A Solitary Flavor

In some moments, I feel a certain alive that I have not known for the past months. My tonic is espresso. I am glad I discovered it at last in Berlin and that here in Santiago, I allow it to purse my lips, to settle on the tip of my tongue, to tear at my stomach with certain pride. I love coffee and my love for it is loud, limitless even. What to say of Santiago? Sometimes, I feel I have woken up in my own past, some streets seem the same, some walks wickeder, secrets I had seen unfold in the pungent past, jokes I have played upon myself, my own tickled ears.

We are staying in a neighborhood that defies the city. Its short, cappucino-colored buildings exude unreal charm. I could sit at Emporio Rosa always, gawk at the 100th artisenal helado sign, simply people watch and ignore the waiter with burning brown eyes. I could eat again and again this goat cheese, mozzarella cheese, salted tomato, crusty bred sandwich that makes me moan. I could love in this city, for its poeple that make me feel safe, for I have found those here certain and warm, less slippery than my Argentine acquaintances.

What to write of Santiago when I have seen so little, stared only softly into the concrete cubes of universities and dodged few cars. There are blue bug cars here, the color of my San Telmo bathroom and sad, suckling street art. There are men in professor sweaters that so suit my father, life glimpses, long kisses, mediocre and the best of friends. We are all so sickly similar, drinking water out of jars and crying goodbyes. I admire huddled newborns. I wonder all the same.

I miss Rodrigo in this soft city, how he brought life (and lust) to every discussion, energized, synergized with every companion. I wonder what it would be like to visit him in Chiloe--one of those wonderful wonderings that takes life in my mind, heaving promise only there.

Santiago reminds me of the 1950s, understated, bold and full of houseware stores that would blow Emmas mind. It reminds me of Berlin on its corners but never of Buenos Aires. Julie says it reminds her of Croatia, which makes me wish for seafood, for ports, for the lovers promise I made 2 years ago, to which I now feel witness but not within.

I sit here, overdressed, overtired, watching a newborn boy all blown up in blue and wanting him to be more beautiful. His mother sips her tea, startles his lips with her thumb and sweats under the reappearing sun, which has repaired my image of Santiago.

When I move, I move to a cafe that is stifling and somehow popular, on a center street with a victorian couch. I would perch upon it if it did not already possess a lunchtime owner, a small businessman who is afraid, embarassed or genuinely disinterested in Cafes With Legs. It is here, holding tight to the wooden tablet above my knees, that my guilt--not gone nor forgiven--weighs only lightly on my chest. It is here that I can say aloud: he is not my kind of man. I am relieved by the heat, what lies at the heart of it all. Whether brown haired in New York or indisputably rubia here, I am the same laugher, same girl (woman?) served with the same subtle (sometimes severe) fright of the given up, same narcotic of nostalgia. Ciego, siempre serà tu ayer mañana. (Blind one, it will always be your yesterday tomorrow.) Neruda´s known words are my greatest fear.

But I must not regret (must I not?), or repent, rather realze that I could never write if I did not feel so hard. This, not my pen, but the piercings of my mind, is, was and will be my only lasting relief.

I wonder--a bit backwards--whether I will ever find the certainty to sit still for the months it would take to really write, or whether my fleeting fingers will flee such perfect possibility and land me back in the other life I have chosen.

Here, with broadway music playing as my background, backdrop, with Neruda poems at my damp feet, I am suddenly alone. Neruda wrote in his poem, Sabor, he conservado una tendencia, un sabor solitario. I, too, have conserved a tendency, a solitary flavor, a fixed patent de las semanas muertas, of the dead weeks, del aire encadenado sobre las ciudades, the air condensed above cities, the only places I will ever call home.

Julie has Dorothy slippers, but not ruby ones...rather the boldest of blues. I have my leather Argentine sandles, propertly worn through, with wishful not worm holes, tied too tight around my ankles, ripped. Both of us were up for giving up our pocorn last night, to a man working in our hotel. Both of us love to write and love to love. And both of us, my artist friend and I, in South America, within the inside and outskirts of Oxford, are finding our way.