Everything You and I Could Have Been If We Weren't You and I

by Albert Espinosa

  “Of course,” I replied, offended.

  “Dance is the way to show how our esophagus is feeling,” she declared.

  And as you can imagine, I didn’t understand at all.

  Let me give you some context. She believed that the heart was the most overrated organ. Love, passion and pain were the exclusive domain of that little throbbing red thing. And that really annoyed her.

  So, I don’t know when, I think it was before I was born, she decided that the esophagus would be the organ that possessed artistic vitality. And according to her, dance captured her vitality; painting showed her colors; film revealed her movement and theater, her language.

  “Should I take the M-30 or the M-40?” asked the taxi driver, bringing me back to reality with a question whose feet were firmly planted on the ground.

  “Whatever you like,” I replied, and he went back to his world and I went back to mine.

  I decided to paint at the age of sixteen.

  I gave up dancing because it was her world, my mother’s world. I knew that I would never get anywhere, that I didn’t even have a fraction of her talent. Did the son of Humphrey Bogart or Elizabeth Taylor think they would be able to emulate their parents?

  I wanted to paint life, I wanted to make a series of paintings, a trilogy of concepts. Capture them in paint. Life in three canvases.

  This was no idea chosen at random, it came to me when I saw Picasso’s painting “La Vie.” It’s my favorite by him. I saw it in Cleveland; my mother was there for the premiere of her latest innovative performance and I spent three hours looking at that marvelous painting in the museum. I didn’t look at any others. At the age of sixteen I became captivated by that blue masterpiece.

  What is “life” all about? Well, it’s about love.

  My mother always said that everything that was good artistically talked about love. The great films that are shown again and again, the timeless masterworks of the theater that are staged over and over and even the epic books reread every five years or so. They all have something in common: love or the loss of that love.

  Particularly, in the painting “La Vie” there are four groups: a couple in love, another in lust, someone alone who has lost his love and another happy to be free of it. I think that each group symbolizes a stage in our lives, the precise moments we have, we feel.

  In that moment of my life, I felt like the person alone, the one who had lost his beloved and was sad over it. Solitary love is still love, but it is completely different from the couple who loves each other, the couple who desires each other and the person glad for their loss.

  I wondered if that taxi driver was in love just then. If he desired someone in silence, if he had had sex that night, if he had enjoyed it.

  I wish we could ask ourselves these questions without blushing. Just as that painting forces you to respond to them, after merely looking at it for a good long while.

  My mother never made me feel guilty about missing her Cleveland premiere. I told her about Picasso’s canvas and my idea of painting a trilogy about life.

  She listened attentively, took her ten minutes (she never answered important questions hastily; what’s more, she believed the world would be a better place if we all took that time) and she said to me:

  “If you want to paint a trilogy about life, speak of childhood, sex and death. That is life in three concepts.”

  Then she went off to take her post-premiere bath.

  She loved water. She said that ideas, creation, depend on what surrounds them.

  She believed that people think that the air we breathe is the perfect conductor for creating, but they are completely wrong. It could be water, and she explained that many inventors had had their best ideas when their bodies were completely submerged. Or it could also be the oxygen mixed with the music of a concert or listening to the same song over and over again while you hunt for the perfect idea. Or sometimes, just smelling the burned wood in a fireplace could be how you find inspiration. She spent her life searching for her ideal creative atmosphere. I always thought they were her post-premiere baths, until one day, on an airplane, she told me:

  “I think that my creative scent is the mix of your breath with mine.” Then she took a deep breath and indicated that I should do the same. We exhaled and inhaled two or three times. “The ideas are already coming to me...” she said, smiling at me.

  I felt flattered and very embarrassed at the same time.

  I didn’t speak again on that flight. I tried to barely breathe and it was a long eight-hour journey between Montreal and Barcelona.

  Sometimes it is difficult to accept someone saying something so lovely to you.

  The taxi driver changed radio stations; the music disappeared and the news about the alien returned. The cabbie, who seemed not to have heard it yet, turned the volume up to the maximum as if that would give him more information.

  “Do you hear what they’re saying?” he asked, startled.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think it’s true?” He changed stations several times. “Fuck, that’s intense, right? An alien here, they don’t even know what to make up anymore.”

  “No, they don’t even know what to make up anymore,” I repeated, not knowing what else to say.

  The conversation stopped again. He sped up; I had the feeling my indifference bothered him. If he knew that in sixteen minutes I would be with that alien, I guess he would have been much more interested in his uncommunicative passenger.

  I took my mother’s advice about the trilogy. I painted death at the age of twenty-three and childhood at seventeen, but I never painted sex.

  I believe that sometimes you don’t dare to paint something that you know is so profound within you.

  My mother spoke to me so often about sex when I was little that I ended up hating everything that had anything to do with it. I’ve never stopping having it, but I don’t think I knew how to face up to it with a palette in my hand.

  Death was easy to paint.

  Although it was very hard to gain access to it. I went through hundreds of prisons in the United States where they still had the death penalty. I managed, thanks to a head warden who was in love with my mother, to make friends with inmates who would soon die and I asked them about their imminent end.

