The street dancer was not an especially sensitive man. He didn’t do the dishes, he peed over the toilet like most men and certainly was not the kind of guy that cares about feelings, but openly liked chubby women without any trace of macho pride, hesitation or embarrassment.
Our relationship began with a flirtatious compliment about my bosom when I stopped by to applaud their break dance performance and that same afternoon I lost virginity on a filthy bed in a filthy patera lodge near Lavapiés.
At the beginning I felt pressured to go further than a skinny girl would go, but soon I realized that my ample flesh was arousing enough for him. He showed no interest at all in risky practices and seemed perfectly content with a few basic positions, so I had no need to undergo cheap book- learned Kama Sutra twists. Condoms were not an issue either and he never asked for a blowjob, yet he loved going downwards and my beefy thighs around his neck.
I felt one lucky chick, the only among my messmates that got a big O the first time. For a buxom hangdog like me, such an early ravishment was almost an assumption of superiority.
Following my intuition, I never discussed our relationship, but after five months of fine carnal romance and sharing a rotten and bad smelling den with a throng of Colombian, Moroccan and Nigerian outlanders, I forgot the odds and my anemic self esteem and brought our future into question.
He said he was earning the money to go back to Michoacán on time for his wedding to someone called Angélica. Then he opened his wallet and show me a shabby photograph of a raw-boned, flat-chested and undersized Mexican girl.
Although speechless, I pushed the question out with great effort: “Did you ever love me?”.
He didn’t temporize: “No, you just make me horny”.
I dressed up holding tears, I said good bye and left the Embassy of Cockroaches with any idea of where to go.
Five boyfriends later I just fake it to work it through, and still miss him like crazy.
The proved notion of my power to make a man steamy is the only thing that keeps me going.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Five boyfriends later
Sheep behavior
Stupid behavior is domain-dependent and a puzzling paradox: one can be a genius in a given area and act like a natural-born fool, a jerk, a moron or a cretine in another.
But sheep behavior is even more a mystery: the crowd buying in the same things, the same myths, the same lies, the same political ideas, the same religion. The crowd going to the same places, expecting the same unrealistic things, watching the same cretinous reality shows and acclaiming the same mediocre, insipid and artless idols just to go on belonging to the disquieted majority as it were a merit of some kind, a contest of purposeless renunciation, the Herculean harvest of an inexistent self. The crowd picking Paris Hilton or Chiki Chiki as buffoons and role models or making Antonio Vega a posthumous best selling just because he is now dead.
An exercise in glorious excess
Ava bought a house in La Moraleja. A house with a witch-shaped weathervane on the roof, called La Bruja. She paid 66.000 dollars for it in 1954. Then she moved to a flat in Oquendo and finally to a duplex in Doctor Arce, right above Peron’s apartment, while the argentinian ex-dictator was exiled in Madrid.
Against all popular sayings about housekeepers tendency to gossip, the janitor of her last residence in Spain -retired and old, but yet very clear minded- still refuses to reveal any secret about the rave bacchanals running upstairs, which made Peron go mad very often.
According Ava, Peron had one very disturbing trait. He would often march out onto his balcony, and make loud, arm-waving speeches to the empty street below. The speeches disturbed his next-door neighbor, who felt he let down the tone of the vicinity.
Ava had always been a potty mouth. She knew that the pejorative Spanish word for homosexual was maricón which rhymes nicely with Perón. So every time he step onto his balcony and began to demagogue his invisible supporters, she gathered her assistants and formed an opposition party by chanting in unison Perón es un maricón, Perón es un maricón.
He hated her wholeheartedly. Nevertheless, Ava attended secret teas with María Estela and loved her home made empanadas.
The Barefoot Comtessa would sleep all day and get up to go to Oliver, Riscal (Archy, nowadays) and Chicote after dark. Tequilas, Old Fashions, Mai Tais and Manhattans were served to her in a row until closing time. Most barmans were told never to charge her the drinks. A lady in waiting who always hanged around called the taxis and pushed her into them and then into bed, if she didn’t pick up a bailaor or a young torero to sleep with, in her futile attempts to forget Frank Sinatra.
A few witnesses of those post-war Hollywood years in Spain remember that she even drove fast cars across the city outskirts, completely drunk, landing herself in crashes no one but her could leave unharmed.
They also remember her whimsical exercise in abounding excess, her exuberance, her generosity, her magnificent audacity to make choices and face the consequences without a trace of pathos, sulks or self-pity.
She was really determined to fit in and would ask in her best Spanish, ¿Quieres una copita? or let the gypsies plop their babies on her lap to hold during flamenco dances.
Wild and innocent at the core, flamboyant and perpetually undone, she was even barred from the Ritz for peeing in the lobby, but if you ask the ones that shared those wild years with her, all of them will say she was larger than life and most of all, unforgettable.
Reportedly, a lone black limousine parked behind the crowd at Ava’s funeral.
No one left the vehicle, but everyone assumed that the anonymous mourner was Frank Sinatra. Later, a beautiful floral arrangement at the graveside simply read: “With My Love, Francis”.
Antiphon
I’ve gone through several nightmarish relationships in my life. As a result, my self esteem was damaged beyond remedy. The women I used to be attracted to vaccined me against any kind of complacency and self-absorption and made healthy vanity the fastest shortcut to shame.
