Retropost (2006): Despedidas
Despedidas
Publicado en Personales. com. José Ángel García Landa
Ayer nos despedimos (hasta la vista) de la pequeña Elsa, una nenita encantadora, que hoy cumple dos meses pero ya estaba en la reunión de sobremesa tan atenta que parecía totalmente socializada. Y luego, bajando a Zaragoza, nos despedimos de la temporada de piscinas apeándonos (y colándonos descaradamente, me temo) en la de Zuera. Hasta el año que viene.
Y luego habíamos quedado a tomar unas cañas por Zaragoza la nuit con Fabiola, para despedirnos de ella, que se nos va a Alemania definitivamente, con gata y todo. Bueno, en realidad ya lleva yendo y viniendo una temporada, cada vez más tiempo allá, desde su euromatrimonio con Gottfried, y ahora sólo es la definitiva. Pide la excedencia de su instituto, y se queda a trabajar indefinidamente en un instituto cerca de Stuttgart, en el país de los suevos. Pues mucha suerte y que sea para bien el traslado. Aunque para ella vaya a ser mejor, a mí me da pena, porque ya es otra amiga que se va de aquí para siempre, y ya se sabe, algo se muere en el sitio donde debería estar el alma. Siempre se dice que nos veremos, etc., pero la realidad es que la gente que sale de tu ciudad en general sale bastante de tu vida, snif. Si ya te ves poco viviendo en la misma ciudad, pues menos aún estando fuera. Aunque igual es una excusa para emailarse más, vaya usté a saber. Tendré que potenciar mis ciberamistades, porque mi proporción de amistades zaragozanas va bajando alarmantemente; debe estar en un uno por cien mil. Igual si las virtualizase a todas nos trataríamos más, von verlost zum Fluß.
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Retropost (2006): Lista de deseos
sábado, 10 de septiembre de 2016
Retropost #1137 (11 de septiembre de 2006): Lista de deseos
Esta es la lista de deseos de Otitas, lo que desea a estas alturas, a los pocos días de cumplir seis años. Me la acaba de pasar, no sé si se espera que yo haga que se cumpla alguno de ellos. Como es el primer día de cole, he pensado que lo de "tener matones" sería por alguna inquietud del chaval, pero en realidad ha ido tan contento y sin incidentes por supuesto. A no ser el incidente de que lo han separado de su querido amigo Sergiopueyo, que le ha tocado en otro grupo. Me ha insistido que "¡tener matones a los lados es guay!" —pobre, no sabe aún que la realidad y el deseo nunca coinciden, y que si un día tiene que andar con matones a los lados probablemente no le hará ninguna gracia.
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Le Léviathan de Thomas Hobbes (1/4) : lanthropologie (Arnaud Milanese)
Amahl and the Night Visitors
From the early days of TV, an opera by Gian Carlo Menotti, ’Amahl and the Night Visitors’ (1951). I’m watching it on Stephen Jay Gould’s belated recommendation (he also much loved Gilbert and Sullivan).
PS. Well, some idiot has erased the original TV version. Here’s a staging of the same.
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The Pretender
The Pretender
(from ’Andrew’s Brain’, by E. L. Doctorow)
I didn’t know opera singers owned their costumes —they don’t, do the? Yet there he was in that heavy tapestry robe and that knitted crown they affected with the jeweled trimming and the little cross on top. He lifted his glass: To The Pretender, he said, looking at me, and then because he hiccuped his arm jerked back and the contents of his glass made a lovely arc through the air and hit his portrait on the wall behind him, splashing over his face made up as Boris Godunov so that the painting seemed to be shedding tears.
Did this really happen?
What?
Your impulsively going to New Rochelle because you’d heard ’Boris Godunov’ on the radio and then finding this czarist simulacrum lying around drunk?
I’m not angry at you for asking that question because I hardly believed it myself standing there in that dark living room, which incidentally was unheated, which may have been the reason Martha’s large husband had put on that heavy regalia complete with that watch cap of a crown. And, after all, might he not have been listening with some bitterness to the same Saturday broadcast? I stood over him as he looked at me with bleary half-focused eyes. He had lost weight and was no longer the intimidating figure he’d been. He’d been a big humpy manatee of a man, huge and sleek. No more. The double chin, the wide face, the big head, it was all thinned out no, the physiognomy, with his jawline like a wishbone and the hollow cheeks with eeys staring up at me that belonged to a very sick man. I found myself furious, totally unsympathetic, and spoke to him as one speaks to a drunk.
Where is she, Martha, goddamn you, where’s my child?
He staggered to his feet and began to sing the dying scene in his raspy bass, holding his arms out to me.