  They spent hours and hours talking to me about death and I listened. Months searching for something that they would show me that I could paint. Aren’t they and the terminally ill the only ones who are lucid about death? They wait for it, they know it, they see it coming for years, sometimes right in front of their faces. And I believe they even come to accept their expiration date.

  I preferred the inmates to the terminally ill because somehow their pain wasn’t so intense and their deaths were more clearly defined, not mixed with another difficult feeling that is almost impossible to depict.

  Every inmate I met seemed innocent, I would have given them pardons. I don’t know what it is about death that makes all human beings seem so fragile, innocent and naïve...

  And those condemned men told me so many things, some of them so dark, others terribly filled with light...

  Until I met one... David was his name. David was going to be executed for raping and killing his two sisters. He asked for his last meal, a strange ritual that was still practiced in all of those prisons. An absurd courtesy to those about to die.

  He didn’t ask for much, a vanilla ice cream with nuts. But it was when they brought it to him, on that inexpressive blue tray, that he saw what death was. I only had to paint his final wish.

  I picked up my brushes and I painted that, as realistically as I could. The white ice cream, the ochre nuts and the blue of the tray.

  David died, I didn’t watch, I couldn’t bear it, I had grown fond of him.

  The painting, according to my mother, reeked of death.

  I could barely look at it, so I gave it to an old friend. I haven’t been able to eat vanilla ice cream with nuts either. When I try to it’s as i
f death itself made me retch.

  Childhood is easier to draw. I remember my mother always said that it was a lie that it was the happiest times of our lives. She thought it was when we cried most. She said that we cry so inconsolably those first few years, that childhood is like tons of sadness mixed with kilos of happiness. The great bipolar stage of our lives.

  That was my inspiration. I painted little kids who had been given toys and then two minutes later had them snatched away.

  I sought out the most believable tears, the most dramatic sobs mixed with smiles and the incredible happiness that still could be seen on their faces. The possession and loss of the toy produced those opposing reactions.

  I ended up creating a truly disturbing painting. Extreme happiness and sadness, pure childhood. My mother was so proud of me... She hugged me so hard that I felt like our two esophagi were merging. Then she whispered:

  “Sex. Now do sex, Marcos. Paint it.”

  Sex. I never even picked up my brush. I don’t think my mother forgave me for that. I started to neglect my painting. I promised her that I would finish the trilogy, but thirteen years have passed and I had almost completely forgotten about it all.

  In just a few short hours her corpse would arrive, fulfilling a premonition that she told me about years ago on a boat on the way to Finland: “One day you will look into my lifeless eyes without having finished the trilogy about your life.” I hated that she was right, just like when, at fourteen, she thought I wouldn’t pay attention to her answer to my adult question.

  I hated that she said it in such a dramatic way. And most of all I hated that there existed lifeless eyes.

  The cabbie arrived at my destination.

  I paid him; I didn’t leave a tip. My assistant was waiting for me at the door of the building complex. Dani had glowing skin. I don’t know how he did it, but he always gave off an air of freshness.

  I know that he held me in high regard and he always tried to greet me with a big smile. He had a gallery of twelve or thirteen smiles, although that day his skin was drawn and his smile was a worried grimace. His entire face was shrunken.

  He looked at me with his green eyes filled with concern.

  I got out of the taxi; the driver took off almost as soon as I closed the door. A minute sooner and he would have taken me with him. I think he was upset that I hadn’t tipped him.

  “It’s inside,” said my assistant when the taxi had fled. “I don’t know what it’s like, but they want you to see it immediately. Everybody is nervous.”

  “Is it green and tiny with antennae and giant black eyes?” I joked.

  “No,” he answered without laughing.

  We got into a second car and headed to the offices. I wasn’t nervous at all; I just thought that I should finish the sex painting before my mother’s body arrived, before I looked into her lifeless eyes.

  I hadn’t really seen them yet, so I could still finish my trilogy.

  I know it seems stupid. I was on my way to meet the first alien that had reached planet Earth and all I could think about was making some strange painting about sex.

  7

  I DON’T KNOW IF MY GIFT FOUND ME OR IF I FOUND IT

  I enjoyed the short trip from the entry to the head office. The driver, a sixty-year-old Peruvian with a young soul, always put on a Cranberries CD as soon as he saw me get into the car. Then he would smile at me with his gold teeth.

  One day he told me they had been his father’s. That when he died, he had them taken out and he kept them, then he had two healthy teeth pulled out and he put in his father’s gold ones.

  “My father is inside me,” he said one day as he smiled at me through the rearview mirror, showing his paternal gold teeth.

  “I’m sure he would be proud of you,” I answered.

  “I don’t think so,” he added. “This was the only shiny part of my father; the rest wasn’t pretty to look at, and it didn’t light up anything or anyone.”

  We didn’t speak about his teeth ever again, but every time he smiled I felt close to him.

