Tales, by Rafael Gallardo

ZIGGURAT

     The foundations of that tower seemed indestructible.
     Illuminated by self-light, its stony body emerged from the ground, hiding offices and mechanical stairs behind the stuccoed skin.
     The night nevermore blackened since the gigantic building fractured its mystery. Nobody could find an upward end in sight, and would scratch the air if the elevators were damaged. From the top floor, Lefar was hearing the confused, just born and noisy languages, as he watched how a cloud of papers, written with primitive signs, fell down from the windows. The historians classified those papers with an useless purpose: to tell about the past, while the tower transcends the future, with a different age in each floor, coated with hieroglyphics and cavernous figures.
    The tower's inaugural ceremony was celebrated the day before, and Lefar attended it from up stairs: he would expend months to descend. This thought traveled as a silent musical scale through the countless superior floors, where thousands of exhausted men were just finishing their work: because of delay in carrying up the water, they had to wet the cement mixture with their own sweat.
     The Arch Consul presided the inauguration.   Antediluvian trumpets sounded. Kloai, at the tower's foot, opened the curtain:
     -ARCH CONSUL: “I shall say onto ye, inhabitants of Babel, the only reasonable word: Silence!”
     -KLOAI: “Sssst!” (She is the only one applauding, because the barbarians who surround the tower cannot understand such a weird language).
     -ARCH CONSUL: “Today is an endless day. It will last thousands of years.”
     -KLOAI: “I got a vision!”
     -ARCH CONSUL: Oh, shut up!
     -KLOAI: “A stumbling beggar will strike the tower and he will not see it falling down, as a playing cards castle, because he will be a blind man.”
     -ARCH CONSUL: “Stone her!”
     -SOMEONE FROM THE PUBLIC: “There are not stones. All of them were used in the tower.”
     -ARCH CONSUL: Canaanite! (Intoning a Gregorian chant, he enters from the back stage, which actually is the tower's gate. He is the last Canaanite chained when Nimrod decided to build the city).
     -CANAANITE: (Singing) “...gaaaAaadr... ...aaAafadr... Aaafdra...”
     -ARCH CONSUL: “That talkative guy in the attendance is an attorney. Talk to him about ecology and new urban concepts.”
     -CANAANITE: “Afr...”
     Lefar would hear this short intervention some hours later. In that instant was served the lunch meant to the day before, prepared several months ago. As usual, something has to fail! The bureaucracy will never understand such a magnum work, neither the efforts of these ravenous and bearded men who, along centuries, have never eaten at the right time. However, today it seems an insignificant fact in comparison with the adventure they will begin when coming down to the streets: the last generations were born inside the tower, and rejected to leave it, their only known world, their home for generations. They reasoned this issue in a document where, months later, the Arch Consul would read and ancient statement, incomprehensible as the workers who, at the same time, would come out, brutally pushed out by modern weapons whose sole presence made them desist in their demands, despite of the attorney's allegations. Over performing, he knitted his tremulous voice with strident gestures. The public smiled when the Arch Consul ordered a magic act to convert him into a Sphinx, a peculiar ornament for a facade.
     Having arrived to the streets, those zillions of workers joined the big party that the city threw in their honor. Everybody was wondering about the construction, wandered by the dusty and antiquated answers. An expert philologist added some words. The tower's workers generously applauded his intervention, originating a multitudinous echo among the public. Kloai, touched, cried spurts of colorful letters upon the attendance, who crazily laughed without feeling their own laugh, but the Arch Consul's, when he finished reading the demand, already forgotten for most workers: they stepped on copies of the document, sprinkled with blood of those who opposed the weapons. Lefar was the last in descending. When his feet touched the ground, first time in life, in his eyes seemed to shine another Sun.
     He drew some steps and joined the new multitude.

SUPER FUNCTIONARY

     In one hour would start the Winter, artificially commanded by a computer.
     To the functionary in turn, that historical fact would represent just a simple formalism. City councilor, soccer arbiter, art critic, assistant of something, president of that, were some of his many jobs in an idle society in which the automation of the nature lets a tiny space for errors; although some times they happen, as this morning, advanced Spring's first fruit.
     His fatality begun yesterday, while he filled the post of Border Director, and a tourist came, carrying a Cuneiform tablet, seven thousand years old, "rescued" during the Akkad's bombing. The relic could save the vigilance, but it was confiscated by this functionary, because he desired it capriciously. It would adorn his home upon a little table Louis XVI he seized last week.
     "The gasoline rationing equalizes us." Coming back home, walking as a common citizen, without collection of powers, he was reading the slogans, written on the walls, which explained the drama of an human mass eating toxic wastes -as a protest statement-, while soldiers and tanks surrounded the governmental building to avoid their entrance. Victims of the contamination, their worm-eaten skins evidenced the ecological damage, not produced by the war, but by the pacific use of the food. The next Winter would be more than cold, because their bodies would freeze at mixing into them food preservatives, fertilizers and insecticides. They would suffer a geometric-super cooling process, known effect, but without solution, because they were human beings (if they were machines, the technology would say them: Salud!).
     "Who has less possibilities to survive, the strongest one or the luckiest?"
     "Some scotch." Relaxing in a bar, he was thinking in jobs from which rising to springboard positions and bigger ambitions.
The afternoon dismissed its light. A woman could not resist the temptation of entering at the bar, to meet someone. Our functionary was the only customer.
     "Do you smoke?" he asked.
     "I make love," was her answer, with catlike voice, as she raised her skirt. Her sex ardently glittered. She took the clerk's fingers, inserting them into the humid hole, later the complete hand, and then, convulsing, she whispered in a placid orgasm "nice to meet you!"
     The pallid ministrant lost the balance, and the Cuneiform relic escaped from his pocket.
     Again he was alone, wondering if she could imagine this smell of pussy in his hand. Drumming, the Cuneiform miniature was still dancing at the restroom corner, sort of spinning top that finished when it broke: the tablet was covering a phosphorescent stone. Seated on the floor -unusual fact in his ordered personality- he beheld how the stone started to emit marvelous sparkles, encrusting them in the night which was just darkening. The brightness illuminated his inner being, fulfilling him with philosophic photons: That was not other, but the ever searched Philosophers' Stone.
     It changed his life, or his state, feeling his form without body, neither instant nor even cardinal point. The senses experienced an incomprehensible emptying, as a new rotation of his tiny quietness in movement.
     In this rare way, the philosophic photons, suspended in the micro infinite, were expelled from one existence to another; unusual action which would continually happen to him.
     To unfold one oneself, to go out from the body, to free the form; all these terms do not attain a definition to his transformation.
     The next day was flourishing as he opened the window, and when the first bit of sun touched him, it activated the philosophic photons into him, lifting his existence to the pre-Nirvana state which allowed to Buddha his temporary reincarnations. Led by the wisdom of those magic photons, he got the mimetic faculty of emptying his figure to invade with his spirit the body of any other functionary.
     But, the perfection requires its counterpart: as soon as he obeys his philosophic fate's call, some ghost -among the many who wander in nature- would embody his feature to feel heat and cold again, the forgotten sense of the objects, the air's smoothness, with eyes to hear the alive humidity...

