chivalrous song, a song of love, a song of farewell? He’d known it in another time, but that time was no longer his. He searched his memory, and in an instant, as if an instant could swallow up years, he returned to the time when somebody used to call him Migalha.
Migalha
means crumb, he said to himself, back then you were a crumb. Suddenly there came a strong gust of wind, the sheets snapped in the wind, the woman stood and began to hang colored shirts and a pair of short pants. Sing again, he whispered, please. At that moment the bells of the church nearby began pealing the midday hour and, as though summoned by the sound, a boy leaned out of the little rooftop dormer, where surely there was a set of stairs leading to the terrace, and ran toward her. He must have been four or five, curly-haired, his sandals with two semicircular openings at the toes and his shorts held up by suspenders. The girl put the basket on the ground, crouched down, cried out: Samuele! and opened her arms wide, and the boy dived into them, the girl stood and began spinning around, hugging the boy, they were both spinning like a merry-go-round, the boy’s legs were outstretched, and she was singing,
Yo me enamoré del aire, del aire de una mujer, como la mujer era aire, con el aire me quedé.
He let himself slide to the ground, his back against the wall, and he gazed upward. The blue of the sky was a color that painted a wide-open space. He opened his mouth to breathe that blue, to swallow it, and then he embraced it, hugging it to his chest. He was saying:
Aire que lleva el aire, aire que el aire la lleva, como tiene tanto rumbo no he podido hablar con ella, como lleva polisón el aire la bambolea
. *
* A free translation of the two stanzas: “I was in love with the air, / With the air of a woman, / Because the woman was air, / I was left with a handful of air, / Air that carries off the air, / Air that the air carries off, / Because she went so quickly, / I couldn’t talk with her, / As if it were lifting a skirt / The air swayed her.”
Festival
He asked me what I thought about it. It wasn’t easy finding the words, it was late, tiredness weighed on me, I’d have liked to go to sleep, I was staring at the lights of the gulf, a damp breeze had risen up, the usual three or four night owls lingered on the hotel’s terrace, it was hard to follow what he was saying, even more so in a language foreign to us both. Now and then he’d pause to search for the right word and in those lapses my attention wandered even more, a country under surveillance, he hoped I’d understand, sure I understood, I understood perfectly, even if to really understand things, you needed to experience them firsthand, yet I knew very well that in those years his was a country under surveillance, or to be more precise, it was a police state. Exactly, he said, a police state, and I was a poor state employee, because everything was the state’s, do you get it? Do you want to know why in the bio I gave to the festival jury under “profession” I wrote “lawyer,” it’s simple, because that was my profession, I was a state lawyer, on behalf of the state I defended people the state wanted to convict, I don’t knowif you understand what a vicious circle this was, that was the function of my profession, to accept this vicious circle, I was the dog who bites his own tail, no, I was the tail the dog bit. And then he added: what if we get something to drink? An excellent idea indeed, I agreed, for me maybe a tisane, the violent images from the last movie we’d had to sit through that day lingered in Technicolor on my tired retinas. Violence in Technicolor, he went on, in our country on the other hand violence was gray, not even black and white but gray, and I had to adapt to that gray, because I was the gray functionary of a state that, in order to make other countries believe democracy belonged to the people, provided the accused with a public defender like in a real
Migalha
means crumb, he said to himself, back then you were a crumb. Suddenly there came a strong gust of wind, the sheets snapped in the wind, the woman stood and began to hang colored shirts and a pair of short pants. Sing again, he whispered, please. At that moment the bells of the church nearby began pealing the midday hour and, as though summoned by the sound, a boy leaned out of the little rooftop dormer, where surely there was a set of stairs leading to the terrace, and ran toward her. He must have been four or five, curly-haired, his sandals with two semicircular openings at the toes and his shorts held up by suspenders. The girl put the basket on the ground, crouched down, cried out: Samuele! and opened her arms wide, and the boy dived into them, the girl stood and began spinning around, hugging the boy, they were both spinning like a merry-go-round, the boy’s legs were outstretched, and she was singing,
Yo me enamoré del aire, del aire de una mujer, como la mujer era aire, con el aire me quedé.
He let himself slide to the ground, his back against the wall, and he gazed upward. The blue of the sky was a color that painted a wide-open space. He opened his mouth to breathe that blue, to swallow it, and then he embraced it, hugging it to his chest. He was saying:
Aire que lleva el aire, aire que el aire la lleva, como tiene tanto rumbo no he podido hablar con ella, como lleva polisón el aire la bambolea
. *
* A free translation of the two stanzas: “I was in love with the air, / With the air of a woman, / Because the woman was air, / I was left with a handful of air, / Air that carries off the air, / Air that the air carries off, / Because she went so quickly, / I couldn’t talk with her, / As if it were lifting a skirt / The air swayed her.”
Festival
He asked me what I thought about it. It wasn’t easy finding the words, it was late, tiredness weighed on me, I’d have liked to go to sleep, I was staring at the lights of the gulf, a damp breeze had risen up, the usual three or four night owls lingered on the hotel’s terrace, it was hard to follow what he was saying, even more so in a language foreign to us both. Now and then he’d pause to search for the right word and in those lapses my attention wandered even more, a country under surveillance, he hoped I’d understand, sure I understood, I understood perfectly, even if to really understand things, you needed to experience them firsthand, yet I knew very well that in those years his was a country under surveillance, or to be more precise, it was a police state. Exactly, he said, a police state, and I was a poor state employee, because everything was the state’s, do you get it? Do you want to know why in the bio I gave to the festival jury under “profession” I wrote “lawyer,” it’s simple, because that was my profession, I was a state lawyer, on behalf of the state I defended people the state wanted to convict, I don’t knowif you understand what a vicious circle this was, that was the function of my profession, to accept this vicious circle, I was the dog who bites his own tail, no, I was the tail the dog bit. And then he added: what if we get something to drink? An excellent idea indeed, I agreed, for me maybe a tisane, the violent images from the last movie we’d had to sit through that day lingered in Technicolor on my tired retinas. Violence in Technicolor, he went on, in our country on the other hand violence was gray, not even black and white but gray, and I had to adapt to that gray, because I was the gray functionary of a state that, in order to make other countries believe democracy belonged to the people, provided the accused with a public defender like in a real
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