PELUQUERAS CON EGOS INFLADOS Y VACÍOS

La señora de mediana edad, acostumbrada a lidiar y socializar con homosexuales peluqueros, graduada de high school, y con la cultura de ese mundo a cuestas, no sabía cómo dialogar con un señor mucho mayor que ella, un hombre gay que vivió casi toda su vida adulta dentro del mundo acadêmico, culto y con amistades que giraban en torno a las artes, literatura, y humanidades en general. Como su falta de criterios no le permitía distinguir entre su mundo y el otro, en vez de asumir un poco de discresión, se puso agresiva; y el señor la miró de lejos, toleró la mediocridad y se dijo: “pobre ego, inflado y vacío”. 

YO NO SOY MI EGO

Mi felicidad no puede estar sujeta al cobro exagerado del agua o la luz, al vecino que me roba el parking o a las tramitas y chismes de la compañera de labores que “la coge conmigo”, porque no le permito que me falte el respeto, ya que  ella se cree que todos los gays podemos ser sus marionetas; ni al amigo o al pretendiente que no cumple como deben hacer los hombres de principios claros. Mi felicidad me la gano por ser bueno, caritativo, generoso, nada soberbio, tolerante, buen genio y amoroso. No me miento. Les juro que no me engaño. Me conozco y sé cuáles son mis virtudes y alguno que otro pecadillo que me saca pa’ fuera el odio, pues me “encojona” que las cosas no me salgan como yo quiero. Yo no soy mi ego. 

STONE WALL WEEKEND'S DRIVES

Saturday night before Sunday's Stone Wall 50th Year Commemoration Pride March, when I woke up at 10:30 p.m. from my third nap of the day,  I had a txt.mssg. from my fashionista-grand-nephew, describing what and whom he had seen in the Village, I was so happy and glad he was experiencing “culture” beyond the world of work and weekend fun, since it is a very special “historical’ event and time to commemorate. At some point, I even felt like going out and be there too, but at the same time, wanted to feel the separation from what was once part of myself; not a sad moment, but a powerful realization, so I went to the kitchen, had a glass of milk and went back to bed. 

EL STONE WALL ABRIÓ LA GRIETA DE LA COLONIA MULTIPLICADA

El Stone Wall abrió la grieta. Lo que ha venido después la ha seguido expandiendo, para poder ver lo que hay detrás de la misma; incluyendo el producto de un proceso colonizador. Ya, ni somos pecadores, ni enfermos mentales, tampco, ilegales; mucho menos marionetas de la gente heterosexual y sus ideas sobre la cultura. Para algunos, por lo menos, la "narrativa" que discute lo que esconde la grieta ha cambiado.

La colonización no se limita a la simple toma de tierras o imposición de códigos y procedimientos de un pueblo sobre otro. Lo que experimentan los miembros de una colonia (geográfica y/o mental) no lo sufren/viven por igual todos los miembros de la sociedad colonizada. Se multiplica el efecto colonizador entre aquellos que, dentro de la colonia o en la metrópolis/narrativa colonizadora, viven en los márgenes del poder: mujeres, grupos minoritarios, étnicos, raciales, lingüísticos, sexuales. 

Una lesbiana latina involucrada en la alfabetización de mujeres pobres en un barrio se refirió a un grupo de jóvenes gays que asistieron a una reunión, como un grupo de “loquitas”*. El diminutivo delataba el desprecio que ella sentía por aquellos hombres; desprecio que también se encuentra entre hombres gays cuando hablan con tono despectivo, cargado de un señalamiento vulgar hacia las lesbianas, refiriéndose a ellas como “machúas”. Algo parecido se encuentra entre gays en Puerto Rico que no van a tal o cual bar porque no es de “su clase”, bares que para cualquier extranjero gay resultan ser tranquilos y nada peligrosos. La única razón para no ir, es que a esos bares van los gays de clase trabajadora o de piel más obscurita.

Una vez esos grupos entran en un proceso de liberación, sus tratados y planteamientos abordan y cuestionan las relaciones entre la metrópolis colonizadora (puede ser geográfica como mental) y la colonia, incluyendo cómo les afectan a estos grupos al margen del poder las dinámicas coloniales, y las estructuras que sirven para excluirlos de la participación completa en los vaivenes de la dada sociedad.

La alta tasa de suicidios entre jóvenes gays se puede explicar en términos de la patología donde el “self hate”, sublimado o abiertamente expresado, forma parte del sentido de identidad que tienen los mismos. En la situación que crea la colonia multiplicada, ese joven gay no sólo se enfrenta a su sexualidad, tiene que enfrentarse a las historias e imágenes distorsionadas que la metrópolis presenta sobre sus otras identidades de grupo. 

Es ahí donde la grieta se expande: los miembros de estos grupos entran en un análisis múltiple de las relaciones; un análisis, no dudo, que es más complejo que, por ejemplo, el que harían hombres heterosexuales blancos, descendientes directos de los colonizadores o los “intelectuales” que controlan la narrativa oficial. 

Esa grieta permite ver el plano personal y colectivo: cómo les afecta su forma de ver el mundo, el interior y y el colectivo, comunal; aquello que los coloniza, incluyendo a los que sirven de instrumentos en el proceso colonizador -aquí se me sale el veneno: no soporto a los homos "comemierdas" que juegan a ser protoburgueses, liberados en lo personal, pero que, en cuanto a los otros, pues que se jodan, y que sigan detrás de la grieta. Algunos de estos últimos me recuerdan a los que Visconti recreó en su película Los Malditos, los que votaron por Trump y hoy están perdiendo derechos adquiridos después del Stone Wall, los que apoyaron a los militares en la guerra sucia suramericana de los 70s, los que justifican a las clases poderosas, cultas y elegantes, que luego, cuando "la cosa se pone color de hormiga brava", empañetan la grieta y los entierran. 

MIMETISMO

Sostienen unos científicos de la Universidad de Toronto que los cerebros calcan. La génesis de los deseos humanos no surge de los criterios del sujeto que desea. Su fuente se encuentra en el carácter mimético de las relaciones, determinadas por una voluntad de poseer al que controla el deseo. Ser él. Cuando te fuiste me quedé contigo. Quise haberme dejado.

MY BILINGUAL NEW YORK

(First two entries to the book in progress, to be published in .pdf, My Bilingual New York)

LINGUISTIC RELATIONSHIPS

If the past becomes the present, one is not able to reflect upon it and judge its qualities, benefits or hindrances, love and pain, values and standards: social and linguistic. 

The following pages are not written is what it is called the native language or the first language. They are written in a language I did not learn voluntarily or because it was considered the language to be studied due to elitist or economic reasons. It was an imposed language by a colonial power, a more powerful country that had taken over the island of Puerto Rico and forced the study of their version of its language: American English, Dick and Jane included. 

The following pages are not written for the purpose of demonstrating how well the colonials learned and master the English language. Some Puerto Rican authors have achieved such a difficult task. Not me. Those are not the intentions of these pages, They are written in a second language that reflects the intricacies that had shaped my voice, which includes Spanish, Puerto Rican culture and history, New York’s bilingualism, racism, sexualities and how I sound and wants to sound. I am not writing to protect the language of Shakespeare or to meet the standards of academia, the New Yorker or the New York Times. These are my pages, not theirs; much less the words of some Puerto Rican who have the need to impress the colonials and prove to them they can write in English just like them. Not me. These are my pages.

