Let’s start by saying that the territory of world affairs and life, which is so even-looking, is really a labyrinth, a behaviorist one, in which some rodents (a minority of them) find the sought-after piece of cheese, but unknowingly, without really wanting it, while others that spend their lives chasing after it go around and around in interminable circles. Some of the rats are cornered, they don’t even even fidget anymore, others face the wall with a blank, empty stare, or they are cornered, and they can’t even find the relatively open space of the corridors in front of them.
Some of the rats are still shaking, under the effects of the last, disconcerting shock, since their own bodies tell them that they can still run and search and pursue. But only the reflex remains: in their tiny intellects is already a perplexity which makes even the most rudimentary movement quite impossible.
I used to think about life and people and society in a different way. I compared cars to small caves with wheels, while houses and buildings were, to me, at best nothing more than elaborate caves. In the past, I remember, I used to write poetry, so I acquired a taste for metaphors. People in the streets had, unmistakably,the fur — thinned of course — and the vestigial cranial features of Neanderthals. I still manage to see, with a sort of inner eye, the businessmen —anyway, they looked like they were businessmen — dressed in their three-piece suits, the prominent chins and the square jaws, thick necks and the back of the hand that held their briefcase, hairy, while they grunted, coughed, passed by me, with their straight, muscular torsos, looking down on me with contempt, at my worn-out jeans, my frayed denim jacket, brilliant and greasy, that I wore like a second skin.
Now, that’s what I remember, in the brief lapse of time in which the drug for the night wears off and the nurse hasn’t came yet with the drug for the day —whose name I cannot spell correctly. She will surely come in a hurry, making up for her delay, as soon an orderly or security guard hears my scream, amplified by the interminable corridors, reaches. I always scream, like a siren of a police car, when I remember certain things for so long. I don’t want to scream, and I am very careful with my scream. Sometimes I even say to him, to my scream, “Come on scream, hold it for a bit. Can’t you see that I’m thinking?” But he carries on anyway and doesn’t allow me to think.
As it was said to me around here, especially by the doctor, a character called Jonathan, a bit nerdy, my scream first grew inside me one morning in my apartment, a neat bachelor-pad located almost downtown, but this happened long after I last wore my jeans. When I wore mys jeans, and the denim jacket, I was still a student, it seems. Sometime later, it seems, I moved to this other home, which I was just talking about, the bachelor pad. I wore suits, and I had a beard that was grey and always well-trimmed. I remember that I also had a beard when I was younger. But then my beard was sort of dark brown, with some red streaks. I decided to shave it off when it started to turn grey, and then I decided that I would grow it back again only when I felt established, more or less, of sorts, at a higher professional level, where I believed I should be. I remember once, back in those days, I landed by chance at a party where the most brilliant and well-known writers in town had gathered. All of them in gray suits, and all of them with carefully trimmed beards, of a basically gray tone, and with different shades of color spotting their grey hair, especially at the temples. They looked so cut that I decided that as soon as I could reach a position in life in which I would have to wear a suit, I would grow a grey beard myself….
I don’t know how many years passed between then and now, or when, in which month of which year, was the day that I started to scream. But I remember vaguely that I was listening to a song from the early seventies or the late sixties, a sort of hymn to the pseudo-hippies who lived here, in Toronto, and I imagine, much moreso in the States. When the big rally come in Toronto, the first one against the Vietnam war, or the bomb, I don’t remember, I was one of the speakers, you know? Not the keynote (but seems that this term was used more in other kinds of meetings, more formal, which I attended much later), and it seems that I was even one of the main speakers, but I’m not sure. Somebody was with me, alongside me, at this time — maybe the same person who gave me, or loaned me, or recommended to me the record, or the tape.I can remember only a full skirt, sprinkled with tiny flowers on a violet background. But in my memory, in the place where her face must have been, there is a hole, a blank space. In my memory, I stand at the front of the mob, dressed in my denim outfit, my beard playing with the breeze, wearing a red headband, and sometimes in my memory this person whom I remember has a dark hole instead of a face, and then it seems that I start to scream. Sometimes there is a white, shiny surface in the place where her face should be, and then I laugh, or a laugh is produced in me. But the men in white overalls or uniforms, they have the same reaction. They make their way across the room, and they leap forward, grabbing me, while one of them inserts a needle in my arm. Then I don’t remember any more. The demonstration ends.
^^^
Jorge Etcheverry Arcaya is a Chilean-born poet, editor, publisher, and translator. He has been living in Canada since the early years of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, where he was a member of the poetry collectives Grupo América and Escuela de Santiago. A highly regarded writer, he has been a key cultural figure and promoter in Latin American and immigrant communities in his adopted country and has continued his prolific literary and editorial work. His texts have been published in various countries and in multiple genres, including poetry, criticism, literary fiction, essays, and science fiction. His latest books are Clorodiaxepóxido (Chile 2017), Canadografía: antología de prosa hispanocanadiense (Chile 2017) Los herederos (2018) Samarkanda (Canada 2019), Outsiders (2020). He has recently contributed to the anthologies Wurlitzer. Cantantes en la memoria de la poesía chilena (Chile 2018), Antología de la poesía chilena de la última década (Chile 2018), Antología mundial: la papa, seguridad alimentaria (Bolivia 2019), and Anthologie de la poésie chilienne, 26 poètes d’aujourd’hui (Francia 2021). His latest publications in magazines appeared in La Pluma del Ganso (Mexico 2018) and Entre Paréntesis (Chile 2022).
Image by the author.