexity.

— No kids, it's so strange to see children alone at this time. Even more, doing what you are doing.

—We know, sir—he said again—but we have lost our money and we have to continue on our way.

There are times when we act without thinking, without analyzing what we are doing or what it would be logical to do.

I should have asked them who they were, where they lived, call the rescue services to take care of them. It would have been better thousand variants or actions to take.

I thought about what they asked me for, money.

I gave them that.

The case my bank is close to my work is pure chance. When I opened my account with that bank, it was in another branch and I did not even work in my current job.

Then, when I started in the store, a bank establishment was across the street.

I crossed Coral Way and got forty dollars from my debit account.

When I returned to where I had left them, I had to look for them. They had moved away. I went to them and gave them the money. I argued that it could be better if they called a taxi, but without losing sight of them, I saw them boarding a bus to the east, that is, towards the downtown.

I walked guided by inertia to the stop where they got on the bus. I was thinking. Reflecting on what happened. I imagined my children in a similar case. No, my children would never be in a similar situation.

I arrived at the bus stop. I sat on his waiting bench. It was cold. The shopping area signs flashed their reds, blues, yellows and whites, mixing them with the headlights of the cars in their inexhaustible flow.

I opened one of the chocolates. I chewed them trying my brain to start going.

I found an abandoned backpack. Among other trifles it contained a faded wallet. It must be the boys' property. I grabbed it, I would see them again.

I left. In my city, everything can happen.

The next day, I discussed the matter with my colleagues, who, as expected, were not interest about that.

I had to be mid-morning at the door. It is a position used to greet customers, check receipts, control returns and some other functions.

It is boring, standing for hours waving to those who do not greet and being nice to those who seem to reserve to you the most warlike adversity.

Standing up, with open arms in welcome, with a stupid smile I dismissed those who left and received those who entered, to each one the own treatment:

—Thanks you for shopping in our store! , welcome to our store, how could we help you?

Suddenly I noticed the pictures on the left. It is part of a very noble effort that our company makes to obtain information about missing children. They are not recent disappearances, some have already been rescued, others will never can to be rescued.

I approached. I watched carefully. Two photographs caught my attention. I did not comment.

I got home. I messed up my things. I did not remember where I had put the wallet.

In one of the pockets of my pants, I found it. I found an ID. Mario Sullivan O’Connor that was the name of the boy, the picture was the same as I saw in the store, that's what I imagined.

Browsing the Internet, this link appeared:

"Mario Sullivan O'Connor missing"

They were not common last names. I investigated. According to a page the surname Sullivan came from Ireland, and also had roots in Spain.

The surname O'Connor was, in the same way, of Irish origin, one of the most illustrious surnames of Ireland, coming from at least six Gaelic clans, each with different branches, among them the royal family of Conchobor, the king prehistoric of Ulster.

There should be no connection with these celebrity genetic trees, unless I had been lucky enough to stumble upon two princes lost in time and place. What nonsense!

It was clear that they had disappeared, their photo asking for information about them; it was for that, to investigate their whereabouts.

Another link, however, attracted me.

"Mario Sullivan O'Connor and Andreé Sullivan O'Connor have disappeared from 1991."

Data and details were given. According to the dates, both were eleven years old at that present.

On the Internet there are things of all kinds, I would not recommend paying too much attention to everything that appears on the web, instead, it was a group of related and intriguing aspects.

Winter was beginning. The work in the store was intense, so when we took our breaks, time flew.

One of the mornings, on a Friday, during a break, a co-worker talked about some kids who had tried to scam him. I did not understand from the beginning what the boys' trick consisted of. I heard him say that they were two boys of different sex; due to my previous experience I listened carefully

My colleague, who apart from two penalties that had been placed on him for driving under the influence of alcohol or narcotics and three or four felonies in which he was been involved, was not known any other notation in his police record, unless one or another slight aggression that did not leave dead people; he was a respectable US resident.

He was talking about how the rascals had changed a price and pretended to take an item for the price of another. "They did not know who they were dealing with," he said proudly of himself.

He bragged about his past confrontation with the police, he had told them that if he had to stop driving, he would, that he did not need to.

With arrogance he gave advice to face situations. He clarified the boys' nonsense and laughed with a burlesque rumble of the perplexed faces of those who heard him.

The show was nothing to do with my interest.

I left the break room. I went to the parking lot. I saw the city, sad; it was disappointed of the people. But my feeling was not because of the matter heard about the boys, but for noticing in my comrades, admiration for the speaking personage of the recess room, who warned the reasoning and all feeling similar to invitation to reasoning, to keep out the margin.

I walked given to my musings.

A woman, friend of mine, says that I am an atypical being; that my soul does not fit in my body.

I believe that my soul is one more soul that lives in the ethereal space that we cannot see. The difference is that mine has had to live in solitude for a long time. Being atypical has its disadvantages.

The truth is that I feel my soul rarefied by inactivity. What is not exercised, get atrophies.

It took me a while to realize. If they had seen them by the store, then, they frequented the place, the area. It was less than two weeks after my contact with them.

Although I did not know the cause, the subject of the boys kept me trapped. It would keep me alert. I described them to two or three cashiers in the store and asked them to tell me if they saw the kids.

