After an afternoon of torrential rain the setting sun bent a golden rainbow over the crisis stricken city of Barcelona, a sign of hope and a sign perhaps, the subter travler thought, that mother Earth still cared to show her children a future, however the moneymen were trying their utmost to bring the human sideshow to an end. The travler was waiting at the bus stop for his daughter to come home from school and when his eyes were not attracted to the perfect arch of shining bright colours, not unlike the much smaller bow he had seen many winter mornings ago along a provincial road to Granada, right over a village chapel, the subter would look the many passers-by in the face, the fashionable young girls, the struggling old ladies, the smiling consultants and the self-employed waste recyclers. He had acquired this habit after he’d moved in from Amsterdam four years ago. The subter travler had been prepared to leave his friends behind, some of them with him and he with them almost all his adult life. He was emigrating, wasn’t he, and emigration is as much about being pushed as it is about being pulled away, so he had indeed been prepared for that. But what he had not thought about was how the extras would disappear as well. The shoemaker and the grocer’s and the people walking the streets with him, the squatters & the dope heads & the large families & the new homeowners who were busy fulfilling the prophecy of upgrading the neighbourhood they, like the travler, had bought into, all these familiar faces that had made up his surroundings were all of a sudden gone from his life. The travler began to miss the stories he had attached to them, some truer and in more detail written, the rest pure fantasy, and out of this yearning he sought new adventures and so he developed the tendency of looking the Barceloners straight in the eyes, restlessly scanning for backgrounds and futures, anything he could attach his inevitable dreams to.
Waiting at the bus stop with that full colour rainbow over their heads, the subter travler smiled at the women walking by, sometimes flashing his teeth at a woman who was looking for his type (so why not him), sometimes showing himself to a young girl training her seductive powers, sometimes throwing a wink at women who (like him) were just enjoying the views, when out of nowhere he crossed the eyes of the man who had given him a story he had completely forgotten about. The man who gave me that forgotten story, the subter travler thought, there he is at last and what a perfect afternoon he has picked to remind me. Instantly the subter was back at the Uffizi museum in Florence on the last day of August of that year, walking past the endless collection of renaissance paintings, mostly portraits and some landscapes with people in them, his wife suggesting wasn’t it here where Stendhal got physically sick from so much beauty, Botticelli’s dancing compositions which he knew from art books in their real splendour amazingly graceful choreographies, showing the painter’s believe in a God who is constantly adding beauty to the original creation, or so the subter thought, when he came upon the effigy of an anonymous man who vaguely resembled one of the faces in his neighbourhood, just enough to let his memory make the connection. And in a flash a story was born. Man in museum sees himself hanging from the wall, that is to say he sees himself five centuries earlier, and it’s a resemblance so striking that in that very instant he loses his faith in the possibility of an afterlife and now is sure we all live many lives through the ages, him having been this renaissance peasant and who knows what else in between. The peasant may have been his own grandson a couple of times, thanks to popular inbreeding, but both the story and his faith want him to have shown up in a variety of places around the globe. And the portrait had to be anonymous of course, head of farmer fifteenth century, something like that; we can’t have all been Julius Ceasar or Jeanne d’Arc, the travler reasoned.
The subter travler made a note of it all in the back of his mind before continuing along the gallery, going faster all the time and at last running, a very pleasant sensation, running through art. That night in bed he read from La loca de la casa by Rosa Montero, a book on writing he had chosen for holiday lecture, and he smiled at the coincidence when the author described a very similar situation to the one that he had had that morning, which in itself according to Montero is a sure sign of how literature, or rather the process of writing, seems to influence reality. You think of events happening to your protagonists which later happen to someone in your environment, a loved one developing cancer or having a traffic accident, or some other literary form of vengeance, and for a while your shame and pride easily let you believe your thoughts control events, Montero suggests, and the subter travler, now part of her story, couldn‘t agree more. In her book Rosa Montero first talks about the instant way in which stories are born - you see someone and in a flash an adventure comes to mind - and then continues to tell how she goes to Köln for the promotion of the German translation of one of her novels and in her hotel room kills her time by zapping the tv channels, to end up in a story about a dwarf woman who not physically but in all other aspects resembles her own person. The travler thanked her for her definitions and for a while tried to use them on his own recognizer, but later the story got lost in his travels, so many new adventures popping up all the time.
All these thoughts came back to the travler when he saw that neighbour passing, his face by no means resembling the Uffizi portrait to stand scrutiny. But that was hardly the point, the subter travler believed. What mattered was that all of sudden under this spectacular rainbow bridge a door had opened behind which many more doors opened, the first one always hardest to find, unfolding story after story, this tumbling of images a story in itself, and a tiny particle in the ever expanding universe of fantasies in which we spend our days.
Bajo la fotografía:
Of course, this mutual influencing of fiction and reality, it’s all born from the same original desire for storytelling which is the true purpose of life, as Botticelli explains.
