Читать книгу Twin Souls - Raimon Samsó - Страница 6

The alcohol and the soda from my whisky soaked the painting, and dragged the paint down the canvas. To me, it seemed a dreadful painting, and it was a hard time to believe I had made it. So, as enraged as I was, I smashed the glass against the recently finished painting. Then I contemplated how that capitulation gesture decomposed everything.

In my interior, a similar abandonment precipitated me to an abysm from which I was dissolving as well; I was blurred and bursting into smithereens. My recent pieces of art were a cartoon of what I used to do; and as a consequence, my sales lowered alarmingly. I wasn’t going through a shortage of ideas period, to which I had already gotten used to lately, but rather it attended to apathy’s consumption. Apathy oxidized my fingers and my brushes until they screech over the canvas, blurring it with mistakes.

That one was a lack of interest, which impregnated everything I touched and resumed itself in the reluctance of representing a world so imperfect to my eyes. I painted hopeless and emotionless worlds because my empty heart sounded filled by the loneliness of the echoes.

I came out to my studio’s balcony to breathe the night air. I closed my eyes, stopped the whirlpool of thoughts; and then I waited for a moment for my soul, a few steps behind, to catch me. The balconies from the old Town of Barcelona are like the shelving of an antique library full with un-catalogued and worn lives. That is how I felt.

During the day the streets are a noise museum. Peeling dishes, children crying, elder remembering, simple and sounding things. This is during a regular day. But this New Year’s Eve came filled with desolation, and the hardest to bear emptiness. I shivered; I was stiff with cold and the abandonment on my second end of the year, alone at home after my wife Clara passed away.

From nearby Royal Square, I could hear people’s voices, their exclamations of joy and their imminent aphonia. All of these got to me after spreading over the sidewalk, climbing through the centenary building’s facade, and reaching my balcony to finally beat me on the cheeks. The world is celebrating a new year that added life to their lives and I coursed a new year that deducted in mine.

Two years ago, Clara and I were visiting Kenya. She wanted so badly to portray the late afternoon of the African savanna that I gave in, as I always did. Clara was a photographer. I loved her like I never loved anyone before, like the first time we met our gaze. That’s why I always gave in. A few days after arriving to Samburu, after an extenuating excursion, devastating fevers attacked her. A parasite invaded her organism, poisoning her blood. The fevers, shivers, vertigo nauseas, vomits and headaches didn’t abandon her until the end. Quinine was not enough. The doctors were unable to save her, and then, my life heeled in a wreck in-land.

I cursed heaven for giving me Clara, and for ripping her away later. I could not understand how a bug from the marshes, so insignificant, could end with Clara’s life, and with a love as big as ours.

From that moment, everything in my life has been a blunder.

I talk to Clara from that moment on, and I wish to believe she listens and understands me. Sometimes we talk, in my imagination, about minor stuff:

-Who takes care of the rosebush? – said Clara’s voice as an omen in my interior.

-Which rosebush?

-The one showing through the balcony.

-Nothing grows there anymore. The roses are dead and the rosebush vanished.

-Well I perceived their scent, and when I walked nest to it I pinched with one of its stems.

-That can´t happen Clara, could it be because you are… -I was about to say: dead. But I didn’t say anything, and stopped talking alone.

Often I continued with these conversations through the whole night, until early in the morning. In a dozing altered her soul’s rest and my conscience’s until I asked her to sleep; soon after, I’d fall defeated by sleep. Sometimes I thought I heard her through my dreams, during the night, as well as when I was awake.

I walked down to drink a caffé latte at the coffee shop. Early in the morning- the first hour of the year- the street resembled the table cloth from the eve: flooded by silence and the first sun’s rays. At my feet a bunch of confetti and streamers, empty bottles, deaf laughter remains spread here and there; a disaster similar to the one reigning my studio and life- in my life after Clara-. Before coming down, I connected my laptop, and opened my e mail. Only one message, from my friend Javier. I printed it, and saved it in my jacket’s pocket to read it next to the bar, while I soaked a croissant.

Javier announced his imminent trip to Barcelona from Los Angeles, via London. He was going to exhibit, for two months, a retrospective of his painting in the MACBA museum. Then: Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen. The itinerant sample would be back in Los Angeles in six months, where Javier works and lives since a few years ago.

Javier is one of those friends whose friendship grows with time, it doesn’t matter how-long-since-last-time, and we always retake it as if it were from last eve. We used to talk about everything, except emotions. It wasn’t that he didn’t have them just that he didn’t feel like manifesting them. He was always like that, reserved, and I accepted it. I knew that under that apparent disaffection beat a sensitive heart.

Years back we studied art and plastic expression together. And after we graduated, he went for abstract painting, and I for dreamlike hyperrealism, like Dalí.

A few weeks later he called:

-Víctor, what time is it in Barcelona? I hope I didn’t wake you.

-Close to midnight. But don’t worry; I had not yet started counting sheep. I am not even in bed. Tell me, when do you come?

-The twentieth, at nine. I’ll let you know the flight number. You have no idea how bad I want to get back to Europe.

-Well, now you seem to be living a second youth… Okay, I wrote it down. Don’t make any hotel reservations; you’ll stay here, in my apartment. I have more than enough space. I’ll come pick you up at the airport. It will be awesome to have you here.

-Víctor, listen to me. I’ve been thinking that maybe you need to take, let’s say, half a sabbatical year. So I’ve thought to cede you my studio, here in Santa Monica. You can enjoy it while I am away. I believe you need to reacquaint with your painting, get away from Barcelona and mostly from the memories. Your last e mails are filled with melancholy and you can’t live that way, so tormented.

-Javier, thank you so much, but this is my place. Whatever I must do, I must do it here. Running away won’t make anything better. I don’t think that a ten thousand kilometers stride will leave memories behind- I replied.

-It is decided. You come here, and I go there. You will love Los Angeles. It is a city full of energy, ideas, creativity. You may paint in my studio; you will find every material you may requisite. You need it Victor. Californian sun will change your spirit. You’ll meet my artistic agent, Jeff, phenomenal person, you’ll see. I’ll leave my studio keys and my old convertible with my neighbor Sam so you pick them up, ok?

-Javier, just wait a second...

-Byeeeee…!

He had hung up before giving me half a chance to reply.

At that time, through the window, I could see how Barcelona began to sleep. Here we go to bed and there, on the west coast, the day began. Then thousand kilometers maybe not, but nine hours of difference did seem enough as to disorient the memory and avoid bumping against my past.

I remember that night I dreamt.

My wife stepped into my dreams again. Then, from the other side, she crossed half the world and sat in my bed to tell me to accept Javier’s invitation. Accept it, anything else. I know it was her because an intense rose perfume invaded my room, and the air smelled like the summer evenings when she looked after the rosebush in the balcony. And from that day on I could not stop smelling the roses, even when I left the windows opened and the studio at the mercy of air currents.

The next morning, because I always gave in to Clara’s desire, I sent Javier an email: «Ok, you win, I accept the invitation. I’ll pick up a few things and fly to the West Coast».

I added a virtual smile. It wasn’t even real, but it was the first one I allowed myself in a long time.