Mastery in the art of war

 

Yesterday I woke up in a nightmare. In fact, I woke up to snap out of it and know, rightly, that I was living another nightmare. It is recurrent. Not in the characters, except my eyes, I remain living these moments that seem to last an eternity. I try to fall asleep again, but I have to resort to the music of Tibetan flutes. I went back to sleep. I didn't go back to the previous location. And if so, I didn't wake up again and didn't remember the continuation. In reality, I've been living this kind of nightmare since the early eighties. Massacres. Massacres. Destroyed buildings, figures among the shadows of the rocks and rubbish in the streets, I see myself helping people, mainly children, I see a wooden body, the back of what used to accompany horses and also agricultural tractors. Some of them happen in urban environments, like the latter, towns and cities destroyed, houses and buildings razed. They started as blurred shapes, as if I were a photographer collecting spaces, objects, capturing lights and shadows, but then, when I see that it is my eyes trying to focus on what surrounds me, I look for the lens between my nose and the darkness of the external landscape, always dark, and that is when I begin to feel and see the nightmare of a frightening reality, on the earthly plane. Groups of people running, I see the arms passing by, and the speed with which they push forward and scrape against the thick bushes, the clothes, shirts and t-shirts torn and bloody, jeans, running feet, I stand up and there are bodies fallen everywhere, I want to see where I am, but destruction seems to be the common factor in all of them. In the eighties, I was terrified of pseudo-hotels, guesthouses, places where people spent the night, which, as the night wore on, partially replaced the image of comfort and rest, of peace after a day on the road, by excessive brightness, empty spaces of large extensions, glazed, and, at the same time, through a normal elevator, apparently normal, going up or down, you would reach another space where the light was diffused through propagation and divided by thin, transparent plastic curtains, where you saw stretchers and not beds, where you saw surgeons and not guesthouse staff, preparing rooms and bookings for guests.

In my eighties, my recurring nightmares were almost always about organ trafficking. I remember having booked a room in Águeda, during a show, sleeping for two adults and my son was in the middle of us. In reality, that arrangement had been made so that, unlike the band, we would sleep in a village, on the other side, far from Águeda. I called to confirm and there was no appointment, someone had forgotten to note it in the book and there were no rooms available. After those hours of dismantling sound equipment, folding cables, establishing and organizing goals and schedules, the solution found was to travel until the tiredness was impossible to postpone. Stop for two or three hours at a gas station on the side of the road. And so it was, in three and a half hours, we were in the desired city and there was still a family guesthouse in the center of the village, where we could spend the night and wake up for a late breakfast, at the nearest bakery. On a hot day.

In the nightmare, we never left Águeda, because after the supposedly pleasant, welcoming room, although small and with a tiny window, you would suddenly feel pain. I would go down the carpeted stairs to the ground floor to call for an ambulance and a couple would accompany me without alarm, asking me to be patient and calm, and they would open a small door next to the room, from where they would take out a stretcher, where they would place your body contorted in pain. Your swollen eyes would not open but the line you made on your forehead was there, revealing that the pain continued. The competent and cold couple was replaced, when he looked at them again, by a woman with large glasses and a man who, due to the lack of color, resembled a ghost. As I held our son, his legs spread across my hips and picked up the bag to follow the stretcher, I was pushed to the floor with the boy in my arms, the door was locked. Sweat was pouring down my forehead, my hair, my belly, the boy was holding the action man in his hands, sitting on the edge of the bed and I, with a kind of shoehorn, which had broken, was trying to break the lock and suddenly, the door opened, and I, with him in my arms, started to run, and I saw the glass corridor through which the light blue light from outside penetrated, not at all in tune with the night, then I saw your stretcher being pushed and I still didn't want to report myself to those who were afraid that they would lock us in again. I waited for the elevator to go down and I would find myself in that enormous space, the size of a football field, which was only visible in spaces divided by those transparent curtains where the wheels of the stretchers were metal and rolled across a floor without noise, you could hear the wheels scratching the floor like a bird whistling in the distance and, while I put my finger between the boy's lips so he wouldn't make any noise, the two of them leaning on the floor, separated us from you by a transparent curtain with two men dressed in the same blue that entered the immense corridors where we had walked. When they came out of the space of that curtain, I would grab the boy's hand and pick him up, so we could see and talk to you. And it was his face, sleeping, that we saw, with a white sheet up to his chest. Arms covered. I called you softly, asking God to hear me. Suddenly, you opened your eyes and told me that they had removed your appendix. But was that a hotel or a hospital? The facade was a hotel, and the back was an organ trafficking clinic. And before the nightmare ended, we would have confirmation that the pain you felt was the pain that everyone who stayed there would feel if they drank water provided by the facilities. That would cause pain. Which would lead guests to become voluntary and camouflaged patients, donating organs to private hospitals and clinics so that the rich and powerful could continue living in good health, diminishing the health of many others. 

