Painting the Forgotten / Rosa María Rodríguez Torrado

He has drawn a table and put a patched plate on the worn paper: there is no canvas nor oils because of the scarcities. Even the air is going hungry, and the brushes go back and forth over the watercolor in an effort to hypnotize the spiritual asthma that such poverty provokes. He loves his Casablanca so much that he wants to go far away, where the nostalgia won’t force him to dream of it and he won’t have to live in his abandonment.

He waits for success with his brushes and a degrading sign — that they profaned with white — that he rescued from his big neighborhood. Long ago he left off the practice of painting bars. Now he draws on the potholed pavement and broken sidewalks, his alienated steps back to what he will remember if he does not return.

January 30 2012