Write, write, never stop. Tonight, and for all nights to come.
When I finally found myself alone and had to take stock of the situation. Away with my uniform. I’m no longer like a lost land-surveyor wandering around a circumscribed area. I no longer obey those miserable orders. My prisoner number stays behind the door. I’m fed up with drinking, eating, urinating and defecating. I’m fed up with talking just to call things by their hackneyed names. I chain-smoke one cigarette after another, the smoke shoots out of my lungs in bursts and flies off in acrid plumes of denials. The prison-like night has swallowed up the artificial lights of day. Dishevelled stars populate the vault of my visions.
Write.
When I stop, my voice becomes very strange. As though obscure notes clung to my vocal chords, driven by unfamiliar storms, having come from all the lands where life and death look at one another and spy on one another, two uniquely-coloured beasts appear, both crouching down, ready to pounce, rip apart and destroy the underlying principle of the other.
Write.
I can only keep living by tearing myself away from myself, tearing out my stitches and my failures, there, where I feel closer to my heartbreaks, the collisions, there, where I de-fragment into pieces to live once more in countless elsewheres: earth, roots, spectacular trees, a grainy effervescence in the light of the sun.
Write.
When indifference disappears. When everything speaks to me. When the sea of my memory turns rough and its waves come crashing against the shore of my eyes.
I tear apart amnesia, and stand up, fully-armed, and become the implacable reaper of what is happening to me in the light of what has already happened to me.
Easy does it, inner turmoil. Easy does it, my despair over what slipped through my fingers. Easy does it, my fury to live.
Write.
Even when it’s impossible to simply think of you. And when my hand can no longer put up with burning due to your absence, your regular or anxious breaths, the smell of your hair, the endlessness of your shoulder, that silence where I can feel every variation of your emotions flow through me. You move a hand, cross or uncross your legs, your eyes twitch and I know exactly what kind of shudder ran through you, the moment when that uncomfortable light bothers you, the moment when your nostrils flare at the birth of a new smell, the image, yes the sleek image that blurs your vision. Is so much happiness even possible? You have goosebumps only on your left arm and you plunge once again into that wave we share, which lulls us.
Easy does it, tenderness. Easy does it, my craving for certainties. Easy does it, my aphasia-destroying dream.
Write, write, and never stop.
Ten years? What does that amount to in the equation of life? It was a dawn, in the hollow palm of your warmth. When did you fall asleep? What time did I get back? Then the doorbell started ringing like crazy. They were knocking the door down with their fists. We understood right away. I leaped out of bed, went to stand by the window, and cautiously parted the curtains. The black car was parked down there on the street. Its headlights switched off. A Fiat 125. All our doubts evaporated. Then we started making all the necessary preparations, as though we were about to leave on a long journey. The doorbell rang like crazy. They were knocking the door down with their fists.
Write.
It would be impossible not to. I thought and thought until I fried my brain pondering this need that took a hold of me. Which has exercised its hold on me for so long. Which means that the reality which appears before me is always geared to another reality that is yet to come. Which means that the present is a constant project, the place where I accumulate matter, the building materials of an edifice which I don’t know anything about for the time being, and which I can only comprehend as the pulsing of a new organ which had lodged itself in me, which has grown until it has started to hurt and gradually began to organise its activities. How could I describe this fanatical and watchful espionage of the real? And its arena is the vast theatre of our struggle, our suffering, our genocide and our revolutions, all the liveliness that buckles under the yoke of silence, under the weight of all those clandestine cries, all those decapitated memories.
I thought and thought until I fried my brain pondering this need that took a hold of me. Easy does it, clarity. Easy does it, my hostility against the darkness of the unspeakable.
Write.
A freezing January morning. The first day of exile. I was curled up on a bench, my hands and feet in chains. A rag covered my face entirely. Water dripped down and seeped through the cloth, spilling into my nose. It was impossible to drink it.
‘Pour it in small quantities’, I heard one man tell another.
‘And you, keep his head leaning against the bench’, the same voice whispered.
‘Pour some more, just a little more’, the voice continued, growing annoyed.
‘That’s enough now,’ the voice concluded.
One would have thought it was some kind of practical demonstration around a dissection table. ‘Professionalism’, the desire to do a ‘good’ job.
I couldn’t see them. I could hear their voices coming from varying distances, or the noise they made scraping their shoes along the ground. Greasy hands pinned my head against the bench. I was slowly suffocating. I thought about the rhythm of my resistance and my approaching death. Yet what image, what flurry of ideas could fully encapsulate the longness of that moment, while my lifeline slowly unravelled, thinning into a laundry line that is violently stretched when pulled at both ends, and which was nearing the point when all the threads would start to snap, one after the other?
