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END OF MY AMERICAN JOURNEY
A heart riding the wind of fortunes along the valley
of disgrace, innocent soul raining tears of joy on a desert bellow, what is
good for? Do knows the child who sweetly sucks, the curse his name will be?
Mouths of gold dress their love for war with words of peace, plans for butchers
to follow the massacre on a paper drawn. Take a heart, stabbed it, crushed it,
burn it, what is that? Is the power of Death. Fresh runs the river from the
heights to the fields, how bloody it is when it reaches the sea! The eyes grasp
the horizon, a brain living an illusion, the future can be written on a paper,
lines on a dancing hall floor. How long will you live? How long will last that
smile in your face? How many trees still standing? You father was a cannibal,
your son will be a cannibal, you are just a dream, a mistake of Nature, an
interregnum between two meals. Is it not so? What love brings is sweet, a bed
of pearls for a diamond tear, hot to drink that beer, tomorrow, who knows?
Yesterday the two-swords tiger was supreme, today rats on two legs rule the
jungle, so what? Will I reject that beer because I can bleed as a fish, stabbed
as a duck? Victory is for the victor, war for demons, songs for kids, action
for souls. Will I ride the wind jus to say that it blows? Who is the fool who
climbs the highest top just to say “there I was”? What would you write in the
page of your life if you were given the power to be the author of your own
story? Would you be another Messalina, another Nero, a Pasteur, a Newton? Be a
god, boy; tomorrow you will win a lottery, the hero of the day, the new
superman, or better, you will sink the universe in a global war to rise as the
savior of the world. But hell has his prince already, remember? Well, kick the
bastard’s ass, be the new prince of Darkness. And why not to be the King of
Heaven? Who are we? Are we something, are we nothing? Our imagination is
greater than our power, our views larger than our vision, our dreams wider than
the night. And we take our nightmares to the day, monsters of clay forgetting
that there is a sun, the waters evaporate, and the sand turn to the grave. How
not to drink that fugacity of a secret joy hidden in the heart of a particle of
time? Can you assassinated a tear? Can you water the land with the blood of
your enemy and rise from it a forest of brothers and sisters? One step, two
steps, all for nothing, when the rain fall the words are blotted, the heat burn
the paper, and that is. Still, pass me that bottle of wine, today is a great
day worth living.
“Hello, here is me, your son, how is there the most
wonderful mother in the world?”
Once upon a time a man conceived the idea of being the
king of the world upon the liberty of all men. Wow, his cock was so immense
that he could rape the entire world. His bro said “you, no good in the head”.
“Well then, better a mad than a dead”. And the story goes on and on, forever
and ever.
“It is me, mom, how are you?”
A guitar is bleeding in the bed of a piano enamored of
a violoncello, lethal disease, no hand to caress its neck, no fingers to kiss
its soul, why they made me? On the pillow rests a lonely saxophone dreaming
with lips sweet as baby tears and gorgeous as a Mozart’s concert. My my, keep on rocking in the free world.
“Is there anything wrong, mom?”
That woman, she never, ever, in my entire life
wandering around, denied me a smile from hers. I could be lost in the space and
out of touch for months; enough to call her to feel healed from loneliness and
whatever pain. She would never add to my troubles any piece of worry. Whatever,
she could give do whatever for her children, no questions, asking back nothing.
“Mom, what’s going on?”
She would not tell me, nor open her lips to say a
single word. She was drinking her tears, I could see it no matter the thousands
miles between us.
“Don’t worry” was all she could manage to say, to me,
her son.
“I’m coming, mom; I’ll be there in a couple of days”
“Don’t come” she said.
“OK, mom, I see you son”
I had not a clue what was going on. That woman could
endure more pain and sorrow in a single day that one thousand women in a year.
God! Something, I could not figure out what, was killing her.
It took me no time to jump in the Ferry Dover-Calais,
and ride the free train straight to South Spain. I remember one ticket train
man telling me to get down in the next station, I told him to fuck off.
There they were. Mom and dad. Sitting alone in their
house. In silence. In the dark. When they saw me, they began to cry. I had
never seen my dad crying. The answer left me cold as I an iceberg. Celia was
dead.
She was 25 years old. She was the little girl in the
house. We all had become men and women. She was their child, living with them,
and soon to get married. She was tall and strong. She was doing Judo, and good
at it; Malaga has a long tradition of Judo girls, some of them real champions
in national contests. Celia didn’t drink, nor smoke, no drugs. One and one
unique man in her life, and she was to marry him in a couple of months. She had
just opened her own business. She had never before been sick. Suddenly, one
day, she felt a pain in the leg. They took her to the hospital, they were
waiting the doctor, she was sitting in a wheel chair. She closed her eyes, and
passed away. So simple, like that.
