Chukita va de cumple

Los días tranquilos y soleados del otoño dan paso pronto al invierno.

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La plaza de Oña se cubre de nieve y las calles se vacían.

!Qué frío, brrrrrr!

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Nuestra amiga Chukita se aburre colgada en su vieja balanza de pesar verduras.

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Lucía trata de consolarla con la cabeza de Fraulein Eisaugen, el juguete favorito de Chukita.

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"¡Chukita, te vamos a llevar de cumple! ¡El abuelo cumple años!¡Jugaremos al escondite y comeremos tarta", le dice Lucía.
Pero Chukita es muy lista y tiene sus propios planes.

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Primero: jugar al veo-veo.

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Después: jugar a "¿qué seré de mayor?", hoy toca "seré carnicerita".

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¡Ooh! Nacho se ha cansado y no quiere jugar más.

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Chukita busca a alguien más con quién jugar.

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¿Por qué nadie le presta atención? Chukita se está enfadando.

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Uno incluso intenta asustarla con un trabuco.

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Pero hoy Chukita no está para bromas.

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Luego, usa su magia potagia para encerrar a los demás bromistas en sus espejos espejitos.

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Y por fín encuentra con quién jugar -a cocinar-.

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!Ja, ja, ja! ¡Ir de cumple no está tan mal!

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Air

He thought it was an asthma attack, then the radio announced that the atmosphere had been privatized. Coughing, he called his neighbor, who answered with a sore throat. 'Yes, it is true', said the neighbor,'you should pay in the counter by the garbage bins. It goes by hours,Sundays are free'.

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He ran to the garbage bin and introduced all the coins he had in the newly installed Global Air Co. counter. 'Thanks', said the counter. The machine also asked him whether he wanted a receipt, but he was looking the other way doing some breathing exercises he had learned ina Yoga course he left unfinished due to persistent back pains and boredom. Curiously, there was no smell of the garbage in the private air. Advantages of modernity, he thought.

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Down at the bar, over a beer, his friends where discussing it. Half of them were for the air privatization and half against it. The argument for was that the private air was efficient and clean and only allowed good smells. The argument against is that not everyone could affordit. Then the TV showed a repetition of last years best Soccer games and they stopped talking about it. 'I need some holidays', he thought. He asked his friends whether anybody was for a trip to the beach inthe weekend. All of them had work to do. The companies they worked for had decided that weekends were a reminiscence of the past and led to inefficiency. Fortunately, he was unemployed. Thus, he borrowed somemoney for more Global Air expenditure and a weekend in the beach.

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'Welcome to Las Palmeras Beach. You are entering private property'. He was not surprised. He filled in some coins in the World Air counter bythe Beach reception and bought a ticket: special package offer, 30minutes real sea water swim and free lying in the sand plus arefreshment and surprise.
While playing with the waves, an old man approached him smiling.'Would you care for some deep conversation looking at the horizon?'. Of course, he did. It cost only five Euros. The old man quoted some famous sayings in a low tone of voice. 'Everybody should love the sea. The sea is our past and our future', the old man said. 'Absolutely,there is nothing like the sea. I remember...' 'Time is out, interrupted the old man, 'if you want to continue having a deep conversation you will be charged'. 'Is this the surprise of thespecial package?', he asked. 'No,' replied, the old man, 'the surprisewas supposed to be a shark attack show. But the shark is currently being repaired. Software problems. It will be on next week. Talk with reception'.

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He was so touched by the conversation with the old man that he forgot to pay the ticket for Monday's air quota while leaving Las PalmerasBeach. Driving home he remembered the weekends in the beach with his parents, when he was a kid. He then arrived home, drank a non alcoholic beer and went to bed. He died relatively peacefully in his sleep before anyone could do anything about it. Due to the recent air privatization campaign and the high demand, prices for burials had gone up. However, his friends found a special asphyxia offer in the neighborhoods church's funerary home. Bury one friend and get the next two half price. They all cried a bit for him before rushing back tothe office.

Jellyfish

The beach is eternal. It's the same one she stepped onto naked and smiling -while her father held her hands and her mother took thepicture - thirty years ago in Sardinia. The same beach she made loveon, twice with her ex, Josep, in Reus, Catalonia, on the midsummernight, three years ago, after he told her he could see theMediterranean in her eyes. The Algiers beach where Camus played football as a kid.

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She knows that all beaches are in reality the same beach. All seas are the same sea. Let the world listen to the sea and let nobody die without loving the sea. The beach is empty. There is still snow on Mount Olympos. The village of Stomio covered by a veil of lonely laziness. The tourist season starts in a month. The land lady told her to watch out for the jellyfish.

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She once met a man who told her he had fallen inlove with a woman named Athenea, like the goddess. There are no jellyfish in the water.She swims naked; she believes nobody is watching. Once, she stepped on a strange kind of stonefish in the Caribbean andspent an hour and a half in excruciating pain. That was when she thought of the concept of torture and understood it.