At home I had the backpack with the threadbare wallet, which was undoubtedly not from any member of the nobility of Ireland or anywhere else on the planet where there was a noble class.

I decided to bring the backpack and have it in my locker in the store where I keep my things. If I could get to contact them, it would be easier.

Arriving at my old car, a friend who also works in the store was parked next to me. He was enjoying abstracted some photos on his phone, the pictures had been sent by I do not know who. He lowered his window. He handed me the cell phone to share the photos with me, photos of a naked woman.

We talked couple of words. I locked myself in my car. I turned on the radio.

I have permanently tuned a station that plays songs of my youth. Then I noticed that something was stuck, it was putted on my windshield. It could not be a fine, because besides that when leaving the house I had not seen anything in my glass, I am extremely careful when driving, to the parking lot do not come police patrols to put fines.

I got off and checked it. It was an envelope.

It was empty. With a written word: “Thanks!”

I imagined there was inside. My friends, they had been there. Apparently, they did not know the city, or rather, the people who live in our city.

Either way, it was a nice, honorable gesture.

I entertained myself watching the mockingbirds, listening to their fluttering, their twittering, their varied trill. I got into my car again. I lowered the window. I listened to the resulting mix by linking the melodies of the radio with the concert of the birds.

I repeat this sequence often, as prophylaxis against stress. I go to the parking lot, I walk, I listen to the birds, what gives me time in my breaks.

In my head rumbled the ... ring, truch, trash, trunk, clip, which I hear at least ten million times in each of my shift.

That arrhythmic rattle of the cash registers, swallowing the deadly sustenance that the troubled world has.

I noticed in the receipt that was in my hands. When I left, I had bought a light snack. I paid with my food stamp card. On the receipt were the numbers: 11.11.

Although other information also appeared, my mind was predisposed to observe this detail.

What the hell did the damned numbers mean?

It is frustrating to believe receiving a message and not understanding it. It is even worst to imagine signs where there are only coincidences, thing which then life shows us in its harsh reality.

With my head resting on the back of my front seat, eyes closed, ears distracted by the sounds, I felt the repetitive numbers going down my neck, on my back, twirl my abdomen, cautiously avoid the hollow of my navel, walking on tiptoe by the belt, jumping to avoid the belt loops of the trousers, running in a hurry by my hairy thighs and legs to mysteriously to hide in my shoes.

Where, later they would take care to tie my feet tightly to don't let me go until my lethargic understanding discovered what had to be discovered.

—Shit!—I shouted, swatting left and right.

I left the car. Walking to my workplace I saw the digits come out of my clothes inside crystalline bubbles exchanging their positions from right to left, from top to bottom like if they no longer wanted to give me any message but only to drive me crazy.

I came across a colleague who asked me the time. I did not even check:

— Eleven o'clock— I said, not understanding why he stayed stared at me dumbfounded.

Ring, truch, trash, trunk, my cash register rang when I stood in front of it, opening its drawer to let me see the eleven bills it contained. I did not count them I had to reconcile with the idea that I had to keep working. Luckily that Friday ended my week and I would have at least one day off. I put on my flashing light to indicate that I needed change and coins.

But that fateful Friday would bring me other surprises.

I changed eleven times from a cash register to another, I went to the bathroom eleven times, for urgency of my bladder and to wet my neck, the hindhead; what refreshes me; It allows me to relieve fatigue.

Apparently someone pointed out to my superiors or maybe they saw for themselves that I frequently interrupted my work, so they called me to the office.

It is not usual in me, in my work what happened. A comment of that kind to my superiors is not favorable to me.

It is remarkable how man is the only living being who is pleased to harm his fellowmen. I have seen worse things. Not long ago I was able to see a story where some people rejoiced to see suffering a person covered by flames whom they blamed for a grievance. Horrendous, inexplicable; the neighbor is pleased with your discomfort or suffering.

But, well, they had not called me to sanction me but to know if I had any mishap.

My bosses know me; they know that I work seriously, the best that is possible for me, so they worried. The supervisor who assisted me has an excellent relationship with me.

I went into the office and after an introductory talk she asked to me:

—What happen?

I did not know how to explain exactly. I talked about my exhaustion, that I was nervous. It was not about anything related to work, but I was altered.

I said I had accumulated time and it could be good to take two days off.

She explained to me that I could join the free days of the week and it would not affect my vacation, which I thought I would use to travel to my country. In addition, the store was very busy and it was difficult to give days off.

I understood. We agreed. I would have the next two days without work and then I would incorporate. Perfect. I said thank you and I retired.

The following days I dedicated them to simple labors at home. Wash my clothes, cleaning, my communications with my family, upload photos to the network, the routine, but some details remained loose.

Domestic work therapy worked. I relaxed I recovered the good mood, however, I do not like to cure with palliatives on the effect, I like to cure the cause; but there are incurable causes.

The result of my meditation on the subject of the boys was to attribute it to fatigue, to the monotony of my life, to the distance of my daughter and others. So ... click and continue.

There was a time when I was in my country; we were in a desperate situation. Our income was minimal for all the expenses of a family.

Although it seems crazy to say, I had the idea of developing an application in C #, the language that was most familiar to me at that time, that would help me to predict, to guess, according to the probabilities, according to the numbers that had recently come out and the It was a long time since they came out, following abstract calculations of fuzzy math, along with millions of other events, the winning numbers, just hitting the hot spots.