Does the rain fall for any reason, or the planets turn
around a sun for any mysterious cause hidden from the eyes of men? Why? How
many whys Mother Earth treasures in her heart? How many whys are necessary to
deafen the ears of a God?
Man, they were broken. Their souls were broken. Their
hearts were broken. Their words, their tears; their bodies were broken. Their
nights were nightmares, dreams visited by shadows reclaiming their sanity. They
were in that bridge upon the abyss of madness. I was there to see them falling.
It was for them, as it is for anybody in this world.
There is a certain limit beyond which the incompressibility on the meaning of
this life carries the mind away. And my parents were crossing that limit.
For some it can be just the loss of the lover. For
another the pressure of society. There are different ways to reach that bridge,
but there is one only way of falling. And I would not let Death take away the
souls of my parents.
To see each other was to remember their child. I was
there, I could see them, hear them day and night. To be together, in silence,
just in silence, in the dark, even if they meant not, they were building for
each other the jailhouse where their sanity would be buried, a jail madhouse
built with tears, their tears, the tears of my parents.
As the days passed the more they were getting deeper
and deeper in their own soul’s destruction. They would destroy each other’s
soul. The choice was mine, the decision was mine. I had to separate them. They
could not keep blaming each other for a death far away from their power. They
needed Time to heal, together they would not allow Time to come and take them
away from that bridge.
Hard was my decision: hard to understand by my
brothers and sisters, to send away from his own house the man who brought us
into this life. But I would stand my ground against Death and Hell for the sake
of their souls. They would have to take with them their father until Time
healed their souls and he could make his way back home. No word would make me
stand back.
The Soul is the most precious treasure the human being
has. All the diamonds of this world can't buy you a simple piece of a human
soul. You take nothing to Eternity, no Power, no Palace, no Crown, no Popedom, nothing. The Soul carries your Peace, your love
for Live, your Freedom, your love for God and Men. You need your soul to carry
before God your Love for Peace and Justice, and your Little Name too. You can't
stand before God with Hate, your Soul will not carry Hate, you will not reach
the Door of Paradise if your Soul is not in Peace and in Love with yourself and
the only persons in this world that matter, your man, your woman, your
children. The Souls of my Parents were under siege. And I would not let Death
carry away the Souls of those I most loved in this world; no one, no brother or
sister would make me lose their souls in the hand of Death.
I knew I had to face the hate that that decision was
to spring in my brothers and sisters. But they knew that I, I would not put my
word down. I said so, and so it would be done.
I hid my face to cry, in the lonely abyss of my pain.
God of my youth, that was the firsts lines of the new chapter of my life? What
was written next, it was not enough the loss of a sister?
Drink that cup, is full with the hate of your brothers
and sisters. Drink it.
I did so. They will see in few months that what I did
was the only thing which could heal their parent’s souls. But who would rebuild
for me the bridge by that hate broken?
I walked away, with an empty soul, till I reached
Madrid. I drank my pain away beneath a sun laying a hand soft and sweet over
me.
Time had to flow. But Time flows slowly when you want
Time to run like a thunderbolt.
I didn’t feel like eating or doing much, just sitting
in La Plaza Mayor, under the arches of Cervantes. There was a bunch of painters
around, earning their living, making funny portraits for the tourists. I made
some friends. Went to see mother sometimes and come back to the Foro. That’s how we call the City of Madrid. Little by
little their wounds were getting better. Mom and dad came back together around
the end of the Spring, their Souls were healed, their hearts would remain
broken though; that’s the law for everybody. Death goes, but the scares Death
carves in a human heart, that remains.
I felt better too. I started to smile and feel groovy.
I opened my arms to a beautiful girl. Not my heart; I never opened my heart to
no one. She was a woman from Belgium anyway, a tourist, she said she was a
student; I couldn’t believe that, she was all the time drinking and partying.
She could speak Spanish, I give her that; she could speak English and French
too. I always got me headed girls. We fell in love, but I told her to let me
go. Tania was her name, tall and pretty like one of those stone girls doing the
column in the Porch of the Erechtheion of the Greek
Parthenon.
My mom was in the Hospital. She was feeling sick all
the time. We took her to the doctor to see what was she having. She had a
cancer in the Kidney. They had to extirpate it. Nobody could say for true that
after the operation she would be OK.
She asked me about the results. I couldn’t tell her, I
just embraced her in her bed. My mistake, I guess. She knew me so well. She
understood right away she had cancer.
When the day of the operation came we were requested
to give our blood for her. My brother Moses, the third on the line starting
from the bottom, he came up to me and spoke to me in the ear.
