The heat before the burn
When the indicators reach the iron barrier, freshly painted green, the clouds slowly descend from the trapeze like blind souls in procession, positioning themselves precisely at the height of my eyes. Two open windows onto a world little or not at all shaped.
It was at this kind of intersection between arriving and leaving in search of any place that would give me a route that I made my way, as usual, to the woman who was waiting for me at the taxi rank.
She dressed as a poet, beneath the countless layers of clothing stacked under the shelter of a mahogany-coloured overcoat, worn, frayed by the slow circulation of summer dust under the largest ceiling of her worlds. She bore pillow creases on her face, traces of paths on her skin, and an ocean in her eyes, the point of infinite solitude, the restless point that separates death from chaos. Every night she would get drunk, not with old Madeira rum nor absinthe, but with her own tears. Torrents of guilt. Or something else.
We spoke more during the long days, when the sun lingered atop the chimneys, a transient brightness within the reach of heavy air traffic. That night, in particular, while the moon settled among other tragedies, I asked her if her persistent crying was bitter and unpleasant. She denied it, saying it was tolerable and extraordinarily ordinary.
“My tears deceive. They have been carefully seasoned by me. I carry with me the nocturnal howl of thorns and, for many years now, I have felt spring hanging from my fingers. There is nothing unpleasant about my tears. They drain through the viscera but are mundane, they serve as a cloak to wrap the trivialities of others and are drunk in these corners where everyone comes to hide in the last hours before dawn. I simply end the days here, with no urge to return, at this crossroads, before the disdain of these three ash trees concealed by the bus stop.”
It occurred to me that all human beings are divided between those who wish to move forward and those who wish to return. Where would this woman wish to return to? Home? There are those who get lost in their own home and those who expand so much that they inevitably build the home within themselves. As usual, translucent threads run down her cheeks, settling on a clear path, wandering like compassless vessels to the centre of the chest. We were nothing but two rocks observing each other at a short distance, bathed in the imposition of silences and half-words.
It became urgent to inhale the flowers that slipped from her fingers, slowly being crushed beneath our feet, and store them somewhere safe that would separate them adequately from what would be weeping, vices, and trivialities.
“My heart is completely hidden. Not by the coat or by the worn jumper that passed from body to body. It is hidden by the skin, by the ribs. No one knows the exact beats per minute. No one notices if it stops for seconds, if it slows down, if it goes the wrong way in a perfectly calculated mechanism or if it parks improperly, somewhere between final dismemberment and pathetic stagnation.”
Silence.
In a voracious impulse, perfectly aligned with her caffeinated breath, she looks at me without any trace of restlessness. And in the face of this unintelligible feeling that blurs my vision in a muffled gust so typical of this time of year, she makes a point of soothing my soul. Her smile is brief yet slow, a lazy pact with the gradual passing of dawn, wrapped in a gloomy, polluted mist.
We move to the edge of the pavement and succumb into the city, diving into the burning asphalt where it becomes possible to feel the heat before the burn, openly revealing the storms that spread within, especially when they concern the left side of the chest.
