Otro del pasado
Un newsgroup post de hace tiempo. Incluye una entrega de la miniserie "The Council of Geleau". Primitivo pero cuco.
¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨
Paaaaarrots. Green, long tails, eat little white bulbous fruit from trees that line the square in front of the supermarket, that little square with one of the preserved chimneys (what we do best) bang in the middle. As you know, we're not supposed to have paaaaarrots in Spain at all, so as in all such cases, you tend to look around nervously for confirmation that what you are seeing is in fact being seen by the rest of the population, that it's not just you seeing paaaaarrots. But they don't appear to be visible to anyone else. Yet they do make a godawful din, from those trees.
I went to work and said "paaaaarrots".
Dani, my colleague, gave me a look of frank distaste. "I have to go now," he murmured, in a brown study. "Tempus fugit."
They have been coming for two years now. I think it's those trees. A tropical bird will schlepp it a long way for a tree it especially likes.
When I meet someone who actually does see those paaaaarrots, spontaneously, without any sort of suggestion on my part, I will marry her if she'll let me. Carmen did not see any paaaaarrots, but she did see my cat scratching the armchair once, on one of her early visits. She opened her eyes very wide and said "Que maaaaalo!" Now I sort of have this association between the paaaaarrots and the baaaaadness of the cat in question, since they have the same number of a's in succession. My first girlfriend, on the other hand, specialised in saying "crooooow". She had quite a fetchingly cadenced way of saying "crooooow", while standing by the exit lane on one of the service stations on the M6, of a windy dappled autumn afternoon, with a bundle stuffed up the front of her jersey. (I don't think any of the drivers who stopped really thought she was pregnant, but she had a superstitious faith in the technique. What they actually did think about women who stuffed random things up their jumpers and wanted to be set down at Holmes Chapel I won't attempt to guess.)
Anyway. It came to pass that last weekend, I had managed to convince myself that I, um, well. It does sometimes happen to men of my age with prostate infections. Perhaps permanently. And then on Sunday, P. insisted on coming round. And wearing fishnets - not normal fishnets, such as respectable demi-mondaines wear, these were an unusual kind apparently made to some European Common Fisheries Policy specification, with holes big enough to let the little fishies through and thus not deplete stock. I'm guessing here, but I think the tinned "sardinillas" (baby sardines) that are sold in Spanish supermarkets and are probably illegal everywhere else in the world, would have laughed in the face of such nets. As, I admit, I also did (mostly because they were worn over the top of some thick woollen tights, as if she had been expecting to play strip poker and lacked faith in Providence and Beginner's Luck). But I digress from the real question, which has to do with the fluorescent light in the kitchen. Since I painted the flat last year, and temporarily removed it, it has refused to work. I eat my supper in a kind of medieval gloom which seems to suit the cast of my mind this winter. So it was that when, in a kind of desperate stalling tactic, I resorted to making tea, she came and sat in the kitchen. This is when it happened.
Before going into which, did I ever mention that the bloke in charge of the Fisheries Department in the Catalan Autonomous Regional Government is called Josep Miralpeix? The name means "Joseph He-looks-at-the-fish". This is the kind of thing I go to sleep laughing (or trying to laugh) over. Conclusion: you wouldn't want to know me, really.
Anyway. She sat in the kitchen, in a kind of discreet backlit penumbra. I glanced at her. Then I put the tea down, very slowly, and said "you look like Carmen, you know, right now." She smiled and didn't look insulted. She has heard about Carmen. Everyone has, I suppose, by now.
"I mean it," I added, after she had said something in reply. "Even your voice just now, as you said that. Your face... everything. It's weird." I was getting a bit upset, confused.
She smiled at me, and said quietly, "I am Carmen".
Ask me to believe in whatever. Guardian angels, synchronicity, Divine Mercy, epiphanies, you name it, I'm a sucker for it since last Sunday. I discovered then that I could simultaneously believe and not believe. I knew this was P., having me on, a harmless joke, but sometimes you want something so much that reality just loses the battle, with scarcely a skirmish. It didn't matter right then what the truth was, this was the Other Side speaking to me, this was something that went beyond time and space, this was Carmen somehow quietly replacing the person I was with a moment ago and saying "I am Carmen", with all that those three words imply, i.e. "I'm with you, I always have been, I am watching and understanding from wherever I am, don't lose hope." It really was her, I'm convinced of it.
