Texts

If words contain the reality that they name, in some unknown place silence must exist. But in this noisy society the effort needed to find it is ever more arduous, whether we’re looking inside ourselves or in our surroundings. We’ve turned noise into a nearly indestructible wall, a border; we’re surrounded by clatter, bustle and commotion, and we live in a rush, at a dizzying pace, as we try to smash through the fortress wall of time, suffering and loneliness.

In the theater where we saw Joker, everything started off well: people stopped eating and we were enveloped in a deep silence, the kind that lets moviegoers forget where they are and immerse themselves in the film. At the end of the masterpiece, which is among the saddest stories in film, the audience broke out in heartfelt applause.

My father’s vegetable garden was one of the most beautiful terrains of my childhood. He arranged his small piece of geography with the precision of a cartographer and he studied the signs in the sky with the same instinct as the wisest of meteorologists, with an eye to diligently caring for and protecting his fruitful and easy to cultivate patch.

Having been born close to nature, my childhood landscape was shaped by the hills and mountains, and this is, perhaps, why the sea holds such a bewitching power over me: during the summer, I gaze from the shoreline into the cold, blue water, and the unfathomable surface becomes both an extension of the book that rests in my lap and the sway of my gaze and my thoughts; in wintertime, from one cliff or another I walk toward the roar of the inundated terrain to which the north wind offers its ferocity.

When we enter a writer’s work, we discern two worlds, which often seem to be overlapping and interwoven: on one hand is the writer’s gaze, her ability to perceive the nuances of the world and of life, and what has traditionally been called her “worldview”; on the other hand is her capacity to express what she perceives in the best way possible. When both worlds intertwine, much like when the warp is weaved with the weft, a fabric is created, a work of art that we call literature.

The last time I had news of Franz Kafka was in Alice Herz-Sommer’s biography. Among her cherished childhood memories, she recalls with great fondness the man who would visit them, a bouquet of flowers in hand. The “eternal child” the book refers to was a sweet and happy young man who enjoyed playing with the smallest children. Knowing that the hand that wrote such harrowing books belonged to a man who was suffering, I want to shelter my own image of the Czech writer under the warm cloak of the pianist’s memories.

Last September, while I was waiting next to the coffee machine, a seven-year-old boy, blond and in a flood of tears, came near. All a-fury, he stamped about and threw himself to the floor. Despite eliciting more compassion than surprise from those around him, Estitxu, his teacher, didn’t bat an eyelid.

In memoriam

It’s very difficult to write in the past tense about someone who was not only a teacher but a very dear friend, especially after starting to write about him in the present tense…

“The first case of the day is for you two.”

It’s wasn’t just the first case of that day, it was my first case ever, since that same week I was moved from reception to the criminal investigation unit; not because I had any special talent but because it was the first week of August and the apathy that permeated every corner of the office during the year was hidden by the idleness of summer vacation. Juan also hoped that nothing serious would happen and that he could easily push to September any case-related tasks.

“Our gaze is submarine”

A few years ago, a boy who wa an avid surfer told me that he knew how deep a wave was by the light; the light that led to the water’s surface, the way towards the mouthful of air. This is a child’s beautiful and moving vision of the depths of our cold and often unforgiving waters.

Over the summer our kitchen vibrated with the exceptional voice of Nina Simone. That exceptional woman who said that freedom was living without fear. When she spoke those words, it was with the certainty of someone who did not live in that space. The source of her fear lived at her side, in her home—it was the man who had surely promised her his love and devotion.