anita's vineyard: that panama hat

anita's vineyard: that panama hat: Everything is inside. I mean either inside my bags or the garbage bin. The steward at check in counter asks me how long i would be in Mala...

that panama hat

Everything is inside. I mean either inside my bags or the garbage bin.
The steward at check in counter asks me how long i would be in Malaysia for. This is just to explain how big my bags are.
So I am going around the empty rooms and i see that everything is inside or on me. I have boots and a cardigan tied to my waist, I could not fit them inside. I am also having a small jacket with me. It is august.
Then the last bit, the panama hat i had also kept out to wear it today, the only way to bring it along. I hold it in my hands. I run my fingers around the straw knots , around that black tissue strap. I remember when i had it bought by my sister. I wanted it to mark my status as tango dancer and as daughter of countryside people. My granddad had the same hat, a clear straw panama hat for the hot sunny days out in the fields. A hat he would move up his forehead with a beginning of a smile, when he had to see who was coming. Then with his eyes free he would recognize the person and the smile would give way to "hello, how are you?"
So i hold my panama hat, i do not want it to leave it in the empty flat that soon will be occupied by other people. I hold it lightly like something delicate, as delicate as a memory.
San antonio de Areco, Rosario, all those places would have been perfect for such a hat. DI carli music and high heels in the night, the hat and the summer heat in the fields during the day.
It is not a big deal to bring it along, it is not heavy. I am next to my door and i turn to the mirror. I look at myself and wear it. It does not really fit me. It used to , though. I move it on the side, I move it on the front. I do not really like me in this hat. But the hat is beautiful as if it were woven out of the pampa straws. I look at myself. I think i am not going to wear it. I think i am not going to bring it. It thought i wanted it, but now i think i am going to leave it here. For somebody that i do not know and will come to fill this place with his things and his dreams.
Maybe he or she will like it. Maybe he or she will throw this alien object away, wary of all the meaning it could have and they did not give it.
I go. I close the door and caress the Singapore boat stranded on the Mandi beach I took in a picture a long time ago. Some tears stream down my face. It was just a hat.

Begins with the end: back to Paris from China

When i get out of the train , the sky is grey and the lion statue seems as lost as I am, forgotten there half asleep and so annoyed to be in the middle of the square, nor on one side nor  the other.

It is exceptionally luminous to be 7am in the morning.

I remember where I put my key but I totally forgot the digicode to enter the building.

Then after a long number of trials I manage to find my way in.

It seems one of those gray mornings when I begged my grandma and my mom not to go to school.

I check that the dolan rubab, the one from Mohammad Emin in Kashgar; the one I picked among all those other fancier ones in his Kashgar store , the simplest one and the more harmonious in his body curves, the one that only Mohammed Emin’s father can play, is all in one piece and I put it to rest in front of my bed. Under its watch I can fall asleep safely and build fat dreams, just for a little before resuming my life or getting to think how to resume my life. I suddenly wake and cannot remember where I am, I know I live here, but where is here? This is something that happens to me more and more, I cannot just recall what am I doing in Paris…how did I drift here??? A coffee will fill the air with home scent.

I shower and get down to go to work. 

The courtyard is bizarrely empty; is it the rain that chased everybody inside or the town has been deserted after an atomic bomb? I cross the front door and a shy sunlight is greeting me. The trees , still burgeoning with a lot of impatience one month ago , are now dressed up in an abundance of leaves. The branches and the sun draw for a second a contorted checkerboard on the pavement . The small kid from the other side of the street slowly plays inside it ; his racket is larger than his back and his knees are wobbly. I think I know his elder brother, he has given up the tennis racket and has a guitar now. He is probably moving on to another type of sport. 

I suddenly see all the other people around me. The middle age concierge in front that is bringing out the rubbish in a red striped shirt. The blond girl cycling across the streets. The forest of cigarettes held up in the street bar. All is silent and I feel I do not want to talk, eventhough eventually I am in a place where I can talk the language and not make my way out of smiles and looks. Then I suddenly realise, if I talk this all will be real.

I think of the Kim-KI DUk's BinJip, I remember that the shouted word brings the violence, that the silenced is the feathered dream of peace and love. I stick to the silence as long as I can.

But then I pop by my friend and I have to say who I am. Strangely I remembered this digicode, and not mine….

I come to the office. It seems that people in the metro are all startled to see me, I do not know these people, what did I put on, how am I dressed? How can they possibly guess that I have not been in paris these last weeks? Maybe I have a tan from yesterday .

Two blues eyes are singled out inside a dishevelled fringe, I remember that this is Paris, plenty of eyes and sighs ,and  I turn back ... but i cannot tell whether they were there or i had made them up...
I arrive to the office, I realise that slowly all the actions that seemed unknown to me are coming back to life, little by little I relearn the talk of the town, of the metro card , of the office badge and of the different codes to enter worthless and virtual worlds. 

I relearn the way out here by actions. 

I relearn to swipe the card at the market , to choose fruits and products. The boy must just come for the summer stages, he is wide and youngly uncomfortable, he looks and stutters with its pen as a broken heart that cannot avoid to keep still thinking to his love somewhere. In the fleshy eyelids I see the blank forming , that moment when your guard is off and the thoughts come in pouring. To stutter and then come back, the click on the black color and the pen is ready for my signature on the slip. I would like to tell him that I know, that you are bound to lose , if you fight and if you do not , you can only wait. But as tears , as daydreaming are not reusable, not recyclable, not resellable , I do not say anything. I cannot tell him how long this siege will last, maybe forever, maybe just another click on the pen.

