EPISODE XVII
“On grounds of sovereignty, you said that you were entitled (by birth) to give no explanations to anyone.”
Recording: Written report on certain acts and declaration of will, of public or private significance
Cali, Colombia, December 2nd 2017
Shortly after crossing Valentina at the airport, The Loser Titan wrote down a letter to Isis, which he kept safe until the appropriate occasion to be delivered arise. When he finished it, he felt like an errand-boy; as he put it into the envelope, he play-acted Julio Cortázar dispatching a letter on his exile in Paris.
Dear Isis:
With great regret I have to admit that I learnt nothing from the mistakes committed during our four years living together, because you´ve never told me the reasons why I was kicked out of your house. On grounds of sovereignty, you said that you were entitled (by birth) to give no explanations to anyone. Owing to this strange jurisdiction of your selfishness, I state once and again that our relationship went wrong, even though we always got along well (never a burn-and-slay quarrel to be proud of). You never accepted to sneakily be clearing the path to the arrival of your true love: the father of Deborah, your eldest daughter. Your non-existent fairy tale with me; your mind-blowing fairy tale with him, in addition to the alleged patriotic excuse “I want to live and stay alone”, harboured you in the aftermath. In order to attain your goal, you were in need to be freed from my stalking presence. The fact remains that your lie was so primitive and as archaic as the Hammurabi Code, so being the case, why else not to recall those far-off kick-out days when a man showed up on your doorstep, you beckoned him then he came in, sank back into the sofa and your thumping heart revived. Did you forget who am I talking about? Yes, I am referring to Moises Klein. A doubt has been cast on the thesis you used to defend so fiercely: the structure of your affections turned out to be a white lie, as it didn´t stand up to scrutiny due to its fragility. You lacked of sincerity, unlike the behaviour you showed years back when you, as steadfast as a soldier, supported me in the life crisis, I underwent during South-Africa Football World Cup of 2010. I still think that your lack of sincerity was rooted in a deficit of trust in me, which explains the non-disclosure of the real causes of being expelled from your side. Indeed, you could have revealed them without making a great song and dance, without making a fuss on it, straightforwardly, blamelessly, holding a non-judgemental attitude, as we two, at least in theory, might have liked it.
To stop living together was a hammer blow which forced me to go back over the terms of our cohabitation. Thus, the first three months of my exile were strictly devoted to think over the things that I had done wrong during the day-to-day routine with you, as we rode on the same saddle. A reassessment ought always to be done so long as you intend to seek remedies for your faults. In this sense, an apology is due when my mistakes are evident, only on proving them would I have deserved an eviction notice for what may be called a capital sin. You know very well that repentance, remorse, are not words you can look up in my private dictionary, my standpoint is that faults are to be repaired in the same way cars have to after a car-crash. You will never see cars in pursuit of repentance because of an accident they were involved in, their owners simply rush to the auto repair shop to get them fixed instead. Likewise, I am ready to mend “the existing punctures” along my personal road -if you allow me to express it figuratively. There are no ceremonies of confession available for cars and cars owners whatsoever, within the automobile market, however much you try to find them.
I repeat it verbatim: I learnt nothing with you.
I would like to highlight something you surely imagine: since my worriment was triggered by white lies, the three-month period of reflection was futile. I buckled under the pressure of a sophism, by which no conclusion can be reached as long as the starting point is a false premise. Socrates should be quite displeased, let´s say disgusted, with the waste of my time, he never ceased to insist on maximising time, time is money, time is unforgiving, whenever time is wrongly spent you must get to the track at the earliest, etc…Yes, it is, my naivety was utterly exposed, as I was unaware of your playing a double game: you didn´t want to miss out the argentine dish, while on the backstage you had been holding a quiet vigil for the birthday´s cake present: the arrival of the true love. Yes, Isis, it´s him, the good-natured heavy-built stout Colombian Adonis to whom your soul was attached to; the man that, some years ago, had dumped you and caused an early drowsiness to fall upon your life. I was wrongly convinced that the waiting for him had been left behind and ended it up in the wax-box of your past treasures. I thought it was a “out of sight out of mind” case, that Huidobro Escobedo had been rotted in oblivion, at least you talked in this sense every time we engaged in meetings, we used to call philosophic gatherings; therefore, I could hardly believe in the paradox: you were still waiting for him regardless of the atrocities Escobedo showered against you ever since he and you fell in love and moved in together in 1992, year of birth of Deborah. The overjoy that cohabitation brought to you at the beginning, lasted too short a time for your committed soul nonetheless, the thrilling experience was too avaricious in the end, for eleven months later Huidobro Escobedo pulled up anchors and abandoned you without giving a sound explanation (as a result of the boomerang