"No vamos por el anís, ni porque hay que ir. Ya se habrá sospechado: vamos porque no podemos soportar las formas más solapadas de la hipocresía."
Julio Cortázar, "Conducta en los velorios"
El hecho de que, de todos los nombres que podrían haberle puesto, la fueran a llamar así, Blanca Dapenna, aquel día, el día de su muerte,parecía profecía, aunque solo aquel día, y sirvió para alimentar la conversación en medio de la desazón de un velatorio sin colores por falta de flores. Ya había escuchado yo varias teorías acerca de la importancia y el significado de los nombres que se nos dan al nacer, pero nunca había tantas como en esta muerte. La pusimos verde por aquellos días en los que la nombraron manager en la oficina - y ya pasó toda una vida-, siendo, como era, que se trataba de la digna hija de su madre, la anterior jefa máxima. Chica de familia bien, con conexiones y de buen inglés, pero sin título, tenía apenas unos años más que nosotras, y, sin embargo, subió de un zaque al piso más alto para instalarse en la alfombra roja. Probablemente ella sabía que de ese piso no la iba a mover nadie: solo la muerte. Lo que me intriga y me corroe por estos días es si el temor de su final, lento, cruento y anunciado, el espantoso final que al final le tocó en suerte, la habrá acompañado casi tan largo como mi envidia. El caso es que su sentencia la mantuvo en secreto por un tiempo, aunque no llegó a ser tan largo ni tan negro como los celos que yo silenciosamente le había profesado. No olvidaré aquella reunión pringosa en la que nos la presentaron. Vestía trajecito sastre rojo, camisa de seda blanca inmaculada, al mejor estilo de la nobleza inglesa, y unos zapatos de taco cómodo y elegante que eran el centro de todas las miradas femeninas presentes. En nuestro ambiente, a una mujer se la juzga más por su apariencia que por su sapiencia, y su cabello rubio, piel trigueña y ojos verdes, con un centenar de pecas asomadas a los balcones de sus rosadas mejillas, que de vez en cuando se ponían coloradas como manzanas, y siempre cuando se enojaba, le concedían el aire perfecto para ser nuestra superior a su muy temprana edad. Eligió coronarse el cuello abierto con un collar de perlas que yo sólo usé el día que me casé, y tampoco podré olvidar que por el coraje de llevar perlas aquel día también la envidié: yo intuía ya para entonces que la vida nunca me concedería una reunión con unción para volver a usar las mías. Me la encontré de sopetón una mañana helada y gris entrando al ascensor de la oficina hace cosa de dos años. Yo andaba de cacería de papeles por el centro, y recuerdo que había salido de casa apurada, despeinada y enfundada en mi gastado tapado gris de paño, arriba de todo lo que tenia, y deseando no ser vista. Cuando salió del ascensor, la noté distinta: más delgada, más etérea, como iluminada y rejuvenecida. Llevaba un tapado azul de ensueño, ese azul que no se consigue en la grisura de Buenos Aires, con detalles de cuero en las mangas y solapas, y un sombrerito haciendo juego que delataba el país de procedencia de la prenda. Ya me habían puesto al tanto de que se había pasado unas semanas en Estados Unidos, pero nunca imaginé la razón de aquel viaje - o la del sombrero -, tan extemporáneos ambos a mi austero y monocromático calendario de trabajo. Otra vuelta que pasé por la oficina por más papeles grises y amarillos, la vi parada en la puerta de su despacho, al que los empleados llamábamos "el oval". Me encandiló su nuevo corte de pelo, bien cortito, tal y como siempre lo había querido usar yo, sin jamás juntar coraje para animarme al cambio. Y una vez más me puse verde por sus agallas para cambiar y rehacerse. Fue recién meses después que las chicas me contaron que el cambio en su apariencia era producto de sus repetidos tratamientos oncológicos, tanto acá como en el exterior. Así y todo, imaginaba que de esta ella saldría. Una mujer de esos colores se me hacía casi tan eterna como invencible. Fueron varias las veces en estos últimos meses de vacíos y de esperas en las que, mirándome al espejo, la pensé: -"Si ella pudo, ¿por qué no habré podido yo también?" El día que recibimos la noticia de su muerte, las chicas guardaron silencio. Yo, en cambio, sentí que todo adentro mío hacía un ruido oscuro. Eche mano a mi vestido negro y me fui al velatorio sin pensarlo demasiado. Era consciente de que a su familia ni la conocía, que mi presencia no agregaría ni quitaría nada, y aunque odio todo el sordo ruido de los velorios, sentí que debía despedirme y enmendarme de algún modo. Me abrí paso por las caras conocidas y las otras y me fui derecho a verla. Ni una flor, ni una cruz, ni una vela. Lo tomé descaradamente como un ejercicio de afrontamiento que hice yo solita y mi alma negra: ¡nunca antes había visto un muerto de tan cerca! Había perdido mi mejor amistad de adolescencia por no poder acompañar a mi mejor amiga en el velorio de su mamá, que murió de cáncer a los 44 años. Nunca supo entender ni perdonar mi aprehensión. Siempre quiso cambiarme... Y fue la primera y única vez que miré a Blanca Dapenna con pena, sin poder ver ningún otro color mas que el de la despiadada blancura de la muerte. A boca de jarro
Another year of my life is about to come to an end, a year of tremendous losses for people such as myself all around the world. So,
I turned, once again, to my therapeutic writing here in my blog, my good old blog powered by Blogger, which to me is a source of spiritual nourishment, like water to my
soul, water that I patiently pour into this profit-free jar ("jarro") of mine in order to cleanse the wounds
that I carry in my heart, again, like most people who turn to art to heal
themselves from all the pain life sometimes inflicts on us so incomprehensibly,
just like it happened this year...
