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1 -
“Sometimes it feels that your life is a game you play to make me feel more and more lonely” He said with his eyes fixed on something outside the window.
She took a long time to ponder this and then she said simply: “We need more milk…” and then, when he turn to look at her she added: “and butter…”
He stood up, grab the car keys and his wallet from the table, and pick up a couple of fabric market-bags from a hook by the entrance and left the house to never come back.

2 -
His body was found two hundred and seventy three thousand years too late, in a sedimentary layer corresponding to the twenty and twenty first centuries of the first cycle.

Let me raise my Vegetarian Glass to make In Absentia, a rather late but simple laudation of my beloved niece Mariana, in the occasion of her marriage.

She is universally considered beautiful – which she no doubt is; and sweet – to which again, I have no objection. But that is the outside, and the outside is only the decor, the fine garment, if you will, to the truly beautiful person that she is.

I can only hope this marriage will nurture and grow that person, and will not let her get lost in the warm and tempting oneness of its binary essence. Let us remember that it is only well to be lost in the two when the one is healthy and strong.

Mariana was the oldest cousin to my baby boy. The luminous smile that adorned his face when he saw her and her sister is one of the most powerful reasons why I will always love them. But she was also my own child for a while, when times were hard and her own family was in crisis, I got to live with them and care for them and take them to school every day. She was a gook kid at home and she was a good kid at school. She used to go to her Montessori class eagerly and with anticipation. Her teachers loved her, and her classmates too.

Mariana is an intelligent woman, gifted with not only of the fleeting intelligence that lives in quick responses and witty conversation, but with the sturdy persevering intelligence that fights and lives on in creativity and accomplishment no matter how uphill the road might seem to be. She can tackle difficult subjects and master them because her intelligence is allied to a strong will.

Mariana is a loving person. She hides behind the social manifestations of friendliness, but it was not just the age difference that made her the first of the children to “return” to the joy of the family reunions, when all the others had wondered away in their search for independence. You could see her loving nature in the way she treated her old grandparents or the younger boys and girls in the family, the way she never missed a birthday even when it was a clandestine affair.

She once wanted to be a veterinarian. She volunteer at an animal refuge. She left Victoria with few possessions but with her pets. She loves animals, not in the fashion-accessory manner she sometimes affects, but with total sincerity.

I meet Mariana first when she was only two very short years old. She was behind her father’s car, playing, with her “mimi” (her security blanket) firmly in her grasp, waiting to meet her Aunt that had been living in Europe and the new Uncle she had brought back with her. From the very beginning I had not the impression of meeting a child, but a person. Very late that night, while her parents and us were conversing after dinner, Mariana showed up dragging her sister by the leg. All matter of fact-like, she said: “Mom, she needs you.” – and went back to bed by herself.

I am waiting for death – not mine.

The death of a garden we nurtured all spring and summer.

Autumn is here.

Winter is not death: it is afterlife.

With its dry air and the utter depth of its emptiness,

winter is a macabre heaven.

Autumn is the dirty, wet, muddled process of dying.

Muddy spring is the incessant fucking of two wild creatures in heat.

We are at the metro station, going south towards sterile,

but we will come out at the other end after a while.

Some trains have a circular route,

some don’t.

It has been published in its own website http://www.elcervantes.org. I highly recommend it if you read Spanish.

Using the history of  T.N.C. he explores the trajectory of Argentinean Theatre in general and – by extrapolation – its tangled thread of art and politics for over a century.

At this point he is trying to get some form of hard-copy publishing under way. You’d think the T.N.C. would jump at the chance to get the material out there, but it hasn’t made it past the “promises” stage. Pretty sad, really; and a telling indictment of the situation of the venerable institution.

“There had been a girl who had laughed with him, the laughter deep inside her throat…” Clifford D. Simak – A Choice of Gods.

Laughing, we are told by Hans Ruesch in his book “Top of the World” (that I knew a long time ago by his Spanish title “El País de las Sombras Largas”; a much more inspired title indeed), is what the Eskimos call making love. Having lived in Canada for 27 years, and having spent some of them in the north, and furthermore having known at least one Eskimo in person (Hey Johnny! I wonder how you are doing these days….) I am no closer to verify that tidbit of information that I was when I read the book all the way back in Buenos Aires, and all those years ago, in my adolescence.