I ran upstairs, looking in all the rooms. An empty crib, open empty drawers, empty coloset. In the master bedroom a rumpled bed, one closet with just the hangers hanging there. On the floor, some scraps of paper. A folded-up bus schedule. ’Ras-chee-chev. Ras-chee-chev’. [THINKING] Listen, I want to correct the wrong impression I may have given you about my feelings for Briony.
Wait a minute. What did you do then?
What?
After you found Martha gone.
I caught the last train back to Washington. That poor drunk had no more idea where she was than I did. He couldn’t even tell me how long she’d been gone. I had the feeling looking around that it had been quite a while. Of course the kid would be safe with her. She’d left her piano. It was still there in the study. That meant to me Willa was now her life. But there was no rush, this was not an emergency, if I hadn’t impulsively taken that trip I would really have been in the dark. So relatively speaking I was up on things.
And there was a little bit of relief there too, do you suppose?
Well, why not? I’m not ashamed to say it. What is more daunting than a judgment in the eyes of a child? It would come eventually, inevitably. It just wouldn’t be now. But I was trying to tell you something.
Yes?
See, the door was open and there I stood. So to a man, an opera singer costumed as Boris, and seriously drunk, singing the role there in his living room—what could be more reasonable than for Boris to see the fellow standing at the door as the Pretender Grigoriy, with his Polish-Lithuanian army, arrived to take the crown. I had thought he was talking about me, and maybe he was but somehow now also putting me in the opera. I was the false claimant to the throne, you see?
Was he that drunk?
Drunk or not, he was in the play, casting me as the enemy. Some basis for that in my being Martha’s ex. And yes he found just the term, plucked it out of Russian operatic history maybe by way of a deeper recognition. At the root, Andrew is The Pretender, OK? Is that what you want to hear? You’ve interrupted my train of thought. You guys aren’t supposed to do that.
But this is important, don’t you think? Didn’t he make you mad?
Listen, he knew I did cog science. He was not unintelligent. when I left he was singing his heart out to me, following me to the door. So don’t jump to conclusions. I felt sorry for him, to tell you the truth. He kissed me on the top of my head. And then he got down on his knees and begged for my blessing. That’s what Boris does in the opera, he begs for the blessing of the Holy Fool who stands in his mind for all of Russia. So I was no longer the Pretender to the throne. I had been recast as the Holy Fool. Or he might have been acknowledging me as one Pretender to another. After all he couldn’t exclude himself pretending to be the rightful czar. You weren’t there. We were brothers under the skin.
So it was a reprieve, is that what you’re saying? You were absolved of being Andrew the Pretender?
We’re all Pretenders, Doctor, even you. Especially you. Why are you smiling? Pretending is the brain’s work. It’s what it does. The brain can even pretend not to be itself.
Oh? What can it pretend to be, just by way of example?
Well, for the longest time, and until just recently, the soul.
—oOo—
(E. L. Doctorow, ’Andrew’s Brain’, London: Little, Brown, 2014; 98-102)
Hombre en su velero
Retropost (2006): Pisando huevos, no tocándolos
Pisando huevos no tocándolos
Publicado en Blogs. com. José Ángel García Landa
Estamos de sobremesa en Biescas, poniendo a caldo a los ausentes, que si el piso de tal que si las tallas de ropa de cual que si los hábitos sociales de Mengana, cuando de repente caen sobre mí miradas horrorizadas.
- Oye, todo esto que estamos diciendo no lo vamos a encontrar mañana publicado en tu blog, supongo.
- No, que selecciono la información interesante.
- Pues más interesante que lo que acabamos de decir...
- Y ojo que alguno se lo lee. Yo por lo menos, bueno, cuando hablas de cosas de la familia. Cuando empiezas con tus rollos patateros esos que te van, pues halahala, cambio de página. A mí no me pongas, ¿eh?
- Ni a mí tampoco. Ni mencionarme. Yo tengo una profesión y clientes, ojo.
- Pero qué me decís... imposible. Estáis hablando con la prensa. Imaginaos que Zapatero le dice al de El Mundo, "a mí ni me menciones, ojo", vamos, ¡que se pudiese borrar uno de los informativos así sólo con decirlo! Pues aquí lo mismo, a pequeña escala. Con la proliferación de medios, nadie sabe lo que va a ser reproducido o retransmitido, es el presente, es el futuro.
En realidad, como los grandes medios, mido mucho lo que digo. Mmm. Estoy en Biescas en un ordenador que no conozco, con una webcam que veo que está conectada. No sé si mi imagen también está siendo retransmitida...
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