ANABÁKOROS

(by Leonardo Garet)

1

THE HIDDEN REASON OF THE JOURNEYS

Our town sank and we discovered we were surrounded by the mountainous ring. Books don´t tell us the real story. And the proofs would be so insufficient that it is easier to say that things were always as they are now. This geography of countries has been the same since the beginning of the planet. It seems impossible that the houses had remained next to the ones they were. They say that only the birds felt the difference and they were flying with their point upward and then fast downward as if a stone had reached them.

At that time one of our parents went to investigate the state of things further the wall of mountains. The silence of his embassy reports that he will have given up the idea of coming back. He must know the real truth, but he will be turning around forever, because many of the ones who didn´t dare to leave as he did, now curse him.

The past of some photos seems to be the furthest, but anyway, there is somebody who suspects that the first photos were taken only yesterday, but they have become old because of the sun and water.

The maps show with different colours the different features of what seems to be an orbit around the town. Nobody can finish saying what he wishes because the echoes of his own words put themselves on top of the others. The sky isn´t up there, either, it is simply out of our reach, and painted of an intense blue, for the eyes and the hands to sink there.

We want the children to learn the names of the peaks, mountain ranges and valleys that we don´t know. They will certainly forget them. Maybe because they hope to run away.

 

2

FROM SALTO TO NÍNIVE

These faces that share the air, the unexpected heat, the jumps, have nothing to do with me. ¨No trouble at all¨,¨ After you¨ , is a completely strange language for me. Who knows in which stop, the man sitting next to me, will get off the bus. The conductor is always the same, although he is another person; this trip is not different from any other one.

Suddenly somebody, whom I had never seen, sticks me pins on the skin. That seems clear now, she is the passenger who travelled from Nínive to Babilonia, the city dressed in purple and scarlet.

I look at her again and again. Her hands and her eyes are some current ones. She is coming to fulfil the promise of the naked body and she looks at me understandably, at me !., that I am from Salto, a city that takes its name from the jumps of water in its river.

The mountains that separate my village from the rest of the world seem to be smashing into pieces and that the streets and the houses were not sunk any more. Everything is shining. The bus has different colours and a music, which comes from the passengers and their seats, moves it now.

At the end of the aisle, there is a world which is opening while we are moving as if we had become a torch thrown upward. Who am I smiling to? I don´t know and I don´t care if somebody answers me.

Instead of humble houses, there are temples.

The woman speaks to me in a language I had never heard, but there is no unknown word for me. She invited me to get off. Her voice opened the abysses of Nínive, which once had snow and suddenly looked running naked, in a river of such transparent waters that a light green let us see the entrance to a cave which undoubtedly would come out from a very distant land ; further these ignominious mountains that surround us.

I would have to recognize my body isolated from the things that include me in the known world, and teach it that it is still the same in spite of the changes of the time.

The conductor came nearer, he was dripping—water from that river, perhaps?—and pointing at me from far away. My destination had already passed, the ticket didn´t allow me to go further the city we had left in the horizon.

-And how do I go back?, I asked him.

The girl wasn´t on the bus any more. She had left it and was running backward.. I threw myself after her but I realized that we were on tracks which would never touch each other. The signs were weaker and weaker. Now I have only her eyes and her hands.

 

17

MY FATHER´S RETURN

My father might not have had time to explain me why we have to travel with our soul. He was a man who used to travel to Montevideo by bus, to Concordia by boat, and to Buenos Aires, Mendoza and Santa Fe by train. He used to travel the same way he used to speak, with his soul. He gave lectures and poetic recitals, making people know about other writers of his time and in places where many times people hadn´t had a literary act yet.( In Chiloé, on the sign where you could read about his ¨literary lecture¨, they advised him to add: ¨highly moral show¨, so that people were encouraged to go. )

He had to stand more incomprehension than the one a lonely person has. And the worst of all is that I couldn´t understand him, either. That´s why, since his death, his person has become more and more important.

Today he sat next to me and I could sense his usual silence that covered me like a cage left at the edge of a forest to hunt birds.

