It is the last day of the
millennium in Buenos Aires --
another journey after a long
absence, lunch
by the river with the childhood
friend, Plaza Mayo
with signs demanding justice,
café La Biela
where the breeze greets us as we
sit by the window across
from the cemetery for rich
folks, and the uncertainty returns:
Why don’t I live here?
Why do I travel?
* * *
Llueven gatos y perros en NY
dice el taxista
con turbante que corre por la
Park Avenue
sobre el asfalto mojado. En NY todo me parece industrial,
gris y moderno, como el cielo
nublado
de esta tarde de abril en
Soho. En NY
la gente linda, joven y elástica
se mezcla con los turistas
en zapatillas blancas sacando
fotos a todo y a todos.
La gente linda, joven y elástica
vestida de negro de pies
a cabeza camina rápido, me
atropella. En NY
las calles humean en
blanco. El tedio me cubre,
me llena el alma aburrida ya de
las grandes ciudades.
Añoro el campo o el mar, la
playa, el pueblo.
Añoro el silencio interrumpido
por el viento o
un cuervo volando bajito. In NY smells of falafel
and hummus mix with blaring
horns
and sirens. “August is Anal Sex Month in NY” reads an ad
in the Village Voice. In Harper’s I read a letter found
with the bodies of two dead
young men from Africa:
Yaguine Koita, 14 yrs. old,
Fode Tourakana, 15 yrs.
old.
Two boys found in the cargo hold
of an airplane, in Brussels.
The letter asks the citizens of
Europe
to help Africa. The boys wanted to
study, to become like us they
say.
How is this possible? I ask.
Why not? You say.
I can and
cannot believe it.
Trashy,
New York is always trashy,
a madhouse
but
sometimes
I want to be like the New
Yorkers,
the frenzied intellectuals,
the funky-dressed women,
the pierced artists.
A thickset woman lowers her
pants against
the wall in Brooklyn. I can see her naked buttocks.
After she’s done, she struggles
to pull them up,
moaning. People steer away
from her, afraid to catch her
disease.
* * *
The mistral blows in
Provence. I sip coffee at
Van Gogh’s Sanatorium’s Garden,
the pansies of all colors:
yellow, purple, white, red, the
cypresses: I stand among them and imagine him
– the yellows and purples weaker
in real life,
not like his, intense, brawny,
almost startling. He
was right about the light here.
Did Vincent
sit here too and drink? Certainly he painted.
After climbing the steps to
Bonnieux, we sit overlooking the village
under a cool shade, awed by the
gothic beauty
of these perched villages, the
stonewalls,
the church steeple bathed in
sunlight.
Do we go places to tell our
friends
we’ve been there? To tell
ourselves? To keep a list?
True beauty is
in the quotidian, in the small
stuff.
The constant motion frightens
me,
a reflex reaction from centuries
of displacement
and migration, of diaspora,
lived entirely in one day.
It is very warm in St. Tropez
and Brigitte Bardot is nowhere to be found.
We sit across from the Casino
Monte-Carlo
hoping to see the “rich and
famous”
but all we see are Americans
with cameras.
* * *
Serene but for the squawking
birds
sleep eludes me in Tampere.
This room boasts of windows, of
sun and trees, too radiant
in this midsummer night.
The never ending light
disorients me.
I have narratives I say: Let me
tell you a story.
While I stroll Tampere streets
or sip a cup of coffee
fragments of Cortazar’s stories
materialize,
Borges’s people appear when I
look out
the window. And I’m back –
in Buenos Aires -- its energy,
its night life, its contradictions.
Borges said he didn’t believe
the city was founded;
he believed it always
existed. You
never really leave Buenos Aries,
it lives with you forever,
said another writer.
I know.
It lives in me, has lived
despite the years and the
distances. And now
I try to imagine my life as if I
had never left it.
I paint scenarios.
I question.
I have no clear answers yet.
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