Monday, March 7
PARALLEL LIVES
How many lives have lived apart from my life? How many are my real life? I like to pretend, dream, be different. I like to fool with the truth. Transparent and non-bending show, and yet, be full of traps, secret passages of wild corners to lurk
muddy quicksand ... I do not know who I am, I do not know how I am and why I never get bored of myself.
Tuesday, March 8
EYES CLOSED
Prior to first in Bordeaux and had been there many times in Bordeaux. One of the fascinations of my youth were the novels of Francois Mauriac, dry and shady these serials that they almost always have it your scenario. I remember a phrase of his, which I have applied more than once to Aviles: "Bordeaux is the port that makes us dream of the sea, but from the unseen or never hear the sea. "
Now ride, not along the shore of the estuary, but by the Garonne, width and sleepy, which stretches lazy on this spring morning. On the eighteenth-century facade of the city stands the tower of St. Michel after the Pont de Pierre.
under the car and I think I could go through the city in which I've never been, but with which I have dreamed many times, with eyes closed. This is the street Montesquieu, there in the background, occupying almost the entire round of the Great Men Square, the market shines glass and steel posts placed around books, such as the San Antonio market in Barcelona. At the beginning of the street, in a small square, showing its circular façade, superimposed with the double colonnade, one of the most beautiful theaters in the world. The building, in 1800, was the first theater in 1905 are projected in the movies. Road to the left and I meet a broad avenue that crosses the tram: the Cours de l'Intendance, at the start, the home of Goya: from its windows I could see the Rue Vital Carles, with the towers of the Cathedral San Andrés in the background.
What a beautiful name that of the Place des Grands-Hommes. Was created, demolishing monasteries and trickery, in the years of the Revolution. It is a circular plaza and the streets leading to it in homage to the great men who made it possible: Rousseau, Voltaire, Condillac, Montesquieu, Diderot, and also, how could it be otherwise, Montaigne, the master of the mountain, as he called Quevedo, who was, much to his dismay, the mayor of the city, and did not want no world but a tower full of books and be master rather than himself.
But at the center of the plaza there is no memorial to these great men, but a supermarket, the same one where I do my shopping every Saturday. no doubt that this city would be at home. Among other things, because here, a few steps, I have Mollat \u200b\u200blibrary, one of those endless mazes in which I would not mind getting lost forever. I like to see about some books bookseller recommendations handwritten.
Mollat \u200b\u200bThe library is between the Rue de Grassi and Dijeaux Rue de la Port, in the corner waiting for a friend that lives in a nearby hotel. And suddenly, the indifference of pedestrians and bicyclists, a prodigious spectacle occurs. The sun peeks through the triumphal arch of the door. See his enormous eye to the bottom of the street. Almost hear the music of a baroque apotheosis. The sun king appears to me in all its glory. Makes me bow my head and close your eyes as a sign of submissive admiration. An everyday miracle, to everyone, but for which I am the only witness.
Wednesday, March 8
BE ANOTHER
I've always liked the double life, hiding secrets in the basement, which the right hand not knowing what the left. In every city I visit I imagine a different life, real life, I would have liked to live. I play sports, I travel everywhere by bike, I was married for over thirty years, my children are walking and loose in the world, I am faithful to my wife and successive lovers, I have some debt ... In this life I guess not change my life for anyone.
I now change for anyone, I like to play it.
At this stylish sixties, doctor or banker or senior executive of a multinational, which has sat on the Castan Bar terrace, near the Place de la Bourse, riverfront. Impatient and anxious waiting for someone. Look at the clock when not yet five minutes ago has arrived. Suddenly gets up and runs to meet a very young woman, that I find particularly attractive. I do not hear what they say, a few words. She walks away slowly, he sits back down, watch the clock ... I change for whom I always end up seeming change. In the end, many lives that I always make up living life just waiting for those who do not get even arrives. The Castan
bar with its stained glass canopy and decoration grutestos, Paul Verlaine want to read or dream the "Invitation to the trip" by Baudelaire, who just left this spring for the trip of a lifetime: the June 9, 1841 embarked on the packet des Mers du Sud bound for Calcutta. His journey during eighty-three days, but Baudelaire reached its destination, the Bourbon Island, defeated by melancholy and nostalgia of Paris, refused to continue. The bar
Castan, as in many other places, I would be who I am, I do not know who I am.