“I can’t give mom my blood” said he.
“What are you talking about?”
“I got AIDS”
I didn’t know he was doing drugs. Well, down there in
South Spain the only people do no drugs are the dead.
“You had to go that far, man?”
The operation was OK. She was a strong woman. She
brought to this world three children from her first man, and eight from my dad.
She never got sick, never drank wine, never smoke. Madonna from old, they don’t
breed women like that these days.
I got me a little hut in the mountains. Near home.
From some friend that I had. There was not electricity, to piss and make caca
there was the entire world to profit, to counterbalance this there was a
wonderful home fire place and a sky plenty of stars. The girl from Belgium
showed up. We stayed alone and happy for the rest of the Fall, we conceived a
child. We moved to Brussels. Got us a flat and made it ready for the child. In
the meantime my mother couldn’t make it through, cancer came back and was sapping
her entire body. I went back home. She had a crisis and we took her to the
Hospital, thinking that she was going to die right there. No, the docs told us
to take her back home: She would die at any moment but there was no place she
could go from Earth to Heaven but her home, surrounded by her children. And he
was right. She died soon after with a smile in her face. Her two big girls were
changing her underwear, that sick she was already. In a sudden she began to
smile to us, thinking when we were little, and she had to do that same thing
for us every single day, every single night. She closed her eyes, and she was
gone, right in front of our eyes.
A Soul leaving straight to Paradise.
In Brussels another soul had begun the voyage of life.
We called the girl Juana, in the memory of my mother. I loved her so much. I
couldn’t understand what her mother did what she did . I was not planning to
stay forever in Belgium. Just making sure that I had the door open and I could
go and come and be with my baby when I could. I knew my life was no meant to be
a husbandman; I knew she was a big girl and she would manage alone, perfectly.
She knew nothing about my Soul anyway.
She postponed the day for giving my name to the baby,
and one day she took me to a private court or something, with her mother and
her grandmother. I could not speak Flemish, they could speak French and
English. They spoke to me in Flemish and she translated to me, apparently, what
they were talking and the nature of the paper I was signing. I thought that we
were there to register the baby, give her my name. I began to feel something
weird during the formalities. I requested to be spoken in English or in French.
They would not. Tania kept telling me that it was OK. I had to trust her. I
want them to translate me what I was signing. They would not. At the end of the
day I found out that I had just signed a paper by which I recognized to be the
father of the baby but, the baby would not carry my name.
“You have called you baby a bastard in front of the
world? Her mother, her grandmother and her grand-grandmother had gathered to
call my baby a bastard in front of the world?”
I got on fire. My heart was hard-loaded. I had to go,
or I would Kill somebody.
I got me a ticket for the next plane flying to
America. And this is how and why I landed in Mexico. I needed Time to heal from
the pains that I have been through the last two years. And I needed to be
somewhere in this world where even the sky would not remember my name.
Mexico Federal City, 20 Millions of soul packed
between the dry hills surrounding the place wherefrom one day an emperor ruled
this land, then a lagoon, the Empire of the Aztecs. Twenty millions packed in a
single city! A twenty Million people City where the tallest building was the
Old Spanish Cathedral, the wonder of America, to give an idea of the immense
extension occupied by the Federal Capital.
Forget Europe. Mexico is another planet, another
world, a world from another galaxy making its living in the Earth as by chance.
Here, Europe, a car is allowed to live a decade, and after that you got to pay
a lot of money to keep it running. There, Mexico, a car can live as long as a
man lives, and even longer.
Here, Europe, a taxi driver takes a unique passenger
load, one at a time. There, Mexico, the taxi loads and unloads at the driver’s
will.
There you are an European. Here, you are another idiot
paying taxes for the politicians lo live like kings in the palace of the gods.
No, don’t misunderstand me, the palace of the gods is in Brussels. That’s how
they named the New European Parliament in the day of its baptism. Thousands of
Millions of Euros expended in its construction; at the end of the party nobody
knew where the money was gone. Well, everybody knew where, but nobody wanted to
know who. Because that is exactly what to be a European means, to be a drop of sweat
in the forehead of someone else, who never did a real work in his fucking life.
And don’t look at me, man. I got no money, your sweat is not on my forehead.
So, you know, you got to be far from the object to
make a subject from it and become you again out of the confrontation between
internal facts and external reality. God said it for many reasons, man is a
tree. Trees are born in the same place, and die in the same place, if they are
lucky, some end up in the fire, or wherever. Just like man, born to be used,
misused, and when is done, thrown to the fire, and that is. This is the
negative aspect. Which means, man, break it. The positive aspect of being a
tree? Our brain is an entity in perpetual growth, we water it, feed it, take
care of it. Life of men is in the head. But not only of books is fed the head.
