Rodrigo Lira

Por esas cosas del destino llego a mis manos una cinta donde Rodrigo Lira se grabó a sí mismo leyendo su poema STP mientras de fondo suena Bitches Brew de Miles Davis.

Me pareció pertinente compartirlo con los amigos.

Baje acá: Rodrigo Lira - STP

Supermensch

- “Jewish superheroes?”

- “What, they’re all Jewish, superheroes. Superman, you don’t think he’s Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself.”

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, (p. 585).

Citas de Kavalier & Clay

"In literature and folklore, the significance and the fascination of golems—from Rabbi Loew’s to Victor von Frankenstein’s—lay in their soullessness, in their tireless inhuman strength, in their metaphorical association with overweening human ambition, and in the frightening ease with which they passed beyond the control of their horrified and admiring creators. But it seemed to Joe that none of these—Faustian hubris, least of all—were among the true reasons that impelled men, time after time, to hazard the making of golems. The shaping of a golem, to him, was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something—one poor, dumb, powerful thing—exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation. It was the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape. To slip, like the Escapist, free of the entangling chain of reality and the straitjacket of physical laws. Harry Houdini had roamed the Palladiums and Hippodromes of the world encumbered by an entire cargo-hold of crates and boxes, stuffed with chains, iron hardware, brightly painted flats and hokum, animated all the while only by this same desire, never fulfilled: truly to escape, if only for one instant; to poke his head through the borders of this world, with its harsh physics, into the mysterious spirit world that lay beyond. The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigation into comic books always cited “escapism” among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life." (p.582)

"The age of the costumed superhero had long passed. The Angel, the Arrow, the Comet and the Fin, the Snowman and the Sandman and Hydroman, Captain Courageous, Captain Flag, Captain Freedom, Captain Midnight, Captain Venture and Major Victory, the Flame and the Flash and the Ray, the Monitor, the Guardian, the Shield and the Defender, the Green Lantern, the Red Bee, the Crimson Avenger, the Black Hat and the White Streak, Cat-Man and the Kitten, Bulletman and Bulletgirl, Hawkman and Hawkgirl, the Star-Spangled Rid and Stripesy, Dr. Mid-Nite, Mr. Terrific, Mr. Machine Gun, Mr. Scarlet and Miss Victory, Doll Man, the Atom and Minimidget, all had fallen beneath the whirling thresher blades of changing tastes, an aging readership, the coming of television, a glutted marketplace, and the unbeatable foe that had wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki." (p.589)

"He had been on and around the Atlantic Ocean plenty of times since the sinking of the Ark of Miriam; the train of association linking Thomas, in Joe’s mind, to the body of water that had swallowed him had long since worn away. But from time to time, especially if, as now, his brother was already in his thoughts, the smell of the sea could unfurl the memory of Thomas like a flag. His snoring, the half-animal snuffle of his breath coming from the other bed. His aversion to spiders, lobsters, and anything that crept like a disembodied hand. A much-thumbed mental picture of him at the age of seven or eight, in a plaid bathrobe and bedroom slippers, sitting beside the Kavaliers’ big Philips, knees to his chest, eyes shut tight, rocking back and forth while, with all his might, he listened to some Italian opera or other." (p.602)

"And now there was nothing left to regret but his own cowardice. He recalled his and Tracy’s parting at Penn Station on the morning of Pearl Harbor, in the first-class compartment of the Broadway Limited, their show of ordinary mute male farewell, the handshake, the pat on the shoulder, carefully tailoring and modulating their behavior though there was no one at all watching, so finely attuned to the danger of what they might lose that they could not permit themselves to notice what they had." (p.620)

Shizo Kanakuri

Shizo Kanakuri desapareció mientras corría la maratón en las olimpíadas de Estocolmo en 1912, nadie supo qué había pasado con él. Estuvo perdido durante 50 años, hasta que un periodista lo encontró en el sur de Japón. Dijo que había sentido mucha sed, que se detuvo en una cafetería, pidió un jugo de naranja, se sentó durante una hora o más y que al día siguiente se embarcó de vuelta a su casa. En 1966 fue invitado a Estocolmo para completar la carrera y aceptó. Su tiempo final fue de 54 años, 8 meses, 6 días, 8 horas, 32 minutos y 20.3 segundos.