     A long time ago an Alchemist attained the formula to not die, but his body succumbed to the time. With the passing of centuries, and the collapse of his metabolism, his organs were extinguishing. Since then his ghost was wandering, trying to recover the Philosophers' Stone which he once hid into a clay lab, the same that the casualness gave to the public employee:
     The alchemist needed the stone to die.
     This morning the functionary would speak an important discourse, in the Third World Inter- parliamentary Congress, announcing the cruel beginning of the Winter. The contaminated demonstrators, demanding a benign season, ingested still worse toxic rations; but the cold was required to counterbalance the planet's overheat, possible sophism by using a complex machinery which, since ten years ago, was controlling the climatic changes, as an objective technological response for the ecological erosion.
     All these fates would decide the functionary's discourse. But when he resolved to talk, the activity of the philosophical photons carried his spirit to Egypt, where he occupied the Premier Lacim's appearance:

      Lacim was loving with passion the galvanized skin of a machine, screwing himself in each screw thread, full of orgasms, beyond the prejudice which separates the metal from the flesh. While they were mating, a menacing intelligent missile detected them, with jealousy of its species.
     Lacim's fate could start another war with the Western Hemisphere, but thanks to the philosophical usurper's intervention, the missile was pacified with a presidential order, inverting the law sense: since then interminable processions march toward the courts, to legitimate concubine relationships with TV sets, cars, computers, weapons...
     Meanwhile, in the Congress, ready to talk, the Alchemist occupied the functionary's body. The entire hemisphere was meekly in silence.
     Representatives from countless countries were waiting for a discourse full of statistics, calculus and logarithms. Did not buzz a fly. Astonished, they heard his speech:
     "The life transcends from outside to inside, as the sun cools. Pluto was the first inhabited planet. When the sun rays stopped warming it, elapsed some thousands of years, 144,000 people attained to travel to Neptune, to begin there a new society.
     The population soon grew. After a long history, 144,000 escaped, for the same reason, to Uranus; from there to Saturn, where they did the most impressive art work in the Universe: the rings of Superior Light, testifying the way of this civilization, which today inhabits the Earth, after living in Jupiter and Mars.
     "The turn for this planet is coming. Only 144,000 people will attain to escape toward Venus; from there to Mercury, and accomplished their time, to the Sun itself, whose surface shall be cool enough to house the last, longest and happiest age of the human being's life."

     In the whole hemisphere, zillions of polluted beings cried for their cryogenic calamity's solution, and as well as the Congressmen, they did not understand the continuation of the Alchemist's discourse:
     "Calypso, Pythagoras, Praxiteles, Epicurus, Aristotle, Plato and I, formed an inseparable group; we shared in confidence secrets that will never know the history.
      Once, coming back from Lesbos, our heads full of categories, Calypso sighted a Philosophic Rainbow, which only she could see, because her wise woman's eyes were able to interpret these natural signs which, by happening in that remote time, we ignored.
     "That archaic age, still fresh the prehistoric magma, abounded in gorges and sharp mountains, covered with igneous elements. Along the Solstice celebrations, the children used to skate upon phosphorescent flagstones. Betting fortunes, kingdoms and queens, they used to slip from the tallest volcanoes' top, leaving behind a luminous track, as a poetic string on the nocturnal darkness.
     "Inspired by the Rainbow, Calypso blew a sacred scent over one of those rocks and her soul was repressed into it."
Saying this, the Alchemist held the Philosophers' Stone, shining in the atmospheric humidity: it was the Calypso's soul, radiating her magic power, enlightening each parliamentarian; she freed herself in their collective insight with an amatory wave of poetic magnitude. A sudden minds' change announced the control that Calypso got over them. It was why the representatives unanimously recited the mantra that she was silently keeping along millennia:

"Being time
and to say
"Come back!"
and to come back I myself
from the first world's breath
in this tiny stone that you are looking at."

     Immediately, the Congressmen displaced their skins, and went to live in another functionaries' appearances:

     This is a very hot afternoon in Nicaragua. The office is full of employees who fight among themselves to attend a the small amount of visitors. A bellyaching guy imposes his authority at buffets and, with conqueror's attitude, goes toward the one who just arrived:
     "What's your matter!?"
     "I am a physicist..." he answers timidly. "I want to know where the Physic Department is."
     "Oh! Ain't concerned. Ask to that one."
That one points to another, another to anyone, and so elapses the time without any kind of help to the physicist who, meanwhile, does an impossible equation: the Physic Department is not locate there; it is not even close by. It is located in other city, but nobody in this town knows it.

Meantime, in some Caribbean island, a functionary was admiring the endless curbs and tangles that knitted the line in Copelia Ice Cream, "the all lines' mother."
     "This time I broke my own record," said the functionary, who was a big player of "lines." He bet his salary to exceed a thousand people lined up, and he already had counted five thousand.
     Not far from there, in Venezuela, refineries and urea factories contaminate everything with mercury:
     "The cars can't come inside, because they contaminate the environment!" the manager orders, as he ignites, as a prophecy, the contaminant factory. I show him my art works, but he interprets them with plastic eyes, resin, ammoniac, and then inquires:
     "Stone, paper or scissors?"
     "I don't know."
     He explains to me how the chemical industry is: an erudite official writes sonnets at the polyethylene, glosses at fertilizer and odes to the kettles. Every five minutes the bell rings to indicate a new rhymester's composition, which everybody read in their computer's screens. Pleasing the lyricist, they respond through the same system with praises and gossips evenly rhymed, as well as with acrostics.
     "His fame exceeds largely the administrative offices, because workers and bosses enjoy equally the madrigal tone of these verses. Secretly, the city's rhymesters aspire to this important job, because it's a privilege to get so many readers: hundreds of poems are daily transmitted in three labor turns (a challenge for the most skillful bard), to all corporation's branches and departments, which is as to say world wide."

