I know it’s fated. Sooner than later I will go through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I will have to work it through her precious innocence lost, her first boyfriend, her first break up crisis, her first rebellious declaration of independence, her first everything lousy that might come to her along the way.
And I will see in all her temporary failures, my own failure to fix the world perfect, to model an ideal partner in her mind or to show myself imperfect enough, protecting a romantic mystery of her own making.
And after the mandatory time of grief, I hopefully will find in her come back the comfort of a father, the balmy and cleansing remains of blamelessness, the colors of her childhood kindling the arctic crisp of gray hair and skepticism. And finally, I will feel grateful and enraptured with love and pride, as I’ve always been.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Ines in the aftertime
Two girls under the searchlight's beam
A searchlight’s beam passed by our temporary shelter. One of the girls was crying and the other one was holding her close so the soldiers couldn’t find us all. Neither of them spoke in the two hours that we shared the abandoned bakery. When the soldiers walked away, we silently sneaked into the nearest metro station, which was very crowded.
A lot of people had been shipped to an unknown destiny, including their parents, awakened in the middle of the night while the girls were staying at Oma’s. I knew the family. They owned a cyber café not far from the bank where I worked as a cashier. The girls were left behind due to a pen pusher’s mistake in the register, and that mistake might saved their lives. The eldest kept the other fed and warm, hidden in a warehouse until the new inspections and house searches make it risky to stay there.
The rumor of trains passing drowned our voices, but I clearly heard that amazingly strong and sweet girl saying: ‘Whatever it happens from now on, remember that you are much more stronger than you think. Don’t cry, don’t make noise, never let go of my hand. I don’t know how, but I will find Mom and Dad for you. Ok ?’
Then she gave her a piece of bread she kept in her school backpack. She wasn’t older than eleven. In the blink of an eye they weren’t there any more and I haven’t seen them again, but every time I feel tempted to abandon hope or cry quits, her voice comes to my mind, powerful, mighty and determined so I can’t help but bringing myself together to carry on.
The Vanished
“You will soon travel far and away” said the gipsy, carefully examining the lines of her hand. Amelia looked straight to her eyes with a frown forehead, as if it sounded ridiculous, allowing the ritual only because she had always been superstitious about gipsy spells.
The weird and chunky woman agitated a small bunch of rosemary tied with a string all over her body while murmuring and humming some sort of cryptic litany. Then she spit to the ground and opened a rough, cracked hand for money.
Amelia was annoyed with the unexpected nuisance and so eager to go on with her errands that she gathered the small change of the wallet and the pockets and gave it to her, vanishing through the corner of the street, wrapped in a shabby brown overcoat.
A street cam captured the last trace of her at half past eleven. Nothing unusual, except for two arrows pointing directly to the figure, as if she were chosen.
Apparently, this is not the first and last case so far. Authorities are being cautious about it, to avoid social panic.
Lola, the eldest of her daughters and the only one that keeps her mother’s secrets doesn’t know about the others yet, so she fakes concern assuming that she has finally found the courage to leave. In her wildest fancies she could never have foreseen such a dauntless determination.
Tomorrow, checking the secret drawer where she has saved money for years -what an operative to change pesetas to euros when they run obsolete- she will change her mind and start to wonder where is Amelia, what happened to her, and what if she doesn’t come home.
Who is going to hang in there with Dad then.
Transilience
How did so many people walk away from the casualty with barely a scratch?
Who of them was the angel?
Soap Opera
He is looking around for her -or should we say him?- among the others in the noisy small square, resisting the urge, postponing the ultimate daring, the boldness to ask her to hide from the world in whatever the nearest and darkest building highway available.
On anyone else that flashy attire would be too much, but on her it looks perfectly attuned to her nature, and even exquisite. Look at her gorgeous hair.
This is the closest he has been from being in love. Since he saw her for the first time, working the street from the bathroom’s window, trying to catch the wireless signal of neighbors with the laptop on his knees, sitting on the toilet, he has spent hours watching her meeting the clients, appearing and disappearing in about five or ten minutes, lighting countless cigarettes with lost and dramatic eyes, or chatting with other rent girls and boys of the district.
Isn’t it love when you wake up and fall asleep thinking of somebody? Isn’t it love when you fantasize to rescue and save her from all harm and affliction? Isn’t it love when you notice a thick lump in your throat every time you see her in the arms of others?
A bundle of anticipated guilt, doubt and regret is paralyzing him. Look at his face, look at him swallowing saliva and cleaning his nervous sweaty hands on his Levis. I bet he is shaking inside, with panic and desire.
Now he is walking towards her. Now they are talking. Now they are leaving. Now they are sneaking in that filthy entry. Wait. I bet he is now opening up to her. Oh, my… I would pay to see the moment, to get the exact words. How long have they been there already?
I don’t know. Not more than five minutes.
It feels like an eternity. Have you heard what she said?
She said: ‘Do you want me to continue or what?’
God bless your ears. And what the hell does that mean?
Well, I don’t know. You are telling the story.