  I like people that make you feel warmth so easily. They achieve it so simply that you can’t tell how they do it. It’s like one of those hidden Microsoft codes. The source is known only to its creator.

  There is a Chinese proverb that I love: “Don’t open a store if you don’t know how to smile.” My Peruvian driver could open up a hundred department stores.

  Dani was still very nervous; his skin had lost what little texture it had had when I arrived. He gestured to the Peruvian, whose smile disappeared behind a black glass that cut us off from him and the Cranberries’ music.

  “Tell me, is it true what they’re saying in the news?” I decided to get a jump on his preoccupation.

  “Yes. We’ve got him inside. They want you to talk to him, to use your gift and confirm that he really is who he says he is,” responded Dani trying, as always, for “gift” not to sound too strange coming from his lips.

  I remained pensive. I wasn’t sure if my gift would work. I hoped so, since it had never failed me yet, but I still had my doubts.

  Dani respected my silence for almost half a minute, but he soon was interrupting my thoughts.

  “Have you quit sleeping already?”

  I wasn’t expecting that, a radical shift in the conversation. I guess he was trying to put me at ease. I pulled the two injections out of my pocket and showed them to him. He looked at them with as much desire as if they were bread in the Great Depression. I don’t think he had ever seen them so up close.

  “Are they real?” he asked as he stroked them softly like a cat.

  “They better be, for what they cost me.”

  “And why haven’t you taken them?” he asked as he brought them closer to his skin.

  “I don’t know, it wasn’t the right moment.”

  “And who is the other one for?” he said giving them back before he injected them in a sudden fit.

  It’s true, I didn’t tell you that every time you buy one injection for quitting sleeping they give you another. It’s not a two-for-one deal but, because of the fabrication method, the medicine needed to make one injection is the same as for two. So that was why they gave you both.

  I tried to dissuade them, I wasn’t interested in having two and I could have used a discount, but I didn’t get anywhere. The truth is I hadn’t thought about the question Dani was asking me; I didn’t know who I would give the other one to.

  “Do you want it?” I asked.

  I know that he wanted to stop sleeping. He had mentioned it hundreds of times, but he couldn’t afford it.

  “I can’t pay you for it,” he answered, blushing as if he had been given an excessive compliment.

  “I’m not selling it to you, Dani, I’m giving it to you.”

  “I can’t pay you for it, I’m sorry.” The black glass lowered. “The chief is waiting for you at the entrance, he wants to talk to you before you see the stranger.”

  He said the word stranger just as the glass completely disappeared. I know that I shouldn’t ask anything more, because we no longer had privacy, but I couldn’t help it.

  “You guys call him the stranger?” Finally Dani hesitated before answering, he looked at the Peruvian and then at me and he must have decided that the danger of filtration was minimal and that the information had no value.

  “Yes, that’s what they decided. Until his origin is determined he’ll be called “the stranger”.

  The car braked. We had arrived at the main building. I saw the chief’s shoes beside the vehicle.

  He was waiting for Dani to open the door but he couldn’t do it, he was stock-still, as if he wanted to tell me something more. I looked at him, inviting him to do so. But he hesitated and the chief’s shoes were getting more and more nervous with the wait. It was as if they were tap dancing.

  “I appreciate your offer,” he said finally, blushing again. “You know that there is nothing I want more in this life than to quit sleeping. Give
me two hours to get together some money; if you think it’s enough I will buy the other injection from you.”

  He opened the door so quickly that I didn’t have time to answer him. I loved Dani’s fragility. I smiled at the Peruvian driver before abandoning his domain.

  “I think that the stranger is an extraterrestrial,” he told me, smiling. “Good luck with your gift, I wonder what you’ll discover.”

  I had always suspected that the dark glass was useless. After it had gone up I could hear the Peruvian breathing, absorbing everything we were saying. Assimilating it, processing it and finally looking at us when we thought he hadn’t heard a thing.

  Although, surely, whether the Peruvian was listening in or not didn’t matter much. I suppose now you’ll be wondering what my “gift” is. What it is I do for a living.

  Painting, as you’ll have already figured out, never got past a hobby. I thinking there is nothing harder than admitting that your artistic vein won’t give you a professional future.

  There is something devastatingly sad about feeling you are one of those for whom their work and their creativity don’t go hand in hand.

  But that doesn’t mean that I’ve given up painting. I still paint in my free time. Although not really, not on canvas, but in my imagination. And the truth is that I have a lot of down time; my work doesn’t keep me very busy, since I am only called in occasionally.

  I don’t know if my gift found me or if I found it.

  “We are expecting a lot of you, Marcos,” the chief told me when I set foot outside the car.

  Then he squeezed my hand so hard that I felt as if two of my fingers were about to break.

  My boss was a sixty-something Belgian who had been an Olympic champion in archery. I had only seen him shoot an arrow once; his face was pure pleasure when he picked up the bow. I love the faces that appear alongside our life passions.

  My mother believed that the world would be a better place if our sexual self invaded our homebody selves. She told me when I was fifteen that I had to understand that there were two people inside of me: my sexual self and my homebody self.