Archive 501
Vivian Galván García
Messages
By Lya VengerikThere are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive. They are announcements or presages that concern me and the world at once: for my part, not only the external events of my existence but also what happens inside, in the depths of me; and for the world, not some particular event but the general way of being of all things.
Excerpt from If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
Every morning I venture out to the small windswept cafe at the end of the road for a coffee, and when my mood is right, breakfast. They serve a hearty breakfast of steaming sausages and fluffy scrambled eggs. Everything is greasy, oversalted, and delicious. The woman running the cafe has been here for as long as I can recall, becoming a fixture in the landscape of the fading mahogany furniture and chipped paintings of boats that have come to define the crowded main room. She is old and grumpy and is very often frightening, but she seems to have taken a liking to me. Today I enter the dark cafe with a sense of dread creeping in like the tide, with each ebb and flow stealing away the sand-drawings of cool collected affirmations I have been writing upon my soul like a protective spell. This morning, I had awoken to find a new leak in the wall opposite my small wire bed. I took it as a sign that the world is intent to leak into me as well. At the cafe, I sit at the corner table by the window which I occupy regularly, and order a black coffee from the old woman who scuttles away to the kitchen after a half-hearted inquiry into my health. I look out the window, so old that the salty air has eroded and melted the glass, warping the view of the churning, smokey ocean. The day is too bright, though not sunny, and the horizon line sears itself into my pupils. I see the seagulls hovering and gathering, their screaming and screeching ominously loud. I take this as a sign to keep quiet today, noting that perhaps my internal commotion, if made audible, would be received with as much annoyance as I feel towards the seagulls.
After drinking my coffee in silence I make my way down to the deserted beach. I walk up and down the small bay three times, as I do every day. The wind whips at my thinning coat which I have owned for many years, and which my father owned before me. Like everything else in this town, the salt in the air has taken its toll on the fabric, and the once brown leather coat is now the color of the sand below my aching feet, barely supported by the leather shoes I have worn every day for 10 years now. The tide is coming in, shattering and foaming, and once, it catches my feet, soaking my socks in ice-cold water. It seems the ocean is trying to tell me that we are of the same substance. That the eternity that it contains has temporarily taken form in me. That in death we will be reunited and my existence will become immortal through it. I take it as a sign to prepare for the worst.
I walk back into the town, trailing salty ocean water, which I now recognize as part of my essence, behind me with each footstep. I despise the fact that I am leaving a trace, the very idea grating against my conviction to remain as invisible as a whisper today, lest the world find me and leak into me as it had promised in the morning. I find myself praying for a heavy rain, to wash away the watery footsteps and to hide my scent within its density. The town is oppressively quiet today, as if the townspeople too feel the eyes of the universe turned to them with malicious intent.
I spend the rest of the day in the crowded town bar (wherein the townspeople have congregated to hide together from the malevolent eyes of the outside world), thick with the scent of cigarettes and stale beer. I sip on my small glass of cognac for an hour, two hours, avoiding eye contact. I overhear their benign conversations, of their small problems and small relationships and small disagreements which to them seem to concern heaven itself. Life suddenly reveals itself to me as a bowl. Those of us who are alive are trapped at the bottom, the walls too slippery and steep to climb up. We live our small lives with our small problems and small relationships and small disagreements and occasionally try to rise above them but we are still here, trapped, alone. Our loved ones at birth slide into the bowl and are trapped with us, and at death are pulled from the bowl leaving us grasping at the walls, to join them or get them back, finding no purchase for our hands. I take it all as a sign to keep to myself, to beware of the hopeless attachment to life they all seem to possess.
As I go to bed I carefully acknowledge that another day has passed, relatively without disaster. My muscles, which were tensed all day, ache and tingle. The world seems to me veiled, thick and pallid, as if a thin film of goat’s milk is covering my eyes. Or rather, the world itself is covered in a thin film of goat’s milk and my eyes are blurred with saltwater from the ocean gushing nearby. Sleep comes, not as an escape or a rest, but as an inevitable and ceaseless continuation of wakefulness. The Sisyphean task of trying to get a good night’s sleep does not resolve itself, once again. In the morning I wake with a pounding pain in my left ear and take it as a sign to not listen to any advice anyone tries to give me today. The leak in the wall still leaks, threateningly.
