And so we come to the moment when I visited Professor Pronceda, as I did daily. I carried the photograph in my inside jacket pocket. I felt that the scholar could help me to find the origin of certain defects among my relatives concerning these family ruptures, insurmountable misunderstandings which went beyond the passion and the noise of interpretations over interpretations, and the anxiety to be different from the rest, even at the cost of prejudice against the other.
"Good morning, Professor," I greeted him as usual.
There was no response, he remained absorbed in a reproduction of Renaissance sculpture.
"That movement is not good," I heard him murmur as he shook his head. “You're not!” he said, and suddenly, waving one hand, he pushed the sculpture which fell onto the floor of the room.
The noise shook up Professor Pronceda, probably because he would hear voices from all those images that would reproach him for such an unreasonable act.
"No! Don't all talk to me at once!" the Professor shouted as he covered his ears with the hands. Then he discovered my presence. His gaze relaxed when he saw me as a familiar image. "Is it you?" he asked and took me into his arms after I assured him that I was the same one as always, the visitor from reality. "It is so oppressive to live constantly in the truth!" He nearly moaned on my shoulders. "Lie to me, please, tell me something about the real world."
I took the Professor to his favorite armchair, right in the next room with no distracting pictures or drawings. He seemed much older than the day before. I left him alone to relax a little while I went to the kitchen to prepare his favorite tea.
Back in the room again, along with the tea, he apologized for the scene he had just made and asked me to tell him what he had said. Of course, I minimized the incident, I had witnessed worse ones. Instead, I asked him if he could "take a look" at an image of mine. I saw the grief on his face again, but this wretched man was doomed to do it, and I was there to take a personal advantage.
"Professor," I wanted to know after his last sip of the infusion, "how do you feel about keeping a conversation private?"
But the Professor did not answer me. Instead, he drummed his fingers in the air as he hummed the notes of Liszt's "Dreams of Love." He finished the impromptu concert (I had not the least doubt that he was hearing it) and looked at me with a lost look, as though I were not really there.
"What year is it today?" but he did not wait for me to answer. "You have something for me, I know. It's personal stuff, right?"
"Professor, I ..."
"There’s not much more sanity time left, son. Show it to me now, you know what I'm talking about."
I knew that it was useless to be modest. Professor Pronceda realized that he was there for something more than a utilitarian service, in many of his attacks of sanity he had confessed that to me. For my part, I could smell the scent of fate. I put a hand in my jacket pocket and held out the yellowish photo.
At first, I did not recognise it, though terror and evidence made my blood run cold and I had seen it many times since my grandfather bequeathed it to me. I was dumbfounded on seeing that image, once static, yet now agitated by the repeated movement in a loop of time. I wanted to understand but a shriek came from inside me. I wanted not to see but black smoke struck the pit of my stomach.
I understood everything at once. The whole environment had changed, I finally became reality, whose supply was propitiated by the truth which should never have been distorted. There was no one in that room but me and those "phantoms", my old "friends," with whom I had learned to decipher myself. But I now recognized that they were not about mere visions. I looked at that photograph again. What had been sepia now had vibrant colors. What was out of focus was now a sharper image. That subject photographed more than a century ago was moving his mouth as though pronouncing a centuries-old message, as though he knew the exact recipient. I looked at that image of my ancestor with my own features and my own eyes, and I recognised the message I had sent so cryptically to myself. At last, it was translated to me to advance or retreat in the mystery of existence.
Then I focused my attention. As usual in this kind of disease, I looked for some signal that would explain the movement I saw in that image. The main subject continued moving his lips, in the same way as for a hundred years, in a desperate attempt to perpetuate a syllable, the one he had pronounced at the very instant that it was frozen by the primitive camera shutter. And there, in the burnished reflection of what looked like the blunt handle of the back door, the truth was revealed.
It was me myself who was reflected there, with every detail. It was me myself looking at that moment of time, discovering to whom that ancestor (perhaps myself, perhaps my father or my son, perhaps a remote relative from the past or the future) was addressing. The truth was speaking to me. But I was not trapped in the movement of time. Now everything had been freed on the canvas of a more comforting, overwhelming truth ever. That man had been innocent, even though he had condemned his descendants, among whom me myself was found, by protecting with his silence the real criminal. We inherited his “guilt,” which was now being redeemed.
I did not know what to do with such a reality but I knew that my whole lineage had been cleansed at the very act of revelation. If it only had been seen, perhaps all these years of solitude and fear could have been avoided. Whoever has walked along an esplanade right in the middle of a desert landscape and promised lights will know what I am talking about. Now my life finally made sense to me. I have been like the epigraph of a chapter written by some unknown god. An epigraph, something isolated, resignified; estranged from a society of phrases among which it lived overnight; altered by the predominance of idea-looters. That is what I am, an epigraph, something that changed its meaning due to someone else's provocation and indecency, though I only tried to find a friendly soul that would serve me my favorite tea amid my phantoms. It is time to me to be dissolved into this cup of tea.
Ariel Pytrell
Ariel Pytrell is an Argentine writer of short-stories and novels, playwright and poet translated into several languages. In his literature, myth and philosophy, history and fantasy, art and science converge in dialogue with the universal and the drama of human existence.
(novels)
Bindaline 1. Shadows from the End of the World
(stories)
Antes del principio: mitos y leyendas que contaron los griegos
El portal de las hadas
Mitos y leyendas de los celtas
El destramaojos
(poetry)
Los olvidos y el Amante Milenario
La mordida y la tinta
Noches porteñas en Babilonia
(theater)
Caro refugio
Laberintos
Sócrates. Amanecer en la caverna
Teatro | La tercera máscara. Caro refugio
(essays)
El profesor de los Anillos: sobre Tolkien, la subcreación y otras hierbas
El renacimiento de lo trágico. Neotragedia para actores, directores y dramaturgos
www.arielpytrell.com
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[i] Luis Alberto Spinetta, “El Flaco” (1950-2012). Well-known Argentine singer, guitarist, composer.
[ii] “Virus” is a well-known Argentine rock band, pioneering the 1980's South American music revolution.
[iii] Some scholars suspect that, either by the same author or by other "pious" hands, the second part has been deliberately removed from the original text, perhaps because it contained information, still considered "political," capable of engaging certain personalities of that time.
[iv] "August" was the name of the month that corresponds to our Ost. The instability of the language is evidenced at the word "August," for instance, which alternates with its variant "Aust" (fifteen times), which will finally end up giving us "Ost", which is the current spelling. Something similar occurs with many words, being a linguistic testament to a phase of the tongue within which it seems that ancient terms coexisted with their derived forms such as we may verify today.
[v] Torsh: a kind of firearm that shoots fireballs. Some specimens of these weapons are exhibited in the Museum of Prior History, which may be consulted in virtual museums.
[vi] The meaning of this expression, which did not survive until our time, is unknown but the meaning can be deduced.
[vii] Commufemes may be a construction between the words community and female. The term "confrere," in turn, was reserved for the Order of Men, for some scholars resolved that the word comes from earlier French meaning "peers of the same Order" (apparently French frère, component of "confrere", meant something like "brother" in that old tongue.)
[viii] According to several documents from that time, we know that during the period it was believed that defensive aggressiveness was a property of veins and arteries which expelled more blood than normal to produce violent movements as an instinctive reaction. It was taken as a normal biological process but each group criticized the other without realizing that they suffered the same defect.
The Unravelled Frames Page 9
