MUSEO

It became an issue because on my way downstairs to wash my clothes I was always afraid of coming across her again, washing herself with a garden hose in that solitary crypt.

In the house we had a communal laundry facility in the depths of the cellar and, despite all the flats having a diminutive toilet, there were no showers. I would take the opportunity to wash  myself when I visited friends, but on Thursdays I would shower at Jean Paul’s. On that day, the Frenchmen would get together to play tarot, sharing animated conversations and better food. So I would go round with my bar of soap, a towel and a bottle of wine and later I would emerge spotlessly merry.

But she, 23 years old, with a rush figure and green eyes like horizons, showered with the garden hose at any time of the day, the door open to the perfumed scents of humidity and earth in the murky laundry cellar.

On the third storey -the highest one of that building- there were two apartments, just like on all the other floors. One of them was mine. From it, I could see the roofscape of the city, receive the morning sun and always find a moment to observe the evening lights. The place, despite being narrow, was light and airy: just a kitchen, a room and that minuscule bathroom. However, the kitchen table was large, the windows were generous, the walls almost bare and my few possessions made the place feel more spacious.

In the garden there were powerful trees, a large lawn and five identical entrances. We, the tenants, were a haphazard community of elderly people, students, unemployed and one or two listless drunks. When the weather allowed it the neighbours would have friends over. They organised dinners and teas and chatted for hours, sprawled about the grass. The neighbourhood was a quiet one, but in summer -when we lived with our windows flung open- one could clearly hear the tempestuous fights of a couple living down the street.

Razali was my closest neighbour, but the first time I ever ran into him was when he knocked on my door. When I opened, I was surprised by the look of him: he was wrapped in a cotton sheet from his waist to his ankles, his hair was stiff and ruffled and behind large teeth he exhibited a smile which I deemed admirable. He went straight to the point and in few words proposed that we get together every two weeks to have dinner and converse about our respective countries. I accepted immediately and we set the first date for our meeting there and then.

Oscar lived on the floor below and had his heart set on being a writer. I only knew him as a casual acquaintance, but living in the same house, it was nearly inevitable to bear witness to his affairs. Having been brought up by a grandmother from Hamburg, he professed to have discovered German literature, “a mirror in which his soul could reflect itself.” He always spoke a lot and in a hurry, but never for long on any single subject. Once, he invited me to eat some apfelstrudel spiced with hash and had a horrible reaction to it. Another time he nostalgically invoked “the creative power of the universe.”

At night, when his literary urgencies grabbed him, he would go into the garden and set up a table, a chair, a standing lamp, an inexplicably long cable and an old typewriter on which he would click away into the late mornings. I think we all took some liking to his excesses, because we would invite him to share our breakfasts. During these meals, Oscar would foretell texts which we would all promise to read but which never arrived.

It was his sister who started bathing in the laundry room when Oscar moved to Berlin and she inherited his flat. 

The first dinner with Razali was in my apartment. I prepared the meal hastily at the last minute and embarked on a generic description of my country. But Razali opened the conversation with specific topics while he ate his dinner messily and watched me with uniform intensity. From the moment of the first get together he showed curiosity on topics which I had assumed were distant.

While we all felt that the country was changing, we were only just able to envision vague personal projects in the future. They had not yet assassinated the prime minister and at the time I was recently returned from a long and happy stay in Mexico.

In one of the apartments there lived an elderly lady with her two sons, middle aged and single, born in that very place. The neighbours were mystified, wondering how the three of them got along living in a place with only a kitchen and one room. The brothers were coarse men of few words, discreetly drunk. The old lady was thin, had an elusive gaze and rarely came outside. None of them had dealings with the other tenants of the house, nor with anyone in the neighbourhood. When they were evicted they relocated to the outskirts of the city and the elderly woman died soon afterwards. Not three months had passed since the move when we began to see the brothers around the neighbourhood again. They would alight at street corners and greet us with imperceptible nods of recognition.

The flat which they vacated was then occupied by Frida, an older woman whom we had seen bellowing up and down the street, looking for a fight with anyone who happened to pass. We then discovered that, aside from looking for trouble, she compulsively stole children’s buggies. After a while, when we saw two or three prams parked outside her house, we knew to expect a visit from a couple of policemen. 

Razali’s dinners were spicy and always accompanied by rice. Razali did not drink alcohol or eat bread. When he spoke he did so with well calculated phrases and enthusiasm. He did not ask superfluous questions. He listened to my tales with delicate attention and I tried as best I could not to bore him with clumsiness. While we conversed, despite the seriousness of some topics, he laughed all the time. 

On top of learning to appreciate those dishes, I had to acquaint myself with places which were, up until then, mysteries to me: Laos, Burma, Jakarta, Manila or Myanmar would emerge during the chats. On the other hand, El Chaco, Patagonia, the Amazon or the Caribbean were places which Razali could already conceive of. His curiosity about my homeland -which grew into a considerable knowledge- stimulated my own. It was in confirming these memories that I remembered my paternal grandmother’s kitchen and began to vary the complexity of my cooking.