I could hear the singing of the ¨caller birds¨. I looked at him with happy eyes, not knowing that that is the way you look when you look forever. He was wearing his grey hat with a black ribbon.

Once, my father told me that you have to wear the hat as long as you can. And after that you mustn´t throw it or give it away, but burn it as if it were a flag.

My memories visit me more and more frequently. They come back to me to take a place that is being formed with the help of all the feelings.

We don´t have to forget that it is important if feelings don´t vanish. There will be always something related with that.

My father used to say: Ït´s only a question of not letting our souls fall down.¨ There must be also a relation with my belief that the soul has the shape of a hat.

 

23

A WALK

-A tyre-, somebody said with an alarmed voice, soon after the explosion.

The bus had passed from the accelerator to a gear to stop. If it was a bomb, I thought we would know how strong the bus was. But the bus was useless, I mean, quiet.

Somebody walked forward along the aisle, as if he remembered something, others stared at what they believed were their shadows.

Looking at the road without trees on its edges, I remembered The red desert, from Antonioni; only that Norma Vitti wouldn´t be walking on these hills and the world of factories wouldn´t start there, either. Otherwise what we knew, would be disappearing.

I felt I had to get off for a walk, but before that I considered going back or forward. If I went back I might not be able to return to the present, which could be confused with the absolute in that uninhabited road, if I moved forward, it could be a relaxed walk because the bus would pick me up in ten or fifteen minutes, with a smile.

After these thoughts, I started walking along the road following the opposite way the bus had come, with each step I made myself turn my head back to know if the bus was leaving but also convincing myself that ¨strength¨meant not to turn my head back and continue walking away.

It was unavoidable to make some calculations: how long it took to change a tyre, how many passengers might have seen me as to know:

a- that I had left the bus

b- that that certainly wasn´t my fate

c- that I ¨wished¨to go back.

I couldn´t hear the noise of the engine any more and that made me feel more supple, stronger and walking without thinking about destinations, but just in terms of a challenge.

There was nothing to win, only several ways of losing. The view was new as if the many years I had passed through it, hadn´t existed. Each step was taking me to caves of unknown small lizards, stones and flowers. If I could stand the challenge longer, I may not understand the message I was sent from the bus. And that might be a recovered way of victory.

37

REASONS FOR WRITING

-You - why do you write’

My next seat partner had said the terrible words. .Referring to the meaning of that question, I also heard familiar voices that were flying about the house with the lightest wind: ¨¨Come in, come in, he is not doing anything¨, and the more supposedly well-intended ones said: ¨¨ now that you have finished your job, why don´t you dedicate yourself to writing?

Imitating my next seat partner´s question, the memory handed me a fat woman´s ¨packet¨, who¨, pressing her dress as if it were guilty of something and with half-closed eyes, explained me that she wrote what she deeply felt, not taking into account how she did it, otherwise , that would kill her feeling..

For the journey to become shorter¨, I answered, while I was folding the informing papers, so that he couldn´t read anything and then his questions started:.¨¨

-And what do you write about?

Then I saw a¨dog cut in the middle, illustrating the room of the conditioned streaks from Pavlov.

Besides, a battery which had been charged from the morning, connected to the eyes and ears.

About what happens outside, or what happens inside, about what didn´t happen or would have had to happen. But the man´s look was fully ready to follow any of those paths, with his implacable and irrefutable tone so I gave up showing that gesture of impotence which is shown with hands and shoulders. He took it as he wanted..

-Ï know-about your love experiences, and that is why you don´t want to say anything.

Undoubtedly, the man hadn´t done anything but preparing that moment , and when he felt sure, he said:

-Ï write, too.

The landscape belonged to northern Uruguay, full of grass and stones and those houses with no trees, with their cabins used like toilets, far away from the rest of the house.

I couldn´t hide my eyes further the seat ahead and this way I heard the beginning of the description of a poem, like a radio that is losing clarification, but you don´t realize about it until the storm becomes louder than the radio.

-But what can you tell me?

-Yes, you are right. I think so, too.

-That is what I thought, too.

I sank into so many things, so many innocent reports and I didn´t feel even able to plagiarize one of them.

