No matter how much moles think they understand the land they dig, the alluvium will never understand moles and most of the times, the tunnels are lost or clogged up . However, the mole will persist in its blind and stubborn plan to dig as far as possible, with tireless and unshakeable determination.
A mole’s tenacity is one of the most amazing qualities to adopt. It can literally make golf course caretakers go mad and force them to take extreme measures in order to exterminate them.
This quality is not based on belief, but on instinct.
When did us, humans, forget to get attuned to this drive, this incredible sense of what has to be done, here, now? No procrastination, no hesitation. Just digging.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
The digger
Civil disorder
Watermelon hopelessly waited for execution.
Tomatoes, in total observance and acquiescence to the Lawful Authority, piled up in the bucket to prevent and suffocate any sign of insurgency and uprising.
But Green Pepper began to doubt the righteous and blameless power of the oppressor and outtalked Small Sissy Green Pepper to turn the Pink Tower upside down, yelling ‘Freedom! Equality! Brotherhood!’
There was copious red spill and smashed seeds on the paving stone and in its fast way street across, Watermelon tasted the brief magnificence of seven seconds of bounty, before cracking up against the water font.
No one honored the heroes. Both ended in the frying pan.
So lost
At the firtst sight, she reminded me Jane March cooking naked in Bruce Willis’s kitchen.
I didn’t even realize that my wife was about to arrive home with the groceries. Of course, she was not naked under a white apron with embroidery flounces and not baking cookies for me either, but I was speachless, paralyzed by her arrogance and candor to break into my kitchen like a burglar, covered only by a thin, almost transparent T-shirt, no bra, and a pair of jean shorts, soaking wet.
‘Who the hell are you?’ I asked in a harsh whisper, as if someone could hear us.
She was leaning on the marble worktop and adopting a naughty, deceptively naive and seductive pose. After a calculated silent lapse she said ‘I’m so lost’.
Don’t ask me how a grown up man, a married man, a self-made man, a father, a responsible adult could let himself get caught in a trap like that. I have no clue. I used to be one of those claiming life sentence for child and teen sexual offenders.
She seemed like she used sex to get a fix, to ease some kind of deep emotional pain. She seemed to be hooked on it, she craved me like an addict craves drugs. And she acted older than sixsteen. I know it’s not an excuse, but she acted older than sixteen.
We did it in less than five minutes, fiercely. And in those five minutes I had a blowjob, a soggy hookup and a back door raid better than anything before in my whole life. I came into her, groaning like a beast. Such a bang, such a seizure, such a liberation. The garage door opened just when I was making up my suit. My wife was asking help with the bags.
All of a sudden I realized she wasn’t there anymore. I came out from the trance like if someone punched my stomach. My heart was pounding wildly, my face felt feverish, and my clothes were wet. I filled a jar with water and I smashed it against the tiles, trying to arrange a plausible scenario to justify my messy looks. My wife didn’t notice the tiny footsteps, but she found a bra on one of the deckchairs by the pool and nail tracks in my back a few hours later.
I am sleeping on the couch and she is giving me a silent treatment, while she decides if I deserve to be forgiven or not. And if you ask me if I deserve, I say I don’t.
But I can’t take her wet, tiny, juicy body off my mind. I can’t think about anything else.
It’s killing me.
Guinea Pig
The goal was to create emotions in the game, the ultimate ludicrous experience and she was one of the human subjects of the control experiment.
The first check was spent at Zara and the second at a Mac Store.
She only had to play two hours a day non stop in a lab, to report any changes in perception or behavior and to keep the secret, obviously.
The game slightly reminded her of Second Life or The Sims, but in just a minute of play she was rushed into her childhood or her teens, and an impolite, blatant alternative self had taken over the control of everything, making brutal amends or satisfying forbidden desires and needs.
On the other side, just out of the screen, reality warped totally out of proportion and she loved that.
She loved the universal permission to freak out in a borderline way, her bizarre, nameless hunger left out like a wild beast, the tingling flood of happenstance kicking inside her central nervous system. After a few weeks she had turned into a female version of House M.D. Ill-mannered, brutally honest, witty, disrespectful, brilliant.
Things started to go awry. At this point, she was having atrocious fantasies I can’t even describe in these pages, even though she was still able to constrain ill drives and maintain a sense of reality.
Now, in the aftermath of her suicide, her latest battered boyfriend is trying to sell the exclusive of her diaries to the tabloids and the white-robe men in the lab have sent their bullyboys to get rid of the problem.
Figure that.
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?
A normal, average life
She was a child prodigy in the 80′s. She could play five of the most difficult instruments and won a bunch of contests, dragged from one to the next by an histrionic mother, desperate for attention.
At sixteen she realized her queerness. At twenty two she killed victim zero.
Since then, she has been perfecting her normal, average life, suppressing one human annoyance at a time. She needs no redemption, no absolution, no amnesty or discharge.
On the verge of forties, she still settles for second best, secretly thinking she deserves better.
Her father swears that she is the best daughter anyone could have. Her mother spends evenings looking at photographs and news scraps of the time both were celebrities.
Her angelic visage and her virtuosity playing the organ, the piano, the violin, the cello can fool anyone.
She has no fears, no feelings of guilt or remorse. An exquisitely peaceful face. Even her natural, impersonal process choosing you as the next prey may be charming.
Her true nature remains invisible to the rest of the world.
She is a skilled mind reader.
Conscience can be a great handicap. Think about it.
Ask yourself how would you live your life if you had such an advantage over the majority.
Thersites
Luka gouged Nastia’s mauve eyes with a dented knife and put them into a ziploc, right after the body heavily hit the floor, just as Konstantin ordered -not only a proof of death, but also a fetish-, washing his blood stained hands pouring a bottle of mineral water over them and the blade.
He drove from Jávea to Alicante, entering the port harbor at half past five.
Konstantin was waiting his arrival at the deck of the yacht and held out his left hand without even looking at him.
‘Ladno’, he said, and threw the ziploc bag overboard.
No checking, no touching. Anything at all.
That night he got drunk as usual. He cried and babbled in Russian on the silicone breast of a Dominican prostitute, feeling like a ghost. Feeling weary and sold out.
Next day he found Nastia’s lover and hit his face until he spit half his teeth to the ground and the jaw was broken into three pieces.
Luka used to read Nietzsche before engaging the mob.
“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster”. What a truth.
He also used to love Nastia from a distance.
Luka has always been a faithful servant. Utterly devoted. Silent. Stoic.
Now he is almost in his way back to the East. The train is leaving in about ten minutes.
Every man has a limit, even though it makes him a deserter, a runaway, a renegade, the next target shot.
He misses Mamulya a lot. She is like death itself. She always has some borscht to put on the table and a warm, quiet, forgiving embrace. Kak pazhivayesh, VazliublEnnyj Luka?
Every man has a a word, a heart, a limit and a mother waiting for him at home, somewhere.
Ya sebya nekhorosho chuvstvuyu, Mamulya.
Ya sebya nekhorosho chuvstvuyu.
T.R
It’s what I can’t name in these photographs what haunts me when I am not watching them.
All the questions that rise up (stories, exotic nature of strangers, serendipious glimpses of night dreams) are symbols of my faith. All this beauty offered to me, all these secrets, tangled, abounded, inexhaustible, like mirages over the shadows of a desert.