Harry Houdini

“It was Bess Houdini,” he said. “She knew her husband’s face. She could read the writing of failure in his eyes. She could go to the man from the newspaper. She could beg him, with the tears in her eyes and the blush on her bosom, to consider the ruin of her husband’s career when put into the balance with nothing more on the other side than a good headline for the next morning’s newspaper. She could carry a glass of water to her husband, with the small steps and the solemn face of the wife. It was not the key that freed him,” he said. “It was the wife. There was no other way out. It was impossible, even for Houdini.” He stood up. “Only love could pick a nested pair of steel Bramah locks.” He wiped at his raw cheek with the back of his hand, on the verge, Joe felt, of sharing some parallel example of liberation from his own life.

Michael Chabon, ‘The amazing adventures of Kavalier & Clay’. p.535.

Claro, al final la mejor historia del libro, la del fracaso de Harry Houdini en la apertura de la doble cerradura de acero bramah, es la matriz desde la cual se dispara la sumatoria argumental de Michael Chabon, todo se concentra en la línea “Only love could pick a nested pair of steel bramah locks.” En ella se plantea que la única redención a la mutilación en que consiste la represión homosexual de Sam Clay y a la dolorosa culpa de Joe Kavalier se encuentra en no huir de la transformación que implica aceptar el amor, su carga y el impulso por destruirlo.

Only love could pick a nested pair of steel bramah locks

When Joe saw the boy, his son, join the motley crowd that had convened on the observation deck to observe as a rash and imaginary promise was fulfilled, he suddenly remembered a remark that his teacher Bernard Kornblum had once made. “Only love,” the old magician had said, “could pick a nested pair of steel Bramah locks.”

He had offered this observation toward the end of Joe’s last regular visit to the house on Maisel Street, as he rubbed a dab of calendula ointment into the skin of his raw, peeling cheeks. Generally, Kornblum said very little during the final portion of every lesson, sitting on the lid of the plain pine box that he had bought from a local coffin maker, smoking and taking his ease with a copy of Di Cajt while, inside the box, Joe lay curled, roped and chained, permitting himself sawdust-flavored sips of life through his nostrils, and making terrible, minute exertions. Kornblum sat, his only commentary an occasional derisive blast of flatulence, waiting for the triple rap from within which signified that Joe had loosed himself from cuffs and chains, prized out the three sawn-off dummy screw heads in the left-hand hinge of the lid, and was ready to emerge. At times, however, if Joe was particularly dilatory, or if the temptation of a literally captive audience proved too great, Kornblum would begin to speak, in his coarse if agile German—always limiting himself, however, to shoptalk. He reminisced fondly about performances in which he had, through bad luck or foolishness, nearly been killed; or recalled, in apostolic and tedious detail, one of the three golden occasions on which he had been fortunate enough to catch the act of his prophet, Houdini. Only this once, just before Joe attempted his ill-fated plunge into the Moldau, had Kornblum’s talk ever wandered from the path of professional retrospection into the shadowed, leafy margins of the personal.

He had been present, Kornblum said—his voice coming muffled through the inch of pine plank and the thin canvas sack in which Joe was cocooned—for what none but the closest confidants of the Handcuff Ring, and the few canny confreres who witnessed it, knew to be the hour when the great one failed. This was in London, Kornblum said, in 1906, at the Palladium, after Houdini had accepted a public challenge to free himself from a purportedly inescapable pair of handcuffs. The challenge had been made by the Mirror of London, which had discovered a locksmith in the north of England who, after a lifetime of tinkering, had devised a pair of manacles fitted with a lock so convoluted and thorny that no one, not even its necromantic inventor, could pick it. Kornblum described the manacles, two thick steel circlets inflexibly welded to a cylindrical shaft. Within this rigid shaft lay the sinister mechanism of the Manchester locksmith—and here a tone of awe, even horror, entered Kornblum’s voice. It was a variation on the Bramah, a notoriously intransigent lock that could be opened—and even then with difficulty—only by a long, arcane, tubular key, intricately notched at one end. Devised by the Englishman Joseph Bramah in the 1760s, it had gone unpicked, inviolate, for over half a century until it was finally cracked. The lock that now confronted Houdini, on the stage of the Palladium, consisted of two Bramah tubes, one nested inside the other, and could be opened only by a bizarre double key that looked something like the collapsed halves of a telescope, one notched cylinder protruding from within another.