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A horseman approaches. The horse is black. The man wears a whitebaseball hat. She wraps the towel around her naked body. A feeling of danger and expectation invades her. She is surprisingly afraid and wonders about her own feelings. There is no logic in feelings. She often profoundly hates and loves the same person.The horseman passes by. He does not even bother to say good morning (it's eight in the morning, she woke up at six. Martha wakes up at six or earlier ever since she broke up with Josep). She has the feelingthat she has seen this horseman so many times before. That ruthless horseman.

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A triton comes from the sea with a trident in his hand. He is coveredin scales, has four horns, green shiny eyes and long yellow fangs. He waives at Martha and asks her, dear Martha what are you doing here in Stomio beach so early in the morning at this time of the year. Martha answers I am part of a dream and I was never meant to make any sense.The triton says fine, but you also understand I must eat you. She nods. That is the only reason I am here. He lifts his trident while the horseman approaches.

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Nitrogen

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The air flies out of my jacket and the water rapidly covers my head. It is still cold from the winter. I press my nose and blow to compensate the pressure in my ears while I descend to the sandy bottom six meters under the water. My friend Kostas is already down on the ground on his knees, as if praying. Bubbles come out of our masks. They fly like silver mushrooms to the surface.

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Kostas checks my equipment under the water. 200 bars of air pressure in the bottle. Every strip is well adjusted. We swim slowly down towards the depth and the rocky wall. The wall is more than 90 meters deep. We descend to 15 meters. My forehead hurts for some reason. Kostas waives at me and I press the button to gain buoyancy. I think I made a mistake but am not sure what. I have too many led weights in the belt. The wall falls into darkness, I feel like a climber on a free fall.

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At 40 meters the water is dark, I hold on to a hole in the wall. A hand comes out of the hole and pulls me in the cave. `I was waiting for you', says a man with a long white beard. `How come we can speak under the water?', I ask Mr. Marx. `Take off your mask, you do not need it', he says.

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Karl looks at me with a grave look in his eyes, `I need to ask you a question'. I listen to him while I gaze around the cave. It is full of books and shelves. An octopus crawls over Althusser's 'Ideology and Ideological State Aparatusses' and a compilation of Kropotkin's essays. A group of clownfish parade in formation around the table. There is one of those depth monster fishes in the space between Freud's Theory of Psychoanalysis and Adorno's books. It probably waiting for some small fish to catch.

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Karl lights his pipe. I wonder what is he going to ask. What happened to his dreams and so on. I quickly think whether to talk about revolutionaries becoming burocrats or to be elusive. I mean, the old man looks happy in his cave, should I really tell him about globalisation, international terror, civilization clashes and so on?

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He exhales a cloud of smoke in the water and says `Could you help me fix the internet connection down here? I haven't found a provider willing to dive down here for the cable instalation'.

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I check his laptop. `But how come we can talk normally down here? This contradicts all scientific theories, including your dialectic materialism', I say.

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`Dreams are made of water', Kostas says while he hands me the yellow emergency regulator and holds both of us five meters deep to spend eight minutes of emergency decompression. The rays of light fall straight passed our bodies down to the depths of the rock wall and a few bubbles full of pipe smoke ascend gently from the bottom.

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Achill Day-o

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Galwegian Ger, Polish Magda and myself sit on the bench of the Annexe Inn. We have a Sunday morning breakfast pint -to honour Kris Kristofferson's song- facing the sun and the sea in Keel, in the Achill island. The place is close to Dooagh, the village where some Don Allum arrived after rowing accross the Atlantic Ocean in 1982. A mean invisible rain is falling down. It gets you wet without notice.

We talk about peoples crossing oceans in ancient times. Apparently some scientists have recently found cannabis, cocaine and other American drugs in the lungs and tissue of Egyptian mummies. They wonder whether some native American crossed the ocean long ago and ended up sharing their stuff with the Pharaoh. That, or else someone with a sense of humour had an original party inside the museum not so long ago.

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The day before we had hiked the island's mountains with the Galway University Mountaneering Club. We walked up hills covered by wet bog, passing by the eerie sight of the deserted village of Slievemore. Its ruins remind of the mid-19th Century potato famine that decimated the area.

Up in the hills, the fog may catch you in the edge of the cliff. 'You cannot see anything but this is the highest cliff in Western Europe, more than 600 metres', a young red haired Achillian lady mountaneer tells me.

Suddenly a gust of wind pushes us closer to the edge. 'There are a lot of fairies in this area. People hear voices in the mist and so on', says she. These are not nice creatures: they are much more scary than what you may think'.

