Autor:    Julián Silva Puentes

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED

We have been without electricity for two days because we forgot to pay the bill. It happened two nights ago, when we got home from work to find the lights not turning on and the shower water as cold as Bogotá hail.

—I heard that sometimes it takes a week to reconnect the service —Diana told me with the weight of the 12 hours of work we´ve been in since we left home in the morning.

—We will pay first thing in the morning and the matter will be solved —I told her, even knowing the long and painful process that must be done for the electricity company to reconnect the service.

—We will pretend that we are like Hemingway and his wife when they lived in Paris in the 1920s —Diana replies, trying to make the best of the situation.

Diana, who is reading Ernest Hemingway´s A Moveable Feast, is floating in reverie and romanticism with the artists who lived in France during the decade following World War I, and my imagination, whose will has long since ceased to be mine, needs little to get far away from where it is, especially if someone mentions the Paris of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Pound.

The Paris of Hemingway and Fitzgerald ceased to exist more than 100 years ago, when you could forget about your work until you left the house the next day and returned to the ring. “Another day of work is another day to pay the bills”, people used to say when they could release themselves from their obligations, at least at night, on the night that was made for rest.

“The night was made for rest”, my grandmother used to say, may she rest in peace. Before my grandmother left this world to rest forever, people didn´t stay up late watching videos of people imitating (in voiceover) a poor asshole who can´t pronounce the word “potassium”. Nor were there any television presenters without major concerns in the world except those of posting videos of their children eating, talking, dancing, playing, watching television and even, which is a bit macabre for me, sleeping.

—They post videos of their children sleeping! —I tell Diana.

—The world is full of perverts —she answers rightly.

I could get used to this —I replied without coming to the case, but feeling that it would not be a bad thing to live a week without electricity.

—We´re not going to stop paying our bills so we can read in bed by candlelight.

—We could have lived at any time other than this —I tell her.

—What´s wrong with this time?

—Too much noise —I reply— and too many distractions, too.

Of course, I think the opposite the next morning, when we have to heat water in the pasta pots (our kitchen works on gas) to bathe. Bending over there in the shower, with a cup that serves to pour hot water on my head, I remember one of those towns in Myanmar where there are no showers and people bathe as we should do now. They also go to the bathroom sitting on their thighs with their asses in the air, because there are no toilets there but a hole in the floor and a bucket with water to clean themselves.

—I still think that all past times are better —I tell Diana, who looks at me knowing that I am as much of an adventurer as she is of wanting to go to the bathroom in one of those holes in Myanmar.

A few years ago I was, I mean an adventurer. I could go days without bathing because I preferred to sleep on the buses to save the money of the hotel while traveling through Ecuador and Peru. I also didn´t get a stomach ache from eating Hungry Jack´s burgers after 9:00 pm, and I didn´t feel devastated if I had to get up early for work after hitting the bars the night before.

I suppose that is the time that is running out for everyone, and it is not wrong to keep up with it and change with it accepting the bad as a necessary weight, and the good as the opportunity that life gives us to breathe a little and appreciate the things that we have not managed to ruin.

In any case, stopping the machine for a couple of days and living without the hassle of technology, gives me the excuse to imagine times that perhaps were not more comfortable and that, nevertheless, ran with less hurry to be able to do things whose end practical is nil, but they definitely feed the soul. In addition, spending the night reading without the annoying ringing of the cell phone telling you that your boss needs you to do something urgent, is a luxury these days.

“I´ll get that report right away, sir!”, you write back fighting the urge to send him a steaming poop over the phone so he knows what you think of him and by the way, confuse him a bit, because no one with a penny of intelligence would send their boss to eat shit even with a tender caricature of a turd whose perfect shape must be the work of a disguised cropphilic who whatsapp gave him the opportunity to shit on all of us.

Speaking of shitting on someone, I haven´t written in a long time without vomiting the desperation that sometimes compels me. Maybe it is because I finally have a job after so long and I can go through the days without thinking about how I will pay the credit card, or if I have enough to go to the store and buy groceries. However, and despite the security that comfort brings with it, for some reason that I have not yet been able to understand, it is the ridiculous and adverse situations, in which I put myself on the scene, those that drive me to write. It must be because I see the world as one absurdity after another, especially if it is about something really important for people, such as nurturing an excessive ambition and accumulating things, especially the latter, that of spending one´s life from one misery to another to get hold of both physical and spiritual garbage, whose true power lies in ostentation.

It is the human comedy, as Balzac called it, I mean the distractions that we get along to stop looking at ourselves well in depth and realize the magnitude of our failures. Precisely about that I am forced to talk, about failure, because the success and the euphoria of triumph are mine, they belong to me and for that reason I choose not to talk to anyone about it, just as I am not interested in reading or writing about the success of others. I prefer the incessant struggle of the nonconformists who find a reason to move on, even if they do not have a compelling reason to live.