As five thousand cheering gentlemen and ladies, the young Kornblum among them, looked on, the Mysteriarch, in black cutaway and waistcoat, was fitted with the awful cuffs. Then, with a single, blank-faced, wordless nod to his wife, he retreated to his small cabinet to begin his impossible work. The orchestra struck up “Annie Laurie.” Twenty minutes later, wild cheering broke out as the magician’s head and shoulders emerged from the cabinet; but it turned out that Houdini wanted only to get a look at the cuffs, which still held him fast, in better light. He ducked back inside. The orchestra played the Overture to Tales of Hoffmann. Fifteen minutes later, the music died amid cheers as Houdini stepped from the cabinet. Kornblum hoped against hope that the master had succeeded, though he knew perfectly well that when the first, single-barreled Bramah was, after sixty years, finally picked, it had taken the successful lock-pick, an American master by the name of Hobbs, two full days of continuous effort. And now it turned out that Houdini, sweating, a queasy smile on his face, his collar snapped and dangling free at one end, had merely—oddly—come out to announce that, though his knees hurt from crouching in the cabinet, he was not yet ready to throw in the towel. The newspaper’s representative, in the interests of good sportsmanship, allowed a cushion to be brought, and Houdini retreated to his cabinet once more.

When Houdini had been in the box for nearly an hour, Kornblum began to sense the approach of defeat. An audience, even one so firmly on the side of its hero, would wait only so long while the orchestra cycled, with an air of increasing desperation, through the standards and popular tunes of the day. Inside his cabinet, the veteran of five hundred houses and ten thousand turns could doubtless sense it, too, as the tide of hope and goodwill flowing from the galleries onto the stage began to ebb. In a daring display of showmanship, he emerged once again, this time to ask if the newspaper’s man would consent to remove the cuffs long enough for the magician to take off his coat. Perhaps Houdini was hoping to learn something from watching as the cuffs were opened and then closed again; perhaps he had calculated that his request, after due consideration, would be refused. When the gentleman from the newspaper regretfully declined, to loud hisses and catcalls from the audience, Houdini pulled off a minor feat that was, in its way, among the finest bits of showmanship of his career. Wriggling and contorting himself, he managed to pluck from the pocket of his waistcoat a tiny penknife, then painstakingly transfer it to, and open it with, his teeth. He shrugged and twisted until he had worked his cutaway coat up over to the front of his head, where the knife, still clenched between his teeth, could slice it, in three great sawing rasps, in two. A confederate tore the sundered halves away. After viewing this display of pluck and panache, the audience was bound to him as if with bands of steel. And, Kornblum said, in the uproar, no one noticed the look that passed between the magician and his wife, that tiny, quiet woman who had stood to one side of the stage as the minutes passed, and the band played, and the audience watched the faint rippling of the cabinet’s curtain.

After the magician had reinstalled himself, coatless now, in his dark box, Mrs. Houdini asked if she might not prevail upon the kindness and forbearance of their host for the evening to bring her husband a glass of water. It had been an hour, after all, and as anyone could see, the closeness of the cabinet and the difficulty of Houdini’s exertions had taken a certain toll. The sporting spirit prevailed; a glass of water was brought, and Mrs. Houdini carried it to her husband. Five minutes later, Houdini stepped from the cabinet for the last time, brandishing the cuffs over his head like a loving cup. He was free. The crowd suffered a kind of painful, collective orgasm—a “Krise,” Kornblum called it—of delight and relief. Few remarked, as the magician was lifted onto the shoulders of the referees and notables on hand and carried through the theater, that his face was convulsed with tears of rage, not triumph, and that his blue eyes were incandescent with shame.

“It was in the glass of water,” Joe guessed, when he had managed to free himself at last from the far simpler challenge of the canvas sack and a pair of German police cuffs gaffed with buckshot. “The key.”

Michael Chabon, ‘The amazing adventures of Kavalier & Clay’. p.532.

El zazen de los dormidos

Presentación de 'Quién va a podar los ciruelos cuando me vaya’ de John Landry

por Rodrigo Olavarría.

Originalmente publicada en: Letras S5.

Les confieso que estuve a punto de no participar de este lanzamiento, en primer lugar, porque desde el sábado apenas he tenido la capacidad de concentración que requiere preparar un texto sobre la obra de un poeta que vino de tan lejos a ver su libro editado. En segundo lugar y, este punto de vincula con el primero, porque tengo amigos en el sur de los que no he tenido noticias y algunos de los que tuve recién hoy en la mañana.

