EXILE

WORDS

There is one or two beds; one or two bedside tables; one or two lamps. In that aparticular setting, Armando takes a seat in a tired chair, approaches an indifferent desk, and extracts the penknife from his pocket. Slowly, he unfolds the blade from the niche where it was waiting to be summoned, and he strokes it caut`ou}y; the sparkle in his eyes is brighter than the one in the metal, but both are sharp like the tusk of a wild boar. He opens a drawer that was there by chance, and inside it both, he and she, become embarrassed: the pencil and the notebook. Armando has interrupted an ancient romance that had been budding secretly for centuries in that chest; mercilessly, he takes the boy, snaps him off her, and closes it again. He doesn’t want to hear more cries.

Very gently, he brings the blade closer to the graphite and starts whittling it softly. One by one, the wooden shavings split up from the trunk and fall down silently on the table. That lead is sharpening steadily and the skin around it is beginning to fear that it won’t be able to retain that scathing guest forever. But Armando ignores those fears and his fingers carry on the task of trying to achieve the perfect figure of a cone.

The evening slips in the room through an ajar window, with no sign of reserve, looking for a mountain of tiny rubble that lies aground on the table. If it dares to be braver, maybe a puff could cause an earthquake. But Armando doesn’t care about those contingencies, as he has just accomplished another small miracle. He opens his leather case and, with an incomplete smile, his fingers place accurately the minute coal needle next to the others.

Now is time to leave that deserted place, in search of another one. He carries a new offspring with him. There he leaves the memory of a home.

MOVIES

Platform, Jia Zhangke, China, 2000.

On one side abounds our necessity of self-affirmation; on the other hides the materials we rejected in favour of others, the unsatisfactory drafts, the fears that don’t threaten us yet, the faults that are waiting to be committed at any time, all that we have decided to forget and even those things we will emphatically deny if someone dares to ask.

The mirror is that simple. A sheet of quicksilvered glass and two faces. If you have it fixed to the wall, you will always see the same image until you stop recognising yourself.

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Railtracks, by Desártico.