IDENTITY

1. I and I

Is it a problem of the matrass? Is it my own problem? What do I do wrong (even) while sleeping? Shit, I'm doing it again. I have to love myself, I have to call myself wonderful names, I have to care for myself. Who else will otherwise? Paternal and maternal love counts only to a certain extent, I'll have to stay with myself for the rest of my days. In the meantime, I should solve my matrass problem.

I catch myself speaking English words all of the time. Feel my identity is about to disappear. What about MY identity? And when I say identity I mean this which links us to a massive group of people. If I don't speak Catalan words to myself while living in my hometown amidst my whole-life neighbours then when will I do it? I who was born and raised as a Catalan. I whose family names are Catalan as far in time as the average human mind can remember. Why is it that I write in English, then? Is it because of Fante's -he himself had a direct Italian ascent- prose? Is it Saunders' voice that has captivated me? Is it due to my secret -not secret anymore- desire to follow Beckett and Nabokov's path -I mean them writing in languages which were not really their own? In the meantime, I should decide if voting interests me -what sense does it make to vote for a country which is your own but whose language you don't use in its written form anymore? Are colonialism and capitalism the only ones to blame here -I mean the only ones to blame for the fact that I do not seriously articulate discourses in Catalan inside of my head anymore-? Or is it just me who in a not-so-conscious way wants to be famous and therefore admits English as the only option -sometimes it feels like Spanish is not an option for me.

Oh, and I should buy myself a table lamp. The small things of real life scare me to death, I'd rather fight a lion every morning than to build IKEA's furniture with my own two hands. The practical life has no discourse, it requires nothing but physical energy and enthusiasm and concentration. Oh, and how I lack concentration! I who is unable to write a couple of paragraphs on the same subject! Sometimes I wonder what am I here for. No reason, just here for the fun, just here to enjoy this weird performance our lives are.

2. El espejo

Emptiness is always scary, no matter if you are in front of a paper or if you are stucked in a wonderful flat screen. Ann is in her desk staring at her wonderful flat screen. The weather outside is cold, fat drops of water pouring from the pink sky of Amsterdam all the time. There are some left cookies in the kitchen’s table and she decides to pick up some. The fact that she has already been through this many times before doesn’t help her at all. With a huge effort she manages to picture herself inside a tiny flat in a ghetto nearby Barcelona where three women sit and smoke one cigarrete after the other. All of them come from Paraguay, a warm country in the middle of South America. Ann hesitates, her fingertips suddenly stop. “How do they look like? Are they happy? One of them could be a middle aged woman and her name could be María Luisa”, Ann thinks. In the middle of the couch there could be Míriam, a tough young lady on her early twenties. But what about the third lady? Why should there be a third lady in the first place? Three is just a good number for Ann. Fernanda could be the name of the third character, a desperated mother who emigrated to Spain seeking for easy cash. The problem is that there’s no easy cash in Spain unless you deliberately ignore the law.

The washing machine was making a loud noise. María Luisa decided to stop it. As she stood up the couch seemed to be relieved of her considerable weight, because she had the esterotyped aspect of a mature latin woman: curved fat limbs and short stature. However, Míriam and Fernanda didn’t seem to notice any movement of the furniture, their sights stil hypnothized by their small TV screen “ It’s time for me to focus on their lifes and personalities, enough description for now”, Ann says to herself. Míriam and María Luisa used to work in a small office until both of them got fired without any recompensation money. This had happened two years ago and they had been living in Barcelona since then. Fernanda had been a neighbour of Míriam in Asunción and the decision of leaving their country came almost naturally, without much thinking. Her younger child needed some kind of expensive surgery, therefore she had had no other choice than emigrating. Fernanda and Míriam dreamed of going back home one day, back to their parents and kids; María Luísa dreamed of a Catalan husband who would look after her. All in all, the simple reality was that there they were, smoking and watching TV on a windy sunday evening. Sunday was their only free day, the only occasion they had to remain in their appartment. During the week the three of them worked as domestic workers, taking care of old people. The problem of their job was that it implied living with their senile bosses and being totally involved with them.

“How’s your señora doing, Míriam?”, said Fernanda.

“Better than I am doing. My back is already destroyed for her weight. She falls all the time and I have to pick her up every half an hour; y tú?”, asked Míriam. Everybody in the neighbourhood knew Fernanda’s job was not only showering good old men. She was a hooker. She had slept with several guys for money in order to help his little Samuel, who was awaiting her in Asunción with his mouth and tongue in urgent need of surgery. None of her two friends blamed her for this.

“The old man I’m taking care of doesn’t want to eat anymore. Nada de nada. I don’t know what else to do.” Fernanda took a deep breath.

