It took a light tap on his shoulder accompanied by a haste greeting the discovery of how he was called: Mariano Torres. The name had an awkward impact on him. It reverberated in his ears with the difficulty of associating it with his person, like a placard with too weak adhesive it dangled from his being like a fake belligerent attribution.
His confusion began after less than an hour of marvelous experience of observing the changing of the sky’s hue during the last faltering glow of the sun as it crashed with thundering silence at the horizon. He stared at it with astonished eyes of an adolescent boy terrorized by ecstasy of the anatomy of the opposite sex slowly being stripped of garments before him. He would crane his neck in half-circle, from one end toward the opposite, to contain in one sweep the whole vista of heaven in outburst of colors, only to let out a deep sigh of resignation in the end due to his inability to put logic into it. And, probably, due also on his failure to contain it maddening beauty.
It was only when dusk had set in and the slithering tentacles of darkness crawled with inevitable certainty when he snapped back to his senses, as if waking from a wet dream. He realized he had been squatting on a breakwater, his feet dangling over the rhythmic onslaught of waves against the boulders beneath him. He looked with squinting confused eyes at the boulevard that ran behind him. His head throbbed in pain, like that of a drunkard’s hangover, not knowing what he was doing here or of what circumstances precipitated his being here, void of notion of the preceding night’s eventuality after drowning in the deluge of alcohol.
He must have sleepwalked, he thought. And behind his trail left the debris of memory of his personal history. Though this thought passed like a wisp of wind that had no shadow thus he was more concern on the possibility of having sleepwalked. So his reaction took the form an idiot looking again at his feet to check whether he had his shoes on. He had, as he found out; a black leather pair polished and glinting above the splash of waves. But the realization only aggravated the issue.
He must be dreaming then, so the reason for the indefiniteness of everything within and around him. He paused to think, as if to catch his breath, then stared at his hand that loomed before him, concrete and palpable. It did not change into a misshapen cactus or into an iguana or into wriggling worms. The hand remained the same; the knuckles were covered by dark coarse skin and the nails harboring specks of damped dust. He knew then that success at staring at it was enough proof that he was wide-awake. The remaining recourse for him then, in this hour of complete confusion, was to pray and rely for a providential appararition of an entity to lay the answers on the puzzle right on his lap.
As he deliberated on these issues, the street lamps had been switched on. The throng of promenaders that moved in perpetual flux along the boulevard had grown thicker by then.
He stood up with a blind effort. Standing amid the stream of strollers, he let himself drift without definite destination, guided only by the vague desperate hope of stumbling into lucidity.
He noticed most promenaders ambled without preoccupied thoughts and malicious intentions about the others. They were engulfed in their own stray thoughts caressed by the evening’s gentle sea breeze. Overwhelmed, he walked with adapting their behavior, a tactic he employed to hide the tremor of perturbation of his soul.
Then a group of young people walked towards his direction. They were laughing in their shared camaraderie replete with guffaws that nobody paid attention to except him.
Contrary to the others with whom he found sympathy in the solitude of their universes, his affinity as promenader to this group was a murderous enmity. Their naïve cheerfulness struck him with the monstrosity of alienation, though the venom of this reaction diminished as he observed that a company or a small group joined most of the strollers, something that he failed to notice earlier. It became obvious to him since those who were involved in casual chitchat on the benches along the side of the pavement knew each other and those who strolled had someone whom they talk to as they ambled forward.
A profound terrifying comprehension with so strong its tectonic shifting in his thoughts stirred his guts. The wisdom popped up in him like an introduction to some complex mathematical equation reserved to a handful of reclusive physicists: promenaders almost always knew someone here. The realization freed that he was able to paddle to the surface of his ocean of solipsistic solitude and breathe the fresh idea that it would not be far that someone among this throng knew him.
All he had to do was to make himself as visible as possible to most strollers. He followed this scheme by keeping a modest distance from the strollers in front of him, good enough for those who walked towards his direction to have a good look at him. Though he also had to ignore the push of those behind him who urged 0him to walk faster.
And there he walked for the first time content and happy with a purpose. He would look farther ahead of him, gauging as by what side he could come across the more strollers. He would veer to the left, then center, then right as he walked on. He would scan the faces of the strollers in an attempt to get an eye contact.
He had covered a good distance yet he seemed to have become invisible the more he tried to be noticed. Gaining no favorable result, he was prompted to walk on his toes to create an elevation so that his head would protrude above the crowd and could be seen from any vantage point.
He reached the end of the boulevard, where beyond led to the city proper and the perpetual noise of insomniac establishments and where from this point the promenaders would turned back to continue their walk. Frustrated by his failure, he went on with his walk toward the direction he had come from. Resigned, he was more concerned now on reaching clarity through pondering than being chanced by someone who knew him. He walked with stoop head, contrary to his earlier posture of putting his face before every strollers he crossed path with.
