The Write Thing

If I could put words to my music, tonight would certainly involve Adriana Calcanhotto’s Mulher sem Razão. There is a lot of sense in that song, in many ways. My favorite lines are definitely the following:

Parta, pegue um avião, reparta
Sonhar só não tá com nada
É uma festa na prisão

Isn’t it the cruelest and truest of facts to actually accept that “dreaming alone does not mean anything, it is a party held in prison”? I guess it is, and that sometimes you do not know better than to have your party in prison. Why not? First of all, it is safer. Second…it still feels like a party.

Tonight, as I play the track from Maré in the background, I would say it is good to accept the fear, the risk of winning and losing (please let us face there are only very few win-win situations in life…somebody sooner or later pays for lunch). It is liberating in a way, it humanizes you. Admitting that fear is sometimes all you have is good enough to help you plod along and still cross the scary waters that separate you from your dream, whatever that is.

In this month of June, in a cold and H1N1-ridden Buenos Aires, only a few days after another commercial plane crashed with no real explanation, the uncomfortable question hangs in the air. We can have the party in prison and delude ourselves into thinking there will be a reason why we will not develop the fatal flu or our plane will not be buried in the cold waters of an unfathomable sea. We can have that limited range of security to build for ourselves…the cause why, regardless of how implausible it sounds. Yet, at the end of the day, we will still have a party in prison and there…we already know the guests.

The year is unfolding in surprising ways. Where I expected continuance, I am now seeing sad but necessary closure, by marriage, distance, or both. Where I expected briefness, I am now seeing the inevitable development of a relationship. I bet the gods are amused at the dice they cast. I thought I knew, I thought I was wise. Until recently, I even claimed to have an instinct, an ancestral memory that rarely failed. To my disappointment and, in a way, to my relief, it does fail, and the truth now dawns on me. I have to come to terms with the fact that there is a day-by-day quality to whatever we do, despite the long-term frameworks in which we technically see things. I am caught in the certainty of uncertainty, and I’d better like it, or else I’ll have to contend with my own ghost when fate decides for me.

However, no matter how much life insists on contradicting my instinct, I cannot help seeing it in action again. Perhaps that is why, one afternoon in a day of recognition and lovemaking, ages ago in a dreamy Mexican town, I turned around in bed, held her hand in mine around my waist, and without looking at her I said: “I have this sense of…arrival with you”. If I am home or not, or if the gods are just fooling around with me again, I will claim not to know. I will breathe in deeply, count my blessings and hope that my instinct is right.

I write for a living, and I write for pleasure…and I can tell the difference. Does that make me less of a whore?

Perhaps it is that I am at odds with myself sometimes, so I can accommodate better to the quirky irrationality of being 80% of my time operating in a language that is not my own, but in a country that is my own and whose language alienates me…so to speak.

Perhaps that is why I am trying to incorporate yet another, one of those that fall in the “least interesting” category, so I can avoid facing the fact that I am a foreigner at home…yet, again, does that make me less of a whore?

Maybe it won’t. So I’ll walk the streets of a city that has not welcomed me since I got back and fight my odds. I’m off to Guanajuato in only a few days, and you are welcome there. Let us look for adventure, let us be somewhere.