The ego. What is the ego? That question that the ego is always quick to answer. Answer whom? Who asks? Who debates the answer? The one telling this, whoever he is in relation to the ego, had an event that confronted him. He was fortunate that Life, to save that portion of life, forced the ego to come out of its shelter, to show its face, to expose itself and kneel next to the life that was leaving. Mine, the one that gave it shelter and food. And for some reason, Life still wanted me on this side. And we return to Alegranza and it's been more or less thirty years since the park; it continues with the park.
It was once again one of those days when I was alone on the island; it seems that solitude is an almost unbreakable condition for certain events. If I was alone it was because the weather was bad. On those days, the body inhabited a kind of infinite calm and tension at the same time and nature possessed you, taking advantage of the fact that there were no practical thoughts, fishing and those things, let's go fishing and fishing. And that, at that time, if I didn't have to think, the truth is, I didn't think much, unless some grievance came to my head or some cool memory, a longing. The past.
I was discovering the world and you don't have to think much for that. Come on, there, between not seeing yourself - there were no mirrors - and there not being much trouble between humans, the ego dozed off. Some time had passed since I had realized that there were only people and people's affairs in my head. And I had begun to open spaces. And it must have been in that state when what happened happened, and I'm going to tell you.
Those days, I would cook at noon, especially to have an early and light dinner later and go to bed at sunset. The night when it fell was too much for me, because I was left alone in the universe and that scared me quite a bit, what I call the atavistic fear. It wasn't Papagayo, there was always someone nearby; in Alegranza, the nights of storms tore you away from anything known. Literally, that night you were the only human on the face of the earth - there were no cell phones and I didn't have a radio station.
At that time, I already knew they were there, but I saw them as something threatening; fear when you are alone in a place like that is very, very powerful. And learning to navigate it takes time. The time it takes to be at peace with those from here and those from there. With yourself. And I'm talking about stormy nights where even the floor of the barracks rumbled when the giant overflows entered the caves on the shore, literally lifting the island in weight.
Well, that's it. I had made my fire and was parboiling some potatoes. I vaguely remember taking one out to see if they were done, I bit a piece and when I swallowed it, it took the old path. That's what we called it around here when you choked; come on, you choked. It wasn't one of those little pieces or a liquid sip that suffocates you; it scares you, but you know from experience that it ends up coming out. No, it was a big chunk of potato.
To situate more, I return to the ego. If there is something that puts the ego to sleep, it is making fire. Between going to the shore for the wood of the jallos, that concentration and that walk begins to knock it down. The rumble of the sea, the freshness of the saín, leave it almost ready. By the time you prepare the little sticks in a pyramid for the bonfire, and it bothered me that it didn't light the first time, then it's almost fried, but it still nods. Now, when your eyes are lost in the flames in the dance of blues, reds, yellows, crackles and so on, then it surrenders, succumbs, renounces and only you remain. And the whisper of the unnameable.
Well there, right there, I grabbed the potato, put it in my mouth after a couple of blows and pa'l old road, the one that takes you to another neighborhood. Now I don't remember the movements, but I must have gotten up towards the barracks; I don't know why I went there, while I was dying in giant steps; there was not the slightest gap to take air or to expel it. Dry. I know that at one point I fell to my knees next to the corner of the barracks. I must have already been purple and an instant from the end. But Life still wanted me on this side, and at breakneck speed it must have started searching my unconscious brain for something that would make me react. A mother, a daughter, a dream, something must have managed millions of files. But time was running out and nothing appeared with the necessary force to get the potato out of the pipe.
Then, in the last instant, less than a second before fainting, the ego woke up startled from its deep sleep next to the bonfire, knelt next to me scared and surprised at its irresponsibility and showed me a page of a newspaper. As I tell it, a real page in front of my noses where I could read in letters larger than the rest: 'Ginés died drowned by a potato in Alegranza'. It was instantaneous. The shame, the pride, not the news of the death itself, no, the form, the fucking way of dying, grabbed the potato and threw it through the nose against the ground. Like a bullet, I have engraved in my mind the sound against a wooden board that was there; it is the most that was engraved on me from that moment and how a piece of potato that is not very solid had to come out to sound against the wood. Through the nose, it came out through the nose.
That day I knew what the ego was, but I had never heard it named. The closest thing, the selfish thing. I thought it was just pride. But I knew that something very powerful was inside me and that, although it had saved my life, it was not the point. Something in me did not want to be essentially just pride and shame. I didn't want to. So we started living again and until today. I told it many times, at least to the people who interested me as the most important fact of who and how I was in essence. That's how I believed it and I always sensed that hiding or hiding that event from myself would be catastrophic. Now, in these times, when I started hearing about thoughts, the ego and all those things, I paid attention to them vehemently because I know they are fundamental. And because they resonated with my story.
I, who am like those cacti that stay in the desert no matter what, full of thorns on the outside but pure flan on the inside, like those cacti I only bloom every thirty years. And I bloom when the ego takes drastic measures. I already told you the first one. The second is now, in this time. It was the ego this time who took a tremendous lesson that I will never tell, and this time I saved it. We have agreed that it should rest, that it is time for it to rest, that I have given it a vibrant life. It only asks me to have a little fire lit in my heart and an open window in my head so that the air moves the flames. And that I don't hold any grudges. Sometimes, if a lot of air enters the heart it gets excited, but I recognize it and calm it down, it is old and tired. Now, to survive without its control and help, I simply split myself in two, like the suns. Alone, totally alone, one, I can't. Because then it is the owners of the ego who eat me alive. So, in nothing, this new flower falls, and there we will continue, in the desert. If it hasn't fallen already, I can't see myself.
So, now I love my ego, I pamper it; it likes it and lets me love it. There are no jealousies. Nor suspicions. And so I return to daily life falling in love with everything and getting closer and closer to the spaces where the unnameable is. Beyond me and his ego.
And now I return to finish this poem that I also wrote in Alegranza years later, when the night no longer frightened me. In case someone is curious to know more about the unnameable. Explanation that I cannot give because it is what ceases to be. Fear? You ask again.
Answer:
The night is such that over the lullaby of the sea you can hear the serene as it falls.
The song of the shearwaters embraces the stars over the witches' sabbath of my eyes in the bonfire.
I love this beating of my heart in perfect time with reason.
The dance of the clouds continues in search of the disappeared Moon next to that of the Earth through a magical desert of stars.
It smells like space, in the mouth the taste of my own kisses, taste of limpet, of sex.
The quiet hands delight in feeling their own irrigation.
I, a solitary man, lover of deserts, tonight I am the same perception.
I fulfill all my obligations as a time traveler.
And so, as if suddenly, I am more what I am not, than what I am. Fear, you ask.