Thursday, March 10 WEB
I like cities I visit for the first time, they are not tainted by my life. But the earthquake of unknown, unpublished places where everything is possible, short-lived. Then, like a spider meticulous weave my web.
I come to the square where the tower stands sharp and black Sant Michel, with a crypt full of mummies and legends, and gathering around the rickety stalls Campillín, scene of my Sunday walk. Several tapas bars around here tell me that he met the English emigration.
I sit on the steps of the Grand Theatre to watch the stylish bustle of the square and remember the steps of the cathedral in Perugia, facing the Corso Vannucci, those endless summer afternoons a never ended. Two teenagers look happy and smile very close to me and I do not know if I look with envy or pity. In my head are the inscription on a "vanitas" Baroque, "What you are left, so I'll be."
La Rue Ste-Catherine is so long, over one kilometer, which leads me to another pedestrian shopping street, Rua de Santa Catarina in Porto. Here as there, I buy books at the FNAC, the browsing at a cafe, I let myself be lulled by an animation that has gone on since the Roman times when the street was the hub which crossed from north to south the city. Quinconces
The Esplanade, with its stalls of fried food and its huge Ferris wheel, brings taste of childhood. Climb, of course, the wheel. Never miss a chance to see a city from above. I can almost shake hands with the winged freedom that is perched on a column at the monument to the Girondins. I like the variegation of this huge fountain without water, with its prancing horses, their solemn allegories, their naked goddesses and the strange couple in the midst of all this mythological mess, looks strangely eyes. One of them, the older, nineteenth-century shows a mustache, the other somewhat younger, is beardless, both of them naked, the more places his hand tenderly on the shoulder younger. I wonder what the sculptor wanted to represent this sample of male companionship? I observed from above, indifferent to the city that unfolds around him and petted by the crescent of the Garonne.
Activity in the Public Garden, with no one on the first morning, a palace gate of iron and gold heraldic. Everything is as you just created, and finish drawing the deft hand of eighteenth-century botanist. There seems real, but a colored film in which I go into a scented silence. On the north side, on a terrace adorned with Ionic columns, I find "the smooth good looks and tired / of that young man embracing a chimera, with the sculpture of Pierre Granet and filled with confusion Mauriac's adolescence and to which he dedicated one of his youthful poems.
then by Les Chartons Road, the old quarter of the wines, which has lost its commercial animation and port, but no mystery. Walk along the Quai de Bacalan, the spring of cod, now occupied by a succession of restaurants and shopping. I am facing the river, shining cloudy, close eyes for a moment and I'm in Puerto Madero, facing the River Plate in Buenos Aires a few lonely days, waiting also something that never came, but came.
Friday, March 11
LE CAFÉ FRANÇAIS
"You're full of mysteries and secrets," he once said. "If we are transparent, what interest would we have?" I answered. Sitting in Le Café Français in Cathedral Square, looking towards the Rohan Palace, the city of Bordeaux, and he remembered that day in June 1940 that met here last time the government before surrendering unconditionally to Germany. In this same cafe, a English exile, Chaves Nogales, awaited events. He was surrounded by people who drank and talked and applauded when it was learned that the war was over. And they kept clapping when, shortly thereafter, imprisoned the Jews in the great synagogue before taking them to slaughter.
This city is bright, like me, full of shadows, turbidity and betrayal. The next day, June 17, a soldier named Charles de Gaulle, who disagree with the shameful armistice shipped to England. Sailing Garonne, an exiled Republican, Chaves Nogales see also "quietly become the land of France in a thin blue line that vanished as they were fading illusions that we have put in that land."
Saturday, March 12
OFTEN Often I think I've wasted my life forever wander the same streets, drinking coffee at the same sites every day practicing identical routines. In my head comes Cavafy's poem: "You will not find another land or another sea. / There is no way for you boat. / In all the universe destroyed because you have destroyed / in this narrow corner of the earth. "
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