     Suddenly, the landscape duplicates in the eyes; scented lakes, drum dance...
     Imagine the trip on your eyelids.
     "Here we are!" says something inside of you, as you are invading other's consciousness.
     Enchanted by Calypso, and their spirits devoted to those further tasks, the congressmen decided nothing about the Winter's start, which was their meeting's central theme, and the nature's automatism wielded by itself the seasonal system.
     But the good luck likes to play eccentric games: some philosophic photons acceded the electronic brain and, dislocating its order, forced it to decree an eternal spring.
     Before the entire world were joyful singing, the Alchemist read in his palm lines this Urbi et Orbe:
     "Sulfur, salt, philosophers' mercury, melted with the Stone to attain a matter which is not material, transparent, with equal weight than the air, neither hard nor soft: the mineral's soul."
     He willed to merge the Philosophic Matter with his own spirit, to transmute himself, using the usurped body as an oven.
     "What will result from you?" someone asked.

"The Soul of the soul."

FIRE

     At closing the door, the wicks turned off in that little and oily sky.
     The flame was still dancing in his eyes when the judge Fire begun to hear the defendant's confession, as the jurors savored the last dinner: with glassy faces they discussed among bites the fate of the defendant, who some minutes later would yawn and talk all the night; that he fought against ferocious rats into the drains, that their filthy backs stroke the air as years over the Grandpa: hanging from his dissolved muscles, they bit once and again his poor flesh. "He must still be pronouncing a sort of moan, drunken of blood." As logic result, the jurors threw up on the dais, a generalized indigestion that placed the time in favor of the defendant, ready to tell them any interminable story.
     In the darkest part of his being, this unhappy judge was tormented by curious ecstasies: roll maddening war drums. Axes and arrows cut the mountain undecided green, while commanding his army's defeat, he runs away, exceeding the horses, until the battle finishes into his brain: it was four o'clock and, as every sunrise, he broke into tears after that painful trance which, without truce, would accompany him through his life.
     Once the judge Fire was awaked, he pronounced these words, as he was burning a mirage cigar:
     "It had a time without remembering, as everybody knows -the cigar volutes draw a landscape-. Then we were talking about peace and war without fear -houses, forests and species in extinction emerge from the cigar smoke-. "Now is different; hoping to discern between peace and war, we die suddenly, with fear to enjoy the death flavor -a couple of puffs, like nuclear explosions-, because the peace, too sweet, palls us, increasing our diabetic catabolism" -other puff: burn in the air the ghosts of each guilty condemned in that court; transforming themselves into awful fire, while judge Fire spits flames and curses, possessed by those ghosts. A short time later would arrive the firefighters, to inundate the court, confused with the jurors' shouts: "Water! Water! The Fire is burning!"
     The defendant laughed as he was navigating on heavy books, full of statements about the corruption which suffer the people with law, but without justice. Almost drowning, the judge Fire accused once again the defendant: "You are so guilty that you steer on the corruption. Why don't you drown with me?"
     -DEFENDANT: Your law saved me!
     -FIRE: Stupid! What would be of you or your wife without law? (By the back stage enters a chained woman, with bandaged eyes. The jurors tremble touched).
     -DEFENDANT: No!!... Not she!!...
     -WOMAN: Shut up, ruffian! I'm The Justice. Perhaps can't you see the balance between my legs?
     -SOMEONE: Poor lady!...
     -WOMAN: I suffer, but I even enjoy it! (The judge fire achieves to hold the balance, escaping to a positive death. The woman utters a tearing shout).
     -FIRE: Alleluia! The Savior is being born! (The woman performs painful movements on the softly lighted stage; she shouts again and at last, with a bloody explosion, she gives birth a Latin American map.
     The jurors cry, sharing her tragedy. Only the judge Fire claps).

TAROT

     The interrupted syllables went over the air infested with smoky rests from the former rite. Last night, the old woman administered a sacrifice, anointing her knife with the blood of a synthetic sheep. She was repeating an ancestral custom, ridiculous in this age full of computers and spatial flights, as a folkloric detail in the few mansions that yet stand.
     Little stings of blood were surrounding the ancient lady, avid of a different feeling, having lived too many silent and solitary years, along which, watching the neighbors' death with painful pleasure, she used to play the cards in every funereal ceremony: the one is jumping and mating; with three spades The Magician holds the present infinite; in the following card, The Priestess reads a manual to understand the Beatles. So, of this weariness, and of this tiredness, the life insisted in keeping her intact, in spite of her just accomplished centennial.
     Her tiny eyes reflected the sheep viscera. With primitive chants and howls the pagan liturgy filled each night, as she tried of divining her future until the sunrise. But something different would happen on this day: in the sheep viscera appeared a poem with the unmistakable defendant's signature:

"Just one lament lacks to the sunrise,
the last, without end
If I could do it,
I would count one star,
broken mirror
at not seeing
a morning

freeing the flesh

My heart fails in pain
almost ever
or almost never
It raves omens,
eyes,
memory."

MALKUT

     "Moon would pull itself along the sky until the sunrise, how not following it? That night my story needed an adventure, because I was suffering the daily smell of oil in the air. Important silence: so we know if we are in silence by fear or complicity; the landscape was a cow head hanging on the wind, insupportable building, Mr. Smoke, I am a martyr of a century with self light and mire in the eyes..."
     The judge Fire laughed sneeringly. Would be better to forbid him any talking along the audience, but the curiosity held his attention. The Cathedral bells rang and an ashen flock of birds painted the new sunrise. The defendant continued his speech:
     "Grieved, I was converting myself in puddle reflex. Was sleeping the night, lighted by a lantern. Surely I was even slept, or walking, or looking at myself, or telling the same and doing the same, what an ironic!, feeling in my conscience a spurt of oil so abundant, that it blackened the unpaved streets..." The judge Fire interrupted this talk astonished: this confession was flowing from his own mouth! Then, he realized that all night long he had been judging himself.

BOX

     "I was educated in Greece."
     "So?"
     The officer stored the astrolabe. The navigation charts of that foreigner were in the right form, but something in his face inspired suspiciousness. Other cops carefully checked his baggage, a big and empty cardboard box, covered with labels "Fragile. Be careful!"
     "Where are you coming from?"
     "From nearby."
     "Where are you going to?"
     "I don't know..."
     They searched in the international police records and all was in order: he was just an unknown stranger.
     "Why are you carrying this box?"
     "Because yes."
     The scientists examined the box, finding just dust from the five continents, but nor a clue of something illegal.
     "You can leave."
     The foreigner went into the box, and while closing the lid, pulled out through a crevice a worn piece of paper on which could be read: "Please, send me anywhere."

.