These written pages are not to defend the particular qualities or rules of the English language, but my version of it. 

The process began when I started very early to see the relationship of the English language with class -closely related to skin color and race in Puerto Rico- and the attitude towards learning the language of the USA. It became a concrete reality when two friends and I left Puerto Rico for different reasons, but most of all, because we were young and wanted to experience the world beyond the island’s conservative and provincial life styles. We had college degrees and jobs as teachers in the island schools, but  spoke English with all the limitations caused by the public school system’s education, but were very well educated in terms of other areas of study. 

We found jobs in the social services and educational sectors, and an apartment on 14th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, next to Casa Moneo, Aspira of New York, Macondo Book Store, the Guadalupe Church. La Taza de Oro, La Nacional Spanish Society, a Puerto Rican domino club and right on the border between Chelsea and the West Village. 

Chelsea had a large Puerto Rican and Spaniards’ population, and all kinds of shops serving their interests, providing a feeling of community that served as the bridge between one world and another. The West Village had the hippies, some left-over beatniks, Julius, the Bon Soir, and the one bar that not much was to become an icon of liberation, The Stone Wall. It was perfect. 

As time went by, the past was no longer going to be seen as the present; including how we view ourselves and how we -in some many ways and values- related with both languages. 

ON TRANSLATION FROM ENGLISH TO ENGLISH

A British critic once said that whenever he read American authors, he felt like he was reading a foreign language. When I gave my doctoral dissertation proposal to be corrected by a USA monolingual speaker, he rewrote my material to the point that my advisor -he had read my original, and had suggested an editor- said, “these are not the same ideas we spoke about”. I then found a second editor who knew Spanish and he edited the text without losing the substance of my thesis. I never finished the dissertation for reasons beyond, but including, translations. Gabriel García Márquez's edition in Barcelona of his novel La Mala Hora made him so angry that he self-published the novel in México. The editor had rewritten his text to the point that it eliminated all particular Colombian idioms from the novel. The Mambo Kings sounded more Cuban in the USA edition in English than its Spanish translation. It was as if characters based on the likes of Celia Cruz spoke Spanish like Sara Montiel. “Joder”.  When editing a text written in a second language, by a bilingual writer, the editor must know the native language of the author. Translation demands a fierce loyalty to the original text, and when it is from the same language -from English to English, written by a bilingual in his second language, the first language has to be present as if talking to him. How readers will respond is a different story. 

DREAMING ABOUT FRANKFURT a.m.

The a.m. in Frankfurt does not stand for the morning, but for the river: Am Main. On the Main, its banks and the park surrounding it were among my favorite places to walk around, to relax whenever I visited the city that Manhattan invented. Its memories keep coming back, as if asking me to reproduce them, to relive each one of them again. Frankfurt, Old San Juan before becoming a post card, Merida in Yucatan, Montevideo and Manhattan are some of the places that shape a certain personal narrative. A narrative that, as one gets older, serves to provide closure, harmony; to interconnect what has been experienced with the new sense of the world. Perhaps is not to recreate or to give cohesiveness to the narrative; but to hold on to the memories in order to validate them: to say as Neruda said, “confieso que he vivido.”

A friend once asked me, why did I continue to visit Frankfurt. She knew that my love for Günter was not enough reason to go back to the banking city. Years later I realized that when I first visited the city I was able to face an approach to living that was not completely possible in the USA. Discovering in Frankfurt a familiar environment, gay liberation movement and leftist communes, but formulated by a generation that had to face the demons of their parents, it forced me to reformulate my own ideas about autonomy, race, class, ethnicity, nationality, and etc. etc. etc. My friends on the Main could not engage in the love movement without talking about the hate of the recent past. That generation was formed by the children of those who lived during the Nazi regime. And as I got to know many of them, they were not willing to compromise. Their honesty, brutal at times, was an eye opener for someone coming from the touchy-feely USA. It was also the period when Nina Hagen abandoned the East Berlin Opera to create her unique approach to music, Fassbinder was redefining cinema, the gay movement on the Main was not separated from the plight of the guest workers, and AIDS was forcing all of us to mature real fast.

For a person raised in the Caribbean there was never a real summer in Frankfurt. Its damp, grayish, cool summer nights seemed like a permanent autumn. And the Spanish word for autumn applies not only to the season but to one’s older years. Frankfurt prepared me for the autumn of my life. Seeing my friends facing their demons also taught me how to reflect upon my life and history. When meeting a non Puerto Rican for the first time, in the USA I was my ethnicity first, and then, I was myself. So many times I had to explain why I was how I was. Stereotypes were what led non Boricuas to question me or my ways of being. My friends in Frankfurt were forced to talk about stereotypes and genocide. When meeting me for the first time, I was an individual first, and then my ethnicity and history would enter the scene, the discussion. 

If one allows oneself, old age can hold the framework to reflect upon the past and not to have to ask the same questions again: who am I and where am I going? Instead you can ask: why was I who I was and why? And then, enjoy the past and since it cannot be repeated, one can create a narrative to tell a story and see life as it was or you imagined it to had been thru the filters of love, desires, regrets. As a German friend recently told me: the North End neighborhood is no longer occupied by the leftist communes. It has been  gentrified by the yuppies and its intellectual wannabes; the permanent anarchist known a La Voegel no longer holds court in his care-free island in the middle of the river; and so many of my friends are dead, and beer is no longer served at the Strand Café, since it was sold to some religious group. But the Frankfurt on the Main is the city I once knew, and the one to dream about when thinking about growth; old age and youthful pleasures that once were.

OLD AGE, EPISTLES AND SHARING BY OLD FOOLS

Some of my friends and acquaintances have asked me to stop contacting them thru my constant emails. Though I did not ask, they would find it ok to do so, if there is an emergency. The ones who are not as polite have simply blocked me. Emails bothers them and are only used -I assume, that is how they reason- for particular reasons. I am quite glad such a reaction did not occur when hand-written epistles were the medium to be used, and quite a few of those time tested letters  are still around, to give us a sense of history, both personal and collective. As an old one-seeing-eye man, afflicted by cataracts in the “good” one, agoraphobic, with problems in his left knee and plain lazy, emails are the salvation to maintain contact and share my sense of the world. One of my very well known old contacts became so angry -after she messaged me, asking if had nothing better to do than email her constantly, and I answered her that she could either delete, block or tell me not to send her my emails- she called me a pompous old fool. I played with the words and was quite happy that fool was not the noun in the phrase. Since it was clear that she did not want my constant emails, and I was not as wise to know how often she wanted my electronic epistles, I stopped writing to her. Old fools can make wise electronic decisions; while learning that, for some, trying to keep in touch would make the epistolarian an old fool.

CÓMO COMPRENDEMOS LO QUE LEEMOS

1:00 a.m. Sólo sabemos lo que recordamos, y no lo que hayamos leído en su totalidad. Cada nueva lectura de un mismo texto, incluyendo a los más sencillos, nos provee otras luces, que pueden ir desde el ritmo, la tonada que el conjunto de palabras estimula en el lector, hasta lo que una palabra o una estructura nos dicen. Volvemos sobre ellos para darle coherencia a una narrativa personal, cambiante, conformada por muchos fragmentos de textos. Algo así dice Octavio Paz en su libro Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe; Alberto Manguel en Una historia de la lectura: dos autores que en esta noche insomne se despiertan en mi memoria. Pude buscar otros en las notas, archivos, la red cibernética, biblioteca; no quise recordar, comprender, acompañado por nadie o nada. 