Dicho esto, creo que es importante que la actividad que nos congrega aquí no se vea afectada por una tragedia como la que estamos viviendo, sino que siga sea siendo parte de lo que justifica y redime a la humanidad. Por televisión aprendimos una importante lección: nos bastan sólo veinticuatro horas sin agua, luz y señal telefónica para ser capaces de matar a nuestro vecino. Pero, por terrible que sea esta certeza, no puedo dejar de hacer notar que cada uno de estos actos, como escribió Dante en el Purgatorio, es un correcto o un aberrante acto de amor, él escribió: “El amor es en vosotros la semilla de toda virtud y de toda acción que merece ser castigada”. Si alguien llega a tomarse la molestia de leer lo que escribimos, es nuestro privilegio y deber, recordarle de la valentía, el honor, el orgullo, el sacrificio, la compasión y la piedad que dignifican a los seres humanos. Dicho esto, puedo empezar a hablar del objeto que nos reúne.

Parto por agradecer no sólo la invitación a presentar este libro sino su misma existencia, que se debe al esfuerzo de Editorial Cuneta, una apuesta poco común en el mercado chileno donde prácticamente no se publican obras de poetas extranjeros. Partiré por mencionar algunas ideas sobre la traducción.

Germán Carrasco traduce, aunque debería decir versiona o hace covers, con amplia libertad, elige palabras y expresiones que no necesariamente son exactas traducciones de las palabras y expresiones del idioma en que los poemas fueron escritos, pero que son capaces de transmitir la naturalidad y el tono con que Landry aborda la escritura poética. Podemos encontrar un buen ejemplo de esta afirmación en el poema “Snow’s return address”, leo:

300 days since the last flake fell

ole crone hobbles across the busy street at night

clutching onto what little residues in her threadbare purse

past the bus station the grizzled cigarette smokers

scratching their lottery tickets with borrowed quarters

300 días desde que el último copo cayó

una viejuja renguea a través de la calle atestada de noche

se aferra a los pequeños residuos de su monedero deshilachado.

Al pasar la estación de bus, los cenicientos

y desharrapados fumadores de puchos

se prestan una chaucha para raspar sus boletos de lotería

Hay gente para la cual la “fidelidad” o “literalidad” es garantía de una buena traducción, pero la verdad es que una traducción es la re-creación de algo que es imposible duplicar. El traductor es como el rabino que insufla vida a un gólem, una imitación del original humano, que le puede suplantar en algún caso, pero que no puede reemplazarlo. Un ejemplo de esta recreación a manos de Germán Carrasco son los versos finales del poema “Some of us are more outnumbered than others”, donde Landry escribe:

My old clothes were always good enough

for the corner of a ham on rye.

Y que Carrasco traduce como:

a mí me basta con esta ropa de segunda:

donde se come frugal no exigen traje ni corbata.

Yo mismo, como obseso lector de poesía y traductor, no puedo concebir un libro que no sea bilingüe. Más aun si el libro fue traducido por un poeta con una obra interesante por sí misma, un autor que necesariamente hará ingresar su propio imaginario y su concepción de la poesía en la escritura que está trasvasijando. El trabajo de Germán Carrasco no es el de creación de una versión sumisa de los poemas que tenemos frente a nosotros, al contrario, ante esta posibilidad él impone expresiones más chilenas que latinoamericanas, recreando para los lectores chilenos la naturalidad del decir poético de John Landry. Como es posible apreciar en los siguientes versos:

You got the workplace blues, baby

and I empathize with you

when they’re brutal in the workplace

you got to find something else to do

Canta el blues de la pega

Y yo empatizaré contigo:

cuando te tratan con prepotencia

hay que puro virar

Carrasco no sólo chileniza el decir de Landry sino que, en ocasiones, le agrega un lirismo que en el original apenas se insinúa, como en la afortunada elección en el verso que cito continuación:

O long love spinning

Oh generoso amor centrífugo

John Landry no distingue entre su ser natural y su ser racional, él nace como una culebra empapada en un roquerío donde sus ojos deslumbrados y, todo lo que él es, se identifican con la flora y fauna de la región que lo rodea. La pregunta de todo ser humano: ¿quién me va a amar? Se convierte en: ¿quién nos va a amar a mí y a la región idéntica a mí con que soy uno?

El hablante de los poemas de John Landry es un ser cuya alma es eterna y ha encarnado en un cuerpo y en un lugar geográfico rodeado de humanidad, radios, perros tras las ventanas y la fragilidad del cuerpo que habita. Es la imagen de un observador silencioso cuya boca es una campana silente y sus orejas son las asas de una urna vacía. Alguien que cada vez que pone una página en blanco frente a sí, se enfrenta a todos los que fue, versiones de él que quisieran no conocerse.