It seems to me that even if it wasn’t true, the concept behind it is good enough to merit adoption. I know, for myself, that of all the passionate moments I shared with my Gabi, those in which we shared a laugh are the most lasting ones. Sharing a poignant, or a dramatic event can tie you to a person – even sharing a traumatic event I imagine can do the same, or so we are told in countless books, movies and TV serials – but sharing a laugh with a person you love gets you closer than anything else ever will. The more you laugh the more you love her, and the more you know her. 

I am scientific minded, you could say. I do not meant to imply I have special claims to mastering a science, or a long, medium or any-sized actual experience with science. I just mean have a mind that clicks better with the idea of science than with the idea of faith.

I discovered very early that I cannot lie to myself. That is, not if I can see what I am doing  (there is all kinds of lying that we do that we know nothing about, and regarding those I have no special powers).

It was right after my granmother’s death. I was seven years old and I needed reassurance that I will see her again and above all, that that awful thing that just had happened to her wouldn’t ever happen to me. So I turned to God – or I rather tried, because it didn’t take. Even at seven I knew that I was just wishing there was a God, but I didn’t really believed in it. And I knew that without proof I could never believe.

The thing I like about science was never so much the science itself, but its philosophy, its ethos. Don’t get me wrong, from my adult perspective I’d love to have studied physics, cosmology or math; but back when I was a teenager there was this artificial and arbitrary divide between the worlds of arts and letters (to which I thought I fully belonged), and the world of hard sciences. But even then I thought as a scientist as far as the burden of proof goes. Because, mostly, atheistic marxism is very much like science in that aspect, and that was the soup I was cooking in.

By this I do not meant I refused the spiritual world. To this day my favourit stories include a healthy dosis of the supernatural and with it (and without it) a sense of the higher purpose. But just as I do not equate higher purpose with religion, I resent the appropriation of the spiritual world by the spiritual types.

Some of the spiritual things I believed in are: love between two persons -love that is so strong and lasting that it creates a third person that is both of them and more; the incredible affinity between animals of different species such as man and dog – dogs and their unbelievable talent for self sacrifice, us and our constant need for reassurance; the powerful connection to other person’s mind that is reading; music, music, music; the instant surrender that happens when you first see your child… you get the gist, right? I am contending that the powerfully emotional is often akin to the spiritual.

Throughout the years I lived in a sort of divided state. My convictions are fundamental to me, and my convictions on the issue of death are and have always been very clear: we cease to exist as an entity, we decompose and disappear. There is no “energy” or “intangible” that remains behind. No essence of our beings survives other than what we live in other’s memories – but that residue has no awareness of itself. Yet, on the other hand, I detect a mockingly detached part of me waaay in the back, by the shadows, that “knows” that death and annihilation of the self – of *this* particular self – is simply impossible.

I have tried to shut that guy up a thousand times; there is nothing I despise more than false hope. But he refuses to go away. I fear that when I grow old and in all likelihood atherosclerotic, I may give in to him. If that moment ever comes, please shoot me. You have my blessing and absolution.

… most likely it was when Alice dropped by for a cup of coffee - I’d just leaned that the cute bronze pot with the wooden handle was actually called an Ibrik and this awaken a thereto dormant passion for Turkish Coffee – she dropped by, I was saying, bringing the exciting but hopelessly mistaken news: I was dead

Needless to say, I immediately made sure the opposite was actually true and, stirring the foam in and pulling the IBRIK out of the flame for a brief moment to allow the coffee grinds to settle, I begin to wonder what item from my rather scarce wardrobe would be adequate for the extraordinary circumstances… Alice was ecstatic. The black satin dress she bought when his mother died was still unused, courtesy of his cataleptic mother’s revival. Here at last she’d found the awaited occasion to wear it.

Truth be told, I did not stray too far out of my way to convince her I was alive – or that even in the event of my death, our relationship was not of such depth as to require mourning garments. I knew her well enough to know that nothing could dampen her enthusiasm, so the Ibrik returned to the stove and I started seriously considering about the bonanza of happy secondary effects my timely death should entail.

And the verb was such that it shall not be pronounced in the company of children and women. Let us just say loosely that the Verb described an attempt at reproduction that while not often successful was nevertheless fun.