LENGUAJES VACÍOS EN MENTES IRRACIONALES

“La verdad es un tejido de interpretaciones y no una suma de datos. Es decir, ¿es lo que vemos u otra cosa? Y ahí es esencial el lenguaje, un tejido de proposiciones y creencias colectivas que tienen su estructura conjunta.// Así que tenemos necesidad de criterios internos y de verificación, que no tienen que ver con los hechos, sino con cómo estructurar el lenguaje de manera que no nos permita decir demasiadas mentiras.” (Gianni Vattino, El País, 28/72019)

“A los blancos de clase baja en EE UU les está matando su blancura” (Jason Stanley, El País, 27/06/2019)

“Watching Skinner on Monday, I was struck, not only by how familiar the process of hollowing out language felt but by how quickly, easily, and politely a Washington audience can accommodate itself to it.” (Masha Gessen, the New Yorker, 30/04/2019)

La búsqueda de que se respeten las vidas de otros ha sido convertida en un discurso defensivo -los blancos, heterosexuales, cristianos están amenazados- y vacío de lo que verdaderamente se discute: el derecho a vivir tranquilamente sin que uno tema que, al salir a la calle, lo ataquen por ser negro, latino, homosexual, mujer divorciada, hombre viviendo en concubinato; que pueda conseguir una casa donde vivir, trabajar sin que lo acosen. Y no solo el lenguaje está falto de substancia, esconde el verdadero motivo: eliminar las diferencias por el miedo que tienen a desaparecer, como si los derechos a vivir tranquilamente excluyeran y diluyeran a los blancos, heterosexuales, cristianos. Un discurso vacío en mentes poco racionales. 

MICROVIOLENCIAS EN CCNY Y MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS

Una profesora universitaria disfruta de llevar chismes entre sus colegas, y hasta entre vecinos en su edificio en la ciudad de Nueva York, y da la impresión de que no se da cuenta de cómo ejerce y fomenta la violencia; al punto, que otro colega la usa para continuar con ese círculo vicioso, y ella cae en la trampa. 

El poder es el elemento que define en gran medida cómo actùan los miembros de una sociedad, y  través del mismo ayuda a la generación, reproducción y mantenimiento de los que controlan dicho poder; siendo las microviolencias un elemento clave, unos de los recursos que se usan en las diferentes relaciones sociales para obtener y mantener dicho poder. Estas microviolencias, a su vez, forman parte del entramado que compone la red social. 

La esposa de un vecino, una mujer con un grado de escuela secundaria, carente de cultura formal y poco consciente de sus actos, trata de distanciar al marido de algunos miembros de la familia del hombre, aquellos a los que ella no puede controlar. Él, aunque quiere a la esposa, al darse cuenta de los juegos de ella, responde con violencia física, y la abandona. Otro caso parecido, pero con la diferencia de que el marido, sumamente dependiente de su esposa, cae en los juegos microviolentos de la misma; resultando en que, ante los traqueteos de la mujer y del marido ser su marioneta, algunos de sus parientes se alejan y le retiran la confianza a ambos. 

La posición que ocupan los sujetos dentro de la estructura de una red social determina el grado de poder que éstos puedan tener, pues no todas las posiciones son iguales, ni tan siquiera equivalentes. Dónde se encuentran los sujetos involucrados en la microviolencia -la posición que ocupan en la red social- determinará la mayor o menor posibilidad de acción, los efectos o respuestas ante la microviolencia. 

EL CEREBRO DE LOS QUE APOYAN A TRUMP

Las neuronas del que obedece crean una "mímica inconsciente", de ahí que no necesita vivir algo en carne propia para sentir empatía con el que manda, cuya "experiencia" es suficiente para convertirse en la experiencia del obediente, ("Power Changes How the Brain Responds to Others", Jeremy Hogeveen, Sukhvinder Obhi, Michael Inzlicht. Journal of Experimental Psychology: 2014, Vol. 143, No. 2, 755–762) Antes de los estudios neurológicos, se teorizaba sobre este fenómeno y se le conocía como el "Síndrome de Estocolmo", en la sociología como "Retrato del Colonizado", en la educación como "Pedagogía del Oprimido", y en Guayama, como "un alza colas", y en Jájome, "un lambeojos". 

ON JÍBARO MUSIC IN THE SOUTH BRONX

“I hated it, when my parents would listen to all that horrible music” said the young woman in my office; after asking me where I was from and telling me where her parents were from in Puerto Rico, another small mountain town. When she mentioned the town,  I said: “Jíbaros como yo.” Her Christmas at home -music, food, dance-, and then her remark, said without any concern as to how I felt about those glorious centuries old décimas and controversias o cadenas or La Calandria, La Alondra, Chuito, Ramito. She was my student, majoring in education and languages, and I consciously, politely, and academically suggested to her to take a course on fundamentals of music. It was obvious she needed to start from ground zero; was not ready to read about 19th Century Espronceda and the history of Jíbaro music; a content she needed to master later on, if she planned to teach in her own old community: the South Bronx. 

(from the book in .pdf, My Bilingual New York, June 2019)

IDENTITIES, SHADES AND THE PUERTO RICAN JÍBARO

My parents, their relatives and friends from the mountains where they were born and raised, whenever they felt the need to establish the value of their identity, would take a deep breath, expand their chests and said loud -it often happened-, “Soy un jíbaro de pura cepa”. They knew it would annoy those other Puerto Ricans who felt very urban or saw themselves, worse, as “blanquitos”. My parents and their selected circle from Jájome didn’t know the history of the nomenclature, demonym, label, and its relationship to the caste theories, when it fist appeared during the 18th Century, to place those called “Jíbaros” as mestizos of a lower caste. The icon, brand, was going to be used later on by the "Partido Popular", without any sense of shame, to promote their politics; including the “Jíbaro” as the ideal Puerto Rican, and “whitened” by a certain type of narrative. Not only the colonial political party “nos encasquetó” the image of the man with a pava hat that is seen in every flag and homes of their loyalists, but it built on top of a mountain, next to the highway that crosses the island from north to south, a big statue of a “Jíbaro” couple.  Anyone who goes to the middle and upper middle class Guaynabo and Caparra suburbs in the Metropolitan area of San Juan can see the results of those policies: who was able to move through class, color and social ladder in the island during the rapidly growing 1950-70’s economy: shades “created” by history and powers and desires. Decades later, in Brooklyn, during Christmas, I would go to visit my brother and listened to some powerful "Jíbaro" music, to share our common history, including its shades.  

(from the book in .pdf, My Bilingual New York, June 2019)

ENCAJADO EN MI RABIA

Más que un cajón, se siente como una camisa de fuerza.  Soy un Segismundo sin preguntas existenciales; una Bernalda Alba aterrorizada por las patadas de los caballos. Solo rabia encendida se propaga por todo el cuerpo, quemando cada molécula de mis entrañas. Encerrado en mi ira, me abruma, atora; golpeo contra las paredes, sin que nadie se entere porque sólo ven la caja. 

I AM THE NEIGHBORHOOD

Around 1972, I met a few people who had studios in the New York City area that was, not much later, going to be known as So-Ho. By the late seventies the artists and writers and actors that had turned the old mostly garment industry factories’ neighborhood into a workshop and residential area were gone; displaced by the artsy rich and decadent “liberal crowd” who loves to hang out with artists while pushing them out from their studios and attics, forcing the new generation of writers and artists and musicians to find new neighborhoods.