Write, never stop.
Every page must triumph over this discomfort, this feeling of futility that paralyses me from time to time. One can only write, write if only to shake the authorities from their siege mentality, which has turned each road into a trap, when the torture shacks are full to capacity, when a people sees all its blood spilled on a daily basis, when a country’s put up for auction, and cut up into big and little lots comprising brothels, murderous bases, flesh-grease for automobiles and slave hands. And to think that the average man on the street, that teenagers tossed out onto the streets of unemployment and aimlessness neither know nor recognise the deathly-pale face of that familiar unhappiness: waiting, police batons, disdain, bullets, hardened hatred.
Easy does it, torments of doubt. Easy does it, nausea. Easy does it, my irredentist volcano.
Write.
This night ahead of me, made brand new by its silence, by words that bloom, organise themselves and come weave themselves into my breath and turn it into a voice. It’s good to smoke.
A train whistles in the distance. It’s drawing near. A swarm of invisible fireflies. Heat in the train-cars. The bar filled with customers. Sleepy travellers tossing about in their dreams, which are more or less erotic.
A train-car detached itself, and rolled along the Andalusian plain, giving Granada back to me. The two of us in Granada. Everything was marvellous: leaning on a bar drinking a small glass of sherry, holding hands, spelling out the names of streets, watching the artisan calligraphers – the heirs of the Alhambra’s traditions – practise their art, asking for directions from people walking by, and even our most basic conversations with them filled us with the thrill of human camaraderie, then going to sleep and waking up with the same intensity. Granada, where loving one another was devastating.
A train whistles in the distance. It’s drawing near. It goes right through me. It exits the tunnel of my body. And once again, the silence that seems to only slightly bother the timid barking of a dog, who was probably stirred from his sleep by the noise.
Day by day, the noose tightens. Prisoner! What is there to say? A typical cell par excellence: approximately eight-by-five feet. Minimum cubic standards, it seems. A light bulb that oozes misery thanks to its twenty-five watts, which is encased in the wall, placed beyond reach by a massive pane of frosted glass, a squat toilet topped with a copper faucet, the small regulation window with suitably thick bars (also regulation), and – a great luxury – a shelf where the ‘lodger’ can arrange his belongings. In front of you is the grey door with its judas hole, which is also obscured by an ingenious mechanism consisting of a sliding metal bar, which in its turn was perfected by another security feature involving a piece of iron wire that runs through a ring situated in the middle of the bar and is securely attached to its base. Finally, you’ve got the cement platform covered in plaster, which pompously takes up half the available space and is where the mattress is situated. This is where the lodger holds court atop his throne, sleeps, has nightmares, and sometimes, having reached the end of a labyrinth of dark thoughts and hallucinations, decides to commit suicide. Naturally, we are in the ‘Central House’, the crown jewel of prisons in this sunny country.
Write.
Day by day, the noose tightens. Day by day, it loosens. The surreal, silent sky comes alive when it is filled with a swarm of nimble clouds, reproducing the earth’s gesture. The sun leaps over the walls, turning the tables on the greyness and reassuring all in sight that spring is on its way. Air circulates, bloated by inextricable messages. Unstoppable birds spread their coloured wings, build, reproduce, learn to steal, keep their eyes pinned on the shiny mirrors, reflecting the parade of life. The dream swells, becoming an organic vision of what clarity has revealed. There are no certainties for the future, it saturates the present with its materiality.
Day by day, this miracle which consists in living, changing, learning to love one another better, nourishing stronger hopes, experiencing happiness, doing away with solitude, marching to the beat of the world’s heart, in the very heart of a citadel erected to ensure a slow death, humiliation, sheep-like submission, cynicism, savage sadness, human exile.
Write, write, and never stop.
The itinerary of our metamorphosis. Which one of us converted the other to the requirements of love? How could I possibly sort through this undivided patrimony to figure out which dazzling gifts you brought me, or know the fiery gifts I placed in your hands? What is love built on, what is it that constantly transfigures it? And what makes it tragic, turns into a blind, selfish wall? What breaks it when it flows like all the unconscious streams of existence and what leads it to rise from the ashes and the worn pelts of old men and women?
There are so many areas of man that need to be regenerated, while there are many windows left to open in his heart, so many faculties that could be freed from the cave in which they’re hibernating. Once those old illusions have been destroyed, the real difficulty will lie in not creating any new illusions to take their place. Because love is a fragile continent, which is always emerging, a continent illuminated by the sun which we always disembark on. And if we know the odyssey that led us there, we have so much left to explore, and so many other adventures await us.
Write.
