Isto

“- Well, this is all a big confusion!”

It was all I could hear from a group of six men, still quite young, that spoke lively, close to Savoy hotel’s entrance, in Fasanenstrasse, Berlin. They all spoke at the same time; the only exception was one, maybe the youngest, which seemed alien to what the others were saying, and whistled. Whistled with conviction and persistence. The others seemed not to notice, as if the whistling was a natural companion to what they were saying. 

The figure of the spirit who denies immediately came to my mind…

By that time, I smoked cigars, always with big vitolas, that I am certain of, and I remember I always searched for places that were well adjusted to the smoke and its lengthy time. I had my burrow in each city. 

This is all I imprecisely remember of that scene, which might as well have happened in another city or at another hotel or, even, in another time. At the end I might have actually been inside the Savoy hotel, in a spacious room, and that conversating group was in the table next to mine. 

And I, very comfortably installed, always imagine that a sudden interruption shakes the scene, leaving nothing but the appetizing cigar, the phrase I retained and the whistle. Like a clear image which suddenly becomes clouded and fragmented in a unexpected quake. 

And then everything is unrealized. 

It is like this almost every night. The confusion, the places, the smoke and the whistle on repeat. As I have mentioned before, all of this could merely be one of those dreams which repeat themselves and occur throughout our lives. Their inhabitants are not necessarily inexistent, but their mixture and their solidity have an equivocal balance. 

I think about this many times, in this powerful force we have to combine things which reach us from such different origins and are of such different natures. 

There seems to be an excipient of an obscure provenance which connects all, combines  everything and escapes us, without us ever noticing its powers and effects. It is these approximations or, perhaps, attractions that give life to what we imagine. Like the paw of a cat which catches - hunts? 

Not that everything that comes close is a part of that which we don’t quite know what it is. There are the things we don’t know, it is true, but there are also the ones we summon with knowledge, by suspicion, by intuition, and still by who knows what. 

Nothing is that easy, as the Genie would say. 

It is a doing or happening that accompanies us, but that can also go back, an understanding that something escaped it or a power of finding what it does not know. 

This is the way things go around us. Why do things go around us? On the one hand, we don’t know, it is part of a mystery; on the other hand, we are almost certain that it is about our stubbornness in not being able to exist without dragging what we catch with us, even without knowing why. 

But let us get back to the beginning. There I was smoking a nice cigar at the Ritz hotel in Madrid, or in some other place, I don’t remember it well, when I heard a conversating group say: “- Well, this is all a big confusion!”.

I never knew what confusion was that, even though it deserved my full agreement. 

Of the boys of the group, the one that whistled remains. I recognised the melody immediately, it was familiar and I never forgot it. Nor will I ever forget it. 

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Jorge Molder, translated by Luna Dimas