CLEOPATRA

     The omnibus stopped in an imaginary place.
     We yet do not resolve the enigma of staying on board, and already we should face another arcanum. That landscape was breathing in the fingers of a woman, reclined on the window, just in my front seat; we were the only temporary passengers, because the others were eternal parsonages, mythical ones: sculptures, canvases, gods and goddesses, traveling who knows to where or why. They were commenting trivialities from two or three thousand years ago, to alleviate their tediousness:
     -CLEOPATRA: Do you remember that slave?
     -CENEO: Bah! I sold her to you so cheap, that I sometimes repent myself.
     -CLEOPATRA: She married a millionaire, but always remembers you in her letters (she unfolds an ancient piece of paper). She says you were perverse and made her suffer.
     -CENEO: And to enjoy...
     In that instant Othello, old and wrinkled, begun to sing loudly, indifferent to the starboard group's gestures, the oldest ones, who were sleeping in their laurels.
     The Othello's singing could be heard from a far distance if the driver would have not ignited the noisy motor, leading the car toward a riddle of ways.

.

MACHINE

     Wild horses passed that morning beside Julio Sanabria without even perceiving him: he was invisible! To check his success he sneaked into the women bathroom, took a nap in a banking vault, and terrorized the President, as he was pretending to be the voice of his conscience.
     The development of a machine, capable of converting anything into invisible, would be obstreperous if it were in different hands, but not in the Julio's ones, because his introvert and solitary character made him to feel better in loneliness. When he achieved it, thanks to his new invisible condition, he left the machine in the safety shadow of an abandoned mine.
     In times of the Colony, that mine produced gold which never could be assayed, because of piracy and wars of that age; but today we know, certainly, that many nations were enriched with its abundance. And now it contains a treasure yet superior: the machine.
     Such as it happens in every rudimentary excavation, there perished many people, whose cadavers were piled through the time, skeletons, skulls, bones, waiting their turn to be dust. But the fate likes to play with the footprints: Julio's dog followed his clue to the mine, and motivated by the instinct, he bit ferociously a femur, putting out of balance the pile, which fell down. At the sort, a cadaverous hand was dropped, touching with the forefinger the button, which activated the machine.
     The first coats of The Earth became invisible, then the water, and at last, everything.

.

ARFAXAD

     The aircraft seemed a tree breaking the space. Arfaxad could see a bright landscape as he was withdrawing from the sky darkness, after of rowing a hundred generations. The wind pierced his transparent skin. Again the city amazed the stars and aerial beings, also this scraped and ancient star traveler, accustomed to any space, but no to that one. He rooted out from his buttonhole the sole flower which was clothing him, when he saw the mysterious and profane rite, devoted to the day on which was divided the earth: who knows the motive of that day named today?
     The past is an invisible box with too many cards where one could choose any game to save the life (being able of winning the death, I never bet it). Some cards are interesting: Gretafe, Opulos, Tager and Jhar. The rest form a common army of cards.
     Gretafe drives away the clearness with his arm full of shields. He is not lion bird nor fugitive man, but frightened, he goes toward the night, because Gretafe is the night.
     Opulos has stars in the mouth. She discloses the celestial veil and knows the wind gestures; moving as waves, she sings mysteriously and dances.
     Tager an Jhar are one, bad luck among the worst. They convert any thing in other thing, forests in far ruins of a city.
Jhar tenses time and again the bow held by Tager. He crosses the quietness of the wind with well aimed shouts, difficult task, but not impossible, because he is an experienced hunter, although the custom impedes him to have success.
     Suddenly Opulos rises her metallic skin among the grass: the ever desired prey. Rings of light surround her. Jhar hushes. Tager tenses the impatient nerve. Opulos begun the magic dance too late: Jhar pronounced a tiny letter. Tager, more decided, batted with his bow the Earth and crystalline sneaks encircled her. .....Gretafe was prying, scrutinizing. Taking advantage of the moonlight, Opulos showed with a movement her beautiful body. The enraged sneaks bit each other, as Opulos continued her dance to enrapture the warrior.
     The night silence hardened. Lifting her bright legs, the female cracked the wind, smelling to sex: the warrior was condemned to live.

.

ABOUT HOW THE GENIUS PUNISHED THE LEADER

     Since that afternoon, The Leader did not review the troops, nor pronounced discourses, and he was soon forgotten.
     The Genius took the power, Genius who was not human, but military. The whole population witnessed his prodigious apparition: he flowed from a bottle which The Leader always carried as a scepter. Nobody believed that the bottle meant more than a symbolic or ethylic detail, because the country's attention was focused on the Terrorist, guilty of the worst felonies: once he pretended to be a sculptor, amazing the people with his work, the sky held up by a pedestal.
     The surprise was still bigger when he took out the pedestal: everybody beheld the night without understanding through which artifice were remaining the stars, daring the gravity. The Terrorist looked up, and as everyone believed to see a presage, he just exploded to cry.
     Yet forgetting the Terrorist, The Leader was overwhelmed by many difficulties. No one subject was loyal, neither his wife, nor his dog. Terrified, he was holding the bottle night and day. But one outrageous circumstance kept him in the power: the last river dried because The Alchemist transmuted all the water into gold: subjected to torture, he confessed a formula, which he really did not know: as a chance into a barn. Following strictly The Alchemist's indications, the policemen distilled dew eight hundred times, but they only obtained scotch. The people drank it until they were drunk, and The Alchemist repeated the formula to fill the last round of glasses; but this time he added a word which never could remember.
     The water was transformed into gold; even the rain water.

     At the sunrise, the landscape was golden.

