On Magical Places of the World, or Here and Now
Somewhere (or in a few places) on this planet, right now as I write a short piece about places in the world, winemakers and their children play with stepping on grapes, in an archaic, classic and handcrafted style of brewing, and no one thinks about dirty or clean feet, about the implications of human contact with the fruit from which will leave a liquid to warm our winter nights. Nobody thinks of increasing the exports of the product, of manufacturing more to profit more. At least not as parents and children amuse themselves with the strange and pleasurable sensation of kneading these berries and feeling their juice being squeezed out of their shells, causing their feet to sink into a growing layer of a natural liquid that will be fermented in alcohol later, to end up in nights of joy that will be temporarily forgotten with morning headache the next day. In this same place of the world, while parents and children don’t know the mechanical press of grapes, a grandfather is sitting watching the new generation of his family giving continuity to the businesses that his father, and the father of his father began in that small Portuguese land in the past century. Verses of old songs run through the old man’s mind, and he cannot contain the contagious joy of his loved ones, and the sadness of knowing that soon he will have to say goodbye to all this. Somewhere in the world, winemakers and their children remember what it is to be a family.
Somewhere (or in a few places) on this planet, right now as I write a short piece about places in the world, young teenagers count on their calendars the passage of time of their relationships with their boyfriends and girlfriends — one month, two months, three months of dating, a year of dating: it’s time to celebrate. They look at their cellphones in the expectation that a congratulatory message will arrive, even knowing that when it arrives the cellphones will warn them, but nothing so far. The anxiety grows. Fear that their partners have forgotten the date also grows (and anger at this possibility follows the same path). These young people are so scattered in thoughts about what they expect to get as gifts (flowers? chocolates? letters?) that they don’t even realize the beauty of the moment they live — nothing is more important in the world than this simple commemorative date. It doesn’t really matter that other people prefer to distance themselves from this kind of frivolity, to those I write about, it’s all or nothing on this day, it’s the end of the world or a fresh start depending on what attitude their partners will take. Some forget that this celebration has to be reciprocal, and just waiting for the other to take the initiative is not enough. Somewhere in the world, young teens celebrate love relentlessly.
Somewhere (or in a few places) on this planet, right now as I write a short piece about places in the world, there are law judges who cannot sleep at night because their judicial decisions weigh more than a simple act of office, they weigh as if they were decisions of their personal lives. These judges are rare. They are often too young in their careers, or dedicate themselves to the art of being human with a unique fidelity, or have not yet learned how to practice their professions with the coldness required of them. All I know is that they cannot sleep now; they take some pills for headaches, lie down, rest their heads on pillows, and the words they wrote in their sentences dance provocatively in their minds — it’s nothing erotic, they’re more like guillotine operators taunting the one who was sentenced to death and who is about to have his head cut off. These judges feel like the very condemned ones whom they condemned, the very children withdrawn from their familiar scopes whom they withdrawn, the very owners of banks that went bankrupt whom they decreed their bankruptcies. They fear death, helplessness, hunger. They feel that they are not fulfilling their roles as protectors, enforcers, advocates of law as a mechanism for maintaining a cohesive society; they feel, then, that they are failing. Then the pills begin to take effect — they sleep, just to wake up the next morning ready for another day of work and, consequently, another night of disturbance. Until eventually they learn the advantages and disadvantages of having the power at their hands. Somewhere in the world, judges flagellate themselves, because of the right motives or not, only time will tell us.
Somewhere (or in a few places) on this planet, right now as I write a short piece about places in the world, there are countless people watching the others so they can transpose the details of life around us on paper. These people are winemakers, young teenagers in love, judges, and so many other things. They are all the people in the world, and at the same time they are themselves. This is the difficulty — to be themselves while all the other beings in the world insist on being part of their (our) personalities, as intruders who are sometimes welcome and sometimes we would like to kill them quickly. They are people who self-flagellate through drowning in wine because of the love that suffocates them. They are beings that carry all the stories of the universe at their fingertips, and how heavy their hands are because of this…
Everywhere on this planet, right now as I write a short piece about places in the world, life smiles and cries, birds sing and accidentally die, we write and free our souls from these invisible handcuffs.
