2023-04-30 06:20:06
It’s Saturday night and I’m on the sidewalk of a bar, a bowling alley, in Bogotá. I went out for air, fleeing the track full of sticky bodies, dogging, lights and heat.
Outside is fine. Outside, girls and boys are grouped regarding to enter, still fresh, still smelling of perfume, their makeup intact, their clothes in place.
The neon letters on the front of the bar glow in the dark street. It’s not that it’s particularly dark, but the city streets always seem dim, at night. but also during the day, that sky always gray, always regarding to rain or raining or raining. And the cable.
The cables cross the streets forming improbable networks; taut at best, hanging like outdated panties most of the time.
It is impossible to look up and not feel like an animal regarding to fall into a hunter’s net… I might say fish and fisherman, but not because in this case the huge, thick net comes from above, it will fall like a blanket, a trap subtle.
I stare at the wiring, a little dizzy from the threads that come and go, tangled, woven by a lazy spider. I think, I remember, of an impressive photo of the Mexican Enrique Metinides, one of my favorites of El Niño, as his colleagues in the police section of the newspapers of his time called him, since Metinides began working as a photographer’s apprentice at the age of ten. , still a boy in shorts, in 1950s Mexico.
A worker lies on the network formed by the cables perhaps of an electrical line, perhaps a telephone line. His body with his back turned, his arms open in a cross, in the photo you can see the perfect crease in the pants and loafers that the operator was wearing. It hardly looks like a corpse, it almost gives the impression of being a trapeze artist who has dropped into the net following doing three or four complete turns in the air.
From these cables the thought goes to the taut threads that form like overhead wire fences on the side of the road.
I’ve seen, a while back, I think following a flood season, hundreds of thousands of little dark balls hanging from those wires. I have seen it from the window of the bus that runs between Paraná and Santa Fe, leaving the subfluvial tunnel, now on the Santa Fe side. I remember them as something out of place on the postcard of a sunny morning, with an absolutely clear sky. The shine of the silk between the black cables, the strangeness of those specks that seemed to be suspended in the air, the belated recognition (might you say recognition if it’s the first time you’ve been to something?), a little startled, quite fascinated: spiders, hundreds of thousands of spiders large enough to be seen from a vehicle at average speed. Spiders or baby spiders. On the wires, in the same way as between the trunks of the shins. Crystalline networks on the side of the road.
It was around the same time that the irupés returned to that part of the Paraná. That’s why I think it was at the time of the floods.
When I go back into the bowling alley I see a Lilliputian girl, beautiful and perfect in her tiny size. I have never seen such a small woman. Dressed like most girls in tight clothing and see-through clothes, she hangs out with her group of friends.
On the screens that hang from the ceiling, Shakira takes revenge, multiplied, on her ex. Everyone knows the song by heart, I know it too.
You may also like
1682836656
#wires #Profile