-Ï write to travel¨, I confessed him.

-¨How ingenious!¨, to travel into the future, the real place of the artists.

-¨No,¨I said ¨to have a journey as a prize.¨

I hadn´t thought it would turn out so good and convincing; the man must have felt struck on a very sensitive place. He didn´t talk to me any more.

 

38

JOURNEY PRAISE

The only real event is the journey. Leaving the Hypnotism of the days, the salvation of the collapse of the roofs. Little by little the journey is constructed , checking the road .like a child copying the alphabet in his handwriting notebook.But journeys cannot be told, even when the other reads the doodle of the road. The most we can do is to trap it in a symbol. The greatest ambition is that the sense of a journey can be trapped in an änabákoro¨.It may refer to what has been seen about somebody who was leaving or has already left along the same road. In that case, a gesture is enough. The readers who are enthusiastic about finding something in what they read, choose the anabákoro.The wounds which do not heal, are the ones from the journeys told in photos or videos. (The same happens with the wedding and the honeymoon that end in an album, which is even more dead than the one in the undertaker´s. There are people who show them to get some money.Journeys change the colour of the things. When you go back you see that the grey typewriter which was on the desk, has become intense blue. And that the splendid yellow and orange cat is now grey spotted white, and to make nobody doubt about his identity, hurries up, without anybody asking him, to do the things that he and only he knows how to do.It is moving to come back from a journey and to see the people and things showing something that identifies them. What is between the known roofs, gives us a hand to help us skip the days.

I believe in the overpowering journey, creator of the man and the reason. In that one written in our brain, like the years in the trunks of the palm trees. In that journey, perhaps not possible to realize, which was taking us far from one place and near the other.

 

47

ONE PAGE BEFORE THE NIGHT

There are no more invisible pages than the ones in a magical book. They have all the travels and it is a matter of knowing the entreaty for them to start again. It is the last way of sensing the seasons of another time.

The man, although he kept looking forward, was undoubtedly talking to me, I was on his right. We had got on the bus in the same stop of the journey but, without having talked or looked at each other, while we were waiting for the bus. I went up first and he could have chosen at least between two free seats; but he came straight to the place where I was as if we were travelling together.

It was in the afternoon, at the moment when the light seems to split up in the colours of the things where it shines for the last time.

I felt light and eager as to leave this world, so I dedicated to reading.

Although he never looked at me , the man next to me must have realized that from the moment I sat down, that I didn´t do anything else than reading Poimandres, the Treaty 1 from ¨Corpus Hermeticum¨of Hermes Trismegisto, and some circulating magazines about supernatural powers.

At a certain time during the journey. I felt better than the others and I looked around with some sympathy, and particularly at this man , because I had the idea I was the only passenger who didn´t waste time. As if he was guessing my looks, he talked to me.

-Basically- he started, and I was confused by his look lost forward and his abrupt beginning, a right innocence must be demanded, that is the one of the old man who forgot the number of his ¨definitive¨loves and of how many crimes he had to commit to protect them¨, the innocence of that one who felt he was starting reincarnations when he listened to the moans of each new woman he possessed.

I had always been impressed by the characters of the novels, who were able to give long, wise and grandiloquent speeches and I recognized my occasional partner like one of them. But I dared, perhaps because I was travelling, to try to control him.

-Zaratustra was the first one who realized what was happening around him: animals which ate one another, which fornicated., died and some part of its figure remained in the one which followed .There was the ray, the fall in the precipices and the so many surprises that appeared in the middle of a well organized party to switch off the lights and turn it into an incomprehensible tragedy. I think there is an actual fight between two powers. But you mustn´t believe I am wrong; the magician books tell us something different. Hermes also presented the bases and put them inside the covers of the invisible book.

He had had a brilliant end so I stopped and looked at him, very happily.

-Think on what has filled your life and look the other side from where I am.

Next to the glass of my window pictures revealed and became alive. Exuberant bodies were waggling.

-That, the wonder-I couldn´t help saying.

-You live in a pitiful time, he sentenced.

