By Raúl Flores
She had the overwhelming feeling that we were alone in this world.
She said to me “Come and look thru the windows”, and I went and looked around and could only be aware of the typical landscape of one of those ordinary evenights rounding October: Foggy shrubs smoothing sadly along deserted streets in the city, and the moon like a white giant patch across the darkened sky.
“Don’t you realize?” she screamed, “Can’t you see?” again she screamed and her voice multiplied echoes in the fall (can’t you see? can’t you see? can’t you see?). “We’re all alone”, she whispered, “Totally alone in this world.”
“What?” said I, “Why do you think so?”
“Don’t you realize?” she screamed again, and her shouting was shooting in the middle of the night: solitude standing, a stone cast towards the moon. She said “Let´s go out. Somewhere. To see what’s new.”
I said yes. So she’d be quiet. I’d have given anything so she’d be quiet. To get all those crazy ideas out of her head. Her poor alienated little head filled with golden hair. Like a Barbie doll. And that’s how I used to think about her sometimes: My little Barbie doll, lost in her little beautiful Barbie world, filled with broken dreams and lost illusions.
So I said to myself: OK, Barbie, let’s go out, let’s be swallowed like Jonah by the fog of these restless times of October, let´s be lovingly mugged by zealous maladroits in the midnight hour.
Original in English