By the eighties, disco music moved to the working class outer and suburban ghettos; and, for the Manhattan art-oriented crowds, 1950’s existentialism was institutionalized, becoming vintage, to live the past in the present. The perception of history and place had moved into a different period: a retrospective at the artsy cult cinema par excellence, the Film Forum, of 1950-60’s existentialist films by the likes of John Cassavettes and Jean Luc Godard were the hit; the place to be seen on any weekend night. Breathess characters were the role models for the post-disco generation, wanting to live non orthodox existences. 

The younger artists and musicians that could not afford the lofts south of Houston moved to the East Village and decided to wear black. The love and flower power of the previous generation was gone and the new one rehashed the old fifties, early sixties individualist discourses, and went mourning, with Basquiat and Nina Hagen as their best representatives. Aids was gradually evolving; death became the “leitmotif”. 

Jean Seberg’s short hair, black tight pants, and the sort of free and not very social conscious character was copied by the kids moving into the East Village, the new frontier, displacing the workers, proletariat families that had made the Lower East Side their residential neighborhood for decades. Converse tennis were a piece to be worn, the brand. Black jeans and tight black t-shirts were everywhere -downtown, mostly-.

Not much later, Calvin Klein and others culturally appropriated the trend; including the use of drugged looking skinny models. Williamsburg became a suburb of the East Village and existentialism went the way of Madison Avenue. But why, close to four decades, two generations later, are they still wearing black? Are they aware of what is happening to their neighborhoods? 

COGNITION AND CHILDREN IN CAGES

Seeing immigrant children in the most inhumane and cruel conditions, resulting from a set of government policies, has the effect of making them, essentially, unimaginable; yet, it is happening. It seems as if a particular racist mentality has been normalized, and is not limited to a small number of hooded characters burning crosses in Mississippi or militia supremacists in the Oregon forests taking over government land; larger numbers of Americans support keeping children in cages.  

ON TRANSLATING FROM ENGLISH TO ENGLISH

A British critic once said that whenever he read American authors, he felt like he was reading a foreign language. When I gave my doctoral dissertation proposal to be corrected by a USA monolingual speaker, he rewrote my material to the point that my advisor -he had read my original, and had suggested an editor- said, “these are not the same ideas we spoke about”. I then found a second editor who knew Spanish and he edited the text without losing the substance of my thesis. I never finished the dissertation for reasons beyond, but including, translations. Gabriel García Márquez novel La Mala Hora’s edition in Barcelona made him so angry that he self-published the novel in México. The editor had rewritten his text to the point that it eliminated all particular Colombian idioms from the novel. The Mambo Kings sounded more Cuban in the USA's edition in English than its Spanish translation. It was as if characters based on the likes of Celia Cruz spoke Spanish like Sara Montiel. “Joder”.  When editing a text written in a second language, by a bilingual writer, the editor must know the native language of the author. Translation demands a fierce loyalty to the original text, and when it is from the same language -from English to English, written by a bilingual person in his second language-, the first language has to be present as if talking to him. How readers will respond is a different story. 

(from the book edited in .pdf., My Bilingual New York, June 2019)

GAY LATINO WOPS AND THE DAMNED BY VISCONTI

He used to say that he did not have that many Latino friends (as if not hanging out in New York City with Latinos was a measure of some form of social standing), much less Puerto Rican friends (though it was obvious, when he had them, it was to take advantage of them). The gay world where he lived was one where to be fabulous and felt to be “in”, the “mostest of the mostest” (o algo así), “de rigueur” (quizás así), was made up of a certain type of gay man. He only invited the suburban "white gays", petite, very petite bourgeoisie, new first generation residents of the City, to his dinner parties in downtown’s “cafės de moda”. It all stopped when he was arrested by an immigration agent and placed in a cell full of Mexicans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, with a Puerto Rican guard watching them. He had seen the movie The Damned by Visconti, forgotten it until he met the new Latino Wops in a federal prison in New Jersey.

ON LIBERATING THE COLONIALIST MIND

There are people who have lived or continue to live in oppressive situations and do not fall into the trap or the colonizing mind conditioning that those in power try to impose upon them, and, furthermore, do not lose perspective of the process itself or mechanisms being used by the controlling forces. "Están claros" was the expression used in the 1960s lefties circles in Puerto Rico. On the other hand, there are those who become victims of the “Stockholm Syndrome”, becoming colonized minds. In response to the last group, there are some individuals who feel the need to save the ones under oppressive situations, as they see their subjects as impotent or incapable to separate themselves from the powers being used to control them. Often, this last group is unable to distinguish between the first two, using larger categories to conceptualize and classify them: all African Americans or all Puerto Ricans or all Guaraníes. The first two groups have been extensively studied and discussed. Not so much, the third group, which includes quite a few educators, social workers, mental health professionals and politicians. I recently met an educator who lives in my neighborhood and is obsessed with educating poor Puerto Rican women in El Barrio Latino in East Harlem. She brags about her research and development projects in poor communities. Last night, after passing by her apartment, seeing her windows lights on and a group of people with what seemed to be glasses of wine in their hands, I continued my walk and went to my very trendy Morningside Heights’ café, and, while drinking sauvingnon blanc wine, eating some Spanish olives, prosciutto di Parma, and miniature empanadas, I thought of the professor and the fact that she most probably did not invite any of the poor ladies from El Barrio Latino to her cocktail party; much less, Puerto Ricans educators who question her motives and perceptions of poor Puerto Rican ladies in El Barrio Latino in East Harlem. Drinking sauvingnon blanc, eating prosciutto di Parma and olives can result in very liberating thoughts. 

PUERTO RICAN SPANISH IS NOT A HERITAGE LANGUAGE

Quite a few progressive bilingual/multicultural educators are calling Spanish a heritage language. When teaching selected language courses or about the education of different USA communities, these progressive educators refer to the non English languages as heritage languages. De verdad! Spanish is for Puerto Ricans -a colonial group- their language -in whatever shape or form it is expressed-; not inherited, kept and defended against all colonization impositions of the English language. Puerto Ricans are not immigrants who have chosen to maintain and study their “ancestral homes” languages. It is a completely different history and must be treated as such. Why are these nice progressive educators engaging in blending peoples and politics might be due to many reasons, including not having to deal with colonial issues and how they are part of the colonization process, and, not less important content and job preservation; and we all know who is in control of those academic institutions teaching courses on heritage or/and foreign languages. 

PITI POIS Y PITI YANKIS AND AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

In order to understand this body of ideas and consequences, several concepts and archetypes must be first clarified: 

On concepts and words: the Puerto Rican usage of “piti” comes from the French word petite that began to be used by “la creme de la creme” intellectual and social elites during the first years of USA colonization of the island, to refer pejoratively to those Puerto Ricans who were more “gringos” than the American themselves. Like most Latin American elites at the time, for its Puerto Rican counterparts, French culture and language was the ideal to be mastered. “Petite” became “piti” for the Puerto Rican masses, who also use it with the “petite pois”, calling the sweet peas, “piti pois”, with “pois” following a Spanish pronunciation: “pois”. 