As usual, I go to the small cafe for my black coffee. Today is a breakfast kind of day, and I order some from the old lady who pats me on the shoulder as she turns to go to the kitchen. The ocean seems calmer today when I look out the window, the sun just starting to come out from behind wispy clouds. When I leave the cafe my the corners of my mouth tingle from the salty eggs. I start my walk down the bay, observing the ocean as it observes me back.
Suddenly, the sun breaks out from the clouds its light bounces on the water and a beam of it goes straight into my eyes. I’m momentarily blinded. I pause my walk. I blink. When my eyes flutter open the light still streams directly into my eyes and I have to turn away.
I have been following this daily schedule, the cafe, the walk in the bay, and the town bar, since I retired. For many years now I have been repeating these movements and actions, semi-religiously, as a way to blur the days together. Over time the small differences that appear in the sameness revealed themselves to me as signs. I heed their warnings and listen to what they whisper in my mind.
Nothing, however, has yet made me completely stop in my tracks. Yet. As the scorching bright light of the sun enters my eyes it seems to go further beyond them, to wrap around the back of the eyeball and shoots like lightning through my body. I stumble. My knees hit the sand, my palms follow. I do not think my fingers have ever felt the sand from this bay. It’s impossibly soft. I open my eyes. The sand is dancing! No, the sunlight reflects off the shimmering grains of sand as they flow, the movement of my palms within them activating small streams of movement. Something within me recoils. The gut feeling returns, asking, begging, what are you saying? What should I be wary of? but no reply comes. It pleads, what disaster awaits? but only silence responds. I take a deep breath and stand. My ear has stopped hurting. An energy within me has become unsettled, shifting around like the sand. I dust off my hands and continue my walk. I had only walked down the bay once, and two rounds remain. But as I stand, looking up to the ocean to orient myself, the energy within me spills away completely. The ocean before me is not the one that was there moments ago. It still crashes and gushes, it is still (I hope) made of salty, briny water, but it glimmers, dancing, with gold. The water reflects the sky, it is the sky, it holds within it the sun like a womb. It has a smell, I realize, the smell of salt and hope and expanse, so much expanse that the world tips forward as I try to wrap my head around the vastness of it.
I cannot finish my walk. A warmth rushes into my chest and I feel that familiar shadow within, my old friend, fight it. Out of habit, comfort, I hope it will win. I start my walk to the town bar, but the walk is difficult. Every stone in the pavement wants to tell me story, every tree lining the road beckons me to it. The birds sing a folk song from my childhood. The ache in my muscles erodes with each step. The smell of the ocean air follows me, reminding me, expanse! Expanse!
At the bar, the crowd of people which usually seems to me dense and suffocating now appears as a shimmering kaleidoscope of warmth. I order my glass of cognac, the color of a rich soil, and listen to the conversations. Now, a woman I have seen here many times before (I do not know her name!) tells her friends that her daughter keeps a rock collection. Now, a man I have seen here many times before (I do not know any of their names!) recounts the view of the sunrise he had while fishing early in the morning, the sun appearing to him like the yolk of an egg. And it does concern heaven itself! I see it now, I see it and I feel it and the joy of it hums at the edges of my skin. The shadow is merely whisps now, I see a raven at the window and, rather than accept it as a sign of coming death, I acknowledge it with a slight nod, with salty water (the ocean is with me still) collecting in my eyes. The sunlight streams through the windows filling the gaps between the people crowding around and I see that the space is full and humming, not just with sunlight but with their heartbeats, merging and mingling until they become a constant beat in tune with the center of the earth.
The bowl does not seem so steep and lonely anymore.