effect, people reluctant to give explanations are punished by having to welcome peers within their bosom, as the vibes of the unexplainable summon themselves so much as they tend to get assembled in the long run. You know the proverb: “birds of a feather flock together”). Escobedo drifted away from you. As a corollary to this disgraceful episode of abandonment, he built dysfunctional families throughout Colombia and cut off contact with you for more than a decade. It should have been so an awful situation for you to cope with! Then you stayed frozen in the open until we first met on July 18th 2009, amid circumstances worth to be told in the form of a Colombian-Argentine novel. A tragic set of exclusions was your life before our encounter, a tragical seclusion when we just met, an inscrutable tragedy your life would be like after four years of being jumbled together. A large-scale tragedy for you, a no-learning process to me. In the dawn of 2014, The Male Alpha turns up from out of the blue, nonchalantly stood at your doorstep (coincidence or not, I had sailed off to exile already), you got distracted and so he found a soil to make a nest on your bed for two years, as if he deserved the repatriation which you, so kindly accorded to him. At the beginning of 2016 Huidobro Escobedo got rid of you, fled the nest leaving no trace of his steps; his whereabouts remained a mystery to everyone. Another unreported missing individual in the annals of Colombian fatal history. You were thrown off centre, what a fool of you, you fell into his hands for a second time unfolding karma thereby. The radio started to play the same song again. Though I was down on account of my signed and sworn “in exile” status, you couldn´t figure out the helplessness I felt at seeing how pertinaciously (helplessness coupled with some kind of suffering which was not my own, due to the unrequited love you squandered with regards to Sir Escobedo, nicknamed by me “The Real Titan” thanks to his Vikings-like 1.98 meters handsomeness, his blue-eyes and wild appearance) your sovereigns flags drowned in the ocean of gloom. You barely moved, you crawled incapable to stand up to fight off the ghosts that besieged your mind and played tricks to your blind heart. Huidobro Escobedo´s coming back brought disastrous consequences upon your life; as well as balsamic effects on mine: I realised that, every time you embraced him in front of my nose, your beautiful face acquired an aspect similar to that of a nymph on heat whose frowning sets a marker of the territory under the bout of her lust, while sending out an unmistakable signal of me being fired off the landscape, to a deserted land full of scattered Gadua Bamboos and bitter memories, full of yearnings and lost flavours, full of incoming brief affairs bounded to be devoid of spiritual significance. I didn´t cry for you, Isis, I never cry over the emanations of a sophism, I do cry whenever my love leakages are spilled onto ladies who failed to withstand the force of my downstream hurricanes. I weep for those kinds of women they sympathise with me, but they don´t like me; those kinds of women that cannot bear my eccentricity, those who finger me for excess of vehemency. Don´t get me wrong, the ladies I fail to impress are wonderful, the matter is that the effluvium of my soul makes room for their heartless instincts to run-away. I forgive them in advance, as it is very difficult to get immersed in the hidden corners of my essence. In order to succeed in doing so, tenacity of will combined with an unshakeable determination to penetrate the mysteries of my evolution cycles, would be a must. Rivers of ink other than huge amounts of time were allocated to these loves, most of which ended in heartbreaks that deserved long rehab periods so to kill the pain. In those foxholes I gave shelter to my own sincerity towards them. My tottering-fenced capacity to seduce the opposite sex lies in a deep ditch, almost motionless. No matter how charming inwardly and outwardly those girls in reality are, my incapacity manifests itself without fail, incapacity to be loved passionately in a way I think one should have to. In summary, my Dear Isis, it was easier than expected: after my four-years-length ongoing exile, I downgraded you from the level of “Exceptional Woman” that Armenian Mystic Gurdjieff encouraged his female disciples to attain; exceptional woman I thought you were.
I stick to the proverb: Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.
Giving me a truthful answer to the inconvenient question I had raised to you, “Why did the faint-level mysticism you abuse of, chased me out of your vicinity and now I am away from your blanket whereas, at the same time, you wryly assured to me you were dragging no couple problems along?” was within range. To make your stand you could have argued that, based on Hegel´s dialectics, you needed a change because, for example, Global Warming had affected you. That brief explanation is as blunt as it´s sufficient for me to understand. As easy as it could have been, it is. But you chose the long way by proceeding with my expatriation, which definitely put off the truthful desired answer. What´s more, a sincere answer would have paved the way forward for a smooth cycle upturn between us. As time passed by, there was a slow natural shift in terms of affection, from you to your second child, Juan José, my step-son, “The sure-fire winner Titan”. Everybody wins, except me, since the result of the match is known before kick-off. It´s not serious anyway. Nothing is serious enough if and when you don´t feel sick and you ride with the tide as happily convicted as you can be, paying devotional tribute to dismissal files moving around.