I said a mental prayer of thanksgiving to the kitchen light and the um, well, problem disappeared.
Which brings me back to paaaaarrots again.
Several people (and numerous paaaaarrots) have said to me at different times: "It's the unattainable you go for. C. just had the sense to quit when she was ahead. The one defining thing all gods and goddesses have in common is that they're not there. They may be supposed to be somewhere, just not - there. If absence makes the heart grow fonder, it makes yours go into a howling amplified feedback loop, where only yanking the plug from the mains will save your (and everyone else's) eardrums. Wise up. Seek the attainable. The attainable lives in Colombia. Or in Morocco, if you don't mind getting it together with a girl called Mince. There are also rumoured to be at least three attainable women in Uttar Pradesh, and one in Belize, not to mention P from up the road, who does make exceedingly good croquettes. Just do it."
To which I say: no, that isn't it, really. Goddess status is not achieved just by not being there. After all, Tracey St-Ives Benchflottle is technically Not There (I made her up about three seconds ago) but that doesn't make her an object of instant and irresistible veneration. It has more to do with being Carmen. Or, for those not in a position to opt for this, it has to do with being a Hazardous Chemical.
I'm just wondering what there is now, really. What do you do when you've used up your quota of bliss, greedily, in four months following your 40th birthday? When all that's left is, well, just what there is?
Wait for Spring, I suppose, that's what. And try not to scare people too much. People are interesting if you don't frighten them away.
Finally, to quote from some spam I just received: "Before you say "Bull", please read the following". (the saying of "Bull" is presumably the logical next stage in the proceedings)
**************
"So!" said the tall woman who had just crossed the threshold of the Conde Raton's study, "this is your game!"
Fabien spun round and, on seeing his ex-wife standing before him, eyebrows cocked, arms akimbo, the Wozzeck harmonica fell from his hand and clattered on the floor. "Yersinia! What a surprise!"
"Oh, I am sure it is so. No surprises for me, of course. I knew you would never have the Jones to leave Geleau without there is a ..." - she looked the potted plant up and down with open distaste - "good reason. I see you are not lonely, at least."
"You are wrong, Yersinia. Ted is just a good friend. We have done nothing - "
Yersinia waved a dismissive hand. "Fabien, a man who leaves his wife for a plant in a pot is possibly not insane. But one who leaves his wife for an etiolated Ficus with a history of greenfly is not fit to be called a Frenchman. Tell me - this plant, this 'Ted' - what has it that I do not have? Hmm?"
Fabien paused to ponder this conundrum. "Leaves?" he said doubtfully.
Yersinia grew red in the face. She searched nervously in her handbag for a peppermint. "So, you wish that I should leave? You would see me go, so that you and your fancy plant can have a good time with cadavers in plastic bags? Is this your way, Fabien?"
"Bark?" said Fabien, scratching his head in defeat.
"I will not bark. Neither will I impersonate Monica Seles, or make 'happy sea-lion' noises. Not any more, Fabien - those days are finished. I will say my one thing, and then I will go. My one thing is this. The police are looking for you. Your picture is all over Arles, Marseilles et Aix - eh. I have lied to them to despiste them a little. But soon they will follow you here. I cannot help this. I have come only to advise you."
"What am I accused of?" enquired Fabien in surprise.
"Oh, they say terrible things. They say you did not use a subjunctive after a negative verb of mental prehension. And that you spelled wrong the plural of "hibou" five times, in letters to bank managers and terrorists from the Pays-Basque. And that you whispered "weekend" to an old lady in a bread queue, who is now in hospital. Wicked things. I did not believe them. But now I see you with this plant, I think maybe they are right. Fabien, I wish to have no more to do with you. I am leaving you, and I am taking our hamster."
"But you've already left me," Fabien stammered, "you left me two years ago. We were divorced."