     Meanwhile, The Genius trained the army in a battlefield on which never were engaged battles; soldiers full of sham facts, without true deeds, in despite of their many years in service. He should keep the moral through ideas from any inspiring puddle: "Shoot the first enemy whom you can't see! Flay a tree! Pretend to be a dead!" Once they finished, he used to shout: "Awake!
All is a dream!" But, it was impossible to keep the big battalions sleeping, and he needed vigil tactics to entertain himself, as neither winking, nor to move a muscle; nightmarish exercises, perhaps the last battle for most of the soldiers, consumed below his maniacs orders.
     -Why do you do it?
     -Because yes!
     Each anniversary The Leader used to send to The Genius a couple of armored cars, loaded with pork liver and dedicatory inscriptions which would seem exaggerated to the few who have not experienced The Genius' superior demagogy.
     It was near the afternoon when The Genius would show his draconian power; but not that night, because he would attend the most glittery wedding of the city.
     -Mr. Temple, I cannot believe a word.
     -I believe in all them.
     Mr. Temple:
     -I will fight tonight with this Drago, a glass in the right hand, and in the other the Ten of Clubs, because he is The Terrorist!
     Anybody could be The Terrorist, thought The Genius, and decided to spy on the matrimony of Drago, personage who used to breathe exhaling fire, inheritor of a huge fortune. He would receive it the day of his wedding, which at last he was celebrating with the only descendant of Mr. Temple. But he was opposed to that. Withdrawing the guests, he raided into the ceremony, wearing middle age armor, the Sword of Saint George at the girdle and the Shield Templar with the cross, piercing a dragon. .....When Drago saw him, he puffed sudden blazes of indignation, burning the Genius' cassock, who was pretending to be the priest.
     -Attack!,- shouted Mr. Temple, as he raised his imaginary lance, which pierced the public opinion; and Drago, since then the richest banker in town, erased the Genius' portrait from the coins: he was against the wall.
     While The Genius was consuming his time in this form, The Leader confiscated even the last drop of rain, converted into gold, and sold the future rains, storing hills of gold behind The Genius' back. The Leader made a comedy to snake his true intentions:
     -LEADER: (Scrutinizing a glass ball) Be silent! At this time the ghosts communicate (he turns on the ball, which really is a TV and, upset with the programs, he changes the channels). Enough! (He mashes the TV with a hammer, causing an explosion). Vade retro! An attempt! A subversive act!
     A bent janitor comes in, to clean the stage, which is a right copy of The Leader's house. This janitor is not a politician, but surely, he would perform better than The Leader, if he have a chance to do so.
     Each night he thinks to appear on the stage, but the performance ends, and neither respond his weak muscles, nor the voice finds the way to go out. He nervously smokes a cigarette, and tries again in vain: the curtain has been dropped. He sweeps others' applause with the hope of defeating his fear the next week. .....Meanwhile, sweeping in front of the mirror, he essays his better skills, with the inspiration of any newspaper's tragedy; and once again he faces his momentous decision: "Just now!," but not either.
     Like that, he was passing a long life, below his own silence. One night, having found a coin, he was flipping it, as he dreamed to seize on the stage in the culminating scene: Face or eagle! Face or eagle! The coin fell on the floor and, wheeling toward a crevice (by the casualness which is the fate), it operated an unknown sliding wall, behind which was hidden The Leader's incalculable treasure.
     Scattered along the country, this rumor fed the disquietude. The Leader refused any blame with the argument that it happened in a weird theater, not in his house: just a new Terrorist's trick; and while the congress was discussing if the "z" is used often in Russian language, or the word "and" beginning a sentence is correct in English, he moved to the forest the treasure, hiding it in a jealously forbidden pigsty.
     The sweeper could change the course of the history with his casual finding. In this world divided between human beings and human beings, some people, tired of the others' cruel oppression, begin revolutions whose destiny is the failure. Any circumstance may be the detonator, but that one just meant a misfortune for the poor guy:
     "The tatters waken in the street. How may I feel unconcerned, if I'm here? I sleep on the floor, like hundreds, waiting for a bus which never comes, as an electoral nightmare, as a forgotten unemployed's agony, always ready to leave. "I vote for that one." Too much fatigue. The haggard drivers shout their confused destinations as slogans, and again, "this is my candidate." The stalled body doesn't care about the hard and dirty floor, neither the hawking drivers, nor the candidate. It is seven o'clock; I know it because a policeman awakes me with a kick. I seek the bus which dispels as I get it on my eyelids. Once again the officer awakes me: the bus already arrived. I fall slept on the last seat, and I dream anything, until a sudden shake awakes me again: a damaged tire. Some hours later will be ruined the motor: to be poor is the worst dream."

     It was raining.

     Actually it drizzled water: the rain of gold was over! The hands were lifted toward the heaven, some for quenching the thirst, gathered along many months, and others with desperation, because the water was not anymore golden; only a pertinacious rain was upon the multitude: the end of an enchantment which kept them dazzled. To make worst the situation, the mailman came with a message to The Leader:

     "Poker"

     Decided many months ago, the luck favored a far country, to finish a very long play of cards by mail. The Leader should have to pay, but The Genius embroiled the economy with his suspicions: Drago did not loan to him even a penny.
     Determined to not use his own treasure to pay for his gambling, The Leader conspired with dramatic actions, to get money from other sources.
     -LEADER: The city has been a benefit, as well as evilness. Imagine the capital of an oil producer country, with the cheapest gasoline in the world.
     -GENIUS: A Philistine's city.
     -LEADER: Suppose that a group of motorcyclists could interrupt the traffic at six p.m., in a plot with the Metropolitan Police...
-GENIUS: Worse than Babylon! An insurrection! Ready! Aim!...

     So it happened.
     And thousands died:

     The sun ended its procession of tales. Bony eyes were appearing through the windows, as the crowd ran behind the butcher's carriage. In funny parade a dog rode an art work. The curious people touched with liveliness its hair as it was urinating a pole and disappearing among the rabble. At the end of the multitude, The Clown laughed at loud tear.
     About the laugh of that clown were issued divers and contradictory versions, dividing the city in two irreconcilable factions, organizers of boxing and literary meetings on which the clown would perform. The disagreement dissolved families; armed fights between policemen and judges burst in each corner. The march took a funneled form, while the clown, without stopping, laughed in the last place.
     In the Cathedral's clock rang five minutes to six, because so it was ordered by the boss of the faction named Important, while in the contrary party, The Honky-tonk, to behead chickens was not anymore an entertainment: it became in their favorite tactic. Full of nails fell down the fakir, confused among the chickens, in a Honky-tonk's attack; his head wheeled some yards and went to stop at the Sad Dwarf's feet, when in the Cathedral rang six o'clock and passed with his white beard the clown, laughing upon the ruins.

