Caricreatures. Diego Maenza

black man who escaped from his masters and be-came king or the unhappy little man with a disfigured face and sad clothes who claimed to have been the victim a hex, as if his soul was worth more than Faust´s. Poor him, innocent creature full of optimism who barely knows the world and thinks that the tributaries are as comfortable as veins of his gums, salty arteries that lead to the truth. What are you afraid of, sailor, that you falter at the sight your own face reflected in the calm of the ocean? That the foam of the waves hits your skull and breaks the rocks of a virgin island? Or that the bobbies go crazy and start pecking your eyes? Of the corsairs of the word standing up as supreme doers, as unequalled demiurges who consider sea as their property? You, hesitant friend, must be the quintessential pirate, the one who sabotages all the languages and codes established in the foreign kingdoms: you will have to appropriate those kingdoms. You will be the one who forces the fish and the albatross to copulate in order to give birth to a new offspring, a mythological creature born from your womb.

      So, our friend, facing his fears, with a renewed but equivocal vision, clings and drinks from his labyrinth, and is determined to invent the seas where he will navigate, a traveller trained on the experiences of others, and who now trusts himself in the capacity of his inventiveness more than in his hazy memory and creates and believes:

      The Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Arctic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea again, the Pacific Ocean, the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico. Yes, your reality will start at the place where your imagination has culminated. It will set sail towards the banks of that world recently discovered by them, but inhabited by the immemorial.

      THE SLAVE

      AND YOU HEAR from the drum

      the biggest echo drop.

      They are so static

      there they witness the son.

      Dawn between dance,

      the night of rituals,

      amalgamated bamboo flute,

      that regenerates the soul.

      They tell me that I was

      an intact dusk,

      I preferred

      the acacias in the chair.

      I go wild at dances,

      endlessly,

      I don´t stop, shaking

      by perennial sweat.

      Slaves of a new

      scream that drives you crazy,

      all beauty, all

      the murmurs of the people.

      They tell me that I was

      an intact dusk,

      I preferred

      shouting alone in my mind.

      Prisoner, yes, sometimes

      but only of my body

      because my spirit

      remains free here.

      And I furrow the sea that embroiders

      the vastness of the horizon

      like an infinite galley

      that the galleys adorn.

      They tell me that I was

      an intact dusk,

      I preferred

      freedom before death.

      Today, I am free: wind

      thunder, fire, ether,

      the snake or the condor,

      roaring black panther.

      THE NOMAD

      FLEE FROM THE TEACHERS OF WISDOM and the plague as well. And take wisdom as your true teacher. Don´t wait for it to come to you, go out and look for it in the mountains and valleys, in the meadows and deserts, in rivers and in the seas, especially in the seas that are the paths to freedom and where the never fatigued Oceanids dance to the beat of the storm. I have travelled the worlds and times. My essence is nomadism. I am a wanderer who has walked, travells and will visit all roads in search of the precious chimera: Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Johan Ludwig Burckhardt, Cristopher Columbus, Fernando de Magallanes, Juan Sebastián Elcano, James Cook, David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, John Speke, Roger Casement, Richard Burton, Charles Darwin, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Neil Armstrong, Yuri Gagarin.

      I have come to look for her embarked on this arduous journey with these swindlers carrying the map, the route that will lead me to the secret and with a safe voice I have claimed the place I deserve. To doubt your word and the place you assign it, would be to doubt your own existence, even though your word is nothing more than a blurred mirage in the middle of the fog for now. If here in the most beautiful part of the sea a plea could be raised to the three-faced goddess, I know that mortals (oh, filthy race of mortals) would be satisfied with demanding all the wealth in the world. I, no less mortal than them, with my wishful thinking, would ask to have the word.

      In the future, I will descend to the catacombs of language and together with the slaves, Indians and the lumpen brother of mine I will utter my tirades in the most prosaic words guaranteeing the fairness of their claims. I will ascend to the cleanest strata and next to repulsive pharaohs and kings, aristocrats and learned, magnates and bourgeois, I will sing the apologies to art for art with refined symphony. The word, nevertheless, stays there, in the purgatory of those two lies. I will have to travel a thousand and one mazes more to be able to find it.

      Meanwhile, I put my feet on this virgin land, I rest on these shores to give a new name to each object and beast that my eyes reach.

      THE JOCULAR

      IF YOU INSIST SO MUCH, carnal, I will tell you how it happened. I was leaving a very cool performance. She was the mum of the shows. That afternoon, I shone with my own light, not even the trapeze artist could match my camel. And that´s where the kick went from. They threw me the corpse hard. They say I am a thief because a coward lost its wool. The magistrate asked me in front of the defendants´ bench: So you are the opium addict who was found in the red zone? Me, an opiate? You have been misinformed, my magistrate. Talk to me well because you are not with your band mates, he said to me. See my magistrate, in the end I´m going to talk to you about what the scroll is like and don´t think I want to put it in my pocket, but simply tell you the truth. It happens that I was going to my home town with the bunch of potatoes in the box of my poncho. In this, when I get home, I tell my wife: Little daughter, here you have this money, go and pay what is owed to the corner store. When my wife returns, she says: A robbery has occurred in the corner. I turned around and I was afraid. But like a big asshole, trying to sap the move, I run to the street, I got to the corner and I realize that the whisk was effective. Of course, when I arrived they were calm as dead people. Next to me, there was a young boy, with some floors more or less, a tilt from the watuves, a cross that marked the Yoni-style t-shirt with an anchor that looked like a ship. And there was also a smart guy. The man realizes that the boy was loaded with green and zaz who sends the shovel to the left wallet and takes out all the cocoa.

      I was not to blame for anything, my magistrate, if I had even been paid in the circus that day and when I arrived, the fighting had already occurred. Do you get me? Or you don´t get me, my magistrate?

      What do you think, colleague? The magistrate believed that he was not speaking to you from the right. Now they throw me in the drawer, crazy. As I don´t have an oar to go out, they say I´m a smoker. I´m not an opiate, buddy. Furthermore, they taught me not to investigate the how, nor when, or where, but why. I would like to know why you ask me so many bullshit, as if you were going to take me out of the dungeon. But as the trip to the bastard island of the damned is long, now you tell me the why of your history.

      AIR