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. SUNDAY, MAY 12, 2024, 2024
Night visit
Claudio Ferrufino-Coqueugniot
Coarse wooden door, adobe wall. It would seem rural, a rusty iron crosses the entrance. I remove it. I enter. There is my sister, she has been dead for years but she remains young, thirty she would say. She gives me a kiss, I shake her black hair, I ask about her happiness. She smiles. At four in the morning she vanishes; I stare at the lines of light on the blinds. I know he lives here, on all eight floors, and if we don't see each other sometimes it's because of the big space. I wonder why he came, could it be because of the war, because of the disappearances, perhaps the memory, steps that each one took on their own and never crossed paths. The garage is dark and yet every night I approach it. Cars in silence, silhouettes, wall in the background, on the left side, on the right. There was the kitchen, there was
mother's chair, father's encyclopedia, miniature boxing gloves in memory of youth. The glass is cold, and I remove my forehead from it and walk up the elevator into the dark hallway. The automatic light turns on when I feel it. I always check the number so I don't make a mistake. I enter. First there is Ben Shahn and then Kafka with Alfred Kubin. Then the liturgy of preparing the temporary shroud, arranging pillows, straightening the vermilion sheets.
News, first of all, let's see what has changed in such short hours. Almost nothing, Russians gutted, tank turrets flying fiery like UFOs. Water. I drink it. I turn off the lamp and sleep dreaming of supersonic fighters, bombs with their own brains, the death of the tsar, the dismemberment of the new false Dimitri. A missile destroys five traitors in Donetsk, an industrial city. Ships and airplanes were made in this region. Great names were born in Ukraine, both good and evil. History is of no use, we will reach its end killing each other like dogs, listening to hierarchs, Trump and Evo twins, blaming heaven for their mortifying task of becoming millionaire masters, the intense “pain” of vice from power. I fall asleep with my cell phone on. There is both music and machine gun sounds. I count the hours as I get up, when my fingers have surpassed the number of ten enemy casualties, I am happy. At least death, at this hour, has cocktail-like flavors. Strawberry or passion fruit, lychee or jabuticaba.
I chat virtually with the poet Ricardo Camacho. We will meet in La Paz, soon or just the right moment. He promises “a reception with allegorical coffins, according to your stripes.” We would almost be reading The Undertaker , by Robert Louis Stevenson…
Edgar Allan Poe in a drunken Baltimore that I only half remember. It was raining and Baltimore stunk. Train siren to New York, Miller black label beer, draft.
At the station in Kansas City, Missouri (or was it Kansas?), Picha and I were surrounded by the African-American population. A Mexican bracero abused by the Greyhound driver. He doesn't understand anything, he looks into the small void, which surely comes from the Tarahumara mountains. I don't want to get angry, I think that remarkable jazz came from here. I tell my sister. I accompany her from Denver to Miami, three days crossing the Midwest and the Great River Basin and the mountains. Deliverance , by John Borman. To think that within such beauty abjection abounds, that black people once hung from those solemn trees, that hatred nestles in Knoxville as in Ivirgarzama and Bucha. I search with my eyes to find traces of Sodom and Gomorrah but a cowbell rings from captive sheep announcing the death of God. The pigs moo and bawl and scream, the patriarch's ark smells of excrement, the greatest absurdity of saving the unsalvageable, mythomania of divinities and saints. I whisper to María Renée to remember jazz, to not be filled with false ideas even though they are real, and to know that her friend Maju is waiting for her in South Florida to take her to eat swordfish fillets.
Russian offensive in Kharkiv. If before they had seen the city as a martyr long ago. Streets of trees and beautiful architecture. Majestic, dark churches with shining eyes. Saints who are pure pupil, poetry everywhere, cinema, photography. Placidity of the surrounding towns, houses that the poor farmers decorate with care, that is their wealth. My beautiful Kharkiv, Ekaterina laments, but we adapt to everything and we will win, she affirms. Coming from someone of Zaporozhye blood, such words in themselves are a mortal condemnation for Vladimir the Last. Their little catfish eyes will not see the end of Ukraine. The Zaporozhye Cossacks laughed and mocked while writing to the sultan, according to Ilya Repin. It was only difficult for them to raise their medium-sized ships and ravage the Turkish coast as far as Istanbul. Towards the east the same thing, Muscovites and Chechens remained as fertilizer. As if killing were a problem. Or die. Indifferent stubbornness in the face of death is a hammer that crushes without mercy. The Sea of Azov will be free and I will once again drink dark coffee distilled on the terraces of Mariupol, when Russia is a bad memory and the worms
of it destroy Dagestanis and Ossetians.
If I tell you during your visit, Sister María Renée, it doesn't matter. That is why you have come, to alleviate my Western doubts, the absurd fear of shadows, the lack of optimism in eternity. Not as a religious matter, you know. Let's sit in your cozy kitchen, at the red Formica table. You play solitaire while we have a drink. We have not participated in battles but shells explode in the unconscious. You talked about the women, whom you loved so much, the immense figure of mother behind everything. And you weren't wrong. Time made a blank slate, leaving tornadoes beating each other in the void. Never back hope. Pain being the greatest school of endurance, support of solid empathy.
What are the objects scattered in the forest? They look like branches. No, limbs of soldiers of the empire, a thousand a day, never recovered and exposed to the sun that in May begins to heat up, to solidify the mud. Together they would form a funeral pyre where the two-headed eagle will be cremated forever. I speak of empathy and yet I have no mercy. Let them all be killed, at eighteen or sixty, all without distinction, let them leave a trail of orphans as a decisive and definitive lesson, let the servants know how to free themselves or perish. Goodbye, little mother Russia, you were of no use to the majority, you always gave milk to drink to the powerful, you unleashed heartless packs of ragged people from time to time, as appropriate, without ever ceasing to be autocratic. Herd of slaves, peasants whom the bald Lenin detested. Do they want to die for Russia, are they forced to? Let them die, then. Papini invented that Ulianov told him that one worker was worth ten thousand peasants. Neither one nor the other are worth a penny, loads of living dead. Darkness and Dawn of Russia, the great Alexei Tolstoy wrote illusorily. Today only darkness.
The dawn rises and draws the silhouette of the Tunari mountain range. I am so far from the front, so far away and sad at the same time that I dream of becoming a sniper and scoring heads as if they were marbles.