"Great art comes from pain", Cristopher Zara in Tortured Artists
As I was saying - and pardon my sentimental
digressions, please, bear with me, once more, but I happen to be a highly sensitive being for the ways
of this materialistic, result-oriented, money-grabbing-and-making, computer-based,
code-encrypted world, even more so at this special time of this special year -, I turned to my old blog only to find that Blogger had changed
so dramatically that much of the content I had so laboriously and lovingly
compiled through the "productive" years since 2011 was once again somehow gone
and not fitting in to the new changes recently incorporated. And I say "once
again" because this is not the first time it has ever happened. Although I know that all changes are always for the better, I urge you
to sympathise with a fifty-two-year-old Argentinian English teacher who teaches English for a living and who chooses to write in the language which opens most doors in the world, and who, in her rather scarce free time from cleaning the
house, cooking for two voracious teenagers and a husband who tends to overwork - which, I’m positive, does ring a bell with you, guys! -,
gardening, doing the groceries, the washing-up and the dishes, apart from
planning English classes and correcting letters and essays in English, and working as a teacher in the outside, real world,
though this year I've had to work from home, for which I had to take quite a
few webinars online and buy myself a new computer and a new cell phone just to
be able to keep my job and continue with the cleaning, the cooking, all at
the same time, since we, as a family, were all at home working away, like so
many other families around the world; so, apart from all that much and 2020 (NFC...), I
also keep a blog powered by Blogger - which I truly adore - , yes, Sir, I write, and I
also enjoy combining my writing with images that I find beautiful for some
reason and spend sometimes even hours googling for, only to find these days some
of them are gone from my blog, which is not actually mine yet, yet again, say, once more, possibly because I have unknowingly yet unlawfully infringed the
laws of copyright in my blog powered by Blogger…
I keep a blog in a rather unfriendly Blogger
who keeps changing once in a while and giving me complex instructions which honestly escape me
and rob me of my precious time from reading better stuff than your incomprehensible-to-the-lay(wo)man set of analytic guidelines, and from writing - which I do find is even worse. Writing! What I need as much as I need therapy this year though writing is for free, mind you, well, sort of, anyway, and want
and love to do, yeah, I'd say entirely for free: for my own good, for the good of the very few who
still can find me on the search engines, who come to drop me a comment that I am unable to find in this amazing Google maze of the new Blogger, what with the wrong indexation, the
change from https to http, Error 404, and what have you, Sir, with all due respect.
