andar por ahí | martin patricio barrios ago. 2012 | Page 96

I was sleepy, my neck ached and I was snorting and stamping my feet because, what’s the need to be irritated because you are around there?
And I have tiny bits of a dream in my pockets, for example.
Snorting and stamping my feet, waiting for you to come in and walk away with your arms a little backwards like a Bollywood actress playing a Mogul queen or a
Tamil demigoddess in the ending scene, a second before ballet and belly dancers burst in the air, walking two or three centimetres further above the floor, with
their chin held high and half a smile, more of marihuanas than of Giocondas, walking as if the cameras from all over Mumbay followed you along the corridors,
acting for who knows what audience.
And I, stamping my feet and with a pain in my neck, irritated, pawing the ground, bawling, sneaking a look at the telephone which could bring your colossal silence
to me (those dreadful gaps in which things are defined in terms of no codes at all because there isn’t any taxonomy which classifies silences and then it is the
soul or the smell which understands and the smell smells and the soul soulens and the heart heartens and the pituitaries or who knows what give a confusing
signal that everything is in order: war has been declared), I wait for you to pierce the air and push the norms of history in which the instinct or the tradition of
those whose defy power are written and you defy power and I thunder, I let off steam, I get lost, I let myself be beaten and I laugh with my hair in a mess and my
soul wet with sweat, I lose myself in your terrific eyes like oceans in the night and I don’t pretend I’m playing: I am playing.
I lose myself in your eyes deep like trenches in that sea in China that wetted my feet on a day I was singing and maybe I was happy.
I lose myself in those eyes I don’t know what colour they are.
A miracle will be necessary to help me with that. (Or throwing a chunk of brick at Cupido’s head? Or bribing him?)
I narrow my eyes so that time doesn’t go by, waiting is a task that consists in doing nothing as long as the other doesn’t change.
Waiting also means scratching my elbows on the walls of some dream or following those gods who led me to throw pieces of chalk at my teacher and stones at
the police, that led me to the edges of the maps, of reason or love, to the edges over which you can lean to see if it is true that the world is held up by elephants
and turtles. And you might be around the re.
A miracle will be necessary to help me with this.
Grow up, Peter, R says to me, he says that to me with certain mercy, as if he was talking to a condemned or an idiot.
Mr R believes that my problem is not being able to stop joking and I don’t think he believes in psychoanalysis.
J says that I do things just so that my historian takes down notes.
JL believes that I don’t think, that I just look.
Run, jerk, if you stay still, they’ll kill us all, Emilio shouted to me and I ran like hell, I ran and I was lucky, I ran like crazy and it seems that Emilio ran and jumped up
to the stars he used to paint and now he must be on the roofs of the world, writing we shall overcome below every star in the universe while I, down here, run so
that they don’t kill us all and I write to you, as if saying that which we always said: if the trick is going to be evident, I’d better reveal it.
Stamping my feet and lost in eyes that grow like cronopios2 that don’t let me see anything but two eyes of a little lady who is half fury, half tenderness.
I have a vocation for having my hands in my pockets and looking out of the window, so I look outwards because out there is where the world is and certainly
something is about to happen and I would like to see that.
I’m sure you are in that out there and I would like to see you.
With the same secret hope that each time I’m shipwrecked I throw a bottle into the sea with a little message poorly written in pencil on a wet piece of paper, I
would invite you to ride a roller coaster or to have an ice-cream at F, or to watch the whales or to do anything.
(vaut mieux une fin effroyable qu´un effroi sans fin…)3
It didn’t matter to be anonymous; that was the option on the menu.
I’m Martin everywhere, all the Martin I can. (p. 8)
2 A figure out of margin, a poem with no rhyme.
3 A horrible end is better than an endless horror.