It may seem an invention, a lie, but for months it worked. It was hard for me to stop thinking about that riddle that finally brought me lost. I achieved it with a similar pause. So I did this time. I took a breath.

The first day of work after the break, passed in calm. With the annotation that a user, of those with whom I have made friendship, gathered in a small group made certain curious comments.

My work has a characteristic. It does not give rise to personal feelings or appreciations. You're a machine; to greet, process, deliver, bye, bye.

New faces, preconceived expressions, uncertain words, pay the bill and leave, with the exception of nearby neighbors who come daily to buy.

We already know them. The client I mentioned before is one of them. His name is Alberto. He is a Cuban who has lived in the United States for decades; an intelligent, cultured, elderly man, who is fascinated by social gatherings and the lottery.

That day he talked about a miraculous event that guided him to play certain numbers. Success guaranteed. There is no doubt that parapsychology and the human mind are golden tools in the hands of those who know how to appreciate them.

I could not finish listening. My replacement arrived and I went to my break, but I found Alberto at the door.

—Come— I said— I want to tell you something.

He followed me to our cafeteria. I bought coffee for both and I began to tell him about the matter of the boys, of the coincidences, of the numbers and their repetitions, of the Romans and the Greeks, of hell and the thousand glooms. 

The fifteen minutes were not enough, after which I had to return to ...  the...ringgg, truchhh, trashhh, trunkkk.

Alberto was thoughtful. It would not be clear why.

The numbers ran through the kiosks of the store, hanging from the roof holders, tumbling, and snaked between the cars in the parking lot. There were not elevens in pairs; they were all and every numbers. They met maliciously; they waited, secreting malignant cabals.

After about thirty days, I found Alberto in another nearby market where I buy my lunches. The food is well prepared and the dishes are succulent.

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye and I imagined that he would say to me: "Do not tell me again the story again about coincidences”. I was about to apologize for involving him or making him a participant, when he said:

— I've been playing the numbers for two weeks, eleven, eleven. It's a good number, no matter the order. Is mandatory, I have to hit the hot spots. They go after me everywhere.

Alberto's eyes were exorbitant.

—Calm down —I told him-don't pay attention to my nonsense, just coincidences.

—No, they are revelations, they are fucking revelations.

—That you believe, the true revelations we do not see them coming.

Our food was ready. I paid the two accounts with my credit card. When I took out my wallet there was no cash, there were a few cents left, eleven cents.

—Get this, save them, maybe it's another signal.

I threw them in his hand that closed just like the door behind me.

It was December, in a month my daughter would be eleven years old. I had to think.

But that's how it is. When I read about Darwin's studies, I was amazed at how many details and coincidences had to occur, how many spontaneous mutations over millennia.

How it was possible that complex structures such as DNA were formed, complex organs were built by a gradual evolution, taking into account that the intermediate structures were not considerable.

—You have to believe in the coincidences—I told to my self—or maybe it's better to believe in the will of God and in ourselves.

Man is not prepared for life, which is a project for which the human species is not ready.

It is not in the material part of the infrastructure that we could seek change, the way.

We have already explored, traveled and exhausted the material roads.

I recently read of an expedition planned to Mars. A Corporation called Mars One carried the project. The news was:

  "Mars One aims to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars. Several unmanned missions will be completed, establishing a habitable settlement before carefully selected and trained crews leave for Mars. Funding and implementing this plan will not be easy, it will be difficult.

The Mars One team, with its advisors and established aerospace companies, will assess and mitigate the risks and identify and overcome the difficulties step by step. Mars One is a global initiative whose goal is to make this the mission of everyone on Mars, including yours. If we all work together, we can do this. Let's go to Mars”

This was extracted from the web, literally. We had already ruined the earth, now we were going to destroy Mars.

If carried out, soon also the paths of Mars and towards Mars or towards any other end of the universe, would be equally explored, traveled, spent and devastated.

Ringg, truchh, trashh, trunkk, ringg, truchh, trashh, trunkk, ringg, truchh, trashh, trunkk. The cash registers shouted in unison, the next day of work.

I came up with the idea of subtly sharing eleven experiences every day from which valuable points could be extracted, also avoid eleven lies, or give eleven traditional medicine remedies.

Give me eleven bites on my tongue every time I say a stupid answer like the dozens that I usually say of when the customers give me brusque answers.

So to speak, I could already have a laceration in my liver caused by fluids Cortisol, Thyroid, or what other hormones that handle stress and bad mood.

It was a Thursday; said insipid Thursday there was another phenomenon of those who incite to lose faith in man.

Around the store was a man with a guitar. He played instrumental melodies, not classical music, although of an impressive beauty. I had a small amplifier or so it seemed and the guitar, nothing else. 

He got tips. I saw many visitors stop and give money to him.

To the cashiers men,  are often assigned to work picking up shopping carts, this was my function for that morning, so I had to be circling around the parking lot.

I stopped two or three times to watch the execution of the guitarist. At first I listened to the melody distracted, but there was a moment when the performer dropped the money given by some young people. He bent down to pick it up and I noticed that the music was not interrupted.