El Orfeo que John Landry es va por su ciudad, New Bedford, como por sobre la cubierta de la nave Argos, descubriendo en ella rasgos de un pasado ballenero, de esplendor pasado hoy inscrito en la normalidad instaurada por fragmentos de siglos de historia y vidas que la poblaron, ajada arquitectura de los sueños ante la cual transitan las viudas de los pescadores muertos, como en el pasado las viudas de los balleneros, cuyos fantasmas se reúnen en los bares del puerto.

John Landry identifica el amor centrífugo de una danza al compás de la música de las esferas en RE o de la revolución única, la revolución del cambio eterno y sin descanso, la revolución del corazón que repite su mantra: “cambio, cambio, cambio” en oídos que no son los mismos cada vez que lo oyen y bocas que no son las mismas cada vez que lo pronuncian.

Santiago, 3 de Marzo, 2010.

Lampedusa

He handed the cigarette to her and took from her a large, clothbound book, black with a red spine. It was an accounts ledger, swollen to twice its normal thickness, like a book left out in the rain, from all the things pasted into it. When he turned to the first page, he found the words "Airplane Dream #13" written in an odd, careful hand like a scattering of spindly twigs.

- "Numbered," he said. "It's like a comic book."

- "Well, there are just so many. I'd lose track."

"Airplane Dream #13" told the story, more or less, of a dream Rosa had had about the end of the world. There were no human beings left but her, and she had found herself flying in a pink seaplane to an island inhabited by sentient lemurs. There seemed to be a lot more to it—there was a kind of graphic "sound track" constructed around images relating to Peter Tchaikovsky and his works, and of course abundant food imagery—but this was, as far as Joe could tell, the gist. The story was told entirely through collage, with pictures clipped from magazines and books. There were images from anatomy texts, an exploded musculature of the human leg, a pictorial explanation of peristalsis. She had found an old history of India, and many of the lemurs of her dream-apocalypse had the heads and calm, horizontal gazes of Hindu princes and goddesses. A seafood cookbook, rich with color photographs of boiled Crustacea and poached whole fish with jellied stares, had been thoroughly mined. Sometimes she inscribed text across the pictures, none of which made a good deal of sense to him; a few pages consisted almost entirely of her brambly writing, illuminated, as it were, with collage. There were some penciled-in drawings and diagrams, and an elaborate system of cartoonish marginalia like the creatures found loitering at the edges of pages in medieval books. Joe started to read sitting down in her desk chair, but before long, without noticing, he had risen to his feet and started pacing around the room. He stepped on a moth without noticing.

- "These must take hours," he said.

- "Hours."

- "How many have you done?"

She pointed to a painted chest at the foot of her bed. "A lot."

- "It is beautiful. Exciting."

He sat down on the bed and finished reading, and then she asked him about what he did. Joe permitted himself, for the first time in a year, to consider himself, under the pressure of her interest in him and what he did, an artist. He described the hours he had put into his covers, lavishing detail on the flanges and fins of a death-wave generator, distorting and exaggerating his perspectives with mathematic precision, dressing up Sammy and Julie and the others and taking test photographs to get his poses right, painting luscious plumes of fire that, when printed, seemed to burn the slick ink and paper of the cover itself. He told her about his experiments with a film vocabulary, his sense of the emotional moment of a panel, and of the infinitely expandable and contractible interstice of time that lay between the panels of a comic book page. Sitting on Rosa's moth-littered bed, he felt a resurgence of all the aches and inspirations of those days when his life had revolved around nothing but Art, when snow fell like the opening piano notes of the Emperor Concerto, and feeling horny reminded him of a passage from Nietzsche, and a thick red-streaked dollop of crimson paint in an otherwise uninteresting Velazquez made him hungry for a piece of rare meat.

At some point, he noticed that she was looking at him with a strange air of expectancy, or dread, and he stopped. "What is it?"

- "Lampedusa," she said.

- "What's that? Lampedusa?"

Her eyes widened as she waited, in expectancy or dread. She nodded.

- "You mean the island?"

- "Oh!" She threw her arms around his neck, and he fell backward on the bed. Moths scattered. The sateen coverlet brushed against his cheek like a moth's wing.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon. p.251.