The women were trying to pass through the glass so I forgot my partner and prepared to enjoy them. The bus became a tunnel of pleasures.The ghost train of a funfair that I had seen in my childhood had terrifying images. Now, an aisle, also long and dark, made images jump but each one of them was more tempting.

I guess that a great part of the effect was coming from the concurrence of several races. A woman with a Chinese face caressed as if it was not necessary to finish; an African was riding as if the horse had runaway; a blonde woman twisted seizing her nipples as if they were apples. The scenes were happening in a car, in a huge bed and in a river.

-Thanks God¨- I said, ¨this is the world¨.

-You don´t know what the world is, a voice came from my left, and at the same time the window was empty and I could see only the fields which would be eternal if there were no floating cows and sheep. Surviving cows and sheep- I corrected myself to give myself time and not to have to answer him anything.

-I didn´t see what you saw, but I know that you saw, whatever you wanted; no other thing. And that excited him. But you will never be able to come out of yourself. I can prove that I am not lying.

The bus stopped.

-I have to get off- I said.

-You are not getting off yet—the conductor tried to stop me.

-Yes I do, today.

I felt the pleasure of seeing the bus driving away and I was lost in an unknown corner.

48

VILLAGES

The villages are buses which lost the wheels befote leaving, or broke down in the middle of the journey because the roof has flown away , and its passengers have resigned. People get used to being in the open air and become sad from the bus which is moving.

Passengers come from the villages: some sadness remain in their eyes. They hardly get on the bus, they exchange newspapers and they are more ashamed than rude, a newspaper says ¨¨We have won¨, another one says, ¨We have lost.¨

The villages remain in the horizon to be recognized by the ones who live there. They have lights ahead, and they vanish at the back.

On the bus some affairs happen. But they are fleeting like the horizon. The passengers become inhabitants again and those affairs last the longest for one year or they turn into marriages. Somebody thinks that the time was fixed that way.

 

84

ON THE LAST SEAT

They were sitting on the last row of seats. They had got on the bus in a stop which called my attention because it had a flowered bower that looked like a rainbow. The man was tall, that is why I saw him first even when he was behind the woman,who was stooped and had light eyes, as if they were made of water. Her hair in the middle made her resemble Florencio Sanchez. I couldn´t say this to anybody , but it took me to turn round several times. Who knows in what way they accepted my curiosity, because once when I turned round , they both smiled to me , with a gesture that I couldn´t help greeting them. I then noticed that they had a baby next to them and not a bag; it was one of those things I knew afterwards, were called moses.

I was looking at the blinding extension of country but the rainbow of the bower didn´t vanish because it seemed to me it belonged to another trip.

The bus was moving so monotonously, that was my case because I did the same trip every week, and I could guess without a mistake, the woods and houses we would find. The idea that the view was like a screen which was moving, made me think that the time would also pass in another sense.

Not looking for any excuses, I went to the seats at the back. The man and the woman seemed to be waiting for me with an impassive smile. They must have supposed that I wished to see the baby because, without saying anything , they moved the white cloth and just looked at me. The baby was inside the inflated folds. I felt I had to look at him and say something. But I couldn´t do this last thing. He was so different from the babies I knew that I became breathless, and I couldn´t hide my amazement. His face was irradiating and I can´t remember anything else. When I looked at the parents, I recognized they were very old. If there was a dialogue, I don´t know. Somehow I knew, however, that they had him covered for the light did not fall on him.

The bus never slowed down, but when I became conscious of the seat and the windows, I looked back, frightened, there was nobody on the last seat. The light of the sun setting was moving on the empty seat, where ¨Moisés¨ had been , forming a kind of whirlpool that seemed to concentrate the arrows of all the forces. Perhaps it is because of this that ¨His eye had not darkened, and his vital strength had not disappeared¨.


Translated by Teresita Barreiro

 

Teresita Barreiro, Salto 1948. Profesora en el Liceo Crandon (1966-1984), en el Instituto Cultural Anglo (1966-2001) y en Enseñanza Secundaria, en Uruguay, desde 1980 hasta la fecha. Se desempeña actualmente como subdirectora del Liceo Nº 1 de Salto