It is the eternal wandering of the vagabond —because I was one once and to a certain extent still am— that which captures my attention and forces me to explore on my own with no other goal than the perpetual search driven by an insatiable thirst to know what is hidden behind the apparent things.

—I like it when you talk about the things you like when you don´t talk about the things you don´t like —Diana tells me with the ugly newly acquired vice of telling the same thing in a thousand different ways.

—You´re starting to talk the way I write —I replied, and she gave me one of those smiles that tells you that everything is fine now and it will always be so it will never be.

That alone is enough for my head to stop going to the swamp where it hides when things don´t go my way. In any case, I like to visit that swamp from time to time, because it helps me create my own human comedy that is so different and so similar to that of all the creatures that breathe and die in this world in which, to find a true reason to live and by the way, give value to existence, it is so difficult.

Speaking of giving value to existence, I hope this writing has it, I mean some kind of value, because it is the first time in a long time that I stopped talking about my bad fortune. However, I think I am better at ridiculing the most pressing situations with me inside, because failure is a rich source of humor even though you make yourself look like a broken shoe, which has happened to me for some time according to my relatives: “You always make yourself look like a loser... we all want to read hopeful writings, not fill ourselves with other people´s problems”.

I don´t know if what my family says is true or not, but what I am sure of is that if Céline´s Journey to the end of the night, would have ended with Robinson alive and Ferdinand Bardamu walking on a sunny day, happy that he finally found what he sought after knowing so much stupidity and human misery, we would be talking about a lukewarm and complacent writing as are the morning programs where a model and a presenter whose smile is as false as the girdle that tightens the belly to both, sing and dance and do cute things so that those who look at them from their homes forget the absurdity of their lives submerged in the deceptive versatility that false optimism brings with it.

Everything is illuminated. Johathan Safran Foer wrote a beautiful book with that title, however this writing does not talk about Foer or anything that has to do with his work. I talk about light ad illumination, because the energy company cut off the light and the truth is that I could not think of another title, also I went around the bush again and I must give shape to this writing that is already long and heavy. Anyway, anonymity gives me freedom, a certain freedom, and when the only ones who read me are Diana and the three poor devils whom no one would believe if they told the world that the second reincarnation of Christ appeared to them, I can mumble senseless  in the way of the angry retards that are seen so much in Bogotá, and say the first thing that comes to my mind: pornography, xenophobia or I could even talk about politics in this country where to comment on anything that goes against the vox populi, can put you out of work and even take your life.

Open your eyes and look for what I said before about what is hidden behind the apparent things, is what I want to say here, especially at this time when visibility is so low because the power company cut us off the light and words are entangled with the shadows left by the candles when they are not dancing, because they have a life of their own, the candles, and they dance to the rhythm of a silent music whose meaning I can hardly guess, but which is inside of me, together with everything that I do not know about the perception of the world that I have managed to build by fits and starts.

In any case, Hemingway´s Movable feast and writing by candlelight is a good excuse to forget about things that makes your life impossible in the world out there, but reflection, so necessary in this age where you are bombarded with appearances and mirages 24 hours a day, it is our duty as individuals to at least try to understand the true meaning of existence. We will never achieve it, that´s for sure, I mean to understand, as Céline said “the fucking reason we are here”, but it is worth undertaking the search even if it is to get lost again and again, because only those who lose the route are forced to find their own way.

—The road to the office is going to be awful tomorrow —I tell Diana with thunder and rain hitting the bedroom window.

—Bogotá turns into a huge quagmire when it rains —she replies.

Diana is right: Bogotá becomes a huge quagmire when it rains. It is also the case when it is not raining and you must take four buses to get to the office in a journey that takes almost two hours each way. In any case, it is still today, at least today night, and there are still eight hours until the sun rises and we must face the world that runs so fast that it does not leave time to think about Hemingway and his wife Hadley eating oysters and reading by candlelight in Paris in 1921. We could do many things, live more relaxed for example, if we only stopped time for at least two hours a day, to look at the ceiling and feel what whether we are experimenting at the moment, or at least to put into practice what Buddhists have called “the action of inaction”.

Speaking of inaction, it is time to put it into practice and let the delicious noise of the rain on our window and the soft light of the candles lull our dreams. We will let the world out there eat each other alive with the bosses and their urgent messages of the night, the off-fashioned actresses filming their children in their sleep, and my inability to engage in this world of superficial cares and immediacy that doesn´t lead nowhere except to contribute to rampant human stupidity.

Fortunately, I have been making myself stupider over the years and I also count with the determination of dogs that chase cars in the street without knowing why or for what until they finally get hit. So I will play dumb with the electricity bill and I will insist on not paying it for a few more days until becomes impossible for us to continue living like this. The silence of the apartment and the candlelight have given me a respite that I have not felt in a long time, so I will tell Diana that I will pay the bill first thing in the morning even if it is not true. I´ll think of something tomorrow when stops raining. Or maybe next month, when rains one more time and I will have to think of an excuse as to why the power got cut off again and yet, everything looks brighter than ever.