It was curious. I noticed the chords he played and the notes, treble, bass and tones that sounded. I play guitar, I am not a virtuous, but in addition to playing, I can recognize how it is logical if the interpretation corresponds to the chords or movements of the fingers and hands. There was no correspondence, it was a recording. What a joke!

The hours ran and I returned to my room. I was hopeful that tonight I could sleep better. I was exhausted and tiredness is an excellent sleeping pill.

As always, I checked my correspondence, I sent my emails to my family, I checked the activity in my accounts, everything was normal.

I was assailed by the idea of reading about an aspect that is not included in my routine habits. I had been dreaming of numbers. I already said that I am not attracted to those predictions linked to dreams or premonitions guided by ideas when we are in the state of unconsciousness; however I spent almost two hours reading.

I read that dreaming about numbers brings different connotations. They help us to know better the internal aspects of our being and to reflect on the way of relating to the people around us, which accentuates the desire to win and not to conform. It can be equivalent to an approach to business. Businesses for me were very limited, but I kept reading. I will quote verbatim what was found.

"Throughout the history of human experience, mysterious numbers and strange sequences have appeared. Even in nature we find numbers, often grouped into sequences and patterns that seem to form a structure underlying all of reality.

Two of the most impressive examples are the Gold Ratio and the Fibonacci Spiral, which imply a higher order of measurement behind what many of us take for granted, such as the proportion of our own body.

Number 1 reminds us that we create our own reality with our thoughts, beliefs, intentions and actions. It is often said that when repetition 1111 appears, it represents a "wake-up call", an "Activation Code", an "Alarm Call" or "Consciousness Code".

It can also be seen as a key to opening the subconscious mind, and it reminds us that we are spiritual beings having a physical experience, rather than physical beings who embark on spiritual experiences.

When you notice that a sequence of 1111 appears repeatedly, you can have an increase in the synchronisms and improbable and miraculous coincidences that appear in your life.

Sometimes, when you are about to reach an important spiritual moment, the number 1111 can appear in your physical reality and show you the imminence of the change.

When the number 1111 appears to you, take note of the thoughts that you had just at that moment, since 1111 indicates that your thoughts and beliefs align with your truths.

For example, if you had an idea inspired by the time you saw 1111, this would indicate that it would be a positive and productive idea and you should carry it out.

When Number 1111 appears repeatedly it means that an energetic portal has been opened for you, and it will quickly manifest your ideas in reality. Your creative power is very great at that moment.

So do not be afraid, the numbers are trying to help you. "

This was what I read.

I cannot and I do not want to say that my reading was the cause, but an impulse. From such circumstances, in which nothing material had changed, I decided to start a small business, I registered it, I bought tools, equipment, resources, so that it would start to work.

I started printing and selling postcards as well as digital images for business announcements. I unearthed my desire to write. I published stories and illustrated books on the net.

In other words, I have conceived the greatest of my dreams; give space to the being who wants to be, let my soul grow even if it leaves my body.

The previous year I made my tax return where I linked my business.

I had important news. My daughter, who was about to be eleven years old, unexpectedly enrolled in a specialized music school, which was an illusion unattainable for me.

My humble work has made this possible, guaranteeing my livelihood, for allowing me to help mine, for giving me lessons in humility, helping me to penetrate human nature and a thousand additional details.

I found my friend Alberto recently, who has not win the lottery yet, or the play four with the combination 1111. He clarified that he would continue trying.

—And you? What are you gonna do?" He asked with a frown.

—I'm going to live, brother because it may be eleven years, days, eleven minutes what is left to me. I have to forget fatigue a little.

I said that, convinced.

I stopped my foot so not to crush the pairs of ones that came out of their pants, mixing with the hurried passers-by.

"There are no accidents or coincidences in life, everything is synchronization, because everything has a frequency. It's just the physics in life and the universe in action. “ — said Rhonda Byrne.

The successes, the satisfaction and the triumph are for those who persevere, trust and believe, mine, should not be so far, according to what I see as success. I did not see the boys again. I had already been told what I had to be told.

I said goodbye to my friend and clicked to give me the escape signal.

Damned words, Chapter 8.

                           Damned words, the story.

ISBN: 9781370977567

Traducir al Español

The fire consumed it. The old notes files, the drafts, the old manuscripts that I had been writing and editing for months, for years. Even the dry grass with some branches that always were scattered throughout the patio, everything was turned into ashes.

The next day I had work in the store. My shift was going to start at six in the morning.

It was close to twelve in the mid night, which avoid my neighbors to calling the firefighters because of the smoke, but late to let me rest.

It hurt me to erase the greatest of my dreams, however, it should be the only cure. There are cures that hurt.

Writing is my best exercise, the food, peace, the communication that I cannot do without.

I wrote about things that happen to me or had happened to me before. A kind of chronicle of daily and previous events, so the decision to forget them, to eliminate the list of current events and remembrances, I assumed it with a fatal retroactive effect.

The beginning was when I decided to restart. In Cuba I belonged to a literary workshop. Now, my work in the store, in the supermarket, it left me free time.

A half-romantic experience had made me pick up the pen again. Intoxicated as I was in that season, it was easy for me. I started easily. I fired my first story with the skill of an old hunter who takes the paths of the jungle and launches his first arrow, sure to hit the target.

