“The best way of not succumbing to a single passion is to have many passions.”
I go to my window and watch you trot through the streets; I can see that you really are the way I describe you, and that the clouds are creating a disorderly pattern in the sky. A construction site emits a cacophony and a desolated landscape surrounds you. A jackhammer drills relentlessly, car tyres screech as they turn at the end of a school drive, and I hear the shouts and songs of stateless children. Children! There you can find the healthiest energy of this world. Only from them can we hope for a transmutation of values. I turn my eyes towards the north, across dry branches of distant vegetation while my thoughts play upon the stages of history. Among this desert vegetation you build your torture camps and, like hyenas, you bury your victims in the still of the night.
I know what you will tell me before I meet you, when I shake your enslaved hand, your murdering fingers, the extreme cold of a depressive. I know your daily, weekly and annual schedule, I know all your lives, and how you spend your time. Time; the monster that struggles to make you more acceptable. Your essence was lost before you were five years old, replaced by the "wisdom" of the professors, by religious obsessions, by sexual repression, by the compulsion for money, and by the denial of self. Of course, you are not conscious of any of this. You are blind to your servility, origins and beliefs. Your doors of perception are closed. You change your face, your stomach, your hips and your breasts with plastic surgery. You update your wardrobe and convince yourself that this is how you really are, how you were made by ‘the forces of nature’. There is no escape for you from being populace. For you, life is simply existing. Did you ever notice that stones and horses also exist? Did you discover that there is a monumental difference between existing and living?
I recognise you from afar and you cross the street when you see me, knowing my regard for you. Somebody once spoke to you of Erasmus, Cioran, Freud and Nietzsche. They revealed many secrets to you about the psychological mechanisms that drive the masses, and the importance of autonomy and creative knowledge... Your eyes darted around in panic, red with blood, and your fingers trembled. Somebody once told you about the Djemaa El Fna at the edge of the Moroccan desert, and the dozens of starving infants... You remained indifferent, your mind on your own young sons, sleeping in comfort in their steady cradles. You will never face a machine gun in the Sahara, nor even a hoe in the Brazilian countryside. Oh, populace! The tears well in my eyes as you jostle your friends in jest, never truly laughing or crying, for they are symbols of your weakness. You are no different from an iceberg: cold, hard and brittle. A murderous scoundrel! I could even come to respect you one day, even after witnessing your violence in the streets of Curitiba, in the alleys of Barcelona, at the border of Algeria and in numerous others corners of the world. Even after living for twenty years under your systematic terror, your barbarism, your slaughter. Whether you are dressed in fine silk or tattered rags, whether you are arrogant or servile, a prince or an outcast...you are unmistakable. You carry the signs of disloyalty and cunning in your furtive, elusive gaze!
You enter like Homer through the doors of society, unaware that you are a commoner, unable to answer basic questions. What is the meaning of your life, your state, your country, your homeland, your continent? How do you figure in the future of your species? What use is your ridiculous patriotism, your nationalism and your fanatical chauvinism? Your churches? Your judiciaries? Your academies and the rest of your institutionalised stupidity? Come on, raise yourself above the level of a trained dog and contemplate this Autumn night! Look at the slow movement of the stars and let them move your worn, enchantment-starved heart.
You stumble through existence, inventing passions, adventures, achievements and lies in order to survive. With your growing senility, you find yourself becoming paranoid, sick and unsustainable, however much you are surrounded by wealth, fortune and slaves. Your sons occupy ‘political’ positions in the State. Your daughter is finally a recognised pianist. Your firstborn son chose celibacy, and the third is on his way to becoming an attorney or a general. Everything is just like you predicted!
Your final days arrive in agony; you are in a coma on a bed of silver. You lie in creased pyjamas, surrounded by relatives and creditors, a cross in your right hand and a testament in your left. The headboard features three lit candelabras that you bought from Arabia, and your dressing table displays photographs of you as a pink cheeked young man. Even then you carried the warning in your eyes. You are now barely able to breathe. The vultures are circling: your sons, slaves, partners, confessors and lovers, eager to divide your estate.
In a grand church, a priest speaks out over your coffin with a morbid and apocalyptic speech, trying to rend tears and convulsions from the guests. A devout pianist performs Wagner’s Tannhäuser, a piece you abhorred... Your corpse moves dismally in its carriage towards the cemetery – a ridiculous and unhealthy place – and the same sacristan that charged you a monthly tithe and stuffed the weekly hosts into your mouth now orders your cronies to lower the cords and finally cover you with soil.
The alcoholics who dug your grave handle your coffin with the same indifference as they did yesterday, when they buried the corpse of a dirty beggar found rotting near the port. Now you are nothing! Nothing! Nothing more than the corpse of a wealthy man! Nothing but a body disfigured by the absence of life, the corpse of a man who lived pretending to be a Brahman and died like an outcast.
The generous earth now covers you. Everyone turns around and walks away, finally free of your arbitrariness and your demands. Some are discussing the expense of the funeral, and the percentage that the lawyer will pocket for the inventory. Others offer opinions on the latest Playboy magazine, the stock exchange, the importance of barbiturates, marriage and Holy Communion. Tomorrow they will beget sons who will buy more country houses and cars, take vacations at the Champs-Élysées, and become doctors, priests and generals. They will continue to pay the tithe, ensuring that the holy sacraments will not be denied them. Poor populace! You die every day, but still allow your heirs to perpetuate you. You are like the plague, concealed and untouchable, under the fingernails of men and on the inside of the castle locks, not even imagining that you could fight or triumph; to an end and the contradiction of that end.
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