Photography became the only acceptable excuse to demand approval and attention, the only source of comfort and relief, the emergency exit, the raw material of new beginnings after emotional downfalls and quakes. The spinal cord of my identity.
And suddenly, the biggest stroke of luck: her adventitious appearance, the unpredictable realization of all emotional needs. The struggle for survival mutated into another kind of primal drive: to give her something of great value in return. To let myself be noticed and succeed, putting this single virtue to a test. To clean up the mess left by past sentimental choices, working hard to earn her magnificent silences, giving the world something as precious as what I had been given.
I barely wheathered the storm until she reclaimed my name from obscurity. Maybe one must be completely emptied in order to be worthy of true grace.
I remember the first time touched her skin with my lenses, long before we really found each other, so even though times of economic recession are not the easiest for artists, I trust the means to find me like she did. Photography is not about distinction and celebrity, but love returning to the world like an antiphon. The privilege of channeling cardinal revelation through ordinary things.
Catenary
To Delia
I arrived before dawn, dead-tired from the 260 mile train trip and there she was: stunning beauty wrapped in messy sheets, offering arms and begging for cuddle.
Imagine Leonard Cohen in the darkest angle of the room, singing Suzanne, imagine me fed with tea and oranges, imagine the girl that said “Come in, I’ll give you shelter from the storm” in Bob Dylan’s song. Imagine both girls and better them, make their skin whiter and softer and give them a miraculous talent for quietude and imagine me lost in her body, feeling the whole scene somewhat unreal.
Take two extremes of this love in solemn silence, supported at its ends and acted on only by its own weight. Take us to the deepest realms of your mind and give us the joys of Sunday morning, the hush of night, the auspicious ways of the shipwrecked, the statuelike disposition of eternity and forget everything else.
We both had to get up and commute to work.
Mondays shouldn’t exist.
Agent of death
It was a case of posthumous revelation.
The man was standing by her side, holding the camera with his beautiful hands, waiting for an omen, waiting for the air to move the undergrowth and the leaves, waiting for a slight change in the light, waiting to hear his own voice whispering now, totally unaware of her proximity.
She touched his coat, and his hair, wondering how warmly and slowly those hands could travel across the delicate creases of her silken dress.
He ducked to the uneven and mossy ground, trying to put all the pieces of the gravestone together.
Confused, perplexed, she read her own name, slowly, voicelessly moving her pale and deaf lips.
The man took five photographs. Four of them were trashed. He only kept the one that rendered her whole life a mystery.
Plate tectonics
Most of the people and things I love to the bones were beautiful, bountiful accidents at the very beginning. It would be risky to abridge memory without blotting out the essential. The true relationship between cause and effect is largelly concealed to the conscious mind.
My heart is the ball losing momentum before choosing black or red, odd or even and then falling on to the wheel. They used to sell cameras saying you press the button and we do the rest.
It never was that easy. The whole process takes so much responsibility that I fluctuate between elation and an overwhelming sense of failure from one click to the next.
Some days she arrives home from work totally worn-out. She barely drinks a glass of hot milk and passes away, chronically sleep deprived.
I stay awake with blurry eyes, looking at her, feeling like an impostor, wondering what happy chance put her in my way and how can I make myself deserving of such beauty.
While others spend hours playing X-Box or Wii, I have chosen impatience, expectancy, distress, distrust and fence-sitting fibrillation as my favorite entertainments. I take photographs of the other half of my whole. Starting from the bottom, attempting the way up.
I sometimes feel like things are starting to fall into place and suddenly I’m brutally assaulted by questions about my so called talent. Something goes really wrong with my self esteem.
Tailcoated men walk by the reflection I’ve built of myself on a fuzzy mirror.
Pledge of the deadbeat dad
I clearly remember the day I found out what was going on. The powerful sense of relief and emptiness numbed every single emotion, including betrayal.
I knew I was about taking the biggest leap in my whole life. My hands against the light reminded me my grandfather’s. Suddenly aged, panthocratic, yet innocent and bursting with the urge of creation. I also felt the whole body shaking, the fear of going mad and then, the rest of fears collapsed in two: losing them and not being enough.
I changed hundreds of diapers with those hands. I shot thousands of photographs over their beautiful faces as they were growing up. Now we have to travel far to spend a short weekend together. Now I am the weak one, the deadbeat dad, even though financially supportive, a hopeless failure.
I suspect they are being lied to or denied their right to hold a strong and encouraging masculine reference. The suspicion wouldn’t hurt me so much if I could keep their hearts and minds from all harm until they are secure, self-assured, self-possessed, self-reliant, self-respecting, self-sufficient enough to choose their own fights, choose their own thoughts and heal their own wounds.
Beliefs, memory and perception are tricky. They can be deeply affected by interference and nasty storytelling. I dread the idea that they will pay the price of our faults. I dread the idea of them trapped in a vicious cycle of lousy relationships just because they were told a horror tale of deprivation, absence and neglect. It’s just unacceptable.
What did I see in my ex? What was I thinking? I don’t care anymore.
I won’t nullify the miracle and treasure of the days we welcomed them to life.
I resist to join the war. I won’t hold on to hate.
I pledge not to bad mouth and brainwash them myself.
I won’t tell them stories of saints and sinners.
My amazing girls still walk on water.