After being driven by brief affairs of transient pleasure, which they sometimes ran to louche, I am pleased to inform you that a young lady named Valentina, one of the creator prodigies, who may righteously be considered a one off-event in the annals of incarnated spirits´ history, took my life over. Her omnipresence showed off in due time and left my thoughts under a cloud of suspicion: whatever experience I may have had with you over the years it should not be regarded as a love story, but rather an episode during which you focused on protecting me against my worn-out heart. You acted as my guardian-angel; you took me under your wing to prepare me for the harsh times to come, while Huidobro Escobedo was underway. Nevertheless, I am still an undressed homeless individual dwelling in no where’s land. The paradox seen in our involvement revealed itself clearly: you sheltered me despite you yourself be living in the open; this cannot be explained through Aristotle’s fundamentals. You know life is a giver and a taker, it provides the ground for unexpected events to happen, it welcomes happenings or incidents that usually go beyond reason. You could witness in words and in deeds as well as with the songs I composed for you (do you remember “Bonds of Peace”?), that I attempted in right earnest to love you, I tried with all my might to make room for the feelings under the current control of Valentina. I acknowledged my defeat, what more convincing evidence than my exile could there be to prove it. The bond created between us interwove peace with protection bricks, both guided by instinctive emotions, which they came to be clue supports in our struggle for survival. In either case, that´s the way it worked. When we met, I had no love to give you, love was still in its infancy, unborn in the womb of my affections; perhaps waiting for its Valentine awakening. In 2009 I was seeking for shelter, for peace, which I largely got from you. Looking over at the lyrics of the songs I composed for you, a common thread is noticeable: irony, sarcasm, a fair share of soft humour bedecked with the same old bonds of peace. In whole, it was not a small thing for a consummate loser. I have no complaints, above all I am delighted for being slaughtered, satisfied with the artistic quality of the compositions, hoping that their metric and harmonies may have contributed to enrich the troubadour´s poetic collections world-wide. Satisfied in spite of the low-impact they caused within the feminine universe.
From the most emblematic space of any battle, the trench, which in my case stands thirty meters away of your home, I unreservedly thanked you for having left me in the open, for sanctioning me with an exile providing no Socratic reasons in support of the righteousness of the punishment; I should be thankful for your decision to condemn me to live in the house below, my dear trench, built up in a flash. Something worth-remembering: it took only three months to get the house done. In the haste to drop me out in the cold, you put so much pressure on the builders, they got water-boarded by the mystical methods you set in motion to commit them to efficiency. I would rather say that you imposed a merciless daily timetable for them to fulfil; you definitely hammered away at those poor sweaty bricklayers, leaving them no choice but to grin and bear it. Every time they dreamt of you, be sure that they dreamt of a trade union coverage. Just think that, at handover, when I exited your house and moved into my new place, in October 31st 2013, I organised a barbecue for the workers to pay off the debts which emerged from your haste to finish off the works. I can be all serenity and sweetness if I put my mind to it, you can´t imagine how cool I could be in a suitable atmosphere. So, that being the case, I sat your workers at my table and they swallowed the meat I had grilled for them, they ate as if it were the last supper, as if they were hungry for justice; I acted a guitar player performance to blow off steam, staggered after so much wine-drinking and so much resistance against everything. Indeed, I put in long hours to kill your workers with laughter by cracking Argentinian jokes, a counterpoint to the unbroken celibacy vow of my seductive powers.
At the beginning of December 2017, I find myself back in the open, yet much stronger than ever before. In a narrow sense, however, I bounced back from the times you feared to lose your dominion, from the time of numberless speeches on sovereignty rights, a litany which enabled you to fill the gaps of your dialectics. Unfriendly weather conditions cannot steer me off course any longer, on the contrary, they provide vitamins to my buccaneering way of life. Blending all these ingredients is of much help to forget past backslidings as well as to avoid setbacks in the future. Coated by a sharp presence of mind, instilled by confidence, surrounded by soothing vibrations, I feel able to put up with hostile environments from now forth, not to mention the assistance of passion, intensity and tenacity, faithful comrades in arms for the battles to come, which ultimately shall contribute to my turning into a better migrant. I have already died a thousand deaths just to awake from hell and die again. But now, Isis, the blossomy of spring overcame hell. I learnt from setbacks that only by establishing myself in reality, past illusions may die off.
