May 08, 2008 11:20
I wrote this short story about 2 years ago, when I first started this LJ and originally posted it in Portuguese. I recently translated it to English, as a request from a friend, so here it is again. Sorry for my poor english writing skills, it's hard to translate some things that don't have a direct translation.
A Place Perhaps Less Unfair
I would rather never ever had found out the way our nauseating world works. I would have liked to continue believing I was happy, able to love and to be loved, without forcing someone to renounce to what we don’t want to let escape. I would like to go back thinking that every smile, every nice action that we do is for free, casual and without reason.
But it’s not like that. There are rules. Conditions. Maybe we will never get to understand them through our entire lives. They are unbreakable rules, I would say they are from the same nature as physics. And, because of that, they are conformations to the principal of action and reaction, conservation of the matter-energy and the casualty in space and/or time.
This, which could seem complex, is, once discovered, of stunning evidence. I don’t know of what happiness or the other multiple states that simulate it are made of, but what its clear to me is that, in the end, it’s nothing more than matter. Matter or energy, it’s the same.
One night, like any other, you go to the parking place where you have your car. As always, you can’t remember where exactly you have left it. Thanks to the skies it’s an appealing metal blue colour. When you put the key in you realize that you have left it unlocked. And the first thing that crosses your mind is if someone else knows it too. You look around… Everything’s normal. There doesn’t seem to be missing anything. But what’s surprising isn’t that something’s missing… There’s something more!
You gaze at the small thing that is coming out from underneath the windshields. It looks like a camera. What’s a camera doing in my car? Wait. It’s too dirty. Too uncared. Maybe this isn’t my car?
When you realize it, to avoid suspicions, you run away from that parking space; who knows if someone had stole it. You, obviously don’t want to get involved. Now, from the tranquillity that distance gives you, you can see that the license plate of that car is almost the same as yours. Weird coincidences.
But only after a long time you realize you still have that camera that doesn’t belong to you in your hands. You’re too far already, too relaxed to go back to that place again. That would be even more suspicious. But you’re not a bad person, you respect the private property. It’s just not the moment. You will think about how to return the camera, to give it back to its owner.
In the mean time, on that same night, in the happy solitude of your apartment, curiosity invited you to inquire those photos of a life that, for sure, has nothing to do with yours. You believe in that, naïve. But when you start seeing them you feel as if your neck is shrinking, and your comfortable house of 200m2 converted into a tiny prison, asphyxiating.
The person who took those photos is you. Ok, not exactly you. Someone who looks like you. Too similar to have been another one. But it’s not a pleasant image. They don’t seem seem like photos of someone who enjoys life, they’re rather from someone suicidal.
And you can recognize instants of your life in those photos, that it’s not your life, but very similar to the extreme. You notice the missing people, and the ones you manage to recognize look weird to you, as if life had passed been snatched right through them. The absences worry you. Where have they gone?
You see her. But she reveals herself as sad and far away. Unhappy. She doesn’t have a look on her eyes that you can recognize in her. Never before you have seen her like that.
All that gallery of sadness, disgrace, not exaggerated but anguishing. You can’t give the camera back. You need to dissect those lives, to touch them. And you’re ready to understand the mechanism that holds that paradox.
You didn’t have enough value to face your alter ego, so your first step is to take her. You don’t even know if she’s called the same or if she shares the same tone of voice and way of walking. It’s easy to imagine that person’s attitude in life, and the voice will sound arrogant and insolent, the same way it’s safe to say her clothes would appear kinky.
Although you didn’t make a big effort in disguising as him, she wasn’t able to recognize you. You allow yourself to invite her to spend a night in a five star hotel. How admired she was when paintings covered the walls instead of wall paper of her golden cage! It wasn’t difficult for you to seduce her again. Anyone could see she was in need of love and sex. That the person who had to offer her both things, had his mind in other stuff (perhaps simply trying to survive). You were sure she had recognized you for a couple of times. Although nature had given you both the same physical appearance, the time was on your side. And you were sure your sexual strength was devastating when compared with your other you.