Ann deletes the following part of the dialogue and rewrites it again. Mixing english and spanish doesn’t convince her. Furthermore, she would like to show things clearer, she wishes she knew how to describe both the space and the situation better. The place should look clean and poor, with some specific items such as pictures of babies and cheap flower paintings. Maybe a cross or two, just to show people from South America are far more religious than in Europe. Ann takes a short glimpse of her window. It’s not raining anymore. The neighbour of the 4th floor is washing the dishes and singing. “Shit, I can’t really create a story out of nowhere!”, she says in a low voice.

The TV was annoying them, so Míriam turned it off. María Luisa was back in the living room; she knew all about old people, how to treat them, which stories to tell them so that they could fall asleep with less than 4 sleeping pills. She was worried with the idea that she would one day become a weak aged person too, but she was too proud to confess her fear. Míriam enjoyed listenning to María Luisa’s advices about how to deal with hopeless disabled humans as much as she liked Fernanda’s stories. Every once in a while Fernanda would feel confident enough to share her sexual experiencies. Some of them were really funny. Míriam would laugh out loud any time she remembered that one about a businessmen who needed a blowjob whenever he had to speak in public. Fernanda had said he was actually a lonely guy whose self confidence had to be repaired every ten minutes.

“He is a total weirdo. Last Monday morning he had a conference at 11a.m. We were in his car next to Arrabassada, that big road outsude Zona Franca y weno, pues the man couldn’t really control himself and he... he poured some of his milk on his suit. He had no time to change his clothes so... he rushed to the conference with a big stain on his trousers!.”

This story is gaining more and more independence. Ann doesn’t control it anymore, hence she doesn’t even think about what she writes down. After all, the content is not the most important part: you just have to make THEM believe. “How can Fernanda be a hooker? She’s working six days a week! Nevermind, reality is often illogic anyway”. At this point Ann realizes that her plot is not working, that her piece of writing needs a guide or an aim. She thinks of Míriam. “Míriam! What to do with her? How to make her special? Perhaps she could be my solution, my goal. She has to be a writer! How can she become a writer? I have to find something in her, a hidden passion she’s yet not aware of. I have to create a conversion! The power of writing revealed through something meaningless, almost ridiculous. Isn’t writing like a fever, like a kind of imaginary extase?”. Ann is out of her mind. The telephone rings and all of a sudden all her ideas break, like pottery smashed into pieces. Her boyfriend asks her to go out for dinner with him to that squat place in the north of the city, where there’s the view of the river entering the sea. She loves the sea so much, she loves her boyfriend so much. Sometimes her happiness unables her to dream, to write.

“Oye, it’s already half past seven. It’s time for our soap opera, sweties”, María Luisa said. She turned on the TV once again. Watching TV together is what these women actually enjoyed the most, maybe because doing so felt like a familiar activity. A new strange kind of family, three women seeking for a chance. On the screen there was the same couple having fights and making love all the time. María Luisa seemed amazed by these televized tales about handsome people suffering from great passions. This way she could feel loved and desired any time she wanted, no matter if her real life was grey or lacked from excitement. Míriam and Fernanda used to watch the soap opera with her until their willingness to sleep finally betrayed them. The air outside became colder, you could hear the leaves crash the window glasses’. This time María Luisa was the first to sleep; she was tired, she had been cleaning all morning and she didn’t feel in the mood to stay awake. Next to María Luisa, Fernanda directed all her attention to the TV. She thought of her sick kid, of the businessman and of the couple behind the screen; she wondered how his baby was feeling like, she hated the idea that his own son was somehow as far away from her as those fake lovers on the telly. Her eyes closed.

Ann drinks tea with milk and sugar. It was not her intention to give Fernanda such an important role. “Maybe I should change this, maybe I should focus on Míriam as I have planned before”, she thinks. Ann checks what time it is. It’s eight o’clock and she has to meet her boyfriend in less than half an hour now; she smiles as she imagines his smell, his beautiful big hands and his smoothy skin. 

It was eight o’clock and Míriam was the only who had been able to stay awake. She had put up with the soap opera until the very end of the chapter. The truth is that she started to like it, that it allowed her to be somebody else; she didn’t like these cheesy characters, though. It seemed to her that she didn’t resemble that dumb and unoccupied loved lady in any sense. She first started trembling and all of a sudden a strange feeling invaded her. Something inside her told her she could just do better than this. The fiction she was offered was unbelievable, overexaggerated. At the same time, she was fed up with reality. Blinded by an unknown strength, Míriam took a pen and a notebook from the cupboard and decided to wrote down a random title of a random story. She had never wasted her time writing before, mainly because she had had no time, mainly because she thought she had nothing to tell the world. “El espejo”. That was what she wrote down -although she couldn’t have told exactly why. She began her story:

Ann is in a hurry. She picks up her bag, she jumps into her bike and she starts cycling through the oldest streets in town, next to the harbour. She finally manages to arrive on time to the north part of the city, where there is this squat and the river melting with the sea, there where a young man is already waiting for her.

1. You know? After all the problem might be I never got properly laid down by a Catalan guy. They stink. None of the Catalan boys I've loved has ever loved me back -and home is where the pussy and the mind are.