I did not have a precise target, it was not even important to me that the story was redacted immaculately, correctly written, from the rhetorical point of view; with enough literary theory.

I wanted to write it, to spill the explosion in some vase where it could be stored and then later drink it, when time allowed me to forget it, like someone who drinks delicious aged liquor.

I finished writing it and gave it to an old woman friend to read. I do not know if he read it or not, he said yes, he liked it. It must have been for giving me the pleasure of letting me hear what I wanted to hear.

The friends help us to dream, to fornicate with the illusions and someway later, they remind us, that they warned us, while they watch us going fall downhill.

Writing the first one, the second one was already conceived. So, period and followed, I continued with my second story.

It was another story a bit melodramatic that happened almost when I arrived to the United States.

Although I had removed enough of the honey that smeared it, I still seemed sweet, sensationalist, implausible. But it was not, it was true. Without taking into account certain details that I added, changes that I did so that only the protagonists recognized themselves, the rest, was the pure truth.

The imagination is for when the truths do not reach to fill the reality.

Sometimes I regret that my existence has been something novelistic, it could seems like fiction; inventions of drunken conversations.

When I make anecdotes about things that happened to me, about which I even have traces, physical evidences that are arguments of undeniable truth, my interlocutors look at me like saying:

— "From where did you get that story?”— even more in the city where I live.

In which it is usual to listen the people telling superlative stories.

Then, to look at you with the expression... "What are you going to tell me; me that I know everything about everything".

The beautiful city of my salvation, covered with tinsel.

The city that I live in, that has given me its warmth, is not guilty that you could read inside the peoples' eyes ... "perhaps you have not noticed how beautiful (or handsome) I am", (some other like these interlinear questions), although...

I lose the main theme.

I wrote three, four, five or more stories. I intended to gather them into a book.

As I said, I was in a literary workshop in my country. I contacted the workshop adviser and asked her to read what I had written. I was waiting several months for her answer, which never came. While I was waiting for her opinion, I kept looking for others.

In my job, talking to Griss, who is a beautiful young woman who studied arts in San Alejandro in Cuba, I told her that I liked to write, that it would provide to her a way to read my narrations. If she gave me that honor, I would give her copies. I did it, uselessly.

Insistence is the virtue that sustains itself.

To start I went around the net looking for advice for my publication, a cheap publisher, possible ideas to publish what I had already compiled in a small digital book.

Every day I thought about a better title, one that was appropriate, authentic, that fit the message, the propositions I wanted to offer.

I found an editorial that offered digital publications with a striking format. It could put the book on sale and gave away two printed copies.

First failure, I sent my original, with the required copies. I contacted a coordinator of the editorial with whom I spent several days going back and forward because of details that had to be corrected before accepting my project.

At the end of this stage I sent the document to him, I elaborated the book's cover, I attached my information for the back cover, as well as the payment of the first installment, because I had to split the payment in two parts.

A few days later I received a message from another member of the editorial house telling me that I needed a ... "Certified signature" to move forward.

I had no idea what was "a certified signature", so I asked him to clarify.

He told me that it was a way to be sure that I was the author.

I could request the signature from a notary or at my work. I could also ask for it at my bank.

Neither in my work nor in my bank were they able to tell me anything about it. They did not know what the hell "A certified firm" was or at least they told me that.

I searched on the Internet and knew that in Argentina, the country where the publishing house turned out to be, that is common, but since I do not live in Argentina and I have no idea of going to that country, I sent everything to the hell. I had been working on the book project for months. I would not use more time or money, because none of these things had any surplus.

The amount I had already sent, I gave it like lost. It was better to lose half than to lose it completely.

I saved what I already had written in a flash memory so that I could investigate some possible way to get the publication.

At that time I had communicated with a friend, Angel, had informed me, who gave me Hector's address, another colleague from my country who had been part of our literary workshop and who had won important prizes.

Angel and I, we went to see Hector. I told him about my project. Hector is a wise man, he is also a writer by trade. He live retired, but write. Their points of view are very similar to mine, we are related in several subjects.

He was very kind to us. He attended us attentively, gave us food. He read a couple of texts of his inspiration.

He promised to read mine as soon as he had them.

At that time I had already managed to put what I had written on the Internet, in a blog.

I did not even know the true purpose of blogs, but at least it let me have my stories in the form of post, linked together and had even developed a kind of simple website where you could read the stories and even gave advertising to a business that I had been planning and implementing little by little.

Besides being free, it allowed me to publish my texts online; in Spanish and English.

I did hyperlinked them: "Translate to Spanish" or "Translate to English", a somewhat rustic translation that gave the opportunity for any possible reader to have at their disposal the publication translated by me, as well as the originals in Spanish.

I added the complementary images. It seemed to be, acceptable, but, still the same, without result. Neither Hector read them.

According to the blog's visit counter, I had… I do not know how many visits.

Possibly my own visits, while I putted the texts to the way I like.

I found in the blog interface a section where it was possible to make the selection that my visits would not be counted. So I specified it, but ... apparently they were still counting.

I applied to use Google Adsense in my blog, which in some way would bring me income. I never could get them to accept me. For one reason or another, they rejected me.

But well, I had my texts online. Whoever wanted, they could read them. The only thing is that, apparently, nobody wanted.