When the nightmares started to have war and violence, you never entered them, I was always trying to save my life, none of my children were with me, but I saw many children and adults lose their lives, fighting against barbarity and natural accidents of great proportions.

Before this nightmare, the barbarity, the rapes, the shootings and all kinds of savagery, it was with women and children in Latin America. Hair was torn out, like scalps, with quick and violent gestures, bodies were dragged along the wood, loaded with splinters and nail heads that went into the flesh and opened holes from which blood gushed. Wooden doors that slammed in the wind, on days that could be beautiful, with a blue sky and an immense sea, with low waves and assertive tongues of foam, where sweaty men wearing shorts and pants rolled up to the knees beat boys, often after having done the same to their mothers. Children where sweat mixed with blood and pain, and I looked better and then, as the dream continued, I wondered what it would be like to grow up and live with the recurring images of all the violence experienced. If they would know how to smile, how they would smile, if they would ever find enough peace to turn a corner without looking back, if when they bathed in the sea or when they lay down to sleep, they could forget the days and nights of terror. How do you forget violence? Can you fall asleep when events change drastically and then, in a permanent state, remain in the latency of a signal that could predict new despair? Could they relax and believe that those days would never come again? I saw myself during the day running with other people like me, without blood or bruises on my body, but soaked in sweat and fatigue, tearing pieces of fabric, clothes caught on threads next to wooden huts, the improvised homes of those who can only live one day at a time, and I tried, with these shreds of fabric, to stop another drip, another wound, after pouring seawater over it.

This last one, which made me resort to Tibetan flutes to go back to sleep, and which seemed to me to be more lasting than all the others, which revealed details and words that worked like keys that opened mysteries, as if they could lock up all the weapons and machetes used, all the men without any shred of humanity, in the same room that would need to be the size of a football field, but was the size of the mountains that I memorized in front of that shack, for all the atrocities and all the terrorists that I had seen in my nightmares. A man with straight shoulder-length hair and a huge, thick, dark mustache let out a scream that frightened everyone. I believe that even those who walked with him and practiced the same evils, all feared him. Cold green eyes, skin very sunburned. A red shirt the color of blood that contaminated every landscape it passed through. A machete gleamed at his waist, on a rope belt that was tied over his pants rolled up to his knees, barefoot and barbaric. I traded people for fruit. He traded sex and food for people. There were many children who became adults through force, girls who prostituted themselves so as not to die and, even so, saw death at their side, ugly and ungrateful, sudden and without mercy for anyone.

I remain in meditation for ten, fifteen minutes, after which I get up again, to cool off with water and I look for the notebook and the pen that are my lover, the one sleeping on the pillow next to me. And I draw a conch shell, at the end of the horizon, a sea, a rock at the entrance and a hawk on it.

They want to screw me over with the house and the land. They set an ambush for me, but I already knew that. They are not concerned about my mother's health, nor mine. They want to steal your dreams, your home, your health and your smile. They devise plans and tricks. They want to paralyze me. And I do not obey their wish. Because the power to choose is mine. The falcon remains on the rock without flying. I write a name, cross it out, write another. I now obey the instinctive movement of my fingers and seven names are written side by side. Four of them are on the side of the rock topped by the dark-headed pilgrim. And on the other side, three more names. I put a date underneath and my hand keeps writing. New date. One date for each list. A strategy and some risks, like those seen in the Swedish game. And I draw swords on the lists. And in the end, already on the beach, I see my back wanting to rise towards a shadow that projects itself above my head. There are no walking rocks. And slowly, the stain grows and overlaps. I stick seven thin sticks into the ground, where I drew the beach and looking at the falcon, I feel a blow to my neck, three stabs in my back, two laughs from a familiar and terrifying voice. God sends me a flash, a ray through which I direct myself to face those who want to humiliate me with slander, lies and horrifying schemes. And behold, I rise from the ground to the sky, down below my enemies strike more blows on a body that I abandoned. That was mine. And the truth is dropped like a bomb that will explode on the ground where I no longer find myself. I'm above. And the details dismantle any and all lies. I resist and look at the jackals I fed. They are just poor, dying shadows, without their own light and capable of devouring those who carry the light.

The bed once again supports the weight of the body that is still mine. The one I can go back to and let go of. I put down the paper with names, dates and forecast events, and put down the pen. Both under the side cushion. I turn off the light. And I light peace, in the torch of God in my chest. And I ask in secret, quietly, the angels who are here to watch over mine. I re-enter the dream world. I am a latent oracle.

Daddy, I'm going to sleep.