He had been mesmerized by his empty meditation that only led his thoughts groping in the depths of incomprehension on his journey within when somebody patted him from behind. He turned, enough to catch the passing feature of a lanky man, lugging a leather brief case under his arm, who made a quick greetings to him: “Mariano Torres, it’s already time to be with your family.”
He could have had stalled the man, trap him in a short conversation, or make a rejoinder that had the necessity of a reply revealing added information about him. But the man strode in hurried wide steps, and dissolved in the flow of the crowd before him.
Left again in his solitude, he repeated the name by which he had been addressed. Several times the name came out loud from his mouth and heard by passing strollers who would look at him, certain that they had been called and mistaken for another person, and would contort their faces at him in surprise. But he was no longer aware of these. His focus of was the name. For him, it had the nature of a stranger who was introduced to him for the first time. The name adhered to him as misrepresentation of who he thought he really was, and too difficult to fit to himself.
He might as well have had the same confused reaction and contorted faces of the strollers who thought they had been called for somebody. But he could not afford to do that. For, simultaneously it was during these repetitions when the void of not knowing how he was called opened its hole before him. Each invocation supplied the pieces of a dormant puzzle he was not aware of until he got the glimpse of the wide picture.
Then a voice speaking to him cut his thoughts. The crowd of promenaders materialized again from the haze of his vision.
“Mariano, I’m glad to see you here.”
He looked at the person talking to him. It was a lady protected from the cold breeze by a blazer, and panting with suppressed heaving of her bosom.
“It’s the same way for me,” he pretended.
“How’s your family,” the lady said.
“They’re fine.”
“Anyway, I wish I could talk to you longer,” the lady said. “But I have to rush back to the office. I forgot something.”
Then the lady hopped onward opposite his direction, and left on her trail the clatter of her footsteps and a fading remark:
“Just give my regards to Mercedes and the rest of your family.”
The weight of how the world knew him as who was reinforced with greater certainty now. Its gravity rested on the quiet pronouncement that everything that had something to do with the name Mariano Torres all winded down as attribution and definition of him. The name was him.
He could not escape from it now, what more with the sly contraption of fate that he had a family. The first one mentioned he had. And now, the second validated it. “But where are they?” he asked.
He continued his walk clad now with an identity and definition.
By then he was used already to the smell of the liquid taste of ocean salt carried by the breeze along the boulevard. As he progressed, the throng started to thin out, until he reached the part where the brick pavement was cut by the penumbra of a grassy field, and where farther ahead, the expanse of the sea lay with its steady waves in the dark, deep and mysterious.
It was only then when he noticed the cluster of houses across the road. There must have gone the man who greeted him earlier, he thought. Probably, the fine lady lived there too. He crossed the road in dazed intention and motive, for he did not know where to go from here.
He followed without pattern the maze-liked streets, looking furtively at windows that revealed the well-lit interior of houses and the souls residing inside. Along narrow alleys, he listened to the voices carried by the wind that seeped through thin ply-boards walls. On several occasions, he found himself facing dead-ends, only to retreat in embarrassment to where he had entered, avoiding the eyes of loiterers to parry attentions.
During this time of aimless wanderings, each street’s and alley’s blind corner presented the horror of finding himself on the precipice of the end of the earth; pitch black in darkness and bottomless in depth.
Then, someone hollered out his name as he trudged along another unfamiliar street. He found the origin of the voice coming from the bungalow house he had just passed. A woman on the veranda was waving her hand at him. He forced a smile loaded with the intuition that she could be his wife and drew toward her. But the impression lasted until she uttered her rejoinder to his soft statement: “Mercedes.”
“Mercedes is not here,” the woman said. “But mother will be happy to see you.”
The woman then grabbed his arm and led him inside the house where an old, fat woman, hunched like a meditating Buddha on the sofa, welcomed him with a smile of surprise. He tried to reciprocate it with cordiality as genuine as he could display, without the tinge of hesitation that restricted his movements into nervous jerks. Around the heavy presence of the old, fat woman a young man and a girl occupied the space offered by the couch and divan. They looked up from the television set and greeted him.
When the old fat woman stretched her flabby arms at him, he stooped toward her in suspended animation, as if for a century, not knowing whether a hug or a kiss was necessary, but the latter had captured her by then in her arms and supplanted a kiss on his cheek, and told him, as if he were a boy:
“Where the hell have you been? You’re soiled and stinking like a street dog.”
“He’s looking for Mercedes, Mama,” said the woman who had led him.
“Did you two had a fight?” asked the old fat woman.
“No,” he said as the only honest reply he could think of.
The old fat woman said then to the woman:
“Give your brother some fresh clothes. And could someone call Mercedes and tell that Mariano is here.”
to be continued.......
Note: This is partial of the story I'm trying to write now. I hope stray blogger in this site would appreciate it.
No comments:
Post a Comment