El final, pero de verdad

Me pregunto cómo va a ser el último ser humano. O mejor dicho, cómo va a ser el último Homo Sapiens que merezca ser llamado ser humano y si es que acaso dos horas antes de morir nos dedicará un momento y pensará en todos nosotros...

En 1985, Orson Welles tenía setenta años, había filmado más de veinticinco películas, estaba casado con una hermosa mujer cuarenta años más joven que él y había bajado más de treinta kilos. Ese año aceptó ser entrevistado en un programa de televisión y responder las mismas preguntas que le hacían en cada entrevista, sobre los problemas que le trajo hacer Citizen Kane, su amistad con actrices como Marlene Dietrich, las razones de su largo exilio en Europa y su matrimonio con Rita Hayworth. Sobre esto último responde simplemente: “La mujer más dulce y tierna de mi vida”, lo importante de esta escena que debe haberse repetido en innúmeras ocasiones es que dos horas después de terminada la entrevista, Orson Welles estaba muerto.

Antes de eso, en medio de la entrevista le piden que comente cómo es tener setenta años, que cite algunos versos memorables de Shakespeare o Shaw; luego Welles hace bromas sobre la vejez, el amor y el dolor, entonces el periodista le pregunta si le parecía que el dolor era una fuente de inspiración para el trabajo artístico, él ignora la pregunta y responde algo como esto: “El dolor es muy distinto a esta edad, no es como el dolor del amor perdido o el de un proyecto o un negocio que se va al carajo, esos son dolores jóvenes, vitales. El verdadero dolor es el arrepentimiento de la vejez, el pensar en todas las veces en que uno no hizo lo correcto o directamente actuó mal.”

Al pensar en estas dos citas, naturalmente, me pensé anciano y a dos horas de ponerme el llamado “terno de madera”. Imaginé el cansancio, los dolores cotidianos con que se aprende a vivir, los amigos muertos, los amores muertos y una neblina parecida a la ebriedad instalada sobre la memoria. Tomé de inmediato conciencia de la importancia de cada acto cotidiano, recordé un fragmento de la novela No Country For Old Men de Cormac McCarthy, donde un personaje afirma que el fin de la humanidad empieza cuando se olvidan las buenas costumbres, cuando uno deja de decir gracias o saludar a su vecino, es una exageración, claro, pero McCarthy vuelve a esta idea en The Road. Esta novela está ambientada nueve años después que una especie de cataclismo destruye el mundo y provoca lo que se conoce como Invierno Nuclear, es decir, un invierno permanente en el cual nada puede crecer en la tierra ni en el mar, a consecuencia de esto mueren todos los animales salvajes, todos los peces en el mar y todas las aves en el cielo. Ante esta situación los seres humanos empiezan a alimentarse de lo que dejó la civilización que acaba de desaparecer, es decir, de alimentos enlatados y, cuando estos se acaban, directamente de otros seres humanos.

En este mundo desolado, un hombre y su hijo, un niño nacido poco después del desastre que acaba con todos los rasgos de la vida que conocemos, siguen una carretera que los lleva hacia el sur. Una y otra vez se ven enfrentados a tomar decisiones que, a los ojos del niño, determinan si todavía son “los buenos” o si pasaron a ser como aquellos capaces de hacer cualquier cosa por sobrevivir. Cada vez que esto ocurre el niño impone su voluntad de hacer el bien, de alimentar a los hambrientos aunque no se parezcan mucho a lo que reconocemos como un ser humano y se encuentren en un estado muy similar al de los cavernícolas. Para el niño estas acciones se relacionan con la idea de “llevar el fuego”, una frase que debió escuchar a su madre o su padre y que significa persistir en las prácticas que constituyen a la humanidad como tal, aunque el mundo se esté cayendo literalmente a pedazos y los seres humanos estén comiéndose los unos a los otros como animales.

Yo me pregunto cómo va a ser el último ser humano. O mejor dicho, cómo va a ser el último Homo Sapiens que merezca ser llamado ser humano y si es que acaso dos horas antes de morir nos dedicará un momento y pensará en todos nosotros, la horda innumerable de los muertos, convertidos en polvo hace rato, junto con todas nuestras religiones, nuestras tostadoras de pan, nuestras elecciones municipales, nuestros desodorantes ambientales, toda la música, toda la literatura y todo lo que alguna vez fue.

Creo que antes que el desierto les gane la guerra a las ciudades y las cubra definitivamente, antes que las guerras, la usura, la desigualdad y el hambre terminen con lo que nos hace excepcionales como especie, antes del final, vale la pena hacer lo correcto.