“Why The Word of the Mute? Because in most of my stories, those who are deprived of speech in life are expressed, the marginalized, the forgotten, those condemned to an existence without harmony and without voice. I have restored this denied breath to them and allowed them to modulate their desires, their outbursts, and their anguishes”- J.R.Ribeyro
When Cristóbal parked the car at a quarter past five in the morning to meet his partner Antonio, it seemed that the streets were still innocent, neat, without colors or smells. They barely crossed paths with people and often saw stray cats roaming the neighborhood.
For hours they would be in an RSU truck collecting everything that the human being means and is: what he consumes.
Through the cigarette butts, the filthy smell of half-closed plastic bags, the attempts at recycling, the alcohol consumed seen from piles of glass, the cans and wrappers of processed foods, the diapers, the uncompressed cardboard, the broken objects, the leftovers...he felt that his life was looking down, constantly looking at the sidewalk, looking at the misery that constitutes us and with it making an analysis of our time. How can we live like this?
But Cristóbal also had another job, and when he got home, despite his tiredness, he managed to open a small old ringed notebook and write poems.
He did it secretly, usually when his wife, Matilde, with whom he had been married for more than thirty years, was practically asleep.
Cristóbal transformed misery into beauty, because he wrote nothing but poems that spoke of garbage, where from time to time a cockroach or a rat appeared as the protagonist. He knew well that poetry was found below - on the ground - and above, perhaps hanging from some star by confusion.
He felt happy with his work because he always shared jokes with his partner Antonio, and both were characterized by a great sense of humor. I am fortunate, he thought as he arrived home tired, because I have health and I live with the person I love. He never thought about his own poverty, although he juggled to make ends meet.
He never thought that his hiding place, that old notebook that gathered “Poems in Garbage Bags”, whose title he thought for a draft, could be read or listened to.
One day, by chance, he met a great writer - whom he recognized on the spot - at the bus stop, and they humbly began to talk. The conversation lasted for hours. They talked about the concept of poverty and words. They talked about words hidden among the most horrible smells to which Cristóbal had become accustomed.
That writer, with a thick beard and an affable look, asked to read Cristóbal's old notebook.
In blue ink, with forcefulness, the writer slid his pen on the last page of the notebook and wrote: “You are already rich, Mr. Cristóbal, you are already a Poet.”