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Another spooky story comes from the hostel where we spent the night. The Valley House Hostel was the scenery of the brutal attack on its lady owner in 1894. She survived both the beating and his lover's attempt to burn her alive together with the building. Her ghost still wanders the hostels corridors and scares the occassional tourist on his way to the toilet in the middle of the night. There is a black and white portrait of the culprit of the beating and burning. His face tells of a man not to joke with.

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Down in the pub, the crowd gulps Guinness and other brews by the fireplace. A couple of musicians play old folk tunes using a flute, a concertina (small accordion) and a bodhrán (the traditional drum made of goat skin). An older man with a sailor hat joins the scene. Everyone falls silent waiting for him to sing. I expect some old Irish tune about rebels, misty green hills and so on. Instead, he starts with a loud 'Daaaay-o'!, followed by 'day-ay-ay-o', and of course 'day light come and me wan'go home'. The bad spirits banish away.

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Seals, New Yorkers and other Árainn creatures

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I take a toy plane (six passengers) to Inis Mór, the largest of the Aran islands (Oileáin Árann).

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The ten minutes flight is shaky and low, but not scary, because it really feels you are in a harmless little toy.

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The passengers clap upon landing on a lazy sunday morning Inis Mór (Árainn in Irish). A Japanese woman with long black hair armed with a Nikon and high heels does not clap. She is on a three day trip from New York. A tripod made of black and grey plastic balls hangs out of her purse.

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I order 'full Irish breakfast', a healthy mix of sausages (three kinds), bacon, fried eggs and beans. I want to go to the old pagan fortress of Dún Aonghasa, a circle of stones on the top of a 100mts cliff in the middle of a karstic landscape.

I ask a bald man for directions. His name is John. He tells me about his time as a peace-keeper in Lebanon in the eighties. He has been working as a musician in the pubs of the island for the last seven years. He tells me about arguments with Israeli soldiers, who didn't know that their president then had been born in Belfast. Former Israel president Chaim Herzog was born in Belfast in 1918.

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I walk down the road towards the pagan fort. An old tall German guy accompannied by a dog overtakes me, tells me to walk on the right because we are not in the continent. We talk about the crisis. He mentions an NGO based somewhere in the island and staffed by foreigners that promotes respect for the environment and renewable positive energy.

Although the NGO sounds a bit scary, they are probably doing a good job, because the place looks green, natural and clean all over. However, when I continue walking I find a beach that appears to be full of inflated plastic garbage bags.

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I come closer to realize the garbage bags are actually grey Oceanic seals. They lay placid in the water looking at the passersby in a very Sundayish attitute.

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The seals jump in the water and swim around with only their noses sticking out of the water. I look in the water line to spot the fin of a shark. Normally where there are seals there are sharks but I don't see anything. A large grey seal remains sitting on the rock looking at me. Maybe it's the matriarch.

In the past some sailors, with obviously unhealthy eyesight and great imagination, thought seals were women waiting for them in the shore. They got close to the rocks and ended up shipwrecked.

This seal is actually very cute. I spend some time in the beach contemplating the scenario and realize it's too late to reach the old pagan fortress. Time to fly back to the Connemara shore.

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Full moon on the Burren

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The path to the Poulnabrone Dolmen, in the Burren, is muddy and full of potholes. Black crows fly around the old electricity posts. The night is slowly falling.

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The dolmen stands lonely in the flat land blown by a cold sea breeze. I take the path back, now under a full moon. A blackbird sings hidden in a bush behind me. It sounds like a baby laughing. I walk quick back to the car.



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Waves

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The sea is furious. The waves explode like bombs but the tourists get closer to the edge of the cliffs in Doolin point.

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The air smells sweet like rotten grass but it is cold and full with salt water mist.

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There are clouds in the horizon, near the Aran islands. The green ray cannot be seen. The mist covers the hills while it gets darker and darker.
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Luna sobre la nieve

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Los esquiadores se deslizan como sombras y la luna los sigue entre las ramas nevadas.

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La enorme luna esparce una luz irreal sobre la nieve. Las sombras de los duendes espían tras los árboles. Algo como un lobo se despereza en su madriguera.

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La temperatura baja pero ellos no se dan cuenta. Cada vez avanzan más rápido, como si huyeran.

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Oyen un ruido extraño. Como una lechuza. Se oye otra vez, pero más cerca.

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Un esquiador se queda atrás. Empieza a soplar un viento frío que hace crujir las ramas.

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Avanzan como fantasmas sobre el bosque. Los esquís hacen un ruido siseante sobre la nieve recién caída.

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En el horizonte brillan las cálidas luces de la ciudad. Los esquiadores se paran a mirar pero el viento los hace seguir. Tienen que llegar al refugio cuanto antes.

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Les espera un chocolate caliente y requemado antes de la vuelta a la civilización. Algo se revuelve frustrado entre los árboles cerca del refugio. El viento deja de soplar.

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Navafría (Segovia). Marcha de esquí de fondo bajo la luna, 10 de enero del 2009.

http://www.navafriaesqui.com/

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