     So, the imaginary war, dreamed by The Genius, became in the ideal of a devastated country whose inhabitants could merely eat a little lunch, while the most of them preferred to keep it for peace time. At the noon the city's virgins used to descend at the battle field with a colorful nut or a cherry for each combatant, in solidarity with their arduous vigilance, while The Leader was planning the range of a world wide insurrection.
     The third world's hospital was filled. A woman shouted imploring help for her arm, that her ill was electronic, that the next time she wouldn't forget to change the batteries, doctor... Keeping her out the operating room, the physician explained her that his business was with the human beings. How may he repair a gun? It happened hundreds of times, a sickness as the stress or the weariness.
     "When the war shall start we will live in peace," was the official slogan and the soldiers, the whole hungry people, waited impatient the moment of surrendering, because they were sure that any enemy would be less cruel than their misery. Nobody realized that The Leader hid his treasure in the most recondite place of the forest, but The Genius, using his ingeniousness, discovered it. His angry reaction attracted the attention of the guards, who in other way never would be near of this forbidden place and, oh, behold!, zillions of pigs were anywhere! In a country with too many hungry people, the incredulous soldiers' shouts joined The Genius' anger, and when the people heard them in the battle field, they ran in disbandment toward the forest.
     That night the capital was shadowed, but evenly animated, because everybody mistook the stampede with the waited battle, and the jargon inundated the homes. The Leader was disconcerted, surprised by enemies he had invented, while the women, hauling their sons by the ears, were running to the battle field. "It is time to surrender!," they yelled; but in the battle field was reigning the calm, may be more than ever.
     At last the morning of that afternoon came. Once informed of that happening, The Leader discoursed to the multitude:
"Mothers, rebel sons..! With a lot of pain I should tell you that the war doesn't yet begin and you have to wait. Some people say they found pigs, but I say..."
     Instantly the place was emptied.
     From the forest was coming the frolicked sound with scent of fried scrap and pork sausages.
     The Leader meditated his next discourse. After that fact nobody would believe in his charm.
     Troubled, he took off the bottle lid, but instead the alcoholic fumes, The Genius flew up with the evaporation, furious as a cop: he was the only one noticed about the treasure.
     "You are The Terrorist!!" The Genius shrieked, as he made explode his unbelievable power along the country.
     -LEADER: Forgive me, I had to do it!
     -GENIUS: As a punishment, I will convert you in a pig: Ptssssh!!
     So, The Genius abandoned the oinking Leader into the forest.

.

HIERARCH

     This was a tall Hierarch, sponsor of the GREEN BANANA PRIZE FOR WORKS MADE WITH CHEWING GUM.
     He begun his mastery as Official Fate's Reader in the eyes of the dying people, who in that moment were playing cards, to wait funnily the last ritual.
     The former Hierarch's decease was so sudden, that his eyes could not be read, as the traditions and laws command. It motivated bitter controversies in the Hierarchical Body, instance in charge of his replacement. Facing too many contradictions, they decided to name at the one who could rouse upper the hand: he won, just to be a gigantic preacher. The dying people clapped, and the Liturgical Coin shined upon their heads. After a brief chant by the chore, the preacher was trembling, as he saw himself reflected in the dying eyes' rosary.

     A drop was dispelled by the Hierarch's foot, when he worked his crosier in the cigarettes smoked along many generations, to conjure the unlimited vice of the human beings, attentive species to all the useless things. He goaded again the ashes with the crosier, and the admired crowd cheered, following his movements, as if it were a bullfight or other eccentric sport. He hit rudely the air, and a collective puff escaped from the incredulous party, astutely ambushed into the crowd, a cigar in their hands, to challenge his authority. A new Hierarch's gesture animated the gambling, and noisy caravans forecasted that anyone would win.
     The fear went over a lot of backs when the Hierarch stumbled and fell down into the ashes. The devotees went tumultuously to rescue him, treading each other in a confusing human smash from which emerged the smiling Hierarch, smoking a cigarette and shaking hands with the incredulous people.

.

TROLLEY CAR

     At four o'clock would leave the train with uncertain destiny.
Scattered along the course, the peasants looked at the huge and smoky mass, announcing with the distorted whistle that its previous trip was not the last one. Everybody saw with quotidian surprise the traveler faces in the windows, while Kloai imagined herself into the mirror. Following with the fingers each evasive movement, she caressed the smooth skin of her image, sinking her nails into the mirror, to provoke in it colorless hemorrhages; inattentively, confounding her own identity, she was moving the stage from one side of the glass to the other. Only the pain could confirm who she was, on an unique time, tacked between she and her image, through an intermediate dimension: the train stopped in a village.
     When the train continued the march, someone tried to cross the way below crushing cranks and rusted pistons (this accident would last in the memory of a few ones. For the rest it was an unimportant chapter in their personal mythologies, changing as a garment). Victor watched the bloody rivulet as he was thinking in his infancy; river plenty of shadowy shores where he used to swim until the evening, which turned off the noise, and even turned on the desperation: the unavoidable returning. Would dry this river before the train be back? He wished to know, but the train was forgetting at full speed.
     Victor also confused that present with his history: he would be an artist, if he have not discovered with fear his inner empty being. He only was traveling in train, bored to salute anticipating farewells.
     The train lightly shook when it came into The New Lands, a dry territory inhabited by species in permanent evolution. Their bodies were doing metamorphoses in the presence of the astonished passengers, while the tired train slipped toward the top. Suddenly the mountain became its form of lizard into a bright light, whose bunch turned the rail at the intermediate dimension: "The beginning seems to be the end, but it is not. But at the end you will see how the beginning is." Victor was watching to fly, from one hand to another, tales and lies, known but necessary in a long trip at the will of the rail, scrutinizing in each whistle its metallic will. Breathing rhythmically, the passengers participated in a comedy:
     -MAID: Welcome are the gentlemen -I gonna wait for you in my room.
     (Recorded laughs. Enters the steward, giving a couple of keys to each passenger).
     -MISTRESS: Nail the keys in my door! (Orgiastic fading laugh. All the passengers go out of the stage. Only remains Alejo, a confused spectator, alone, acting mistakenly).
     -ALEJO: In the beginning was the Word, but it is the end.

     CURTAIN

     (Recorded claps).

.

GRK

     The worker was checking the sunrise, unknown because of pollution. As each 24 hours, raising a TV camera, he climbed the Satellite City's top and crossed the clouds. The image would appear in the TV screens much later, time which delays the energy to cover such a distance; but this day changed his routine: instead the sunrise, the screens showed a dancer upon a nine dimensional      mutant named Grk.
Grk created this muscular and erotic girl to bewitch billions of people, through the TV, in the Satellite City, since that time the capital of his unlimited power, while in Earth he imposed a tyrant to govern on the underground shelter's inhabitants, in whose central cave the Painters' Detachment guard a group of white canvases, survivors from the war; soldiers of countless battles, though ignorant, honor those invisible colors, fundamental Grk's symbol in a world rebuilt with the ruins of the catastrophe, in the same place, but at a depth where the sunlight is an useless datum.
     Bloodstained walls and torture tools were the terrible becoming: one eye was the price of the power. Following old initiatory rites, the tyrant stabbed the magic sword into his own eye, raffling the risk to accomplish the next ceremony: the Sword would empty every eye in that blinds' catacomb.
     From caves to the Satellite City, orbiting far from that nuclear world, but contaminated by rockets leaving toward infinite wars. .....We can suppose Grk without form nor creed; we can suppose anything, the terrestrial surface, if it still exists...

.

THEATER

The Life's Theater shows an absurd tragedy: someone has to perform the scene in which no one wishes to appear. It is the reality of the stage, the only possible way to do so. It is why the performing does not always reflect the actor's personality: he cannot take off his own skin, just like that, leaving muscles and veins to openly palpitate.

