winter takes over.... 



Outside, the drizzle keeps on falling. It is barely four o'clock and it is pitch black night out there.

I'm trying hard not to cough my lungs out while I have somebody sitting in front of me for a guitar lesson that I can't afford to cancel. It is also freezing cold and he's wearing his jumper and coat; there is central heating here but I don't know how to use it and in the circumstance it is better to wait and ask for instructions later when H. comes home.

Nothing hurts. Nothing really hurts and yet i'm feeling wasted as if I had just been washed up on the beach of the world after a shipwreck and life is such a miserable empty experience just tonight while my pupil drills through his pieces and the rain falls outisde in a world of wet darkness and cold. Inside all is very nearly as distant, nearly as cold and lacking in meaning and purpose, those trite nouns used by second rate American movie characters...

but isn't purpose something we adscribe to things, to the world...

around us, the cars fzzt their way up the wet road,

while i'm teaching, cold, tired and full of cold, i get flash backs of things long forgotten, walking by the Centro Comerciial Pro-Patria, the Banco Obrero estate and the shanty town on the far side, coming back from somebody's house, who knows doing what, drinking or talking, putting the world to rights or listening to music, knowing not at all how dangerous it was to be walking those streets full of violence in the middle of the night, waiting for the 'carrito por puesto', the by-the-seat taxi van that would only take me half the way home and then I would have to walk across the night of Catia, with its seedy bars, its prostitutes who would call you invitingly -until they finally got to know you and knew you were just a kid and skint at that so weren't a prospective customer.. I remember often stopping for a expresso in hte middle of the night at one of those bars -they used to have the 'seedy' entrance and an adjoining coffee bar. One of these girls would often give me conversation and I would utter the usual common places, try to do something for yourself, study and save, strive for a better life...

my pupil is still going through his piece and i wake up from this reverie thinking, did I really live all those things, so far away and so long ago, all those things from a life that I find difficult to comprehend... "Play that again, please, it was a bit hesitating in the beginning..." but as soon as he starts to play I'm gone again (and yet I'm still aware of what he is doing, he;s not changed the fingering so he's tripping up on the next bar still, but 90% of me is just not there...)

The fat policeman slapping his 'rolo', his truncheon against his left hand, his cap rolled halfway back his skull of greasy hair, boozy eyes, mexican moustache looks at me and stops me with the standard issue routine... where are you coming from, where you going to, ID card, proof of gainful employment, police record certificate, stand against the wall....

Suppresing the cough I watch the minutes slowly crawl; I normally enjoy this lesson, but today I'm tired and empty and only ghosts come to visit me, ghosts of long ago and far away and ghosts of might have been or could it ever.
 

Posted: Mon - November 17, 2003 at 05:34 PM          

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