Caricreatures

CARICREATURES

CARICREATURES

© Diego Maenza, 2018

© Translated by Gastón Jofre Torres, 2020

Cover illustrations and interior of public domain

© Tektime, 2019

www.traduzionelibri.it

www.diegomaenza.com

CARICREATURES

DIEGO MAENZA

 
We can´t stop the drawings that are created in the air.
We can´t stop the drawings that hang down at night.
We can´t stop the drawings that burn our thoughts.
 
 
We don´t know who traces those drawings.
We don´t know why those drawings adorn
these bum suburbs out of nowhere.
We don´t even know if our eyes are able
to see those drawings.
 
 
But the fact that surprises us the most
is that all the things are incomplete,
since none of them exists or is sustained
without the complementation of these drawings.
 
 
It is not strange then that these drawings seem to us
more perfect than air,
more inhabited than the night,
more real than thought.
 

Roberto Juarroz,

Twelfth Vertical Poetry, verse 32.

WATER

WOULD I DO IT? MAYBE I WOULD BATHE IN YOU. I would flow to the rhythm of your swells, I would let myself be carried by your waves, I would shipwreck in the hydrates of your womb, I would anchor on the shore of your islands, I would sip your fluids and I would water myself in the tributaries of your southern lips. But, would I really do it? From the clouds would fall, in a prodigious drizzle, algae and nenupharies, lilies and lotuses, and the meat impregnated with our green wateriness would meet again. But it wouldn´t be like this how it would happen, because the strength of your shyness would daunt me. Your silence would be a siren song invoked from the spring. Because your art would be liquid, it would be watered through the stream and it would show your quiet interior, the mystery of that prudence so yours that would incite me to despair and disguised agony. You would be the sigiad naiad, the reserved undine that would watch over my saliva like the estuary that would protect the tranquility of the shad. It would be… You would be… The conditional would expose my inability to board. My explicit refusal to transfer in a true conflict the coldness of your eyes. Because when you think about it, this whole story would be the confirmation of a downpour that would patiently turn into snowfall: with the hail that would be your fearful arms, with the frost that would be your timid legs, with the frosts that would be your subtle hair. And as usual, you would start paying tributes to Boreas or to your pale and silent sex, which would be the same. You would appease the storm, you would appease the deluge with the thoughts that came from that interiority which would claim you; You would dominate the storm that would fight to bring your scruples down, the unhealthy flash flood of internal rapture that would sponsor the flooding of your ponds. Storm breaker. With your laxity, you would placate the flows of my eyes that, terrified, couldn´t even look at you, because we would no longer be pusillanimous waiting for our obstacles to be removed in the humidity of the hesitation, and we would overflow in the torrent of our tamed waterfalls. The lightness of your downpours would have the virtue of uncovering old leaks that would splash frugality on the weakest instincts.

At that moment, I would be aware that I would do it. I would make you gaps in the wasteland of your shells. I would end up spilling myself into the paradox of your tsunamis: because if I said it, it would be the truth and then (oh, cruel god of words and seas!) this would never happen.

THE PIRATE

Yes, friends, I was a pirate and I´m proud of it. I served the famous Francis Drake on most of his grandiose expeditions and I participated in the last of his battles, where I lost one of my legs. But, make silence and I´ll tell you.

The annoying friend, which you see over my shoulders, has been my faithful mate for a couple of years. He grooms my hair and pecks my eyes. In return, I crumble a loaf of bread daily and of course that in better days, when I want to change one of my doubloons that I guard with zeal in my chest, I buy birdseed at the market and I invite him to have a good dinner. I know that it´s a little funny, but don´t laugh so loud because the innkeeper can get upset with me.

Yes, yes, I assume it, I was a buccaneer too and I had to go through this business. While our captain was exploring the islands near the landing ones, I provided food. What else I could do! Those were perks of the trade that I admitted with discipline. Until I became a slave trader under the command of the big William Dampierre, the literary pirate, and we got to the shores of the New World.

