How did so many people walk away from the casualty with barely a scratch?
Who of them was the angel?
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Transilience
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?
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.
Faux pas
If you want a short-cut to enlightenment, there is no quicker route than looking at a mirror, listening to your secret judgments or finding purpose or use in any unwise step.
Don’t panic, bear with composure, sit up, sit tight, delay the common belief, let go of the stroke of vanity and assumption. Wait and see.
Five boyfriends later
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.
No place higher
They nursed their hatred for years until that Bloody Saturday.
They observed each other with animosity across the street, day after day, year after year.
They held their creeping flesh until a sparkle of aggression, a minor fault agitated the latent stockpile of scorn and curse.
Ten were shot down in a few minutes, six of them little kids.
After cleaning the blood spill from the pavement, and releasing the shiny balloons to the apex, the deadly countdown launched off again. Widows and comfortless mothers cried alone in dark bedrooms and nothing but the crickets disturbed the slow, silent and peaceful summer.
Let the night do the talking
Two girls shared an extended banal conversation at the end of a dusty wooden counter.
Three Victorian cracked mirrors reflected their faces and the busy street behind the window.
I spent a long time watching the scene, while waiting for her to come back from the ladies’ room.
The dust on the counter was part of the decoration, as well as the alabaster pendulums hanging from the ceiling, the paper glasses containing remains of tea and coffee. Everything seemed so artificially old and shabby, so London á la mode that I wondered why we hadn’t pick Prague as our destiny.
Later, we had dinner in a café where Formica-topped tables that hadn’t changed in fifty years. I looked at her pensively munching a serving of ham omelet and chips. My moodiness banished in less than a second. She touched the corner of her mouth as if I had seen a drop of mayo or whatever. She did it so graciously that Picadilly at dusk felt the perfect place at the perfect moment to me.
I suddenly remembered Clea’s Alexandria, the making of a world through love, the remembrance of things half forgotten and I noticed my new biography replacing the old one only for her.
A struggle against conformity
It amazes me how the fragments of the moment always manage to fit together in spite of all the defective maneuvers and devices of the mind to impose a Procrustean strict conformity to what we are supposed to see and feel.
Meaning appears beyond the image, fading as we attempt to state it as if reality had a defense mechanism of its own.
The two girls with hair extensions, heavy makeup and deep racks passed by the boy without noticing him.
I shot the camera from intuition and even though I can’t remember what I was thinking at the time the shutter was released, I can easily relate to the boy’s gawk: we can only see what we already believe and perpetuate the rule in order to shrink the anxiety associated with desire and to avoid the emotional insulation resulting from rejection.
Robert Doisneau wrote that one’s got to struggle against the pollution of intelligence in order to become an animal with very sharp instincts – a sort of intuitive medium – so that to photograph becomes a magical act, and slowly other more suggestive images begin to appear behind the visible image, for which the photographer cannot be held responsible.
Maybe none of the girls were worthwhile looking at (dull, average, unexceptional), but at this moment, the boy’s glance yields a return: a foreknowing vision beyond them.