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I was meditating on a document for The
Conspiracy of Beauty, pen and paper on the bed in front of me, when Alba, as
she was oft inclined to do, started to recite to us from a biography she had begun rereading the previous weekend. It is entitled “Dead Conversations Bury
the Listener”. Going by the yellowed colour of the pages, the claret hardback
embossed with the title and author’s name, Bashir B. Sherpa, a tome published a
century or more ago. I relax and close my eyes. I am carried away on scents of
ancient libraries full of volumes fingered by the chosen few that talk of ages
past and of ages to come, not in languages long forgotten, but in dust and
cobwebs, the dark and dark secret odours….
‘I splatter, I dribble, I blabber, never having ever wanted to see the light out there. It’s all some insane effort on my part to take myself back into the long gone peach universe and beyond, where there was never a question to be asked. Where there was never anything to be understood because it was a time before syntax. Where there were no tenses to show things their logical order. It was back beyond the time of listening and waiting and growing and putting off ‘till the very last moment my birth. Birth, light, and I can just imagine what was running through my desperate thoughts with no syntax and no concept of tense; a vacuum. Suck the liquid back out of me, suck out everything I never asked to be pumped into me! Suck it all back through that umbilical cord, oh vacuum, suck my life back out of me! Send it all back into the eternity of the only true peace I’ve ever known. Curse the sperm that wasn’t lazy enough to give it all up as a lost cause. Curse the ovary that beckoned on the strongest, stupidest sperm, for it was swimming so hard it had no time to think about giving it all up as a lost cause. Curse the hormones. Curse my father for his lack of control over his hormones and curse my mother for patiently waiting there in submission, in missionary position. Curse her for hating every moment but yet putting up with the pumping. Curse the web of umbilical cords….’
“String Theory!” interrupted The Pretty
Girl from the kitchenette. “Jone, por favour, this is serious stuff here, it's art!”
Complained Alba. “!Joder¡” I thought without uttering the slightest of sounds, “Let’s get back to the crooning”, and Alba did
just that, but just before she did just that, she looked at Jone through the
sliding glass panel to the kitchenette counter where she was brewing a pot of
strong coffee and warned, “Don’t you dare….” Jone smiled a knowing smile,
winked and executed a cute little curtsy. “Where was I….Oh yes, String
Theory….”
‘Curse the web of umbilical cords pumping for life, pumping for the future. I will call on the vacuum. I will oblige it to suck me back through the generations, through the eons, through the infinite tides of amniotic breakers, through the first cell membrane ‘till I encounter, face to face, face to tremulous nucleus, the nucleus, and I tell it, “Don’t you dare….’
“I just said that myself!” Said Alba,
interrupting the natural cadence of her reading. “Coincidence!” hissed Jone
through a cloud of steam from the percolator. “You’ve read the book before. You
knew it was coming before it came, like you do when we’re making love!” “¡Idiota!”
‘Don’t you dare, don’t even think about it I’m warning you, on the part of the devilish baby in me, for the never to be conceived me, for the uncountable quantities of baby me that were never and will never be conceived. Don’t do it. It never worked for me and if it doesn’t work for me it’ll never work for you.’ But, of course it divided all the same and that’s how everyone gets the opportunity to make the journey back. Few take it up. Dead conversations bury the listener.’
