Collapse
Everything began to collapse with a continuous movement; almost as slowly as it takes a desert rock to disintegrate in the wind. It was a very cold night, although it was not winter. A colleague of my father’s was smoking quietly on the sidewalk. I was 16 years old. Without looking at him, I mentioned some of the physical damage that is often caused by smoking, then I was silent. He took a cab, we continued on foot. My father was upset with me for being imprudent.
*
We rent a room in the only inn available in high season. It was the home of an esoteric woman. When I asked her about the desert she smiled effusively and said, “There’s only peyote there.” That. I returned to my family in great comfort and told them the only thing there was in that place. We laughed. A moment later we were on the roof of an all-terrain car heading towards the peyote. They showed us how to find it. Having only assimilated its shape, I discovered that the ground was mined with male and female cactus. The gentleman cut a piece of it for us to taste, it was not a significant dose, nobody hallucinated, we only tasted an intense, bitter and very unpleasant flavor. A taste that haunted us every new year. But the first one was certainly that one.
When we returned to the room we lit the fireplace. Someone managed to smoke the room from too much blowing on the logs. The windows had to be opened to let the smoke escape. The result was a stifling, icy room. Below was the New Year’s party in a hall — warm but flavored with incense. My mother was in a bad mood, she was cold in the room and downstairs, she would get dizzy from the incense. The result was one of the worst fights between my parents.
*
I was 17 or 18 when my father was fired from his job. He had dedicated more than twenty years to the company. The ending was so bad that you could see the deterioration in his face. The hair whiter than before, some very marked wrinkles on the forehead, the cheeks hanging. Stomach problems. He was given a good amount of money when he left. Maybe that’s where it started.
*
The house’s garden faces a river called San Joaquin. I imagine that once it had clean water and was home to life, but now it is an outdoor spout. It used to carry an intense, rotten smell. Some government administration decided that it was time to do some work on the river so that it would run more effectively; this would avoid the stagnation of the water and the stench would come to an end.
The change in the riverbed caused a process of water erosion on our land. The water took away the land until the definitive collapse of a good part of the garden. We lost beautiful trees, among them a pine tree that my parents planted when they got married.
*
Beginning to live without the other. Without their presence or their questions. Without his voice or his steps on the stairway. Beginning to digest the news and turn it into an experience. Transfer it to writing. Wrap reality in suffering. Exhaust the fictions. To accept death.
*
Suddenly a call. The information: my brother is dead. From what? An accident. In the mountains. He was taken by ambulance to the hospital. It was an instant death. He wasn’t alive during the transportation. By law, he must have an autopsy. By law, it is a hassle to bring his body back to the country. What law? How it hurts.
*
At best, erosion will make the rock a sculpture. Slow processes often give the impression of stagnation. As if life stopped. Needless to say, movement never stops. Even if there is a big obstacle in a riverbed, water finds a way to flow.
*
We have begun to remove the mud that keeps us paralyzed. We remove old and dusty objects from the closets. We begin to imagine a future in another house. Perhaps there we will succeed in stopping the inertia, or at least the promise of a new direction.