"Well, I'm leaving you again," said Yersinia decisively. "Only now, I do it in an impressive and dramatic way. Et, mon cher petit chou-chou, the hamster is mine. As soon as I arrive back in Geleau, I am going to pick it up. I trust you have looked after it well." And with that, she threw a toffee apple at him, turned on her heels and clattered out the door.
"Shoots," said Fabien. He made a face at the empty doorway.
"Tendrils. Chlorophyll. And that's just for starters."
************
Solus Krapkin was having a thoroughly difficult morning. After various attempts on his life during the night, one involving a trained anteater suspended from a rafter, the moment of real crisis had come when, after having fought off a screeching old lady wielding a scimitar in the shower, he weighed himself in the motel bathroom and found he had gained 14 kilos in the space of two weeks. There was no other word for it. He was Fat.
As was his custom whenever making this discovery, he decided to console himself with a hearty breakfast consisting of a kilo of black pudding, three buttered parsnips, a baby octopus stuffled with truffles and a large samovar of strong tea. He rang for room service and placed the order, adding as an afterthought "and no moribund Algerians, please". Almost immediately his door burst open and an Algerian in a fez and djallabiya, with a knife sticking out of his back, fell onto the floor in front of him.
"I'm sorry," said Krapkin, switching to Old High German in the heat of the moment, "but I did ask specifically for no dying Algerians. Nothing personal, but there already was one in the train three days ago. In my own compartment, moreover. In Russia we have a saying, that to see two dying Algerians in the same week brings bad luck."
The dying Algerian groaned. "I'm sorry, mate," he said, "But you'll thank me when you've 'eard wha' I 'ave to say. See, it's like this. I 'ave it on good authority that there's this French bloke, called Fabien Something, wot's gone looking for you. Seems as 'ow 'e found some plane ticket wiv your name on it, like. Don't ask me 'ow I knows, I jus' does. Right now, 'e's 'oled up in a place in the South of Spain, called urrggh."
"Urrggh?"
"Sorry mate, that was just me dyin'."
"Damn," thought Krapkin to himself. "These North African chappies always seem to pop their clogs at the wrong moment."
¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨
Paaaaarrots. Green, long tails, eat little white bulbous fruit from trees that line the square in front of the supermarket, that little square with one of the preserved chimneys (what we do best) bang in the middle. As you know, we're not supposed to have paaaaarrots in Spain at all, so as in all such cases, you tend to look around nervously for confirmation that what you are seeing is in fact being seen by the rest of the population, that it's not just you seeing paaaaarrots. But they don't appear to be visible to anyone else. Yet they do make a godawful din, from those trees.
I went to work and said "paaaaarrots".
Dani, my colleague, gave me a look of frank distaste. "I have to go now," he murmured, in a brown study. "Tempus fugit."
They have been coming for two years now. I think it's those trees. A tropical bird will schlepp it a long way for a tree it especially likes.
When I meet someone who actually does see those paaaaarrots, spontaneously, without any sort of suggestion on my part, I will marry her if she'll let me. Carmen did not see any paaaaarrots, but she did see my cat scratching the armchair once, on one of her early visits. She opened her eyes very wide and said "Que maaaaalo!" Now I sort of have this association between the paaaaarrots and the baaaaadness of the cat in question, since they have the same number of a's in succession. My first girlfriend, on the other hand, specialised in saying "crooooow". She had quite a fetchingly cadenced way of saying "crooooow", while standing by the exit lane on one of the service stations on the M6, of a windy dappled autumn afternoon, with a bundle stuffed up the front of her jersey. (I don't think any of the drivers who stopped really thought she was pregnant, but she had a superstitious faith in the technique. What they actually did think about women who stuffed random things up their jumpers and wanted to be set down at Holmes Chapel I won't attempt to guess.)