The eyes need to see, the ears need to hear, the nose need to smell, the hands
need to touch, the legs need to walk new paths, new road, new highways. We are
trees than can walk, so man, break it.
I was doing so, anyway. After the storm comes the
sunshine. And after the sunshine the moonshine. But one thing at a time.
First thing to do, what? why you are looking at me? Of
course, of course, climb the Pyramid of the Sun. San Juan Valley, a wonder.
Second thing, Acapulco; the hot waters of the Gulf,
the big birds pelicans swimming in front of you, a most funny thing.
New Spain they call the country in the days of my
ancestors the Conquerors. And tell you what, as you travel from Mexico City to
Acapulco, that’s what it is, with the difference that Spain has been fucked by
the Spaniards, and Mexico still preserves the fragrance of Mother Nature on the
hills and plains.
Poverty, crime and prostitution is everywhere though.
You can buy a woman for a meal. Disgusting. And man, Mexico is a land so rich
that if their politician were good men the Mexicans will be the happiest people
in the world.
Kitchen was good and cheap. The bed too. The Avenues
were magnificent, and in the Zona Rosa, as they
called the Touristic Area, you could buy anything for less than a dollar, sit
in a terraza and drink your beer for few cents.
Sunset is what I loved most. I used to sit by la Plaza del Angel de la Independencia,
or Independence Angel Square, and wait for the sunset. It was absolutely
refreshing. Like a springtime rain in a hot summer midday.
Cinemas were all around. Mexicans were crazy about Antonio
Banderas, who was born just around the corner of my hometown. The only problem
was their problems. I had enough with my own. You could not walk around the
city without falling in a worker demonstration parade, the masses filling the
avenues and shouting their reclamations slogans. Whenever I sat downtown my
European-Spanish look got me guys crazy about sharing with me their pains,
their broken dreams, their frustrated political aspirations. I just want to be
a happy tourist drinking and laughing, joking and loving. Leave me alone. I
wouldn’t say them, leave me alone, but I had to go to the toilette, you know?
“Ok. Hasta la vista” and I was gone. It was then that I decided to hang around
the USA. You know?, people dreaming with money but not because they don’t have
it, but because they wanna have more. That make me
laugh and happy. People that want to have more, they always have a plan to make
the dream come through, always, and while they display before you their holy
dreams, just as a Napoleon displaying his armies on the table, they pay you a
beer, take you to the pub where the girls are, show you where the fun happens.
You are a tourist, right?
It was kind of heartbreaking see the kids running
after the train to catch the coins the passenger throw them from the window.
Mexico is heartbreaking, with its Feminicide Question, its Cartels taking over the Government, its subjection to a State
totally dominated by Corruption. I felt so good when I reached San Antonio.
Home! People, stupid people like me wasting their time in a park, drinking and
singing, taking the girls round the corner for a kick, I love you baby, oh
yeah, next, please. Home, the planet of Bob Dylan, Dream Theater, and Guns&Roses. I had my plane back in a couple of months.
Hurry up, go to LA, Miami, New Orleans. Until I realized that it was stupid. I
would do the round of the States. How would I make it back, I didn’t know.
There is always a way out. Geography was in my head. I wanted to know nothing
about the History of the United States. Just show me the wonders. Grand Canyon,
Mount Helen, Niagara Falls, Woodstock, New York, Nashville, God knows.
I entered in the States about the beginning of
December 1995, and made it to Seattle around sometime in the Spring of the
1996. Seattle was a good city to play guitar in the street. Downtown the
underground was for free; it was always busy, the guys really nice and sparing
their coins with a smile. I think I was the only guy basking. “Where you from,
man?” they asked me that all the time. “We don’t play in the street no more”,
it’s what they meant. Obviously I had to be from Europe, only Europeans played
in the street, and there was no many; this far North I was the only one, it was
like seeing a blue bird from the South. Good for me, I was making real money.
All my pain was left behind once a came out of San Francisco. I had an
earthquake too. That was fun. You would think contrarily. But Europe is so
bored for that matter. I love earthquakes, give me more.
Yes, yes, I was back. It was me again. And I thought
it would be a great adventure going to New York but crossing Canada from
Vancouver to Ottawa, then the Great Lakes and Niagara Falls. But the girl in
the frontier didn’t like me very much. She did not know the difference between
Spain and Mexico. Who on Earth gave her the post? There was no way I could
convince her that Spain is no Mexico, that I was not looking for work, I just
wanted to visit the country. She thought Europe was Great Britain, and only
Great Britain.
