To all those heroes who, in the deepest intimacy,
face extraordinary calamities and difficulties
in the silences of the mind and heart.
I didn't come here to reclaim a lost paradise. I am here to overcome everything and change it. To the ancient mark that I carry engraved in my being, of heartbreak, betrayal, shame, frustration, abandonment, violence, marginalization, disgust, absence, and whatever else. Above all, what I have caused. But also what I have received. Not only my part, but that of my parents, my grandmothers, my village, my people, and the rest of the beings. Everything. And there is only one trick I know, and that is to be equally aware of the great things as of the bad things. Whether in the physical or emotional aspect. Because we can suffer a toothache second by second while it lasts, but we enjoy its relief for very little time, very little.
And I know that happiness is exactly what you feel when that pain goes away, that precise instant of awareness of the relief? That space where you don't need absolutely anything. You are. So, the question is why do we let it go so quickly without even a new pain in between. Just in case it helps, I have learned to maintain it, to sustain it second by second, and I only do what I did when it was pain, to be fully aware of the simple fact of being pleasure, second by second. That's also what I mean sometimes when I say the bowl. That the show is over is something that now neither occupies nor worries me in the slightest; pains may come, many and varied, mine and others'. I feel them and I will assume them. But it won't be because I invoke them. And it has been like this from the first moment. And from long before, even.
Sixty-three years ago, my mother had her first child, which happened to be me. It wasn't a "normal" birth; I arrived in this state in an extraordinarily violent way. For some reason that I haven't been able to detect yet, I postponed myself, I reveled in my mother's belly. I don't know if it was fear of the new world or that I didn't want to jump until I saw something more of the previous one; maybe I was trying to synchronize things that otherwise wouldn't have happened, or maybe I was too happy there. Maybe I had something to learn, or maybe it was just fear. Who knows.
The fact is that I wasn't coming out, and my mother was agonizing after days of unsuccessful attempts to bring me here. After ten months, with my fontanelle already closed and wrapped in more than five kilos of stubbornness, the doctor decided to kill me to save my mother, who was already in her final agony. He ordered them to prepare what I understand was a kind of drill to pulverize my head and went out of the room. To smoke, I imagine. That deep puff of someone who thinks they are the maker of life and death in the same gesture. My mother and Doña Lola, the midwife, my transition guard, my bridge, remained there. It seems that the two conspired not to kill me. My mother, in her agony, was willing to risk it. And they decided not to prepare anything. I am not able to describe the tension, the horror, and the hope of those two women in that room, alone. Infinitely alone, but at least with the ancestral practice of managing solitude. When the male arrived, he threw such a tantrum, flew into a rage, and gave them a huge scolding. He grabbed the forceps and tore me out.
I came into life like someone going to death with a hatchet to the head. Well, the other way around. So, my mother was left broken, and I came out shattered: bleeding from my ears, nose, one eye, and God knows what else. I like to think that the guy screwed up his wrist. But, at least, he had the knack to get me out. I thank him with all the intensity of the word thank. Maybe, sometimes a rough gesture is needed to "give" life. Maybe, another with more sensitivity would have killed us. Or would have only saved one. Who knows?
Not long ago, I was able to reach that moment. I felt torn by the jaws and fainted, falling backward on one of my stones. So, it seems that the consciousness of the event is forbidden to me. Pain can be assumed up to a certain limit; beyond that, it is dark. It's like pleasure: when it reaches a point, there is that equally impenetrable light. Or maybe what is forbidden is the information of who we are at that moment; perhaps, it was my tremendous innate curiosity that kept me there for so long, trying to see myself from both sides at the same time. We curious people usually get good beatings for snooping around. And other times we do a lot of damage by lifting the lids sealed by time, secrets, silences, pacts, customs, the networks of history.