I made new business cards, I included the electronic address of my blog and my page, I paid a domain to where my blog was redirected quickly and gave access to the page where the titles with links to my texts appeared tabulated.

Nothing, I did not have visitors. Not even a sad comment to say: "I like ..." or "I do not like your texts."

I sent them a link to... I do not know how many people, in emails, I gave my business card to customers of the store that were already familiar to me.

Just a little was missing to put cards on the ceiling mixed with birdseed so that the wild pigeons can scatter them in the city.

I gave my business cards to my coworkers; I sent the link to my sister in Michigan. I did everything possible, imaginable, the reasonable, the conceivable.

I did anything that would have been occurred to an author on the solid surface of the planet, or to another improbable being under the margins of the sea.

Like could have been devised by a fictional creator of a hidden asteroid, or an inhabitant of our galaxy would have imagined, whatever, just for a comment.

Nothing. Zero criticism, without observations, nor even a note.

Nobody read my texts.

I conceived the idea of putting an ad in my blog that would clarify that I would pay a dollar for each visit, paid immediately and automatically from my Pay Pal account. If I did not do it, it was because I could not make sure they read and left comments.

Even so, the idea beat rebelliously, refused to let itself be abandoned.

It was not easy for me to get home after spending the entire day in front of a cash register resisting, what is not easy to find words to specify, as well as other days collecting shopping carts and to begin writing.

It needs a lot of thirst, a lot of desire to express, but I had them.

This point made me to think.

"Express to whom?", "Will it has any interest?", "... any meaning?

Questions without answers.

Also, what was my persistence that my stories were read? "Was it important to me that people who ... in case to catch Christ on their own, would peeled him the monkfish and put him a ring in the ear, would be useful to me their comments?

At that time, I sent the files to my mother in Cuba. My mother is a teacher with more than fifty years of experience, with preparation, cultured, besides, she is my mother; always willing to help me.

I asked her to read and correct possible spelling, grammar, writing, syntactic errors, etc.

Here my first suspicion appeared. She told me they were fine, that she had not found any mistakes.

During my exchange with the coordinator of the editorial that I contacted initially; Fernandez, it was my way of calling him, he detected innumerable errors, for which he suggested me to hire the professional correction services, which were not himself but another staff member of the editorial. I did not do it because I did not have enough resources.

I think Fernandez was possibly the only one who read my narrations. The money I sent, I considered it like a payment for his services.

Apparently, not even my mother had read my stories.

In my work, I struggled with the distrust that my companions looked at me like ... "the crazy man of the stories". Every person I spoke with, I felt like he was going to tell me ... "do not get me involved with the subject of your stories". It was a spider's web.

At home, I reread my words, I broke them into pieces, threw them in the liquid structure of my voice, I was about to throw them one by one into the toilet.

I read them to my dead, I forced them to listen.

Some of them refused to continue visiting me from time to time.

Among them was Julia, a black woman from my hometown, a practitioner of an African religion, which, if she did not invent it, I do not know where she got it from.

One of the nights, I was sitting in my incredible study, so, Julia appeared.

Leaning on her wooden stick, smoothing her coiled gray hair from when she was alive, she touched me on the shoulder.

— You're spending your time. Your hourglass has its grains already counted, do not do not throw them away.

When she was alive, Julia was respected by my grandmother, who was a saint, a goddess of divinations.

The dark wisdom of that black woman of my memories would tell me why.

My words were... damned words.

That's what she told me, and she left again; this time forever. Never again she came to me, neither to my glories, that there were so few, nor my nightmares, that were so many. She never returned.

I was wondering why, what was the curse.

I saw in the store how people bought expensive magazines, where they gossiped about if...any was no known which artist married once or twice, if the president wanted to leave the chewing gum, about I do not know how many of silly stuff in social networks , about the shoe heel of I do not know who broke up in an interview.

It was a cruel, ruthless waste of editable material.

"I'm going to shit on the curse" —I thought— "I'm going to tell the world, or whoever wants to read me, I am going say what I want to say and by the other hand, I join to those others, that could exist, that they detest inexcusable imbecility, to repudiate the unscrupulous use of the intellect. "

Well, it sounded very heroic, but they were simple bravado. I was still looking for readers.

I read and reread my texts, correcting them, modifying them, adapting them to the narrative form I prefer, in short; miserably wasting time on lunatic idealizations of scriptures that no one would read.

I succumbed to outbursts of anger. Once, I threw the folders with the written material out under a torrential of water that was falling. Then a neighbor parked his car and unwittingly prevented it from being ruined.

Another time, I made them a package and sent them to a place where they bought paper for recycling.

Weeks later, I received them back with a message, which specified the correct ways to send material for recycling and an invoice that I had to pay due to they send them back to me, as well as to attach a check if I wanted to send the paper again.

Neither in the dumpster did they want my unfortunate damned words.

They gave me pity. My poor damned words, which had not asked anyone to be written, they had come into the world because of my unfortunate habit of saying and contradicting.

Our words are like our children; a result.

Lying on my bed, I saw my words walking distressed by the window frame. Divided into syllables, shake their hands with one another in their fraternal sorrow, in solidarity. To glide like a snake of smoky letters asking forgiveness to the ants of the ground for their hapless reason of existing.

They keep surfing the brooms shots when he tried to throw them out, throw them to the street.