Is this the only trial that made us into what we became, in our reciprocal relationship, or our relationships with other people? We had to get to know one another, hurt one another, going from stomping our feet in anger, to stammering, shutting up, isolating ourselves because we felt misunderstood, happily triumphing when a ray of light came to bring us new meanings of tenderness, embracing our aimlessness, opening up a new path for us so we could reach an unprecedented milestone. Then we started to talk, while the world around us grew more real, and poetry humanised us, as our people fought and sacrificed themselves to allow us to have a homeland we could actually live in, and finally while we woke up to this gift. This was our odyssey, at the end of which we discovered that our hands looked incredibly similar, and discovered our human camaraderie.
Write.
Once again, an immeasurable night. A plane suddenly bursts out of the silence. Its rumble explodes as though something had gone wrong with the plane’s organs. It must prepare to land. Why is this all so agonizing? My body’s like a resonating chamber that tingles from head to toe. You see, a mere nothing triggers your presence in me, which cannot limit itself to being a mere memory, but instead convulses me while I lie on the bed, clenches my throat, makes me put my pen down, mechanically light a cigarette and takes me far away from this bar-crossed place which defies the passing of time and to somewhere where you and I can walk together side by side, happy.
Write.
I must confess this. I have some confidence in the power of words, even though I move them around in any way possible, even if I speak them out loud to ensure that their timbre hasn’t been ruined, and that a lower-quality word hasn’t snuck its way into their flock. And when I line them up and arrange them, I have to read them and re-read them, in order to ensure that what I’ve written isn’t esoteric or estranged from what I think of as acceptable, such as our common suffering and our common hopes. Writing entails this responsibility. And starting from the moment where I take up those responsibilities – oh yes, I did just that – it becomes impossible to beat around the bush or to content yourself with approximations. One must be able to defend every word, every sentence, and if you’ve got nothing to defend, to ensure that they target the sensibilities of each and every one of us, until they become as familiar to our ears as the crackling rain, which is indispensable to the earth, like the innumerable – and often strange – flowers without which spring cannot come into its own.
Yet, easy does it, intransigence. Easy does it, rational demon of poetry.
Write, write, and never stop. Tonight, and for all nights to come.
Yet another night when it’s impossible to do anything but write, jostling against this silence that challenges me through the idiom of exile. At best, I try to explore this voice of the prison-like night. I listen, and little by little grow to understand its harmony, I move along its surface and receive its bloody echoes. I hunt the silence down and usurp its powerful voice, while its damns start to buckle more and more, collapsing in a roar which amazes me, which scatters away into the night.
The country comes to me, an aerial chant that surged out of the depths of history, a crucible of incandescent sparks and sweat, of oiled muscles that hammer down on the anvil of rebellious matter, of planting seasons, harvests, of bread and black olives shared out amongst people, the froth that boiling tea makes in the glass, which is passed from hand to hand, trumpets, accordions and drums prompting the streets into colourful processions, laughter and rambunctious children drunk on music and fragrances, the reddish ankles of women perched on round tables beating time with their feet, vibrant breasts like fresh, ripe pomegranates, a frenzy of rattlesnakes, musicians playing off-key who ostentatiously slay overheated violins, electrocuted tambourines, disembowelling plump string instruments, showing off the range of their scales.
A long silence then the country comes back to me, with a devastated face, which is completely unrecognisable. Screams here or there, a fight, a rape, a murder. The cries of wild-eyed children who are flogged so that they learn to keep their mouths shut. Mourning cries and women in tears who scratch their cheeks with their fingernails, tearing out their hair, lashing the ground with their scarves, punching their thighs, and beating their heads against walls. The cries of babies left abandoned in shantytown shacks, in the penumbra of neediness. Cries sparked by malnutrition and illness. Cries unleashed by women beaten half to death by desperate, drunken men. The groans and gaps of those terrified women, who kiss the feet of their aggressors to beg for mercy, for God’s mercy, for their children, for their shared misery. The cries carried by the odious winds of March’s insurgency, when students were gunned down in the middle of the day by a false, traitorous Independence, armoured dinosaurs crushing tiny dreams hatched in the heat of the day and the smiles of men. The cries of my comrades tied to torture trestles and pau de araras, or even parillas. The cries when the cry becomes the Esperanto of resistance, the slow epic of hope and human drama. Oh, my dear comrades, my flesh is hallucinating, and my heart is so full of love that it can’t stand it any more, your eyes, which are so unforgettably full of promises, our irrepressible tenderness.
Write.
While standing halfway through my journey, with my neck in a noose and after many wounds, I write.
The galloping
years pass by
The scissor-dials destroy the clock-face
crushing the hand of the Cyclops
as he sits slumped on his
throne
and my people march on
and I continue to exist
a rebel