Why do you laugh? Wretches, don´t laugh at me. Leave me and I´ll go on. As you can see, I keep my sword. It is true that it does not have the same edge as before, but I would like to stick it in his ribs seeing that they raise so much fuss preventing the youngest people from hearing my story.

I carry a wooden leg because the pirate tradition stipulates it in their codes. My chest travels with me because I wouldn´t know how to pay my expenses if I do not take care of my goods, and I do not leave my spyglass because I did not have it, I would not know how to envision new horizons. This has been my story, friends. If you invite me for another drink, I will tell you the adventures that I had with the pirate Colon in the far islands of Las Indias. Bless you!… But, what do you do? Why are you laughing so much? Idiots, my leg was amputated by a cannonball and not because the mule-drawn carriage crashed me as you said. Listen, don´t push me and don´t touch my back. Don´t you dare break my sword. It´s OK, I admit it: it is made of wood, but do not break it, it serves me as a cane. Where are you going little bird? Don´t leave, little bird. Leave my treasure! Don´t open my chest, please, don´t open it. It´s OK, it´s OK: open it. You can see it: it is our adopted logo on the shores of the New World: the snake is covered by the feathers of the Eagle.

THE NOOB

THE SEA MAKES HIM HAVE NAUSEA, vertigo, panic, even if he has a map in the form of a maze. The horizon is so broad that seems infinite. It overwhelms him. His desire to conquer his domains fills him with despair and helplessness and discover himself so inexperienced and insignificant in front of the vastness of the waves. He, precisely he, who is just beginning to take his first steps in the world of piracy. His ambition is huge, disproportionate, and therefore laughable. He pretends to conquer the seven seas. He wants to cover them as a whole and he can´t survey them with the shortness of his gaze and limitedness of his navigation. So he chooses to remember where he walked, even if he had only been in daydreams, a novice traveler who relies more on memory than on the ability of his inventiveness: the Black Sea, the Red Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, the Adriatic Sea.

And he opts for fantasy by taking refuge in the tavern of dreams, where the minstrels sing strange and foundational stories of bifurcated beings that fork and metamorphose, that are at the same time elements, animals and gods, numbers invoked in immemorial rituals that have arrived in the ancient world to contaminate everything, precisely them, so learned in their culture which descended from Olympus and forged and perfected in the smithies of Rome.

Metaphysical and spiritual stories that infect, in a good way, the materialistic and rational sharpness of his wise friends; or fables closer to him, apprentice of a filibuster who wants to take flight like a seagull and then dive into the elusive prey, like the beggar pirate who, in front of every-one´s laughter, claimed to have been a slave trader and to have inaugurated a renewed insignia that conferred courage and transformation to the acolytes who welcomed her as a banner, or like the black man who escaped from his masters and be-came king or the unhappy little man with a disfigured face and sad clothes who claimed to have been the victim a hex, as if his soul was worth more than Faust´s. Poor him, innocent creature full of optimism who barely knows the world and thinks that the tributaries are as comfortable as veins of his gums, salty arteries that lead to the truth. What are you afraid of, sailor, that you falter at the sight your own face reflected in the calm of the ocean? That the foam of the waves hits your skull and breaks the rocks of a virgin island? Or that the bobbies go crazy and start pecking your eyes? Of the corsairs of the word standing up as supreme doers, as unequalled demiurges who consider sea as their property? You, hesitant friend, must be the quintessential pirate, the one who sabotages all the languages and codes established in the foreign kingdoms: you will have to appropriate those kingdoms. You will be the one who forces the fish and the albatross to copulate in order to give birth to a new offspring, a mythological creature born from your womb.

So, our friend, facing his fears, with a renewed but equivocal vision, clings and drinks from his labyrinth, and is determined to invent the seas where he will navigate, a traveller trained on the experiences of others, and who now trusts himself in the capacity of his inventiveness more than in his hazy memory and creates and believes:

The Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Arctic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea again, the Pacific Ocean, the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico. Yes, your reality will start at the place where your imagination has culminated. It will set sail towards the banks of that world recently discovered by them, but inhabited by the immemorial.