Trato de escribir 1 vez a la semana de ningun tema especificamente. Muchas veces escribo poesia, otras veces antologias, otras veces resenias historicas.
Había una vez una un choque que dejo detrás una larga cola de cometa brillante. Nos mantiene en el interior, hace nevosa las imágenes de la televisión. Se instala en gotas frías en las líneas telefónicas.
Uno aun puede ir despacio con los esquís en un sol invernal a través de malezas donde algunas hojas aun cuelgan. Se parecen a páginas arrancadas de guías telefónicas antiguas, nombres tragados por el frio. Es aun hermoso escuchar los pálpitos del corazón, pero a veces las sombras parecen más reales que el cuerpo. El samurái se ve insignificante al lado de su armadura de escamas negras de dragón.
Once there was a shock that left behind a long shimmering comet tail. It keeps us inside, it makes the TV pictures snowy. It settles in cold drops in the telephone lines. One can still go slowly on skis in a winter sun through brush where a few leaves hang on. They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories, names swallowed by the cold.It is still beautiful to feel the heartbeat, but often the shadow seems more real than the body. The samurai looks insignificant beside his armor of black dragon scales.
It was August 15th, 2007, 6.40 pm when the earthquake began; it lasted three minutes, but seemed endless. The power went out suddenly and lightning struck the desert of Lima, making people scream. I remember my grandmother telling me to pray, the apocalypse was here! I lived in “La Punta”, a peninsula in Callao, with my grandmother and my mother. Callao used to be twice its size, until a violent tsunami buried half the city after a similar earthquake. Rumors that the sea retired meters away spread through the whole neighborhood, since we knew that it would come back more furiously. People took the few things they had and ran without knowing where to go. The only place where my family could go was my aunt’s house –across from a shelter for people in the neighborhood. It took all of us until the next day to realize the human impact of the 7.9 degree earthquake: destroyed highways, inhabitable houses and fear in the streets. The entire country was shaken, morally destroyed. The news of a fallen port in Ica and the death of 510 people shocked us.
Before this earthquake, I used to think that “charity” meant giving money to the poor kids who circulate in every corner in Lima, where I am from; but it wasn’t until this earthquake changed my life. I was only 14-years-old, but I knew that I held some responsibility to help. My family in Lima wasn’t wealthy, but at that moment we were better off than the people in Ica. We waited a couple of days, but it only became clearer that we could not turn our backs. “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”
The next day, my sister collected money from friends and family in the United States. I went from classroom to classroom in my middle school collecting money. My mother also collected money from her friends. In total, we collected more than 2,000 dollars (what a regular police officer makes in a semester). With that money we bought blankets, pots, buckets and canned food. When I told my mom that I wanted to go to Ica to help distribute the donations, she asked me:
* “Carlos, why do you want to go?”
I responded: “If I don’t go, I know I will regret it when I am an adult.” I felt that the experience would change my life, and it certainly did.
Just as in the Haitian earthquake, all the help went to the epicenter ignoring the surrounding places that received damage as well. The epicenter was in “Pisco”, but the whole state of Ica was destroyed. Help from all around the world came for Pisco, but other parts from Ica were ignored.
In the bus to Ica, we saw children everywhere with their hands opened waiting to receive something, they were waiting by hundreds in the airports or bus terminals to receive anything from the tourist. When we arrived, my mother asked the cab driver to take us to a town where people would appreciate our donations the most. He drove us to a place called “Los Molinos,” a small farming town. What we saw was stunning: churches, schools, houses, everything had crumbled. There were people dead on the streets and hundreds of homeless people waiting to receive any kind of help. It took us about four hours to share everything we had, but afterward there was still a feeling of emptiness, of not having done enough.
On the bus back home I began to wonder about my life, the good fortune I had for living in a house that didn’t crumble, the luck I had studying in an intact school while their schools had been destroyed. I was happy to do something to help them rebuild their lives, but today I realize that it was my own life that had changed the most. That day I realized that I had the power to help people. I had the ability, the resources and the responsibility to change people’s lives. And I achieved all this by realizing that my “home” in the phrase “Charity begins at home” wasn’t the corner of my house where I gave alms to the poor kids, but my whole country, Peru.
The 1850’s were passing and the air smelled burnt. The pigeons were traveling south from the other side of the road, where Lengstern, a small town in Nebraska, was. On the other side, Robert Allen, a mid-fifties old man who nobody knew he was from, was wondering if something happened to his little town.
-“Robert, did you dry the cow yesterday while milking her?” said Robert’s mom.
Drying cows was Robert’s specialty, to the point that some old men, usually drunk, told the little kid to stay away from the cowboy’s life, to practice tebeing a locksmith or, even better, to go to school to have the opportunity to go to the big cities to make 10 times more money that any cowboy could do. Despite all the recommendations that the old men of Lengstern gave him, Robert decided to practice every day to become the best cowboy of the town. He never expected what was going to happen.
“Every morning is different” said Mickey, Robert’s friend. They knew each other since they were born and have always went some naughty things that neither of them repented doing. The little gang consisted of four 12-year-old kids, Robert, Mickey, Rex and Broncho. They used to be together in every problem, in every gift, all their toys were for the four and they made butter every afternoon together. They sometimes made naughty, very naughty things around the farm. Besides everything, they were happy. Oh, yes, they were, together they would look at the sky every morning to see the shapes of the clouds, they would climb the mounts together and collect lizzards of every color and shape. They would always laugh together because of the same old joke, and they had so many experiences together, that they considered each other brothers.