All day my mouth has uttered words in this un-native tongue, I find myself hesitating but not for the lack of words, not for forgetfulness, I am just amazed by the fact that I am all of a sudden able to speak french again, I make jokes in it again and it all pours out of my mouth without me commanding it.

so who am I?

the night of the match: el partido y tu ojos de cielo

Songs and film tell the epic nights ravelled around a match, this memory is about one match not so long a time ago, a match where I danced a night and a storm away.
Buenos Aires was charged with the expectations of the match to come, the spring afternoon got sucked into the night where Argentina had to fight to gain its place into the championship. The town quickly emptied in the evening and we all hardly noticed the thick and heavy clouds. When the wind started to sweep the deserted streets, I was already in the guest house. I lied down to recover a bit of energy for a night out at the milonga, I did not even remove my high heel pink and red shoes, feeling like a doll waiting to go down to his ball. I did not watch the match and in a rave-like siesta,  I started to hear far away all the forgotten windows clattering in the tension of the match. Baires was holding his breath and in this place of passion sweat and blood, the clouds must have sucked up the electricity, the atmosphere charged with emotions and in the middle of silenced sighs of hope and fear , of beers waiting to be opened, of cries and relief. The match ended and as to reply instantaneously the clouds burst open , all the relief materialised in streams of water pouring down the streets , all the souls sweat together and fell back in town. I took a taxi and went to the milonga , the taxi driver told me the result and i sighed too thinking of a happy smile going down from the bus uttering  a "maybe I'll come to the milonga tonight, after the match" half door,
and then with my doll shoes, a springtime flower shirt tied below my breast and my heart to give, I entered the milonga. And it was the most beautiful tango night I have ever danced, a night suspended between my furtive glances at the door and the clock,  and my eyes closed while I abandoned to the dancers, letting my legs learn the earth and the ground. I danced and danced , light as plume and as heavy as the promise of maybe not love but surely not dream,  of lips to encounter of smiles to change and eyes to be close , of softness imagined between two hands and two faces, between the sky and the ground, a heart offered  for the slaughter and the party and the feet rooted to the ground. The ripening pleasure of the body mingled with the expectation that is not yet a desire for a smile that was not turning up yet. But still I was there and I danced , because every promise of love can only be danced, because the swirl of my skirt could be the festoon welcoming those eyes when they would come in. I cannot imagine another way of explaining what tango is if not this sweet mixture of a hope sure to be fulfilled and that fear that already knows. Every step in the ballroom, every smile exchanged, your body gets lighter and your heart is heavier. On and on you cannot ever stop to feel, embrace and wait . Live suspended in a dream. And I have never danced again any better than that night, where my life was leading me through steps my sweet dancer had taught me that afternoon. Never my body had been that supple to listen and respond, my legs so long to round up like silk. Never I had so glown when closing my eyes and being seen.
The night closed out on tu ojos de cielo and the cumparsita.
The sky was clear again, the rain had gone. I went walking back to the guesthouse, the dream had evaporated, and the world had been washed new... the dreams of the night before trickled away in the gutters ...i was not in the least disappointed

more pieces from old paris moments

melting in the air in between two places, we walk swiflty living the life of shadows , living the dream of everyday

Would you like my old disc player? come and have a tea 

outside and inside , still and moving, hot and cool , shadows and light , everything is inside the other

feel like blooming?

just a couple of weeks ago the wind was diminishing me and now i feel like my heart is swelling and my senses catch the newly born smells in the springtime. The clear sky and reassuring rays brings the promise of a summer and ripened fruits, long evenings to pluck and heat to cool off in the nights. I do not know where such fullness and bloom come from, I am just so happy that in these days where I type on a computer, where I trickle my thoughts my body and my soul have not forgotten how to answer eagerly to the call of springtime. So no matter how many i-stuff one can have or play with, still one can not help but respond to nature. So good to know, from the inside.

the man with the pigeons

suddenly the end of summers makes way to the chilly wind: the drastic change is one of the feature of the north and many a times the foreigners get caught out in the street with their sandals and sleeveless shirts, bare arms to the newcome autumn. 

One reason more in addition to the stench from the pigeons that was pushing me away from the man living in the corner between Leroy Merlin and Pompidou. With in the eyes the pictures from one movie in the beaubourg, I would probably have wished to walk past him fast and gain back the metro or even better a warm living room. I just could not move and stayed.

He was chasing away pigeons or was he embracing them ? this misery to my eyes was quite piercing, but I did not want not be human, not to witness his strange dance while the night was falling. The place was coverd in guano , as if being on the street in the first night of autumn were not enough , he had to make his place among the awful fat birds. And then again, he seemed to merge into them into a strange tragic desire to disappear. 

The night fell and everything was getting dark.

Strange as it may be , it was not that cold in the main street where the other tourist were trodding. I still wonder if he is so abandoned, can he become like one of those birds? does he want to ? to forget his humanity ? and what is humanity ? I have never seen him since, I just hope I will still have the courage to watch, to stay there with him, even at distance , the next time I see him caught in the night.