.

HONORS

At the entrance a saber was symbolizing the family respect for the stranger country where they established after the war.
-We are here to render you honors-, explained the City Mayor. The Dutch housekeeper shrunk her reddish face: she did not understand nor a word. Her boss went out holding a gun, menacing the visitors in his native language. Pretending not to hear the jargon, the Mayor, with worthy attitude, read the document according to which the City Council resolved to give to that stranger the City Keys. The band played a hymn stanza, and candies were given to the curious people to finish the act.

.

RUBBISH

The neighbors sought among rubbish all night long. At next door the poet Lezama Lima was once living. Eaten by the time, the three floors building fell down; too many people inhabited the same house, kind of good look, because in other way they would have to live in the marginal neighborhoods where, to be worse, the Party does not have any Bureau: it is impossible to go out from those ghettos.
One day, L, M and H meet at their accustomed corner. H drives a Russian motorcycle. M goes into the bank, while L waits at the gate. M suddenly comes out, scaring at the few customers with an AK4 weapon, and loaded with a countless booty. L helps him to bring it until the Russian motorcycle, which H trays to ignite in vain: all seems lost, but the motorcycle ignites and they attain to run away in an acrobatic action. The next day they will not find how to expend nor one "peso," because there only are rubbish of the cold war.

.

ALBIGENSIAN

     "My blood evolves toward the fire. I wrongly chose to believe that I was not believing..." Lacim read this in the newspaper, The History About the Albigensian and the Inquisitor: morbid would gnash his teeth if she were burned in the bonfire, predicting courses and conjuration.
     Crossing the park a death was coming, flowing out red sucks from its gargoyle's jaw, while the Albigensian vibrated her hips, as the inquisitor's teeth, who was convinced of a salvation to his spirit with the Albigensian's dying. Nevertheless, he trembled in front of those fleshless lips, smiling, going slowly ahead from the park, with speed of tree (in that moment was dropped the curtain. .....Intoxicated with gases and claps, the actors picked the wardrobe for other scene: the curtain goes up at crescendo lights rhythm. A whip, suspended in the air, suggests a slow lash on the Albigensian's naked back. Each gesture forebodes the pain that never comes; terrorized, she whimpers as the whip is almost licking her skin: the light stops. Also the whip).
     At the other side of the city the train, you already know, went up through uncouth relieves.
     Among the passengers, Lacim excelled just to be identical to the others. He was timidly revolving in his eyes a lot of paired eyes until he gave up to the sleep. After some miles, he opened the newspaper and yelped with terror: he identified his own photograph in the record of dead. He awoke. The newspaper, moved by the smooth morning wind, telegraphed incredible messages. Timorous, he sought in the appropriate page. The constant whirls seemed hits. Comforted, he smiled at not finding his photo. Only then he realized that the train was derailing toward an indecipherable precipice.
     The curtain went once again up. The Albigensian distilled exquisite perfumes. The public was applauding frantically while she accelerated her eyelid's contortions at the rhythm of a growing public's panting. Her skin was darkening, producing music. An actor interrupted the scene to fire the simulated bonfire and something of each spectator perished burned. The Albigensian guffawed. That spectacle seemed decadent to her. Upset because of the inquisitor's indecision, the director ruled a different scene: knelt in the precipice bottom, Lacim was crying for clemency to a partial judge, defender of the new moral. The orchestra left of playing a mere and sad chord, and the judge's hand fell over Lacim, as a guillotine, slicing vertically his face: a proof of his strength. The attorneys of both parties beheld how the dead face was breathing an impossible air, while the figure without face clamored stained with blood.
     One hour later the inquisitor would burn the Albigensian. He spied the impatient movement of the fire, biting shades. Built with water panels, the scenery filtered colorless lights, silver sparkles on the sweaty skin of the Albigensian, owning the next scene:
     (A heavy rain is almost beginning. The windows shut as playing cards around her nude body, in the center of the stage. A dense cloud becomes in amber stone, which immobilizes her in a transparent cube).
     Countless and out of tone horns sound. Upon the cube, many damning relapses appear, formerly condemned to the bonfire. An heretic cold blows suddenly, finishing with the bewitching: using her power, the Albigensian had run away.

.

ZODIAC

     In the words of that goddess anyone could understand a night in vigil behind the scrutiny of unattainable hours: just six o'clock and, surrendered to your dark light, I already feel the tiredness of seeing you, Sunrise.
     Casting an incomplete shadow, the face rotated: the ancient head was yet hanging, supported from the ceiling against the gravity, "this mysterious body's aspect to hide the soul's defects," as said Laurence Stern. But she did not have soul to hide, and the visitors struck her body.
     However, her words remained clearly written on the pedestal: she was a statue that I was painting again and again while a frantic crowd welcomed a pilgrim, who came with a message about the ignorance of the fear at the pain which suffer the people, exhausted their sensibility in building of altars with synthetic flowers, below the intense sun toward which the goddess would wish to open her lips, to whisper, to feel that a voice caresses her throat of broken stone, carved by hand: the sculptor looked at the work, always unfinished. He let his hand slip again through the smooth and fresh pubis. Drunken of love, he was murmuring while carving in his own chest the statue's heart.
     The most hidden bells of the night rang. Invoking pagan angels, unmerciful beings unhanged the head in an awful rite. The body was given to a museum, which exhibited in cold cabinets extinct languages and disused archaisms. Here, elapses the time without sense, as in a painting: hidden by piles of antiquities, the goddess' body bleeds, reflected in a sky, alike a spherical mirror, where the pilgrim trays of coinciding his image with an opposite pole; a diversification in which each reflection is other ego: too many solitary pilgrims in the same place. A clown entertains them, his face full of razors and tooth brushes, just one among those many who disappear at opening the eyes.

April
Cloud
behind the pilgrim,
finding himself
by infinite time the only street
and dogs
and a statue which never had arms,

only imaginable hands.

.

