(This is a rush translation. The version may not be in its final form.)
Poor devil,
What will you give me? (...) You have delicacies
which do not kill hunger; gold that flickers,
but equal to mercury escapes the fingers (...)
What I need,
if you have it, they are fruits to put of top
always leafy, and that before being caught
do not have the rotten and the worms inside already.
Goethe, Faust.
I thought, "I fall asleep." Now I was on a train trying to escape to my grandfather's farm in the south, of something I did not even know what it was. As if the whole world were dark, silent and wrapped in the shadows of the night. The landscape, a cold gray that turned dry trees, sharp stones and solitary birds into a great ruined ruin. Heavy clouds seemed about to strike with lightning and storm.
What had I seen? Was it attacking a woman? Were there even beings who fed on blood? I had read from childhood about uncovered corpses intact in their tombs, earth tossed over tombs, coffins found open, nails and hair growing after death, bodies with blood in their mouths, and families that died shortly after the departure of a loved one. My strange drawings frightened successive teachers.
It did not help my day-to-day humiliation, "know-all", "daddy's boy", "fagot", "library mouse", because, in addition to being quiet, I did not like football. In fact, I had not realized very much such things, cause I was living in the other world. "He's rich, but he has no mother," one girl said once. Lucky to have a friend, Jonas - very clever. I always had an indomitable imagination, but I was now saying to myself, "There is a limit." My psychologist thought that I was both too adult and fled into fantasy to avoid the pains of reality. What reality?
Lord Kevin, my father's great industrial friend, was a frightening figure to me: as a child, I imagined seeing him by my bed, at my window or perched on the tree in front of my bedroom, in a sort of parallel reality in which I tried to move and could not.
As a child, I had often dreamed of this tall, blond man with hair on his shoulder: in one of those horrifying dreams, we were in a dark forest, surrounded by other macabre men. The delusions that the cruel dream fairy imposes on us! I seemed to see in the shadow monsters with bluish faces and fangs, some pale with claws, a feline-eyed woman with a tiger skin.
Prisoners were tortured. One of them, who looked like a policeman, had around his neck specters with animal faces that bit him. Another, a dark-skinned man, perhaps Arab, was bitten by a dog in the leg, kicked by a young man, while another beat him with a staff. Lord Kevin threw him into a fire.
Now I was afraid to return to this state of conscious sleep, where he would be easy prey, like a fickle candle, a book not well open, a church in ruins, watching the sea of sleep, unusual logics as if the real were a veil of the look.
I had always been a sort of prisoner in my father's dark mansion. I felt lonely and felt the world more and more frightening. It seemed that somehow a mantle of violence had covered all souls, who could only communicate through aggression. The terror - visible and invisible - was very concrete. Subways exploded, offices ruined, storms and snow created by pollution, waters carrying crowds of fragile slopes, ambitious politicians dying the public thing rotten, the state seemed helpless against the proliferation of robbers and white-collar criminals.
Besides, my life had turned upside-down recently. Since the death of my grandfather.
That's when I opened the chest. There were some documents, scrolls, letters, and texts - plus the medallion I carried with me - that seemed to have been handwritten by him with a large bird's feather.
My mother died when I was ten. My father never wanted to marry again. He became a sad, business-oriented man. But he was kind to me, though I thought I should make money, conquer realms, "win." The problem was his sinister friends. Maybe someone says that everything has already been explained. This is not the case, even when it comes to what we can call the domain of the visible. More: people are strange.
I, for example, remember my mother leaving to work and me crying at the door. I should have less than a year. The world is strange.
I remember at twelve when I entered the room and saw my father surrounded by his three best friends whom I never liked - Lord Kevin, Augusto Coligne, the arrogant journalist, and Marcos Toledo, the astute executive secretary - kind of glass heart, filled with a red liquid, on the table. That scared me, but I did not even dare ask.
I sensed there was something between this macabre man and my family. Inside my grandfather's chest was a gold ring with an engraved symbol, which I carried on my finger now. But why should my grandfather have a trunk with such strange texts? One of them said:
And since these things are properly dealt with, it does not appear from the phenomena that there is an incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent being, which in infinite space (as space would be in its sense) sees things in themselves intimately, and perceives them totally, and fully comprehends them by their immediate presence before them?
A parchment showed an Egyptian lion, next to the goddess Bastet. Or two lions and the sun.
Another, looking like an old Latin print, which I discovered meant:
We drink Sum: we become immortal
We went to the light, we met the gods
What can hostility do to us now? (...)
*
AJr, 2011
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