On archetypes: The pitiyanki continues to represent a certain type of Puerto Rican, but, strangely enough, it currently includes, the "independentistas" (Puerto Ricans who favor complete decolonization and independence from the USA), who sent their children to English only schools run by American educators. To make matters more confusing, there are a lot of traditional "pitiyankis" who send their children to "escuelas públicas" where very little English is being taught. So, it is not uncommon in Puerto Rico to meet lots of pro-statehood USA flag carrying individuals who cannot speak one word of English.  And then, in the continental USA, there are suburban middle class Puerto Ricans who use their Puerto Rican ancestry as a tool to classify themselves ethnically,  like an outfit, or in order to react to the perceived significant other, as a reaction, but cannot even say “gracias” in Spanish. All of them are considered “piti yankis”.

Actual subjects or representations in the visual arts. poetry, narratives, theater, essays and academic treatises can be used to answer  the central question that would inquire as to how American Exceptionalism is being transmitted to -or expressed thru- the Puerto Rican personae. 

ON LINGUISTIC RELATIONSHIPS

If the past becomes the present, one is not able to reflect upon it and judge its qualities, benefits or hindrances, love and pain. The three friends left Puerto Rico for different reasons, but most of all, because we were young and wanted to experience the world beyond the island’s conservative and provincial life styles. We had college degrees and jobs as teachers in the island schools. We spoke English with all the limitations caused by the public school system’s education, but were very well educated in terms of other areas of study. We found jobs in the social services and educational sectors, and an apartment on 14th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, next to Casa Moneo, Aspira of New York, Macondo Book Store, the Guadalupe Church. La Taza de Oro, La Nacional Spanish Society, a Puerto Rican domino club and right on the border between Chelsea and the West Village. Chelsea had a large Puerto Rican and Spaniards’ population, and all kinds of shops serving their interests, providing a feeling of community that served as the bridge between one world and another. The West Village had the hippies, some left-over beatniks, Julius, the Bon Soir, and the one bar that later one would become an icon of liberation, The Stone Wall. It was perfect. As time went by, the past was no longer going to be seen as the present; including how we view ourselves and how we -in some many ways and values- related with both languages. 

(from the book in .pdf, My Bilingual New York, June 2019)

STONE-WALL AND SURVIVAL SKILLS

I met this Latina bisexual woman who liked to dismiss "loquitas", made fun of them. Since she claims to be a politically progressive person and a Paulo Freire expert, one can wonder as to why she does not include effeminate gay men among the Freirian oppressed groups. She might be trying to survive and be perceived differently by the "straight" women she loves to hang out with. It is widely accepted that social groups develop “survival” skills, thus, the questions are what are those skills, and in what particular contexts and specific conditions they are required, developed and used. Some of these skills are constructive to the self and the group; others might not help surviving at all. Eating healthy foods helps; wars necessarily do not. But on the other hand, some of these skills can be only detrimental to a given generation or an individual at a specific time and place, but can be seen as protecting the person or the group in the future. 

Groups on the margin of the circles of power develop certain strategies that they use when dealing with those who are seen as qualitatively, racial, ethnically or sexually different, who control decision making, rules, and mores. As previously indicated, some of these strategies might be detrimental to the group. As a child in Puerto Rico I used to hear the expression, “hay que mejorar la raza” (the race must be improved), and this self-hating statement implied in some form the survival of your descendants since the "race" the speaker was referring to was a "race" being abused and discriminated. At it meant marrying outside of your "race", "blanquear" the family. 

Up to Stonewall days some gays used survival skills that included masquerading attitudes and images, oral, visual and literary, as well as engaging in self-denial discourses. Straight-acting is what gay men do when they behave in “macho type” behaviors. In the Spanish-speaking gay sub-culture straight-acting gay man can change from the macho type depending on the group surrounding him. In the company of other gay men he most probably will “soltará su trenza” or “se le saldrán las plumas”, will let his true self be free. But straight acting can also be a form used to deny the connection to the larger gay world; one that is perceived as weak and effeminate. 

A similar behavior is found among members of certain ethnic, racial groups or economic classes when they claim that they are not like selected others. This distancing leads them into formulating stereotypes or repeating what the ones in power say about the particular groups being persecuted or discriminated. As an advisor at an urban institution I came across an Afro-Cuban woman who swore that Puerto Ricans were lazy and unable to manage the USA system. Here she was in a program developed by Puerto Ricans, facing a Puerto Rican professional who was guiding her through the institution and she repeated what she most probably heard others say about this particular ethnic group. This survival strategy is based on the need to be accepted by the group in power, thus supporting and perpetuating the reasons for discrimination and, therefore, avoiding being identified with the discriminated ones. 

Stone Wall brought about a change in what can be discussed publicly, even if it is only for the purpose of understanding the so called homosexual condition. It also brought the need to organize politically, educationally and medically. Four decades later the public discussion of the homosexual condition is still a threat to many, not only the religious fundamentalists, Taliban or Catholic League, but also it is a menace to many middle of the road liberals. Yet, to be silent about it is not what most gay men and lesbians are willing to accept. Self-censorship is no longer a given as a survival skill; on the contrary, it is openly viewed as a repressive tool.

(from the book in .pdf, My Bilingual New York, June 2019)

LAGRIMITAS

Was there any day when I was not to supposed to be on guard, waiting for the next catastrophe: suicidal intentions, alcoholic parents fighting each other, beatings for no explainable causes, some relative with a nervous breakdown, the brother in law in jail, the sister of the neighbor who was killed by the stepfather when she rejected his sexual advances? Was I to be blamed for not having been at home, when so many of those events took place? Was there going to be any night, when there was going to be peace, rest and be able to go school the next day, ready to learn? The town was small and my sister and brother’s teachers were years later to become my own, and knew the history of the family and made room for my continuous, unexpected crying outbursts that lasted until high school. Some of my peers, the bullies, called me “lagrimitas”. I stayed away from them, a difficult task in a small town. After repressing those experiences for so many years, many decades later, they seem to be affecting me again, finding it very difficult to leave my house, waiting for the emotional explosions to come back, to cry without apparent reason. 

HER CAFÉ COLADO AGENDA

As we spoke, I got the impression that she was always talking to me from -to use a psycholinguistic concept- a “meta cognition” framework. There was some type of hidden agenda in regards to what she was saying. At times, I was able to figure out what she was truly trying to achieve, but, often, it took me several hours or days to realize what was her guiding intentions, her hidden layers. To make matters more complicated, she was not necessarily aware of the ulterior motives as to why she was saying whatever she spoke about. Buying the cotton felt cloth filter for my “café colado” was not the issue. Her arguments on bacterias and dust and whatever other reasons she used against me buying the “colador” sounded very logical and scientific, but were not the real issues. Anything that sounded like her mother’s needs to stick to old Puerto Rican ways -instead of using the more USA middle class, picket-fence commodities- made her very angry. Once I served the coffee, she asked me, if I could make an expresso for her in the old aluminum pot.

THE BALLAD OF BRUNHILDE SCHMIDT (FRANKFURT a.m.)

(Around the early nineteen eighties I met a young woman in Frankfurt a.m. who argued against group control in the leftist communal houses where I stayed during my visits to that city. As a result, I wrote the following story, which is dedicated to her and all of those who refuse to be controlled by the significant others.) 

