Tales of a man all alone
For years, Fernandez, an engineer and civil servant, had suspected that tedium ruled his life. With enviable punctuality, he would now get up without even looking at Marta, and, after a coffee standing in the kitchen, and the elevator that completed his wake-up with the jolts on the fourth floor, he would go out into the early morning street bustle, which he no longer noticed, because he himself was part of that bustle.
After exactly twenty-nine steps, counted daily in the course of fifteen years that had gone by in a flash, he reached the corner, crossed diagonally to the left and diagonally continued through the park. His life was true to the saying "from home to work, from work to home".
Desde el alba
Un hombre es todos los hombres, le leí alguna vez a Borges. Este poemario tiene esa unicidad de narrador: desde el principio de la vida de todos los hombres, hasta la muerte de uno y todos. Baste decir que Desde el alba fue primeramente publicado en papel en 1988 a través del premio Florián de Ocampo, de la Diputación de Zamora, con un jurado que honra a este autor y de cuyos nombres no quiere aprovecharse. Como claves a este conjunto de poemas, limitémonos a unos nombres: Platón y John Dunne, ingeniero y pensador irlandés. El primero aportó los mundos de las ideas y de las apariencias; el último, su teoría del tiempo serial, ya en sí poética, que cala en las imágenes y la misma estructura de los poemas. No creo que este libro sea para el amante de la poesía desnuda; aunque también es cierto que el misterio del poema puede obrar milagros.
A orillas del Bahana
..every man is desirous of what is good for
him, and shuns what is evil…. and this
he doth, by a certain impulsion of nature,…
Thomas Hobbes
(…todo hombre desea lo que le resulta bueno,
y rechaza lo malo…y esto hace por cierto
impulso de la naturaleza)
The Fake
Although many saw him and even heard him speak on more than one occasion, not many knew him, and today I am one of the few who still remember Ricardo Garcia Mataga. Perhaps a succinct description and a few brief facts will help to bring him to mind. He was that tall and lean man, with a short moustache, who some decades ago frequented the Central Cafe in the mornings and Elizalde’s Tavern in the evenings. In him had converged our dark brown of the south and the ungainly height of the north, which explained the Hispanicization of his surname, McTaggart, brought by a Presbyterian great-great-grandfather who had come to our city in the mid- nineteenth century, according to what he himself said in his more than frequent discreet chats. You will have seen him more than once talking pompously in front of a cup of coffee, conjuring up the attention of his companions, or leaning against the long wooden bar of the famous wine shop he shared with illustrious citizens with sleepy eyes and
trembling legs. He gained a certain renown at one time thanks to a book of poems and a novel with a gypsy setting in which he claimed to have a deep knowledge of these people, their behaviour, their customs.
On the Dark Side
El domingo siempre ha sido un placer, se dijo, y, despreocupado, las manos en los bolsillos, Juan siguió a lo largo de la cerca mirando el jardín de la casa abandonada, que más parecía una jungla que un jardín. Cómo no iba a dar miedo si parecía el Amazonas. Se detuvo ante la puerta cancela, le faltaba pintura, y alzó la vista a la fachada. Tenía la fama que tenía, la casa esa, la que se había ganado a pulso, decían, desde antes que él naciera, el asesinato de la madre y sus hijas, la desaparición del padre, la del inglés, que había llegado un día con mochila y se había atrevido a entrar; hasta un perro había desaparecido; y una quinceañera que estaba de paso con su familia y había dejado un revuelo de guardiaciviles y abogados; pero él no se acordaba; todo eso lo decían los mayores.
The Squatters
As we all know 'squatters' squat, that is, they break into our houses and there they settle, never to leave, except by force. The squatters in these stories also squat, unexpectedly, illegally, even brutally, albeit not in our houses, but in our minds. No one is safe from these “mind” squattersThe characters who make up these stories are only an example, a mere possibility; even more, you who are reading these lines and I who wrote them could well be the victims of mind squatters, and still not know it.
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