Anyway. It came to pass that last weekend, I had managed to convince myself that I, um, well. It does sometimes happen to men of my age with prostate infections. Perhaps permanently. And then on Sunday, P. insisted on coming round. And wearing fishnets - not normal fishnets, such as respectable demi-mondaines wear, these were an unusual kind apparently made to some European Common Fisheries Policy specification, with holes big enough to let the little fishies through and thus not deplete stock. I'm guessing here, but I think the tinned "sardinillas" (baby sardines) that are sold in Spanish supermarkets and are probably illegal everywhere else in the world, would have laughed in the face of such nets. As, I admit, I also did (mostly because they were worn over the top of some thick woollen tights, as if she had been expecting to play strip poker and lacked faith in Providence and Beginner's Luck). But I digress from the real question, which has to do with the fluorescent light in the kitchen. Since I painted the flat last year, and temporarily removed it, it has refused to work. I eat my supper in a kind of medieval gloom which seems to suit the cast of my mind this winter. So it was that when, in a kind of desperate stalling tactic, I resorted to making tea, she came and sat in the kitchen. This is when it happened.
Before going into which, did I ever mention that the bloke in charge of the Fisheries Department in the Catalan Autonomous Regional Government is called Josep Miralpeix? The name means "Joseph He-looks-at-the-fish". This is the kind of thing I go to sleep laughing (or trying to laugh) over. Conclusion: you wouldn't want to know me, really.
Anyway. She sat in the kitchen, in a kind of discreet backlit penumbra. I glanced at her. Then I put the tea down, very slowly, and said "you look like Carmen, you know, right now." She smiled and didn't look insulted. She has heard about Carmen. Everyone has, I suppose, by now.
"I mean it," I added, after she had said something in reply. "Even your voice just now, as you said that. Your face... everything. It's weird." I was getting a bit upset, confused.
She smiled at me, and said quietly, "I am Carmen".
Ask me to believe in whatever. Guardian angels, synchronicity, Divine Mercy, epiphanies, you name it, I'm a sucker for it since last Sunday. I discovered then that I could simultaneously believe and not believe. I knew this was P., having me on, a harmless joke, but sometimes you want something so much that reality just loses the battle, with scarcely a skirmish. It didn't matter right then what the truth was, this was the Other Side speaking to me, this was something that went beyond time and space, this was Carmen somehow quietly replacing the person I was with a moment ago and saying "I am Carmen", with all that those three words imply, i.e. "I'm with you, I always have been, I am watching and understanding from wherever I am, don't lose hope." It really was her, I'm convinced of it.
I said a mental prayer of thanksgiving to the kitchen light and the um, well, problem disappeared.
Which brings me back to paaaaarrots again.
Several people (and numerous paaaaarrots) have said to me at different times: "It's the unattainable you go for. C. just had the sense to quit when she was ahead. The one defining thing all gods and goddesses have in common is that they're not there. They may be supposed to be somewhere, just not - there. If absence makes the heart grow fonder, it makes yours go into a howling amplified feedback loop, where only yanking the plug from the mains will save your (and everyone else's) eardrums. Wise up. Seek the attainable. The attainable lives in Colombia. Or in Morocco, if you don't mind getting it together with a girl called Mince. There are also rumoured to be at least three attainable women in Uttar Pradesh, and one in Belize, not to mention P from up the road, who does make exceedingly good croquettes. Just do it."
To which I say: no, that isn't it, really. Goddess status is not achieved just by not being there. After all, Tracey St-Ives Benchflottle is technically Not There (I made her up about three seconds ago) but that doesn't make her an object of instant and irresistible veneration. It has more to do with being Carmen. Or, for those not in a position to opt for this, it has to do with being a Hazardous Chemical.
I'm just wondering what there is now, really. What do you do when you've used up your quota of bliss, greedily, in four months following your 40th birthday? When all that's left is, well, just what there is?
Wait for Spring, I suppose, that's what. And try not to scare people too much. People are interesting if you don't frighten them away.
Finally, to quote from some spam I just received: "Before you say "Bull", please read the following". (the saying of "Bull" is presumably the logical next stage in the proceedings)
**************
"So!" said the tall woman who had just crossed the threshold of the Conde Raton's study, "this is your game!"
Fabien spun round and, on seeing his ex-wife standing before him, eyebrows cocked, arms akimbo, the Wozzeck harmonica fell from his hand and clattered on the floor. "Yersinia! What a surprise!"