Brunhilde was a girl, a very lonely girl, the village of her childhood, already very small reminds her of a jail, and pushes her to escape. Her mother is too strict. Her father is long gone, Brunhilde would prefer to have a better choice. One day she leaves the land, her pretty squared land, a suitcase in her hand In Frankfurt she arrives, her braided hair shining under a cloudy sky, Brunhilde is overwhelmed unable to realize her world will fall apart.

The buildings are so tall, the people are so fast, the boys are sweet and nice, the girls so sisterly Brunhilde is very happy under her city crowd. Brunhilde is overwhelmed, she doesn’t realize, her feet are already marching to get some lesbian rights.

They offer her a room. The house is occupied. Brunhilde is overwhelmed, unable to realize she is already cooking for the entire pack. They take her everywhere, “Brunhilde let’s go there, Brunhilde let’s come back”, Brunhilde is getting tired of following the pack.

One day she leaves the house, the full of conscience house. A suitcase in her hand, she goes to a cafe, the future to be explored Brunhilde contemplates. In front of a trinkhalle a foreigner she meets, as tall and dark and handsome, she wishes him to be. A guest worker he is.

He talks about the west, he cries about the east. They dream of the casbah. They dream of magic rugs. Brunhilde is overwhelmed, she doesn’t realize, there were eastern bells around her Teutonic feet.

He works long days and nights, unhappy to leave the house, the pretty lovely house. Brunhilde gets upset. He never will be back. She goes to the police. The papers to fill out. The ballad about the lover she hears on the tv, “The worker, our guest, was killed by a skin head.”

ORGÁNICOS EN KETTENHOFWEG, 1986

El tren no llegaba hasta las cinco. Con una hora de espera, tenía tiempo suficiente para comprar lo que sería nuestra cena y una buena botella de vino. Celebrábamos nuestros encuentros como si no nos hubiésemos vistos por años. Hacía dos semanas que no nos veíamos, y la despedida en Hannover parecía más la de un soldado que se va para la guerra, que la de dos jóvenes amantes al borde de la intelectualidad en una Alemania pos-moderna. 

Después de pasar un mes en la comuna gay rural, donde todo era de todos, desde los sweaters hasta los amantes, Günter regresaba a su trabajo de guionista para la radio –en esos momentos estaba investigando sobre las posturas políticas de los ciudadanos que vivían en una zona cerca de un campo de concertación nazi-; y yo volvía a Frankfurt, al apartamento que compartía con la Koester, y a sus extensas conversaciones sobre todo y de todos. 

Desde el banco, lo vi bajarse del tren. Su emblemático maletín, desgastado, quizás encontrado en la basura, o regalo de alguien, o liberado de alguna casa, lo distinguía, junto a sus estrujadas y nada entalladas ropas, de los muy pulcros pasajeros alemanes. Sonreímos, nos saludamos de lejos, y una vez más el extenso y fuerte abrazo llamaba la atención de los que pasaban cerca de nosotros: "¿Que habrá pasado? Hermanos no pueden ser. Alguna perdida familiar. Celebran algo, un premio." 

Como no nos besábamos en público y por aquella época, la gran mayoría de la gente heterosexual prefería no aceptar que dos hombres se amaran y tuvieran sexo, otras preguntas eran más fáciles de formular, menos desestabilizadoras del status quo. Si nos hubiesen visto en la cama, al desván terapéutico con ellos.

Aquel largo abrazo, las manos tocando el pelo, los cachetes, luego bajadas hasta las espaldas, un suave y andrógeno empujón para mirarnos las caras, de nuevo otro abrazo, y las preguntas y respuestas de rutina -"¿Cómo te fue el viaje? Sin tropiezos. ¿Cómo estás? Cansado."- fueron interrumpidas –"¡La compra!"– y la sonrisa que nos unía frente a las pequeñas catástrofes, los desaciertos que guiaban nuestra relación. 

Comida no nos iba a faltar, y aunque sería la muy favorita macrobiótica que Barbara Koester comía por aquel entonces, nos teníamos el uno y el otro. Tampoco tendríamos el buen vino; tomaríamos las muy espesas cervezas sin filtrar, biológicas, que vendían en la tienda naturola cerca del apartamento en Kettenhofweg, Frankfurt, 1986.      

RELATOS

¿Cómo relacionamos vidas que formulan un saber que excede por completo a la conciencia personal? ¿Cómo “sabemos” algo que se manifiesta de forma distorsionada, como si vidas paralelas se asomasen entre los intersticios cada vez más resquebrajados de un espejo en el que ya no se refleja casi nada? Escarbamos en la memoria, fotográfica, textual, filtrada. Hablamos y, entre silencios, escribimos. 

(del libro en .pdf, Jájome Heights, Junio 2019)

THE CHARACTER THAT FEARS HE MIGHT BE KILLED

His face was so terrifying, it stayed with me for the rest of my life, except I had turned it into a sexual desire. I loved men who looked a little drunk; the smell of alcohol in their breath seduced me. Then one day, it all came very clear, when the image of his angry, not fully drunk face returned, and I felt the fear of possible death: my whole body began to tremble. An unreal fear since he had been dead for over thirty years. A few days before this realization, I dreamt of a man who looked like him, coming into my apartment entrance door, to kill me. I knew my father had murdered a man and was jailed, but not for long since the case was decided on his favor, self defense got him out. He had beaten my mother several times, and, often, she had to run away from the house and hide with her relatives. He never hit the children. He didn’t need to: his angry face was enough reason to fear him; to scare us into feeling he would kill me or any of us. The terror had been internalized. My mother was so terrified of him, she kept repeating all the time that he had killed a man. I guess it was her way of making sure we did not cause a situation where he would become violent, which he did, many times. 

Over my lifetime, I have transferred the fear of being killed into the most mundane of relationships, including the bureaucrat who assisted me in any office or the taxi driver or the person next to me in the subway. At the College, a colleague used to brag around that she could control me because I was afraid of her. She might have been "tough", but was not wise. Colleges like all communities are not church confessionals, and, at some point, her comments made the way to me. I kept working with her. I was not there to engage in demonstrating who was the "big macho", but to educate students on issues of language, to some degree colonial education (she was a typical colonial), a task I carried out with the greatest "valor", without fear about my ideas and my persona. Fear of my parents never prevented me from facing knowledge and the desire to share it. 

(from the book published in .pdf, My Bilingual New York, June 2019)

THIS IS NOT ABOUT IMMIGRATION BUT WHO THE IMMIGRANTS ARE

I know what it means to be a man who sounds different and have seen your face when my accented words come out from my mouth, heard your classification categories that do not include those who do not look like the white man you use as a standard to measure citizenship and rank and place in the social scale. You cannot lie to me while acting so paternalistic, pretending you love me, believing your praise will be taken as a truism. I have lived with you, worked with you, eaten in restaurants with you, listened to you. I know you.

CUERPOS GASEOSOS

CUERPOS DE LA CREACIÓN

Dice el Popol Vuh que de los gases del fango surge la creación, y no de las ideas de un tipo que parece ser un viejo chocho como dicen los hebreos.

CUERPO EQUIVOCADO

No me había dado cuenta por que respondía como ella, hasta que tuve que revisar las facturas y sentí una inexplicable furia ante un cobro injusto. Ella poco a poco había entrado en mi; mientras estaba viva quería seguir en este plano terrenal, y cuando murió, mi cuerpo fue el más frágil, se apoderó de él y hoy soy ella en uno de hombre, llena de ira por estar en el cuerpo equivocado. 