NIMROD

     A train with a weird appearance is approaching to the multitude, waiting its arrival to feel happy.
     Few ones know this impossible train, which only travels on routes between the thinking and a sea where once the circus worked: in each vapor puff, dancing elephants and acrobats were escaping, essaying different forms to die.
     One has to be suspicious, however, of a crossroad which could be fatal; it happened before the colossal tent had been built: this field witnessed the war which everybody won, and many unexploded bombs still stay in the way. The station's headquarters vainly seek the warlike rests because, plus the intricate run, they have to face the tricks of the opportunists, looking for a derailment.
     Thousands of years ago this circus announced the new division of its spectacle: ahead the less credulous ones, who really were the most credulous. It was declared by Nimrod, Circus' Permanent Painter, in a decree written on his incongruous and untranslatable skin.
     Nimrod used to paint any city while the spectators were deciding if they enjoyed the spectacle. In contrary case, he changed of city. In that form he painted a beach and a tent with an orange light which annulled the night. Nimrod converted in custom that light, and the inhabitants forgot even the color of the darkness: he originated an interminable day whose hours were repeating themselves, obligating the people to repeat. Some ones repeated each other, as others preferred collective sessions of repetition, besieged by a third anti repetitive group with original phrases reproduced in series.
     It was a remote time. One could see how the water was adopting the forms of fishes and wild beasts. Nobody then believed that Nimrod would be back without leaving; still less that he would debark from this train an afternoon, ahead of the circus, repeating indefinitely the silence.

.

CORONER

The parchment was in the center of the table. He tried of reading it, but the window was closed. Dazzled by a lot of imaginary faces, he remained in the dimness. The cars, converting the verticality, did incomprehensible tones; important fact if the parchment's owner was trampled; a conjecture that did not help him to decipher the minuscule signs of the parchment, into a darkness alike the fear of standing in that place along unbreathable hours. He inexplicably felt as if he were gambling his happiness; it was why he rushed in deciphering the parchment: the coroner only had conscience of a mortal chill when he understood the parchment's meaning. He ran toward the door, but it had been walled up.

.

SUICIDE

     Never a bridge was better designed. That said the witnesses of its incredible construction. All the night those encrusting-stone men were amused by a lamentable deed: the foreman saw how the stones and the river water were going toward the suicide's face.      The magnificent arches were surfaced with rubies, opals, silex and limestone, as a multitude of feet doing a deep shade which will go up to everywhere:
     -What is this city?
     -It is still Babel.
     Announcing the finished work, a viscous liquid was spread over the bridge, while the foreman hit the water with the edge of his lips.

.

THE WALL

     The out of course ship was waiting an impossible hostile boarding. Nobody would navigate, nor has ever navigated in this ocean, only this ship with a crow silently doing common tasks. The passengers claim for the boarding:
     "The dispatcher guaranted us that the cruise includes the rudest boarding! We already paid for it!"
     "Boarding! Boarding!"
     Even if it were explained again, they would not understand that the ship lost the compass and they were just astray travelers without any hope. With nervousness, piled inside the ship, they anxiously desired a sudden boarding, though fearing the forms of the clouds and the water.
     So it elapsed years and never happened the boarding. From the ship emerged a continent without street nor houses, but only the ship, separated of the world. Its colossal structure housed functionaries, markets, banks, confused among beds and domestic accessories; children playing with armed helicopters and nuclear spinning tops, while the surface remained as a desert.
     "A man with a spot in his forehead moves the ship to complicate the prophecies."
     All is possible:
     Hidden in the ship's deck loneliness, an animal is surprised at seeing me; it scrutinizes, prevents its claws, but it is a tame animal and has fear. In other circumstance I would care it. I am stretching a wire fence from that point which is non visible at the left, to that other which also is non visible, at the right. All this will be mine. I would fence it with stones, but I am the only thing in the horizon, and this scared animal, trying to hide itself into the nothing. I have not wood nor wire. Only faith and astuteness. I am worried about the animal, looking at me with wild aspect and almost human ferocity. I leave it in outside of the fence. I continue fruitlessly my project: the animal remained in my domain. I pass over the fence which I still don't make, and again the animal is in front of me. I offer water to it. It doesn't wish. Neither food. Then I realize that it is a female, pregnant, and at the other side her ambushed mate is menacing. I rush the construction, as I imagine wires organized at thinking speed. The animal tries of clawing them, but the speed of my brain reaches the limit of the ship: the sea draws a woman becoming visible.

.

HERALD

     Since ten years ago, when begun the war, this herald waits for a signal that he shall communicate with a whistle, which evenly shall repeat other heralds, without consideration about the wild territory nor the distance.
     Even if other ten years would pass, he would wait a notice whose meaning he doesn't know, below a strong discipline: early in the morning, the herald essays whistles without doing any sound, because it would start a heralds' whistling net, always ready to hear him, night and day.
     Each year, at Christmas Time, the heralds meet to compete for a trophy which shall win the one who could attain the best and longest silent whistle; in that way, the obligation becomes in pleasure. Along those days the vigilance is abandoned: camouflaged with colorful masks and costumes, our enemies infiltrate the party, desirous of diversion, as well as we are. Of course, we recognize them, also the King, and we take advantage of the occasion to do in peace secret trades of war.
     But not all is enjoyment: the herald's personality is deteriorated along certain time, because of loneliness and constant vigil; a bad dream from which we would wake up at any morning: the notice did come! The whistles seemed so real that its indecipherable course was trivial to everybody, intrigued by the rumoring imagination of that senile heralds' line, stopped in a distant time, as artisan symbolism from another age: no one remembered which war we had won.

.

PERFORATION

     Depending of the depth that you could see, the color changes to green, brown or black. If you descend more, you shall observe how the evil is burying his excrement, and an igneous fauna speculating about the evolution, starting from the hydrocarbon. This beings would not believe the existence of life in the terrestrial surface: with buried language they would explain incredulous versions about the drill, if it perforate their quotidian quietness. The same would happen above, if one day could occur the contrary.
     "Let pass the Professor!" shouted the President to the crowd.
     -PROFESSOR: Is kind of weird this excrement.
     -PRESIDENT: The one from the volcano?
     -PROFESSOR: The one from the people.
     -PRESIDENT: (Prying at long distance) I can't see anything!
     -PROFESSOR: You are looking at a painting. Open the window.
     In front of his eyes roared the volcano doing eruptions. Nobody knew the time, or where would go that river of burning excrement which was razing all matter alive, all dead matter. It shone opaquely below the sky until he shut the window. The Professor, meanwhile, was doing algebraic operations, scratching the air with his finger: "It is not dangerous!" Blindingly, the Leader believed it, going into the boiling mash.

.

LIGHT OIL

     Wait! Here should appear four hundred pages more where I could write a technological dissertation, but I didn't do it by respect to you. So, I was thinking in front of the mirror, restless because of I should present an exam the next morning, when in the newspaper would appear the news about an uncontrollable falling down of the oil; but nobody would care: there would remain the towers.
     The examination was in these terms:
     -Q: What is The Earth?
     -A: It is a planet with self light.
     This answer occasioned scholastic discussions, but it was not even important: the falling down almost leveled the worst limit, and we did not perceive the black fate. After a sudden silence, a very noisy splash! of oil crushed us.