You may
have noticed, dear Sir, that I have asked for help several times over the last few days through several comments and requests in Blogger Help, although my own children - who must be only a few years younger than the very brightest of you, guys, there in the fun-park-like-window-panelled-dream-like Google offices you work and play somewhere in the first world - my children here in a hot and humid Buenos Aires fear that I won't be taken seriously, poor things! But I am deeply in earnest, Sir, because I have been recently informed by a fan of my insignificant-in-the-top-blogs-ranking blog that one of my publications was "lifted or quoted without due permission" by a certain local newspaper somewhere out there in the so-called first world, a publication from my blog with photos taken by myself, photos of myself and my family in it. Tough luck on me! Who am I to complain if this kind of stuff happened to William Shakespeare Himself, after all? Still I determined, only a few days ago, that, before the end of this horrendous year, I had to become the owner of my own blog: - "Oh, yeah!!! By all means! That'll do the trick!"- I said to myself in front of my messed-up dashboard all alone at 3.00 a.m. I decided that I should buy it in order to own what is mine, and I did attempt to pay the $12 dollars a year that is the fee I would gladly pay for me to become the owner of my own work and protect my own work from being plagiarised or copied or reproduced without my authorization, or from simply disappearing from the Internet when changes are introduced or it is decided one-sidedly to eradicate relevant and high-quality social media such
as Google+ to clear the way for the likes of Instagram, powered by Facebook (N.F.C. again, Sir), or Twitter, with its regrettable restrictions on characters, or LinkedIn, the bomfire of vanities where no one without contacts gets linked in, where everything is sales and catchy images with brief, momentary, to-the-point, high-impact and short-lived clichés lifted from soembody elses's genious, art, craft, pure sentimental and admonitory, cheap, shallow self-help - in the best of cases- scanty written word, as that cannot be called Literature, or soul-probing-and-searching, until-your-fingers-bleed - as Hemingway would put it -, hard-worked reflection, or even writing, dear Sir. This is what is happening to Art and Culture, Mr. Google, mind you! In Google +, R.I.P., I was only too happy to generously and profusely contribute, I found hundreds of followers with the time and the disposition to come to my blog out of sheer interest and generosity, my blog without ads or sales involved, and I was ever so very pleased to meet a
bunch of soul mates with whom I have lost contact and who used to help me out when
things went wrong in my own blog powered by Blogger...
So, just to make a rather long
story short – long like most of my writing for postmodern standards - and sensing that I am, to say the least, bitterly disappointed and therefore angry, I beg you, dear Mister Google - being, as I am, too, forever grateful to you for giving me the chance of
creating this beautiful little blog of mine of more than 500 publications now, among many other things you so smartly make it possible for me to do every single day -, let me tell you this, please, Sir: this blog, I fancy, will be part of my legacy to my own family, at least the part of family that
appreciates this that I do and that does not think this is a just a passing fancy or a waste of time, a
pretentious hobby to boost my battered ego. So, in short, I beg you, please, Mister Google, help me here! S.O.S., Mr Google, please, please!! I just need you to help me nicely and easily to set my blog right in the
right way and to make it possible for me to own my blog.com, though I happen to have been born and to live in
Argentina, which, unfortunately, though understandably, is not on the list of countries where this is a viable option...
Tough
luck on me, yet again, you see!
I really hope you do
something to help with these two simple New Year’s wishes I keep in my little
jar at home in Buenos Aires!
Respectfully and sincerely yours,
A boca de jarro
P.S.1: Translation into Spanish available upon request.
(Dear Reader, please, do yourself the favour of refraining from trusting blindly on Google Transaltion services for the sake of my beloved Mother Tongue, Spanish.)
P.S.2: I deeply regret that the view of my beautiful jar sucks from cell and smart phones but, there again, there's little I can do about to fix it without Blogger's and Google's help...
"El mundo", tomado de El libro de los abrazos de Eduardo Galeano
(Cerrando un año sin poder abrazarnos…)
"The World", taken from"The book of Hugs"by Eduardo Galeano
(Closing a year without being allowed to hug each other...)
Galeano teaches us that...
A man from the small
village of Negué, on the coast of Colombia,was able to climb up to the high
sky above.
Upon his
return, he spoke. He said he had beheld, from up there, human existence. And he
revealed that we, humans, are a sea of little bonfires.
"The world - he revealed - is that: a multitude of people, a sea
of little bonfires. Every person glows with
their own light among all others. There are not two bonfires that are the same.
There are big bonfires and small bonfires and multicoloured bonfires. There are
people whose fire is peaceful, which does not even tremble in the wind, and
people whose fire is wild, which fills the air with sparkles. Some bonfires,
dull fires, neither gleam nor burn; but others burn life with such zeal that
you can't even look at them without blinking, and whoever comes close to their
fire becomes aflame."
I HAVE TAKEN THE LIBERTY OF TRANSLATING THIS ENLIGHTENING TEXT INTO ENGLISH - MY SECOND LANGUAGE AND MY OWN EXISTENTIAL FIRE - BECAUSE IT IS WRITTEN BY A FIERY WRITER WHO SHEDS LIGHT ON MY OWN EXISTENCE . I AM POSITIVE HE WOULD NOT EVEN BLINK, AS HE WOULD KINDLY UNDERSTAND THAT I HAVE ONLY DONE SO TO DEDICATE MY TRANSLATION TO ALL THE YOUNG BONFIRES WHOSE FIRE I ATTEMPT TO KINDLE EVERY DAY AS