Oscar would sometimes return from Berlin, where he was finally studying German. In his search, he had found his grandmother’s sister. After a number of visits (during which I suspect he conversed in rudimentary German) the elderly lady invited him to install himself in her home, which he described as large, ancient and solitary. I imagine it was wooden. During one of his comings and goings Oscar fell in love with an angelic young lady who died in India shortly thereafter, having been bitten by a rabid dog. He stopped writing for a time then, and we observed with apprehension as he arrived at the house in unfortunate states.

It was around that time that the prime minister was assassinated. We found out about his death in a packed bar when the music and general palaver were muted abruptly. The next day we seemed almost suspended. We worked, did our shopping or crossed the city squares, hovering. When we spoke, silences seemed inevitable.

With time, the conversations with Razali began sketching landscapes which ended up becoming familiar references, not devoid of humour. By turns the muslim faith and Zoroaster; Gandhi and Lenin; confucianism and Luther; the Greek philosophers and their contacts with the kingdom of Asoka came up. The Byzantine Empire, the Crusades, Ataturk and the Ottoman Empire did not fail to appear.

Once, we heard Razali having a dialogue with two policemen at the house entrance. Dressed in his knotted cotton sheet, he was gesticulating calmly, whilst Frida -who looked prepared to die on the battlefield- contended for a buggy with one of the officers. The rest of us considered intervening lest they both be arrested. But despite the initial confusion, it soon became clear that the pram was a gift from Razali to Frida. After a comment on the asymmetrical relationship between criminality and justice (which neutralised the lot of us) Razali gave the name of the second hand shop where he had purchased the gift and suggested that the police venture that way to verify his statements. He then exhibited his brilliant smile, wished the entire party a good evening and climbed the stairs, shuffling his slippers. Frida was as radiant as the sun. The police officers left, somewhat confused but altogether satisfied. 

Oscar appeared one day with a bandaged head. He said that he had taken a beating in Berlin after being mistake for an Arab man and he asked us if we would help him write a statement.

Tino, an agile and carefree youth who lived off the contraband of snakes and exotic

reptiles, would periodically enjoy the privileges and attentions of Oscar’s sister. It was quite some time later, after the death of the prime minister, that one of Tino’s iguanas escaped and was caught at the stairs by Razali, who evaluated it with culinary interest.

After many dinners over the course of three years, Razali resolved to tell me something about himself. He was from a small village where his ethnic group had maintained a secret tradition of self-defence which they practiced at night, hidden in the forest. He explained that he was now living under a false name and that, since a cousin of his had left town nine years earlier, he had nobody to speak his three childhood languages with. He told me that he worked as a cleaner, but I never found out where. He also said that one day he would leave without saying goodbye and that  we would not see each other again after that.

During the final meetings he expounded on ideas which I now remember with unfortunate lagoons. He explained why he thought that marxism and psychoanalysis were the last ideological tools (and the most effective, he said) of colonialism. He was suspicious of historical materialism, which he considered too closely linked with Christian idealism. He proposed exercises to formulate Marxisms based on the traditions of the Q’ran, the animisms of Siberia and Africa or Mayan cosmogony, even when these exercises resulted in failures. He said that the most diabolical of Hegel’s jokes was his appropriation of oriental concepts of dialectics. For Freud he felt nothing but horror and pity. In revolutionary buddhism he highlighted its non-hierarchical proposals and in taoism its propensity to riot. He had no relationship with music, nor with art, nor with what I myself knew as literature. He did have one with cinema. He confessed that while waiting for the opportunity to return to his country he had obtained a doctorate in political science with a thesis that he described as utterly ridiculous. He also told me that he liked my food and gave me many of the spices which he used.

One day, Oscar’s sister had a radical break with Tino, the iguana guy. We can only assume that it was out of revenge that Tino abandoned a hatchling boa, which proved difficult to catch, in the laundry room. While Razali was trying to seize it we found a scrap of paper with a poem which read something along the lines of “My poetry/is more Modern/because Mi Avant Garde/is Bigger./Than yours.”

As promised, Razali disappeared. He left the key to his apartment in the door and the rest of his things as they were. Two years later, I too took off. I am told that the house was bought by a group of people who renovated it and have lived there since. I am also told that these people practiced architecture and design. I did not see Oscar again for a long time, but once I received a letter from him, promising to send his novel when it was published. In my answer, I took the chance to ask him if he had been the author of the poem which we found in the cellar. He answered immediately, denying the allegation with horror and telling me that he had discovered Catalan literature and had plans to move to Barcelona.   

  Carlos Capelán

August 2015/February 2016 

Lund, Sweden

Translation: Eira Capelán