In the beginning, only her body was there. While kissing her, while undressing her and helping her to undress you, the woman, the flesh invaded by blood looked at you like a corps looking at his closed ones. But when she noticed the heat of your face searching in places where something was missing for so long, her pupils contracted, her muscles got hard, and that woman that nothing expected of life began to breathe again. You felt her fingers, reborn, were seeking to give you pleasure. And it came to a moment where you didn’t even think of making happy the other, your one, but this one. And while you invaded her with your semen and offered her your tongue, you knew you had started a change. Irreversible.
After the sex you manage to get some details from her. You didn’t care that she could suspect anymore. What’s more, it would have been weird for you, almost offensive, that she didn’t know the truth yet, or an interpretation of that truth. You asked yourself how she would react when she got back to him, I mean, with you. And it was tremendously exciting to be cheating on yourself.
This way, reuniting with her, you built the moment of meeting with yourself in your imagination. You already had enough information about their lives to make a simple theory: it existed between that man that looked like you and you, a link, a balance, like communicative vases, that obstructed that both surpassed a certain amount of happiness. There was no law that ruled which mode the fortune or tragedy would get to each one. To your luck. Well, all the years in your life had been magnificent: a family who loved you, parents and grandparents who’re still alive, everyone in good health, full of optimism, of vital fury. You enjoyed a childhood full of light. You have great friends that never betrayed you, and as far as you know, the ones that you can’t call friends, share an excellent image of you. You always had success with women, and with all of them you still maintain a good relationship. It’s hard to remember when it was the last time you were sick or suffered physical pain.
So that your theory had a base, the life of those people must have been a living hell. One of the parents suffered a terrible death during the childhood. Families called foster families, but that never accepted that that small weird human being, full of anger, could get in their lives to stay. Scholar failure and incomprehension. Bad behaviour and runaways in raining nights. Solitude and scabies dogs that bite you.
The evening you suspended all your plans, hiding to everyone you knew what you intended to do or where you were going, you almost couldn’t keep in your excitement. You would show up there in his home. You took her keys during one of your dates. Or maybe it was her who, with discretion, left them for you.
His home, your home, was how it would be expected, in a neighbourhood known by the quality of heroine. With delicacy, you go up the stairs that lead you to the 10th floor. It stinks something worst than humidity. In every floor of that building live people. You hear them breathe, scream at each other, and ignore themselves with noisy TVs. Does each one of them another one wandering in the happy extreme of the world? Do they know by any chance that they’re the unhappy member of the equation? And that all the intention, all the hope to escape this situation is useless, so they ignore the meaning of their lives?
In the end, I arrived, exhausted, to the 10th floor. I put the key in the lock.
The next thing I remember is his and her image, I mean, me, looking from a certain height. I’m sitting. With the hands and feet tided up to a chair. My head hurts. Why do I feel pain? On my left there’s a mirror, where I gaze my crane full of dry blood. Never had I seen the colour of my insides. When I see them there, whispering, I understand I can’t hope for more fortune.
Since then they keep me locked in the attic. To avoid me from screaming, they cut my tongue. To avoid that I’ll make noises or hit the walls, they covered the room with mattresses and blankets, that my nails, which they regularly amputate, are unable to drill a hole. They have to keep me alive for everything to work. Alive, but endlessly unhappy. The bigger my disgrace is, the bigger is their luck. I don’t keep bitterness for them. I enjoyed unconsciously from that benefit for years and didn’t know how to defend it.
Now I’m happy when they open the door. I can breathe again, see the sun shine or the full moon, the scents from far away.
They changed. Seem happy. I was so naïve to believe I was the one discovering them. If I had everything, why did I have to keep looking? But I feel proud, because I’m me, my other me, safely the only one in this worlds that knows its functioning and inverted it, for once, the big dream machine round.
short story