CUERPOS RECICLADOS

Ya no cago. Hace años que no cago. No es por razones patológicas. Mi salud está como coco. No cago porque he logrado poder evacuar sin tener que llevar la excreta hasta el culo;  mi cuerpo se encarga de reciclar la mierda. La convierte en gas antes de que esta salga fuera del mismo. 

Mi culo no es el culo de JLo. Simple y llanamente es mi culo. La JLo es todo nalgas. No, yo. Mis nalgas son menos voluptuosas, aunque más delicadas y duritas que las de la López. Mi culo es poesía. Por eso, quien me llevó a usarlo como instrumento técnico de reciclaje de la mierda, primero escribió versos y letanías sobre mi culo, que luego publicó en un blog que mantiene sobre la vida de un viejo en muchos sitios.

El mal comprendido científico y poeta conocido como El Jíbaro, quien, con su enorme talento para inventar lo que a nadie más se le ocurre, me ofreció mucha plata si le prestaba mi culo. Se lo puse a su disposición, siempre y cuando no abusara del mismo. No eran mis nalgas lo que a El Jíbaro le interesaba, ni tampoco, en el sentido estricto de la palabra, le interesaba mi culo. Fue su intención, por un lado, poetizar sobre el ano y luego  usarme como conejillo de indias para investigar si sus teorías sobre la emisión y reciclaje de gases podían ser comprobabas. Para eso, la investigación científica y no para la poesía, necesitaba un culo que tuviese ciertas dimensiones, y el mío, después de medirlo y estudiar sus propiedades cumplía con sus requisitos literarios y científicos.  

Mi culo tiene una circunferencia perfecta, criterio fundamental que guiaba la selección del ano por parte de El Jíbaro y que sirvió de punto de partida para investigar si cumplía con otros requisitos formales, sus colores y olores. 

Nada de pelos ni hemorroides. Sus arruguitas, sin mayor pronunciamiento, y  que fuese rosadito con alguna que otra tonalidad marrón. Los olores fueron más problemáticos y se resolvieron con un cambio en la dieta y uso de jabón. Nada de Maja o Yardley, jabón sin perfume y hecho a base de caléndula. Una vez completó el estudio de mi culo, me cambió la dieta y, fundamentándose en los  ejercicios que sugiere el yogui Arivhanda Moombai en su libro Poses Anales y el Desarrollo Espiritual, comenzó con el estiramiento anal. ¡Como sufrí!

Una vez aprendí a expandir y contraer el orificio, comenzaron los ejercicios de respiración. El Jíbaro consiguió que otro yogui, Malahonda Raja, me entrenara en el arte de respirar por el culo. Malahonda, un americano originario de Iowa,  me entrenó  vía Skype a inhalar y exhalar aire; ejercicios que luego me llevaron donde uno de los propósitos de El Jíbaro: usar la capacidad para inhalar con fuerza y así poder mover las entrañas de manera que continuamente revolviera la excreta por dentro, cual procesador de alimentos, hasta triturarla y convertirla en gas. 

   

Lo que no me esperaba es que, después de que me pidió meter un dedo y jugar con mi ano, metió otro dedo, luego la mano, hasta que entró su cuerpo completo en mi cuerpo. Logró lo que a principios me había dicho; y yo, al no prestarle atención, no vi cuáles eran sus verdaderas intenciones. No quería ni que se lo comiesen los gusanos, ni terminar en forma de cenizas; mucho menos regresar al polvo.

Darle el culo a El Jíbaro no ocurrió de la noche a la mañana. La edad, (a)sexualidad e incomodidad con mi papel en la sociedad me sirvieron de motivo para aceptar la propuesta de El Jíbaro. Una vez me explicó sus intenciones, usarme como conejillo de indias, me dediqué a investigar un poco sobre el tema; la relación entre los gases y el ser.  

Ya que la medicina occidental no aceptaba tal proyecto, fue la medicina tradicional china la que me ayudó a entender que mi cuerpo reflejaba una cosmología. Un excelente orientalista y médico uruguayo, don Daniel de Vallebajo, quien también se había interesado en las perfectas dimensiones de mi culo, me explicó la relación entre el yin-yang, los dos aspectos del Ch’i, la energía o hálito primario, y los gases. 

Aunque dicha filosofía establece cualidades opuestas para el yin (como el frío, la humedad, la oscuridad y lo femenino) y el yang (el calor, la sequedad, la luz y lo masculino), no se trata de algo estático, pues en esta dualidad se presenta un constante enlace entre los dos elementos.

El diagrama que me presentó el doctor Vallebajo enumeraba las bacterias, virus y  los gusanitos que en mi cuerpo vivían, muchos de ellos eran consecuencia de la enorme cantidad de guayabas que comía en mi Caribe natal. El muy detallado organigrama sirvió como agente catalítico para aceptar que podía transformar la función del estómago, los intestinos y el culo. 

¡Eureka! El descubrir que mi cuerpo era un ente dinámico, y que, cual colmena, alojaba otros muchos cuerpos, me ayudó, por un lado, a minimizar el sentido de soledad y, por otro, a reconsiderar que mi ser no se limitaba a un solo Ch’i, pues se nutria de los Ch’i de los gusanitos, bacterias y virus que en él se alojaban. Con esta información me dirigí donde El Jíbaro, acepté  su propuesta y viví lo anteriormente relatado en este y otros cuentos con personajes que viven como gases en mis entrañas.  

No llegaron de noche con gran cautela, como llegaron los Tres Reyes Magos en aquel villancico puertorriqueño que se oía por los lares y jurutungos de las islas de los encantos. Llegaron sin esperarse en una reunión de literatos etnocéntricos en Nueva York. Llegaron y salieron casi en respuesta a uno de esos constructos atomistas que repiten los que no pueden ir más allá de los datos, los ‘petite’datos. 

"¡Mnjú!": dijo un jíbaro literario niuyorkino y este otro, el que había entrado por mi culo lo repetía, el  "mnjú", no con oalabras, con una retahíla de pedos bien sonados. Retahíla que la muy lingüísticamente engalanada profesora de educación y etnias no pudo resistir, sus muecas la delataban. Mucho menos pudo evitar el olerlos, por poco se asfixia cuando trató de cerrar los rotitos de su muy anchita nariz. Al menos, calló y paró de citar datos a tontas y locas que no servían para explicar las historias literarias de los jíbaros en el noreste de los EUA. Si hablaba, los humos dr El Jíbaro que se metió por mi culo la hubiesen invadido.

Sin esperar respuesta, otro de los allí reunidos comenzó a citar evidencia y explicaciones, sin parar: que si la Mari Mari Narváez  en Claridad, que si Fernando Picó en 80grados, que si Jorge Duany en la Revista de Oriente, que si los billones que salían y no regresaban a las islas, que si las multinacionales, que si la economía informal, que si los inmigrantes que sacaban y no invertían, que si Antonio Gramsci y la hegemonía cultural, que si los discursos del imperio y los papagayos que los reproducían sin reflexionar sobre los mismos o darse cuenta que le servían de fotutos a los verdaderos cocorocos. El lingüista, a quien no se le conocía como economista ni científico social, contradijo la muy abarcadora sentencia que la etnocéntrica había sostenido antes de los pedos.