Both look heartbreakingly sad. Maybe she was a father in Brazil, before the surgery I mean. Maybe the little son or daughter is fighting for his life in a hospital and he is making the money to pay an expensive treatment. That would make this love impossible, wouldn’t it?
Look at the knocked flat expression in his face walking away without looking backwards.
Or he finally got a blowjob and he is trying to get over it. Wasn’t he dating a girl? Maybe he is bisexual and he wanted to try what is it like to get a blowjob from a trans.
She has just spit and used a mouth refresher. And now she is redoing her lips and her wig. Remember Grissom. Stick to the evidence.
You love to ruin all my fun, don’t you?
The girl in Grampian
Every night she wakes sitting straight up, cold sweating, heart pounding, holding on to the sheets as she were being sucked by a black hole in the middle of the tiny apartment in suburbia, full of cockroaches and damp blots that she rents for three hundred euros a month. She gets up, awfully dog-weary, heats some water for instant coffee in the microwave, puts the TV on and dopey drifts infomercials until the daylight breaks through the only window. Then she gets a shower, drags her body to a bar and asks for a true espresso, a bagel and the newspaper.
At seven o clock she takes the bus to the factory and begins her job of chunking and fitting recently slaughtered chicken into trays. You get the picture. Nobody knows where is her accent from.
After the premiere of Stieg Larsson’s Men who hate women, several co-workers have marked her resemblance to Lisbeth Salander.
She is too tired to go to the cinema, too tired to get the book and read it.
She leaves the factory knowing that tonight, like every night, she will wake up cold sweating, heart pounding, holding on to the sheets with the alcoholic mouth smell of her father speaking dirty upon her face permeating the bedclothes, quenching her throat with an asthmatic wheeze. She moves along the sidewalk under flickering lights praying for a truce, wishing not to hear her mother saying you are making a great fuss about it, wishing for all to end before needing to make it end herself in drastic manners.
You know what? – asks a teenager in the bus. You are much alike a swedish actress I’ve seen in a movie yesterday. Have you ever read Men who hate women or The girl who played with fire?
She shakes her head pensively while holding on to the handrail and gets off again into the chill of the night.
She would have never notice Lisbeth Salander’s face in the billboards if they weren’t so insistent about it.
A methhead is curled up by the front door, his lanky body not more alive than a roadkill.
She heats some water in the microwave and pours an instant soup in the mug to keep him from freezing. She also lets him a blanket.
Maybe she is stronger than she thought she was.
Maybe tomorrow she will get the book or go to the cinema.
Disease
My life as a sick person began the day I got married. Everyone seemed to think that I should not wait to tie the knot, as I was thirty and single, which was the same to say that I had already become a spinster. Family matchmakers usually mistake similar lifestyle and habits for real connection. Besides there’s no reason to stay alone if you can share your misery with someone alike. We both are aloof, old-fashioned and quite unexciting people. It was pure common sense to pair us and it naturally happened in my sister’s wedding banquet. Obviously, they were in a hurry to get rid of ‘my problem’ and I couldn’t say no the popular demand.
We danced, we started to date and we finally got engaged.
There was nothing actually wrong with him, although he was quite down in the shadows: a laconic, methodical and flat forty-two year old man. The kind of man who gets up at half past six in the morning every day, and goes to bed at eleven every night, after rinsing his mouth and gargling exactly seventy times, not more, nor less.
The atrocious headaches started during our honeymoon in Benidorm and didn’t get any better in the following days. Imagine the bright sun, the holiday noise, the crowded beaches, the open-air dances and my brains smashed with an invisible hammer no matter the pain killers I was swallowing down like candy.
Although the bizarre auras and disturbing delusions caused by migraine I managed to keep the house clean and tidy, to cook, iron and do the groceries without going mad.
After our first anniversary everyone started to wonder about the babies. We went through the procedure twice a week, but the babies didn’t come and we stopped trying when I reached my forties. We got twin beds and watched television.
Neither of us had great expectations about the other. He was noiseless and respectful, he never complained about my aches and pains and I stopped longing for a more communicative and affectionate husband as a newly-wed, so the marriage worked fine according the standards.
But one day he got up and in the middle of his morning shave he told me that he had a business travel to Malaga that same morning, the first in twenty years of marriage. He left with a small suitcase and a hand bag, he kissed me and announced he was coming back on Sunday.
I spent five days alone, totally migraine free. I was bursting with energy, I wanted to go out and buy new clothes, change my haircut and even call old friends, go to the cinema and dine out.
I was so blissful, so thrilled, so elated that took me almost three days to do the math and establish a direct link between despair and my husband.
An embittered flare up of animosity traveled through my entire body: he had been sucking my energy from the very first moment we met. I hated him, I hated the people who blackmailed us into marriage and I wanted to clear the venom out of me once and forever.
On Saturday night I seasoned his soup with insecticide. He survived and bashfully dismissed my crime as if it were a trivial, marginal event. At the hospital, they asked him about me and he alleged he had been away for a week and already felt sick in the journey back from Malaga. They declared the whole thing an accidental poisoning and I forbear the stabbing headaches as part of my punishment.
Maybe happiness is not for everybody.
One should be grateful for the small givens without asking for more.