I’m pretty sure that true success (happiness) comes down to the decision to shift from frustration and fear to curiosity and fascination, and I always feel as if I am a step away from cloud nine, yet not knowing what is keeping me stuck or making me walk around with this heavy burden of uncertainty and half belief.
Next time maybe I will let things just flow at the speed of trust, abdicating all enquiry about the causes and reasons of the unfolding.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Traveling lights
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?
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.
Thunder and shadow
I’m suddenly aware of my true artistic purpose: to survive the temptations of the past opening up in blatant integrity. The yes, the no, the not yet are still very challenging as my nature is a paradox of mental impatience coupled with a physical lack of verve. But everything moves at such high speed, and the moment fades as fast as my camera’s shutter so I have no time for defending old beliefs and assumptions. What comes up to my eye is reckless, and sometimes offensively bold, but if I censor the input or pay too much attention to the detail, if I black out in allegiance, trying to appear perfect, trying to get public attention, I become part of the majority that loses the day and closes the window to the wondrous failure that art is, that love is, that life is.
Despite the collateral damage, I was able enough to bounce, to take the leap, to bear off from the death house and wave my flag of rebellion from the distance. I’m still awfully scared, but I’ve never felt so mindful, so willing to put up with the truth of what is at hand. Faithfully, precisely, immediate and even religiously. So ready to conjure reality in it’s wholeness: thunder and shadow.
That great golden hive of the Invisible
Some days after knowing about the cheating, I went to a mountain retreat with some friends.
We bathed naked in the river, we had miso soup for dinner and meditated in behalf of clarity.
Rilke wrote that all insights occur after the fact: I was scared to death, but feeling relieved by
dissolution.
My hands felt unbearably hot and I was struggling hard with a lagged need for physical
containment. In that warmth I flash backed the dilapidation, the rust, the spoilage, the washout and wreck of the previous years.
The one you live with can be a spiritual master or a scrubby guru.
The one you live with can bring your essence to light or brush truth and beauty aside until you become a dead one walking.
Since then I’ve experienced a progressive turnaround and major adjustments.
I love my daughters and my girl beyond what I thought possible.
I arised refreshed from doubt and surrendered to photography as a life-long calling.
Everything is there, disturbingly appealing to the senses, reclaiming the lost years from precariousness and seclusion, ready to bloom.