Sorprendido ante su casi automática respuesta, lo miré detenidamente. Estaba algo descolorido, amarillenta su tez, adormecidos los ojos, con una cara que proyectaba felicidad, paz interna; y, distinto a la etnocéntrica, no hacía muecas, ni trataba de cerrar la nariz. Su metal de voz, más suave que de costumbre, recordaba a otro personaje.

Abrí la boca, en shock, No podía creerlo. Era El Jibaro quien hablaba. Cual espíritu a lo Allan Kardec había entrado en el cuerpo del lingüista, y distinto a los espíritus kardecianos, se manifestaba en forma de pedos. Sus planes no eran entrar en un cuerpo solamente. Sus maquiavélicos planes incluían penetrar en todos los cuerpos posibles. Claro, valga la aclaración, donde no pudo entrar fue en el cuerpo de la etnocéntrica o en el de cualquier persona se negara a reproducir sus cuentos, oler y ser parte de sus pedos.

CUERPOS METAFÓRICOS

La poeta amerIcana Sylvia Plath decidió suicidarse poniendo su cabeza dentro del horno de la estufa de gas en su cocina. Su ira era tal que no quería morir en vida lentamente, ni explortar con un tiro en la cabeza a lo Hemingway, o con una bomba al estilo de cierto mártires contemporáneos, ni correr hacia las lanzas y ser crucifcada cual Cristo redentor, ni ser Alfonsina Storni y llenarse de agua para flotar sin rumbo en el tiempo. Quiso el gas. No pudo diluirse aunque la metfora así lo sugiera. Creo, que luego la cremaron.

CUERPOS EN UNO 

El color del agua y la excreta en el inodoro asustaban al más valiente, y en este caso había muchas razones para explicar el escalofrío que sentí, el que los pelos se me pararan cuando vi aquellas aguas rojas. Sangre. Cualquiera de las lombrices, gusanitos, ácaros, virus o bacterias que hacen de mi cuerpo su residencia podían ser la causa de lo que parecía un derrame. Hubiese preferido que la vista del inodoro con la excreta y aguas negras color vino me recordasen a un Francis Bacon. Mas bien parecían un Damien Hirst. La sangre no me asusta; estar a la merced de otros, sí. Peor todavía, si estas en un barco en medio del Atlántico. Un cuerpo derrumbándose poco a poco, tubos por la nariz, la boca, el culo, agujas, máquinas enchufadas en la frente, las tetillas, las nalgas, las bolas, enfermeras regañonas, médicos en apuros, hospitales cobrando antes de matarte, a esta edad, testamentos sin preparar, documentos sin organizar, relatos escritos a medias y el deseo de vivir y conocer lo que me depara el futuro me mantuvieron completamente inerte frente a la no muy agradable y rojiza excreta. Quizás la roncha que tenía en la mano no era una picada de mosquito o el dolor de estómago no fue una mala digestión. Puede que el cansancio no tuviese nada que ver con el calor del mediodía en el Caribe o que el haber puesto el detergente en la nevera no fuese resultado del un descuido. ¿Voy al médico del barco o espero a llegar a Nueva York? ¿A quién le dejo mi colección de libros antiguos, mis pinturas, los ahorros, las propiedades, el amor incondicional que a tantos profeso? Las lentas y difíciles contestaciones a todas aquellas inquietudes y preguntas fueron despachadas de mi consciencia por el recuerdo de la cena. Ni los gusanitos, lombrices, bacterias o el virus eran los responsables. ¡Qué susto! ¡Qué alivio! La noche anterior me había “jartado” de remolachas. 

CUERPOS QUE TRABAJAN MEJUNJES

Macoco se encomendó a Yaya para que le comunicara a Pucho que Chachi estaba en camino con un mejunje hecho por Pecotao. Mejunje de malos olores no querían en Rincasina y, mucho menos, en manos de Chachi. Con un escalofrío de mensajero, a Mayombe y Mayú no les tomó tiempo en saber lo que por allí venía; empataron unas flores de malamadre con hojas de malagueta y las pusieron a soltar el aroma, a fuerza de agua y alcoholado. Por el camino de la Cócora, Chachi olió los poderes del sahumerio, trató de despojarse, no pudo; soltó el mejunje, cayó de rodillas y remeneó su cuerpo por buen rato, tiró trompetillas y el poder del mejunje destruido por los vomitos de Chachi, que le caían encima al mejunje. Al otro lado de la Cócora, Pecotao presintió que su mejunje no tuvo efecto; no pudo controlar los gases, le salían sin parar.

CUERPOS QUE PLANCHAN

El cadillo no paraba de enredarse en las patas de los cabros, los hería; desangraban. No había santo ni sahumerio que acabara con las agujas de la maldita semilla. .\ Desde Rincansina, pasando por La Cócora, hasta Cimarrona, cabro que por allí corriese, cabro que moría. Mayombe trató de cortar sus raíces y el cadillo volvía. Mayú trató de ayudarla, y nada. Fuego por todo el pastizal atrajo a los blanquitos del pueblo, molestos porque las cenizas ennegrecieron sus almidonadas camisas, faldas, guayaberas y sábanas. Echaron DDT o algo así que apestaba. Mayú y Mayombe sonrieron de lejos: sabían que al cadillo nadie ni nada lo mataba. Hasta que un día, Tembandumba, harta de las quejas de los duques de la mermelada y las señora emperifolladas, decidió bajar donde Mayú y Mayombe. Ellas la vieron, pura densidad en el aire, gaseoso, y la sintieron. Se les metió por dentro. Las jamaqueó un rato, tiró al piso a bailar culebras, sacó vómitos y espumas; confirmó su presencia. A Mayú y Mayombe no les gustaba mucho que Tembandumba bajara -gracias a todos los santos, lo hacía pocas veces-, es que las dejaba de cama. Tres días más tarde, después del bembé y Tembandumba desaparecer de allí para luego, y que, aparecer por Jobos, Mayú y Mayombe encontraron a los cabros caminando entre las traicioneras matas, evitando tocarlas, comiendo cadillos sin herir sus patas. Cuando los blanquitos de Guayama volvieron por Rincansina y Cimarrona, al ver los diestros cabros que ya no desangraban, decidieron regresar al pueblo y planchar sus propias ropas.

MÚLTIPLES VOCES

MÚLTIPLES VOCES

Allí estaba ella a su lado, sonreída, observándolo a él que decía que no aprobaba la homosexualidad de un amigo pero que no lo rechazaba cuando en realidad lo que quería decir era que no aprobaba mi homosexualidad, pero que no me rechazaba, no porque se creyese a sí mismo lo que él decia, pues él nunca tuvo voz propia y ahora era la voz de su mujer, que a su lado sonreía sin decir nada, feliz de  que él tratara de avergonzarme con su discurso moralista y yo sabia que era la cafretona peleona que lo mandaba a que me dijera eso, porque ellla no tolera que yo tenga control sobre mi vida y no le hago caso, ni permito que ella, una negrita de arrabal con ínfulas de ser chic, me controle, a mi que tengo gustos finos y como chocolates de primera y  escargots frescos y no de latas y el pato que cosumo es orgánico y casi crudo en lonjas, acompañado por los mejores vinos de todo sitio y ella que solo come mondongo y vive del otro y me envidia porque soy un hombre con gustos impecables, sobre todo, incontrolable, mantengo la calma y lo oigo y la miro a ella, sonreída mientras olía el gas que los chocolates después de los escargots me causan.  

(de la colección de relatos Gasesosos, en marcha)