Excuse Me, Sr

Excuse me, Sr, are you a cop? Pardon me, I've noticed your badge. I see you're traffic officer. Monterrey Traffic Department. You must feel extremely powerful, no? Important, maybe? Yes.

I see you don't feel like talking.

Remember that night? It was nearly 12:15am. Gray Toyota. Broken light. How do the transit regulations work? How does a person driving a car with a broken light ends up becoming, along lots of punches, into a drug dealer?

Do you know Kafka?

Of course not. How could you know him? Excuse me, Sr. I didn't intend to offend you. You only know about cowboy magazines, or joke books, maybe.

Do you know what happens to a person when, one night, after finishing his thesis... I'm sorry, do you know what a thesis is? No, of course not. A thesis is a final document that many universities require in order for someone to graduate. Graduate! From architecture, in this case.

Well, do you know what happens to a person after that, being punched and accused to be a drug dealer, and exposed to the media by a negligible being who feels powerful for being dressed with a uniform made out of second hand fabrics?

Did you listen? Kafka again.

Well it's good that a person like you is used to Kafkian processes. Your -how should I call it?- Expertise... would help you understand that a person in that scenery, exposed in the media, unfairly accused... a person like that looses much more than his family, title, or his reputation.

A person like that looses something unfixable in his essence. I don't know what it is. I just know that something disappears. A person like that has nothing to loose. A person like that transforms.

I'm gonna to take the blindfold off your eyes. Your sight's gonna take a while in getting used to the light. It's just a matter of seconds. Before that, however, I want you to bring to your mind the last memory you've got of your children.

Excuse me, Sr, can you see now?

Look at them... your kids.

I suppose those pieces of meat, guts, organs, and hair don't look a lot like the image you had in your little head. Do they?

Kafka!

In A Beautiful Pilgrimage

So yes. I saw her crossing the street and I immediately started chasing her.

There was no reason. Why do we insist on finding reasons for everything? I've always thought they're useless. Something that's completely logic and reasonable for someone (such abstract words!); could seem the most primitive, sickening, and dark thing to somebody else. I don't waste my time looking for reasons for what impulsively comes out from my heart. (does it exist?)

I chased her. Because I just felt like it.

I followed her along main avenues (I felt judged by the multitudes), along commercial streets (is it that people won't conceive anything else to do on weekends but consume?), along narrow and claustrophobic alleys (much better, now we have something in common), I followed her at a safe distance. And she kept walking, non-stop, without turning around, like if she had her eyes fixed in something that I couldn't guess.

And yes, I tried to guess: I imagined her arriving the kinder garden to pick her kids; or meeting her husband and have an improvised kiss in the middle of the street that would remind me to Doisneau; or even better, that she arrived to leave her kids at home with her husband, said goodbye, met with her young, beautiful, dominant lover, and had an improvised kiss in the middle of the street that would remind me to Doisneau.

Nothing, no husband, no kids, no lovers, no improvised kisses. Just her and her solitude ahead; I and she before me. Is it that she pursued her destiny? And I? I don't know. Three hours of quick walking make anyone tired, even a walk-junkie as myself.

But she kept walking at that fast pace. She, with her short dress that showed that sweet cellulite of a mature woman, of a woman who has lived, who has world, and above all who walks a fucking lot. She with her high heel shoes that made her show off that beautiful calf, as the lyrics of that Bronco song said. And I with those callosities that gave me the cramps like small electric discharges. Five hours and she wouldn't stop.

But, how could one let someone like her escape?! I saw her when she came out of that lingerie shop. I, who love, who fantasize with the women who enter a lingerie shop uninhibitedly and take their time picking thongs, hoses, garters, bras. Those women who raise the items towards the light, look at them, and imagine themselves wearing them. And while they do that, I, with my wrinkled cigarette, almost smoking the filter, imagine them.

I imagine their lives, their tastes... I think that a woman's underwear says a lot about her. I imagine everything about them before they decide to enter the shop. I imagine and never guess. But this time was magical. I did it, I saw the lost look of this beautiful forty-year-old and I imagined her in underwear.

I had that image in my head, mixing with the smoke of the tobacco and filter of my cigarette. And while the image focused, she picked those items which revealed before my fantasy. She chose everything that I imagined and put it in the bag.

How to let someone like that go away?

I don't know... it's been a day and a half, and I keep walking. She's still there, before me, at the same distance.

She walks and walks, and I follow and follow. The view of that human woman, without perfections, makes an eternity of pilgrimage worth it.