The sun keeps appearing and disappearing behind fast moving clouds that quickly change their shape. It is a spring afternoon in a neighbourhood where people do not worry about money. (Which does not mean they do not worry, obviously. Their get frightened over their bodies, partners, children, pets, cars, tennis rackets, mothers, affairs, etc.) Continue reading
El otro día soñé con Hossam, que bailábamos un vals de insólita coreografía determinada por nuestra diferencia de altura. Voy a extrañar a ese gigante con alma de niño que a las ocho y media empezaba a quejarse de que tenía hambre y quería volver a su casa.
Sus compañeros marroquíes lo llamaban yogur, porque su apellido es idéntico a una conocida marca que en árabe es sinónimo del producto lácteo. Apodo refrendado además por su costumbre de traer algo de comer para todos, muchas veces justamente yogures -otras, bananas y otras, chocolates- y repartirlos, banco por banco, al comienzo de la clase. Continue reading
Their father died on a Saturday night. It was in January. The doctor would come in the evening. In the morning of that day, he’d asked his wife as well as Max and Charlotte, his kids now well in their 30s, to leave him alone. They had gone shopping…but nothing was bought. How can one buy anything on a day life ends? They’d spend their whole day wandering. Waiting. Charlotte had noticed how surreal the sunlight had been at the end of the day. As if a bridge of light had been set between heaven and earth for him to cross over.
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Photo courtesy of Penboutique.com
Once she was living in the reality of her transformed relationship with her deceased husband, Patricia’s awareness and appreciation of what she had hitherto referred to as only a ‘physical’ world, expanded like a delicate flower-bud opening in the bright morning sun. She began to see people, and living things around her, literally, in a new light: a many-coloured luminescence, an intimate, alive, embracing relationship of hues, and shades, and tones was flowing and pulsating around her and in her. Life became a continuum. There was no cutting off point between what she saw, what she thought and what she felt. She felt herself as a part of all Nature, and Nature felt a part of all of her.
“Natura Naturans,” she would whisper to herself, whenever the memory of a barbecue in the garden some years before, with their friends the Lamberts, and their godson Santiago and his passionate theories about biology, floated up.
Artwork: Enrique Cropper
Such was the immediacy of Patricia’s internal dialogue with her dead husband, there were even times of the day when a semblance of normality appeared in relation to his physical absence. “Besides,” Patricia had often jibed, “he spent half his life chained to that ERA desk.”
Yet, for all her strength, all her uplifting spiritual imaginings, and all her attempts to persuade herself that things at home were ‘more or less normal’, Patricia’s children soon learnt to tell when Patricia was having ‘one of her bad days’. The signs were varied but recognisable: an odd, distracted air during a conversation; a brief bowing of the head at an unexpected moment in the day; or a gentle sob from the bathroom when Patricia put herself out of sight.
On these occasions, though they could see it coming, they were powerless to prevent Patricia from ebbing away into a morose state of despair, when Patricia would slowly find herself engulfed in loneliness, telling herself, as she spiralled downwards, that George was no longer there and that she was a fool to even try imagining that they would ever be together again. In such a condition, a pattern would repeat. A darkness would envelope Patricia and she would shut herself off from contact with anyone else than her closest family, simply chuntering that “It’s alright” and “Don’t you worry about me”.
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