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.

Visits

Is there anything true about reincarnation? I don't know. What I know about the concept is that one way or another, many societies/cultures/religions in history have theorized about it. I know the inherent kindness of the Buddhism, whose followers firmly believe in the cyclic journey of the soul until it reaches the state of purity and climax: the nirvana. I know that the concept has been part of innumerable film premises throughout the young cinematographic history.

I know that the majority of the new generation have grown and have been growing with an obsession for the alternativeness and for the need of differentiation. In that obsession, the resistance to certain religion is strongly attached. The atheism has become a fashion. It has become just that of which lots of atheists ran from.

I know I'm catholic from education and from family. I know that I've set up my own personal Jesus in which I want to believe. I couldn't care less about the church, the priests, and any human and institution who thinks that has the hand in religious aspects and imposes rules, interpretations, symbolisms, etc. And I want to believe there's something beyond; that in the death, like the Scorsesian Christ says: “Is not a door which closes. It is a door which opens.”

I have schizophrenic chats with my dear departed. I talk to them and try to imagine what would they answer. But maybe I'm not imagining! I believe there's something stuck in the Mexican collective subconscious that relates strongly with death. And this goes much more farther that the stereotype.

I've heard all kinds of ghost stories. When I was little I had the obsession of listening this kind of tales and then stayed up all night. Now I beg for those sleep hours lost. But those hours of insomnia where no lost time. Those where hours in which I imagined what I've had heard, in images. They where also hours of reflexion and premature analysis. Many of the stories that worried me the most and disturbed me where the ones that had to do with visits of my dead relatives.

A few weeks ago, I was walking to my apartment. The noise of the city has become overwhelming considering the great amount of stories and characters moving and acting inside my head. It was then when it happened; something I see as someone's visit. Or at least I want to relate it with someone's visit. I was walking a block away from my destiny, when a jogging woman with her dog crossed my way. The dog was a white boxer with a black stain on its right eye. I starred at the dog 'cause I simply can't ignore those animals. When they turned to their sidewalk and I kept going straight, that dog turned its head and saw me. And when we were looking at each other, the dog didn't look to the front anymore. It kept looking at me and I did the same. The dog didn't jog with its owner anymore, he just looked at me, and you could see nostalgia in its look. Those things that you just feel. And that way we walked for a whole block, it kept ignoring the jogging, and I stayed fascinated by the experience.

I have a picture which I wanted to publish here, but I didn't find it. In this picture I appear incarnated in a 4-year-old boy next to a hallway to the patio of a middle-class house. I appeared with a smile that I haven't seen on me in any other picture until now: because those were the times in which the emotions flowed without filters. And behind me, with a nostalgic and heavy look, watching me, was El Pirata, my fisrt dog: a white boxer with a black stain on its right eye.

I think that if someone had taken my picture a few weeks ago, while that happened, I would've repeated that pure and genuine smile.