“Yeah”, said I in her face, “you were a British
Empires’ subject, didn’t you?”
As a matter of fact by her skin you could see she was
from Bangla-Desh, Pakistan or India. She got pissed
off with me and called the big boss. He told me to fuck off.
“What’s wrong with you, people?” I still tried to
contend, but for no purpose, it was a loss cause. I headed back to Seattle,
with a little chance I could get me another baby earthquake. “All right then.
Let’s go to New York following the wind”.
Descending Washington State to Portland I took the way
of the Snake River. Most impressive paysage, cascades
accompanying the road all through Idaho, till I entered Utah. I took a breath
in Salt Lake City, Mormon Land, and kept going to Rock Springs on my way to
Cheyenne, the Wyoming State, where a guy offered me the job building a straw
house, which I accepted to say one day that I helped building a straw house. A
fairy tale, does it sounds, isn’t? Chill up there in the Plateau, the winds
howls like an old woman raped by a bullfrog. I got my fun, I waved bye, got my
money and keep going south.
About Denver I got quite lost, I didn’t know how to
get to Nashville, and I left the wind show me the way, whether through Topeka
or Oklahoma City it was both directions good to me. Finally I made it through
Topeka, Jefferson City and Saint Louis, where I laid for a while beneath the
Steel Arch Square, the American Wonder. Americans have a different conception
about what a wonder is. I like them. Even their Architecture is children staff.
Their Avenues, their ”sky-rapers”, all and all is
just a line cutting another line, simplicity to its utmost. Bit I won't offend their pride.
I kept heading South till I reached Memphis. It didn’t
occur to me visiting the grave of Elvis, nice guy, but his music says nothing
to me. By the river there was a free rock concert, guy playing his guitars as
good as Hendrix. I slept right there. A couple of days after I took the stand
to go straight to New York City. But the guy who gave me the first ride he did
not see it right me leaving the country and not visiting Paradise, West
Virginia. He lived in Charleston, gave me the key of his house and left me
wandering at pleasure around the city. He had his work, and in the evenings got
me to the pub, and most important of all, that weekend, before I go, it took me
to the Beauty Mountains. When he left me go he did it with a satisfy soul and I
with a heart full of beauty. NYC was round the corner. My intention was to
visit the Falls, but that could wait.
And there it was, the Greatest of the Cities in the
World, where if you can make it you can make anywhere in the world. Would I
make the money for my plane? The vision of NYC from afar it is fantastic. Until
you're in Manhattan and then you feel reality, there is no science fiction,
just concrete and people filling the space between, like ants from the field to
their home cave, and from their home cave to their fields of work. The
underground was filed up with people playing for money, with their orchestra
and all; me with my road sack and my little guitar. Tell you what, got me a
lady the first day. She showed me the place, the Village, where to go and where
not to go if you like women, which was my case.
“So, we make love?”
“Yeah” said I.
My first contact with the City. No bad at all. I found
me spot to play out in the open. Union Square, Washington Square, perfect
pitches to earn a simple living.
Sometime later I met Holy, I moved to her flat and
decided to fly away for a while, I was not going to leave NYC without filling
my ears with the song of the Niagara Falls, or hanging around Woodstock, of
which so much I’ve heard. She would meet me there in a couple of weeks, she
said. We will meet. All right.
Quite nice country side around Pennsylvania and the
New York State. It was summer time. Delicious nights and days. As it happens in
all countries where winter is long by that time everybody was happy and feeling
groovy. I ended up in Buffalo playing with a blues man singing a song for me :
“You will keep rocking till you die”. I squatted in his place for few days and
then I hit the road straight to the Falls. No words to describe it. You got to
be there. Get wet, sleep by the edge. Nothing to compare with. You can compare
Symphony X’ sound with Dream Theater’s, or Vai’s guitar with Satriani’s, for that matter, but what to
compare Niagara Fall with?
I met Holy there and we made it around Woodstock
together, we got lost in here and there, swimming in tittle creeks made famous
by the hand of the American landscape painters. We didn’t know how but we fell
on the road where Dylan had his motorbike accident, and swim naked in a lake
nearby where little bambies, so beautiful as in the
pictures, stared at us with their sweet eyes.
Back in NYC she said it, “I can pay your ticket plane
back to Europe”, and she was serious. As a matter of fact she got herself one.
Knowing me, she thought that she could not wait to do there what I have done
here, to do the round. I had no money and made it; she had the money, why she
would not do it? Great girl!
I made it after all. With a little help from my Friend
Above, but I made it.
We landed in Amsterdam, and with a kiss goodbye we
followed our own stars.
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