That's how I had to reconcile with the idea of stopping, stop writing for a while. To top it off, I had some days off.

The store where I work, which only closes in case of natural disasters in which have to be more than a million dead, or also in case of nuclear war, was going to close for a day and for my misfortune I had the two free days of the week consecutively. Three days.

Three days without work, without writing, lose miserably the hours, squandering time.

I bought a TV, another error, although not recurrent, because I never had the habit of spending my time watching television.

Current television is a grotesque insult to the intelligence of man with a medium level of intelligence or higher.

I had the idea to inquire in the web about the social functions of modern means of communication.

I could know, according to expert opinions, that ... although in its origins, the media were conceived exclusively as an information tool and in the present yet the obvious function of the media is to communicate or inform, there are many others such as: entertain, teach, train, socialize, marketing and serve the system.

Without comment, I returned the TV.

But those days were not unproductive. I managed to reach a conclusion. For weeks I was been pestering my English-speaking colleagues to help me translate things I wanted to write. Not to translate literally, but translate keeping the idea of saying what I intended to say.

English is not my native and main language, so sometimes I did not find the appropriate equivalents about phrases that exist in Spanish.

Well, for my blog page, any translation served me, better, regular, elementary, any. In any case, there was a way to access the original in Spanish.

For my books that were being sold in digital publications, the prices were so cheap that inaccuracies could be justified.

Regarding a possible presentation of my modest work to a contest, if successful, it would be up to professional translators to translate.

Thinking about the purpose of my lyrics, I relied on what Nobel Prize winner: Camilo José Cela affirmed, "to write you just have to have something to say".

My humble damned words, they carried their message.

Finally, regarding my dream ... well, some people say that ... "Dreams are a sign of dissatisfaction with destiny".

My destiny, at this point, it was not going to change.

I asked myself: "Tell the truth, what is your dream?

Why did i want to be published?

My intention, that someone could read, was achieved with my publications on the blog, perhaps had presented another form of use of the blogs.

My passion for writing would not stop in any way, unless I decided so.

Maybe my dream was to get an income, albeit a small one, from the sale of my books. Do not be so dependent on my only biweekly check.

If I thought so, I had to remember what my friend Hector, the writer, told me:

—"Writing, it brings more losses than income, economically speaking"

I was thinking about seeing my habit as the bad habit of writing, or ... probably, the vice of writing, the unscrupulous way to make others waste time, to provoke the immersion of others in your personal feelings.

My anecdotes were significant to me, they were important in my way of thinking, but they could be seen frivolously.

Nobody tells a true story better than who lived in it. However, the same story may lack interest for everyone else.

Then happened what nobody could predict.

Once, I was talking to someone, to whom after I explaining that I had a thousand experiences to relate, that there was not ... that I could not say, what I still needed to live; He gave me a true sentence.

Cesar was his name. That man knew the surface and the depths.

—"Have you been in a war?"— He said, with his breath lacerated by the cigar.

—No, thank God, I have not been to the war.

I kept silent.

I saw him look at me thinking "you do not know anything about life".

César was in the war in Africa, in Vietnam, in Nicaragua, he had crossed the Strait of Florida without knowing how to navigate. He was part of the government of a country.

I was a miniature, neither the least comparison. But there was a difference.

He gobbled his memories, that is, I thought so.

After a long time without seeing us, luck put us face to face. We greet each other affectionately, have lunch together, talk.

Our talk addressed everyday problems, questions about family, work, routine; light affairs.

We look at each other, on the plain of silence.

—I'm busy writing a book. I said after a while.

—“Three things must be done by man, plant a tree, write a book and have a child," — he recited and encouraged me to continue.

I told him about my book. To my surprise, he showed great interest.

I did what was already a mechanic procedure when talking about my texts, I passed to him the link to the page.

Surprised, I saw him sink into reading.

He read a story, continued with the other, He went back and read again, He was around for two hours absorbed, reading and rereading without stopping.

Unheard, who had a lot to tell, was interested in my stories.

When he finished, he asked if I had printed copies. I said I would print the texts he wanted.

—Would it be too much to ask you to print them all?

I said no, I asked him how to deliver them to him. He gave me his address.

As we parted, Cesar patted me on the shoulder.

— At home I will continue reading.

I did not go out of my bewilderment, even more, from a distance he shouted:

— Be careful with your words!

A few days later, we saw each other again. Unfortunately, I did not bring the printed texts with me, because I had not planned such a meeting.

He pulled out a bunch of pages.

—I also have that predilection. Will you listen to me?

Obvious, I said yes.

He kept reading a long time. As I supposed, were war stories, of the jungle, coexistence with his comrades, they were impressive.

— Is it fiction? -I asked.

— How fiction? Is fiction what you write?

— No, it's not fiction, but it has modifications. I can not say that it is as things happened or that they are exactly those characters.

— One difference. I write adjusted to reality. Mine, they are legitimate, authentic facts, real characters. I can show you pictures.

He searched his things. He showed me pictures of individuals, of celebrities that I knew; not personally, but from the photos in the newspapers, in magazines.

He appeared photographed together with personalities of the history of my country. Portraits of comradeship of the war, occasions that, even, had to be registered in official means, war reports, documents of that style.