“Why do you say that” responded Broncho.
“Because we have never seen the same exact shape in two different clouds, my dad told me that the clouds are made of steam and that they are shaped by the wind, well, the wind of every morning is not the same.
After that beautiful autumn day, the four kids went to the farm of Old Billy, they used to go every day to the farm to steal two or three hens and cook them in the deep of the forest, where nobody would ever find them. Old Billy knew this, but he never said anything because of the relation that he had with Robert’s mother. But because nobody stopped the little gang, as they became older and older, they started doing naughtier things, like changing the food in the horses, kicking the pigs, or drying every cow on purpose.
Everybody knew that they had to close their pens when those kids passed by. Everybody told them as criminals, but nobody did anything because the little gang gained a little respect, if the cowboys said something, maybe the four would take retaliation. The town citizens sometimes met at Johnny’s, one citizen that hated the little gang, but they would always arrive at the same conclusion: Be more careful with your belongings, because some animals are stealing everything they find. They refused to say outloud that the, now teenagers, did.
One day, Robert was alone smoking a cigarette outside his house. His mother went to sell milk to the city, but she should have come back hours ago. He was walking around the town looking for her, she should have stopped and talked to one of the hundreds of friends she had, or maybe she felt in the way to the city and is waiting for somebody in the town to come by. Because his mother didn’t come yet, Robert was hungry, very hungry. So he decided to steal a chicken from Old Bill’s farm as he usually did, but he found something weird, he found a path from outside Old Bill’s ranch to Old Bill’s house with similar pot to the ones he had and milk all over the place. He decided to go inside to see what had happened, and he found the worst thing he could have imagined, Old Bill almost naked on top of his mother, who was crying and begging for help, but nobody heard her because Bill gagged her. Robert didn’t think at all, he grabbed Bill and started hitting him without stopping, Robert didn’t care about the blood he saw in his right fist, he ked hitting and hitting him until Bill couldn’t move. His mother escaped, she ran to the forest ignoring what his son did, Robert killed old Bill.
When he noticed what he did, he went to his house, grabbed all his belongings and fled the town. He was crying, missing all his mornings watching the clouds or the jokes he used to laugh when he was a kid. None of them were right there, the day when he escaped town. After three days someone found the body of Bill because of the odor that the corpse emitted. As soon as the whole town noticed this, they blamed Robert because they have not seen him around. They called Robert’s mother, who told the whole story, but nobody believed her. Everybody saw this case with the eyes of what have happened in the past 2 years, all the disappeared animals, all the sick animals, all the destroyed pens. They asked Mickey, Rex and Broncho where Robert was, they didn’t know. The town sought him everywhere, even in other towns, but nobody ever found him.
Robert escaped to Florings, a town 200 miles north of Nebraska, in South Dakota. Although it is far away, only one road is needed to go to that city. Robert practiced for some years the art of locksmith, and he was the best in Florings. Nobody ever asked where he was from, nobody ever talked to him, Robert didn’t have any friends.
“Down the road, all the way to Nebraska, there is a big fire” said some guy in front of Robert, who immediately asked the guy what town was it, he said Lenstern, Nebraska. Robert remembered all his childhood and adolescence in his beautiful town in three seconds “how can a simple fire create this smell 200 miles away?” asked Robert.
Robert Tranströmer has never been in Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh. Though a poor country, is much wealthier than the average, and Dhaka is the place where he had to go for working. He is a mechanical engineer for a company settled in San Francisco and the only thing that he hates about his job is when he goes to random countries with very similar names. He remembered when he thought that he was going to Slovakia, and in when his plane landed, he saw a big poster about the beauty of Slovenia. The only thing he liked about this routine was the extra paid time that he had for going around the city as a tourist, but still he thought it wasn’t worth the trip; but in this occasion, his company actually gave him more than the regular 2 days that he usually has for hanging around the city, they doubled that time. This was the reason of why he was excited about going to Dhaka, he saw in the map that Bangladesh is surrounded by India and he thought that he would get a photo of a holy cow, a dream that he always had; or that he would have the opportunity of eating Soy meat at McDonalds (they adapted their food for the religion) He thought millions of things about Dhaka. He thought that this time it would be better, because the company gave him extra paid time to go around the city of Dhaka. He only went for one week and four days he spent creating designs of machines of every height and weight for a company established in Dhaka and he would had three free days to explore the city.
In his free three days he carried a camera wherever he was. He visited several museums, attractions, he tried different dishes, he was very happy. When he was in the Buriganga River, a river in Dhaka, a tourist guide told him that the water in the river is used for religious purpose depending on the time of the year and that it could be drunk if necessary.
On his last day, he was very excited because of a pepper called “ghost pepper”, a pepper native from that country. He has always been excited about peppers, be loved the “habanero peppers” and he could eat them without any complications. When he bought the peppers, he looked overconfident and bought three peppers for 2 dollars each one. Although some natives of the zone told him to take the seeds out before eating the pepper, he decided to save the pepper for his last night in the city and eat it completely.
Walking by the Buriganga River, he took out one pepper and placed it in his mouth. He waited for about three minutes to bite it, he didn’t feel anything in those three minutes and that made him very confident. When he bit it, he didn’t feel anything at first, but then he burst in heat and he could do anything, he didn’t speak the language; he didn’t know what to do. The only thing he could do is drink water from the river, but he didn’t want to do it. He was screaming out loud and nobody was around him. He resisted the pain and fell asleep in a bench, and when he woke up, he lost his flight.