My lot will be flooded with philosophy cafés, panels of discussion on literary topics other than spiritual retreats, embellished with hazardous combats between the Gods of the Land of Milk and Honey, claimed to be obstinately fair, and the Gods that deliver cyanide candies. Since I am a junior Samurai, I never give up, I can jump into a lion´s cage for an ideal even though I have never had an ideal. Casualties are commonplace in wars, but in my own wars it´s me indeed the sole casualty. Oh, Isis, when my forced displacement took place, I wondered: Is there going to be any other woman who venture to shelter me in future? Half because the wind decreed it, I count on the love of your children, I mean the sure-fire winner Titan in the first place (he miraculously inherited none of my unseductive powers to conquer women, instead he is now a brilliant Casanova), and Deborah to a lesser extent. They are somehow like a nook wherein I cheerfully look forward to the forthcoming events. Nothing to worry about. I have absolute confidence in spicy life ingredients capacity to bring a bundle of energy to my wandering path.
It´s worth to highlight here that your pure-souled children turned out to be the greatest love-story I have ever lived. Self-help books (which seldom are of any help, for most of their readers have fallen prey to an unsurmountable confusion) states that the purest love is the one addressed from parents to their begotten children, these being much purer than the love given to each other by couples. At least that was my case: the purity of my love towards them was unquestionable, whole-heartedly spontaneous and, what still strikes me, a two-way of subtle vibrations exchanges: from them to me and from me to them. Far from being a consolation prize, the affective bond built with Juan José and Deborah may be my sole visible victory, the only one I have ever intentionally promoted. The exception that confirms the rule. Regardless of what has been written up to now, I have the feeling that something is missing in my life, never is anything enough, my soul carries a deserted area subject to be populated by Valentine princesses or fugitive sirens, tenants of pantheons open only during banking hours. My younger sister asserts that, I am always looking for something else while endeavouring to keep away from family traditions: she is right. She is right and I am wrong. To err as a factual support of my well-educated flickering fate which tossed me hither and thither, the basic roaming condition of a wanderer. To me life has turned a momentum tinged with passion, a glorifying burst which equally embraces me and tears me into pieces.
If you had been honest with me from the very beginning, you would have given me the chance to choose whether to live four years at your side or to escape before the outbreak of hostilities; or even, in the third place, to keep on living in my rented flat. If you had told me the underlying reasons of my eviction, today December 1st 2017 I wouldn´t leave you. What I affirm is based on common sense, the restoration of the natural order of things, let´s say that spontaneity would have made this turning point a harmonious twist of fates. The flow of naturalness would have transformed this setback into a humanized removing process. You may understand me or not, but I can´t help but to believe that you have never understood me nor have you accepted me just the way I am, you have never listened to me, at most you have come to my defence appealing to waves of dubious wisdom. Of course, we should never forget your pernicious silences fighting unborn wrangles between us (every time you wanted to skirt around the substance of a matter or to pull out from a quarrel, especially when you were cornered by unbeatable arguments, you went off on a tangent by saying that in order to discuss a subject there´s got to be two persons standing against each other). I would go as far as to say that you never became aware of the herbs of mourning grown around my exile. Even posthumously, it would have been pertinent for you, as well as an anti-shock measure, to accept what I expound on this letter of protest -written not to be re-admitted in your life, I am no longer looking for that-, this acceptance would have spared us the tremor that farewell always implies, the modern reedition of the earthquake of Armero, dated November 1985, occurred in your beloved land of Tolima, a tragedy of which you´ve been a victim, since you were living in the region by then. I don´t want to be forgiven, I don´t need it, I need to get away from you, to leave you. You may dismiss outright the corner-stones of this letter, it´s highly probable that you will deny the view of reality seen -under risk of being too insistent- from my point of view.
Unlike you, I give explanations. I agree with argentine´s psychologist Jorge Bucay, when he postulates: “Because I appreciate you very much, I set you free”. At being fired from your home I leaped across the ocean while you applied the leapfrog procedure of bypassing the three famous filters that Socrates suggested to ponder, before undertaking an action or abort it: goodness, realness and necessary. He warned that any accomplished action without fulfilling these three conditions shall be taken as inhuman, and at the same time shall be fingered as to hack its original intention. I bring to your attention how often you boasted of fulfilling Socrates’ three famous filters. It therefore wouldn´t come amiss to think of a change of filters in your life: it´s cheap and in the long run you would derive lots of benefit out of it.
Corollary: Those people whom I consider of high value to me, deserve, in my opinion, to receive sound explanations, as many as they request. To me, the fact of giving them is rather an act of humility than a lack of sovereignty.
Me, your ex
Cali, Colombia, December 1st 2017