"Oh, I am sure it is so. No surprises for me, of course. I knew you would never have the Jones to leave Geleau without there is a ..." - she looked the potted plant up and down with open distaste - "good reason. I see you are not lonely, at least."
"You are wrong, Yersinia. Ted is just a good friend. We have done nothing - "
Yersinia waved a dismissive hand. "Fabien, a man who leaves his wife for a plant in a pot is possibly not insane. But one who leaves his wife for an etiolated Ficus with a history of greenfly is not fit to be called a Frenchman. Tell me - this plant, this 'Ted' - what has it that I do not have? Hmm?"
Fabien paused to ponder this conundrum. "Leaves?" he said doubtfully.
Yersinia grew red in the face. She searched nervously in her handbag for a peppermint. "So, you wish that I should leave? You would see me go, so that you and your fancy plant can have a good time with cadavers in plastic bags? Is this your way, Fabien?"
"Bark?" said Fabien, scratching his head in defeat.
"I will not bark. Neither will I impersonate Monica Seles, or make 'happy sea-lion' noises. Not any more, Fabien - those days are finished. I will say my one thing, and then I will go. My one thing is this. The police are looking for you. Your picture is all over Arles, Marseilles et Aix - eh. I have lied to them to despiste them a little. But soon they will follow you here. I cannot help this. I have come only to advise you."
"What am I accused of?" enquired Fabien in surprise.
"Oh, they say terrible things. They say you did not use a subjunctive after a negative verb of mental prehension. And that you spelled wrong the plural of "hibou" five times, in letters to bank managers and terrorists from the Pays-Basque. And that you whispered "weekend" to an old lady in a bread queue, who is now in hospital. Wicked things. I did not believe them. But now I see you with this plant, I think maybe they are right. Fabien, I wish to have no more to do with you. I am leaving you, and I am taking our hamster."
"But you've already left me," Fabien stammered, "you left me two years ago. We were divorced."
"Well, I'm leaving you again," said Yersinia decisively. "Only now, I do it in an impressive and dramatic way. Et, mon cher petit chou-chou, the hamster is mine. As soon as I arrive back in Geleau, I am going to pick it up. I trust you have looked after it well." And with that, she threw a toffee apple at him, turned on her heels and clattered out the door.
"Shoots," said Fabien. He made a face at the empty doorway.
"Tendrils. Chlorophyll. And that's just for starters."
************
Solus Krapkin was having a thoroughly difficult morning. After various attempts on his life during the night, one involving a trained anteater suspended from a rafter, the moment of real crisis had come when, after having fought off a screeching old lady wielding a scimitar in the shower, he weighed himself in the motel bathroom and found he had gained 14 kilos in the space of two weeks. There was no other word for it. He was Fat.
As was his custom whenever making this discovery, he decided to console himself with a hearty breakfast consisting of a kilo of black pudding, three buttered parsnips, a baby octopus stuffled with truffles and a large samovar of strong tea. He rang for room service and placed the order, adding as an afterthought "and no moribund Algerians, please". Almost immediately his door burst open and an Algerian in a fez and djallabiya, with a knife sticking out of his back, fell onto the floor in front of him.
"I'm sorry," said Krapkin, switching to Old High German in the heat of the moment, "but I did ask specifically for no dying Algerians. Nothing personal, but there already was one in the train three days ago. In my own compartment, moreover. In Russia we have a saying, that to see two dying Algerians in the same week brings bad luck."
The dying Algerian groaned. "I'm sorry, mate," he said, "But you'll thank me when you've 'eard wha' I 'ave to say. See, it's like this. I 'ave it on good authority that there's this French bloke, called Fabien Something, wot's gone looking for you. Seems as 'ow 'e found some plane ticket wiv your name on it, like. Don't ask me 'ow I knows, I jus' does. Right now, 'e's 'oled up in a place in the South of Spain, called urrggh."
"Urrggh?"
"Sorry mate, that was just me dyin'."
"Damn," thought Krapkin to himself. "These North African chappies always seem to pop their clogs at the wrong moment."
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