Читать книгу Bottom of the Sky - Rodrigo Fresán - Страница 24

To explain everything to me as my cousin Ezra Leventhal once explained everything to me.

And friendship is a strange force that strengthens us while simultaneously negating us with the need to feel ourselves as close and as similar to the other as possible. When this friendship also involves the unifying and homogenizing force of blood, then the whole thing becomes far more powerful.

But, of course, the final result is that of a false similitude; because there was nothing more different, between me and Ezra, than our reasons for being interested in science fiction.

While Ezra sought the comfort of other worlds to try to escape a future that would force him to carry on the family tradition amid rolls of fabric and mannequins, I, for my part, needed to travel to planets that were as far away from my past and my family’s past as possible.

Ezra was a rebel who had to overthrow a galactic tyranny that turned men into androids, defeated and subjugated by sewing machines. Beings who only rebelled, within the labyrinth of the tailor shop, by organizing clandestine poker games, cards dropping from their hands onto the same long tables where by day they trimmed fabrics with the irrevocable slowness of the autumn leaves at Central Park and Fifth Avenue. That almost-forbidden territory where the most exclusive women walked about, wearing the heavy winter coats they had sewn, and where they—the coats’ anonymous and servile creators—sometimes ventured with their families, braving the the city above to point out to their wives and children, with a mix of pride and sadness: “I made that coat . . . And that one . . . And that one over there.”

For Ezra, I belonged to an even stranger yet equally tormented race: I was the orphan of a mother annihilated by forces from another dimension and a father who had lost his mind and—getting too close to the absolute and radioactive truth of the universe—his life.

For Ezra, in a way, we were all victims of higher powers, of despotic cultures, of galactic tyrannies to be overthrown.

For Ezra, science fiction was an escape hatch, a door opening onto a better world, a shadow he had to illuminate so it would come to life and he could see it.

For me, on the other hand, science fiction was something to believe in: the only way I had to understand my life and the planet where my life had landed. It gave me the power to see myself from outside, to feel foreign, alien, and, yes, Faraway.

Science fiction—unlike the uses Ezra gave it—not as something to attack with, but something to hide behind and defend yourself with.

For Ezra, science fiction was a weapon.

For me, science fiction was a shield.