viernes, enero 28, 2005

Live and Learn

In an sceptic, cold and wet island, during the time of the biggest dictator in democratical history, a young gentlemen crosses Hungerford Bridge with no idea in which way his footsteps lead him, although he knows with a distant sadness that he heads slowly to the West End, where his soul almost always turns into an amber colour the contemplation of the magnificence of the illumination who cross Trafalgar Square.

He remembers his father always told him: if you are tired of London, then you are tired of life. Today, he doesn’t agree with this affirmation. With his young age, between man and teenager, he went round the city guts, making him more and more sick of it.

Admiringly, he looks at how Soho has withstood the Christmas and Thatcher avalanche. Its gloomy streets, full of prostitutes and Sex-Shops, continue to be depressing. For any site, in any corner, night professionals offer their services like little pieces of paradise.

Bored and sickened by the eternal Soho spectacle, he went to New Oxford Street towards Lincoln’s Inn, when he had met a man who will hand him certain great important merchandise

The man waited on a bench. He was a person with long, curly dark hair and beard, like a modern Rasputin. He met our young main character, and both began to talk:

- Hello, sir, how are you?

- Fine, thanks. Pleased to meet you… Andrew, isn’t it?

- And you are Sir Alan Moore, isn’t it true? But we must leave good banners, if you want. You saw me from telephone that you have an article that I could find interesting, if I’m not mistaken.

- Yes, that’s right, my young gentlemen. But it isn’t a normal product. In fact, I dare to suggest that it’s one of the most special things in all the universe. Also, it isn’t especially expensive.

- I think it’s correct on this day, Boxing day, isn’t it?

- Yes, but it is not a bargain. The difference is that the price has another nature. But, to resume, this is the product I can offer you.

- What is this? It’s like a sphere with a thousand colours inside it.

- Contemplate it for more time, please. ¿What can you see?

- I see that it’s not a sphere, really. It hasn’t a defined outline. It looks like a 3D image floating over my hand.

- I can say that I want you to look inside, young sir.

- I can see in its deep abyss the Keops pyramid, I think. Also I see all the Hercules columns. I observe Babylon in all its glory, when Alexander went inside it. I can see Pierre Menard, the real El Quijote’s writer in his home in Paris. I watch now as the miracle makes dream: The Alambra in Granada. I see more and more images: Paleolythic paints, Lord Byron, a Scottish castle, a gunner man with blue eyes called Roland, a black cancer muting a lung, a Neruda’s poem, a rose grows in Plutarco’s garden, the first Norman ship which disembarked from France, a New Zealand Maori warrior, the hideous groin for our President-Dictator, old coins, dying Angels, couples making love, a Masonic temple, the twelve sages from the Chittauri tribe, dead gods, forgotten or not existence, Holmes sodomizing Watson, and I see more and more books, an infinite Babel’s library, Wilde spitting Joyce, a beautiful feminine sex organ opening its petals like a flower, the centre of the universe and the most distant point, alpha and omega, the aleph.

- Yes, that’s what I offer you, an aleph. The entire reality, as we know it. And it will only cost you your soul.

- Thanks, but I don’t need an aleph. I have one already.

- You already have an aleph, how?

- Yes, my dear old friend. It’s called London

- I don’t understand you.

- London is a mixture of everything. Here, all people mix, all the human race which we conquered and subdued when we were an Empire. Since our old mythologies, and when we were the masters of the world until the grey and sad today. We went out of our island convinced to take the reason and the truth of the British still of live to these poor and foolish barbarians. But we could prove that we were uncivilized compared with them, cultures with more than four thousand years of history. We changed them, yes, but they contributed more to us. You know people say: you can’t send the white God to black people without the black God goes to white people. That’s what I try to saying, the impressive ethnic mixture that was rising, the mixture that after, a lot of blinds and fools have wanted to ignore. I think that we have two inheritances, one of them natural and the other acquired, and we need to love both. We have to grow over our self. We have to survive this bad decade and rise over our ashes and the others that we have going created. We can’t say we are English yet. That’s false. We are more than that. So much more.

- Good speech, really. So, you recommend…?

- Live and learn.
Cayetano Gea Martín

4 comentarios:

Martuki dijo...

El aleph, otra vez. Me lo encuentro mucho últimamente. Me ha gustado tu pequeño relato anglosajón, Caye. Me ha recordado q tengo q ir a Londres x lo menos tres días a empaparme del ambiente.

Kay dijo...

¡Ostras! ¿Es que vas de vez en cuando?

¡Me apunto!

Martuki dijo...

Esteeeeee, no, no voy nunca, x eso digo q tengo q ir, xq he estado 5 ó 6 veces, y ninguna he hecho lo q realmente quería hacer, xq ha sido en el típico viaje d verano a Inglaterra a aprender inglés, con todo planificado d antemano, y en el plan no entraba deambular x las calles ni ir a los mercadillos, sino más bien ir a museos (el d Ciencias Naturales es la pera, además d un edificio precioso) y d compras x la zona pija. Vamos, q quiero algo más, otra visión d la city. Pero cuando quieras vamos.

Anónimo dijo...

Desde luego que no hay nada mejor que ver y vivir otras culturas para aprender a respetar a los que son distintos a nosotros...ójala todos fueran capaces de hacerlo.
:)
Carmen
www.fernandezaguilar.com/bitacarmen