It was in Arrecife on June 5, 1956. Later World Environment Day. Ha! I don't think I was waiting for that. That's me. My mother did remember the pain, but a mother will never show you the darkness. So today, Doña Trinidad, mother, mom, we celebrate 63 years of such an event. And I leave for silence other postpartum events that no screenwriter would leave behind today. And I don't even want to imagine my poor father, Don Ginés, with how stressed he was. I don't know if he was out there, I imagine he was, and I imagine how he and the doctor would look at each other through the dust of the smoke from their cigarettes. I was the first child of that man, what would they say with their eyes? My father had the most beautiful green eyes in the world; without them, I wouldn't be here, they would challenge each other, hate each other, curse the things of life, or tremble resigned before the gestural immensity of the universe.
Well, I went through that, I went on a motorcycle at a hundred and something per hour in a swimsuit against the asphalt, I went in a car God knows how many somersaults and the final crash. And, above all, I went through what happened in the hospital? another one that no screenwriter would leave behind. I spent a week, seven days with its hours, minutes, and seconds, of an extreme toothache in Alegranza, alone, without analgesics of any kind and without the slightest possibility of communication with the outside because there were no devices and there was a storm of waste. I went through a hepatitis C treatment, curled up like a dog on the sofa, for an eternity. And some others with their extreme pain. I went through unbearable emotional pains and some anxiety or anguish attacks on the verge of madness. And I spent one stuck, scared shitless, in a brutal vertigo attack on the edge of the Alegranza caldera, about an impossible ten meters from reaching the top. Panic. Vidal, only Vidal with his ways and his manners and his tender words, was able to get me out of there. Dragging me. He tells me that he made me swear that I would never tell it. I have asked him for permission to break the oath.
I went through seeing men and women clinging to our soldiers' clothes, crawling, begging us not to abandon them, and armed to the teeth, taking us to the last cartridge, we left them there in the hands of the new invaders of the Sahara. In an instant, at 19 years old, I already knew a lot about politics and nations. And it hurt. But, for some reason that I don't know, I don't remember having suffered, it must have been because of how I started life that pain always defeats suffering for me. In fact, digging a little deeper, if I have suffered, it has more to do with imagined things than with life itself. That is, when in the midst of the bonanza of pain I stopped feeling pleasure and started to desire, to demand, to criticize, to wait? Aaaaaaaaahhhggg!
And although this has been the most common situation in the time of my life, now, seen from this present, those spaces almost I would say that they did not exist even if they were all together official years of time, almost all that time. I only perceive as lived what hurt or what pleased. This, I don't tell it because it would be very long and unpleasant. So I am quite convinced that my levels of pleasure have something to do with their opposites of pain. Said in another way, that pain points towards there. I'm not sure about that; I'm in learning mode.
In the same way, it seems that all the physical, repressive pain that I went through in school and institutes has been transmuted into an infinite pleasure for learning and an unusual gratitude to the teachings that life and its teachers, from here and from other worlds, are granting me. Now, every time I breathe is a deep pleasure, continuous. Inside and outside, comes and goes, I am not I am, takes and gives, I am not I am, I learn and I don't know. And, then, now I can think about the past and the future, because I do it clinging to that breath, fixed to the very instant, savoring the thought as the act of access to the creation that it should be. And I can think that the next change of state can occur even if the pain that has to be assumed is incalculable. Because I already lived that pain. And I passed. And I have a photo in my mother's lap, so comfortable. So chinijito.
As I said in another post, I am a cactus that only blooms every thirty years. So this is my conclusion, my flower of the sixties: I no longer desire a dignified death, nor do I fear an undignified one, nor do I desire a happy one nor do I fear an unhappy one, neither accompanied nor solitary, neither fast, nor peaceful, nor painless nor healthy, nor naaa de naaa. The one that touches, which is not my business, will be the one I need. In which I trust. And that lightens so much? And I breathe: Inside and outside, comes and goes, I am not I am, takes and gives, man woman, woman man, I am not I am, I learn and I don't know.
I wrote this for my sixtieth birthday and, with some minor corrections, I publish it today, the first birthday of the death of the one who gave me light and darkness. Trinidad is her name and she clearly indicated to me that beyond light and darkness there is another seeing.