He continued reading, incredible things, although true. Raw hardness

Bombings, minefields, wild beasts, attacks on villages, guerrilla warfare techniques, deaths, fallen comrades, who lost a leg.

He read one similar to my ... "pink tales".

Love appeared. We laughed when I pointed it out to him.

—Without love, there is no life — he said — is the foundation of war and peace, of life and death.

Cesar was a hard man, made by hammer and chisel, a stone being, with a soft heart.

We said goodbye. I had a nice time. About a month passed. We contacted again. I told him about my friend Hector, the writer. I invited him to meet us. Cesar, he was a hopeless loner.

— I meet those who have been left on the road — he said— we talked, we remember.

I already knew. Days ago, in one of those moments when I leave the world, my body, my eyes are lost in immateriality, I saw my dead go to where those of Cesar to ask for details.

To try to clarify why, what was the purpose of mixing two so different universes?

They had to go the same way from where they had gone, because Cesar's dead were entangled in a game of dominoes, arguing about fighting cocks.

My words had given me a truce, but it was false. Apparent inactivity They were planning an ambush.

They got  a new skill. The characters crossed, changed positions. They went from one story to another. They connected with figures of anecdotes that he had not yet been written.

It was a total rebellion. They were written themself, annotated on the margin, erased, omitted.

One afternoon, after finishing my day, I felt my phone ring. A number I had already seen in the store that called me insistently. I could not answer before, because I was working.

I answered. Was Cesar, who called me from a different number than the one I had saved on my contact list.

He called me from a hospital. An accident had occurred, "a slight mishap," according to him.

He asked me if I could do him a favor.

— Sure, tell me, what do you need?

— If you're not very complicated, could you go to my apartment and bring me some things?

The real extent of the matter did not pass through my mind not even for a moment.

—Well, friend, tell me what you want.

— Under the plant pot in the window, is the key. Come in; take a couple of t shirts, the paper on the bed and in the bathroom and some others details for the bath.

He gave me the hospital's address.

—No rush, whenever you can.

—Don't worry, this afternoon I'll take your things with you.

I went to see him. Before meeting him, I had an exchange with a nurse who took me to his bed.

—It is regrettable. Something terrible. We are shocked. He said, as we walked.

—Are you sure we're talking about the same person?

She stopped for a moment. She reviewed some papers.

—Is he César Antonio Alarcón Morales?

She looked at me expecting me to verify, but I could not be sure of the full name.

—Well, we'll check— she said.

We take the elevator. We went to his room.

There was Cesar, dozing.

— Hi! —I said and tried to hold him.

—Do not touch him! Please, it's very delicate— said the nurse.

I turned around stunned.

He woke up. He laughed.

-Hi partner! -said, smiling- Did you bring my stuff?

I still did not understand. I looked at how many artefacts, devices, peripherals, emergency equipment.

I put things on top of a small table.

- But what is this? What happened?

- Ah! ... Things of war.

The accident had happened nine days ago. It was not like he said, "unimportant", it was ... extremely serious.

He had been taken to the hospital practically dead.

We talked little. I did not know how to disguise my grief, how not to show that I was overwhelmed by adversity. I put things where he could reach them, although he could barely move.

As I left, I saw a bird perching on the window.

— See, I have company-said with amazing good humor.

Another nurse or doctor stopped me when I leaving.

—Are you a relative?

— More or less.

—He probably will not walk again.

I left after a small dialogue in which we agreed that I would return, that before coming to Cesar, I would meet with them and explain specifically, the details, the true measure of the situation.

I went back by the hospital. As agreed, I got interviewed the doctors before going to see Cesar.

They were clear. It was a kind of paraplegia, possible tetraplegia.

Paraplegia is a disease in which the lower part of the body is paralyzed and lacks functionality.

It usually results from a spinal cord injury, as in the case in question, or from a congenital disease. If the arms are also affected by paralysis, in what could become the case, the disease is named tetraplegia.

They gave me other details; however this was the summary, approximately.

I left the hospital after talking with the doctors and seeing my friend, to whom I did not tell him about the conversation.

I was walking towards my car and thinking about life.

Simply unpredictable, unidirectional, volatile path marked by the passage of the clock.

To freaking out, escapes from the hard ones, then bit you the light ones.

A sun of lead was felling on the city, plucked smoke from the asphalt, crushing the people's yearnings.

I visited my friend two or three times a week. I helped him shave, I told him about my annoying litigation with the rebellious damned words.

I told him how I grabbed them out of my pocket while i saw them writhing, I tried to unscrew them from the usual dialogues.

We were discussing about his eternal companion at the window, a hawk or a bald eagle.

With Cesar, they took and brought him from a room where he was given medicines, treatments.

I picked up the paper sheets he asked me for.

It was close to twelve in the mid night. The next morning I would have to start early. I had to sleep.

I threw the pages on the grass; I looked at them one last time.

A cold, frozen breeze began, which forced me to take refuge inside the room, letting the flames do what they had to do, what they were obliged to do and they didn’t.

I could never know if I live in the world I live, if I can erase what I want to erase.

Data, reminders, notes files, drafts; were disappeared, but, covered, hidden under the dripping roof, in their miserable pagan scriptures, there they were, indifferent, healthy from the disaster.

The fire had consumed it, brutally devoured everything, except ... my damned words.