The sanity.

Published in Alas de Albatros on July 5th 2007.
Translated by the author himself.

To the last abencerraje.

—Am I crazy, then?

—I believe that you have done already your own diagnosis.

—I do not do anything, I just would like to know if I am crazy or not, if I have the head screwed on or I am mad.

—You’re not ill, if that’s what you mean.

—I see, but neither sane, isn’t it?

—According to your definition of sanity, you are not, of course.

—So, I am insane.

—If you want to see it thus. But at no moment I have said that.

—Well, and what I am supposed to do?

—What are you talking about?

—You’ll say then, if I am nut as a hatter, they are not going to let me go that way, bothering to people or climbing the roofs, I guess.

—I already said to you short while ago that you are clinically in possession of your faculties.

—But, haven’t you said just a moment before that I am not sane?

—No, I said that you yourself reject it, according to your definition of sanity.

—Oh, sure, pretty way to slip off.

—Excuse me, but that is not the subject, here we come to talk about your case, and you insist on which this supposed sanity seems miserable, bourgeois and coward to you, according to your own words not long before.

—It’s funny, you’re playing dumb now.

—I am remembering your own incongruence to you, and trying to approach the subject with practical sense, that’s all.

—So that’s indeed what I want, to be pragmatic, to get straight to the point, and to know what the hell should I do.

—You can do a perfectly normal life.

—A «sane» life, do you mean?

—If you want to see it thus, that is exactly, if you are able to do it.

—Do you insinuate that I can’t? I must be for locking, then.

—I do not insinuate anything, I only indicate that, considering your conception of what sanity and madness are, you could do well to trying to assume the real thing just the way it is.

—Now I don’t know how to distinguish the reality.

—At least you reject it.

—That is, in addition to crazy, I am also an immature.

—Neither the one nor the other, but you take refuge in your own world, your letters and Utopia, and for that reason the real world, the one outside there, seems absurd and anodyne to you, boring, foreseeable, or too prudent, too sane, as you say.

—Something must be done with me, then, you know, weird people are locked in.

—I believe that you are talking to me about former times, you’re very confused. Now everything is different, more scientific and human.

—More prudent, more sane, sure, of course, everything politically correct and quite well planned.

—What do you want then, to rush yourself to the wind mills like the Quijote? You will get nowhere that way, just more damage shall come.

—But I will feel much better on the charge.

—How do you say?

—That the world is too full of Sanchos.

—Why don’t you try to make my work a little easier and allow me to help you?

—Because I am dotty, don’t you know? I always want to look beyond first face of things, to arrive where other people don’t even poke their nose, to devote myself to an ideal enthusiastically, to leave everything behind, to be faithful to my instincts.

—If you’re so self-satisfied, then I do not understand what do you do in this consulting room, let me tell you.

—Satisfied? Absolutely not, disappointed it’s what I am. And the only thing that I do here is to try to know if I’m really crazy or is the world the one that has lost the head.

—The world is the one it is, gentleman, and I don’t deny that sometimes it seems deranged, but you will continue seeing it always that way while you don’t assume that will and desire have their limits, and there are things that, simply, cannot be. You must concentrate yourself on small challenges, day by day, being a little more pragmatic.

—To resign, you mean.

—Not necessarily, but to mark a sustainable objective to yourself.

—To conform to, come on.

—If you want to reduce it to that, yes, at least you will stop feeling like that.

—Like that how?

—Desperate.

—What could you know what desperation is about.

—I work with it every day.

—But it doesn’t look like that, it’s as if a miner left the coal bunker with his hands unpolluted. You know about all those things from a distant spot, seems to me.

—I have been twenty years treating patients like you.

—Then I’m sure you earned a good benefit, but, about me, this consultation is being completely useless.

—I’m very sorry that you think thus.

—You’ll tell me, I’m the same way as the beginning, lost.

—I believe that, somehow, you are comfortable in that deviation. For that reason it’s more difficult to treat you.

—To treat my madness.

—To treat your case, nothing else. Don’t go ahead.

—So, you’re hefting the possibility that I am mad.

—I am studying your history.

—Don’t dive in it completely then or you’re going to stain, we never know.

—What do you say?

—That I could infect to you.

—Mental diseases are not contagious.

—Do you see it?

—What?

—Already said here, I am like a fucking hatter.

—But...

—Thank you very much, doctor. Have a nice day.

Welcome to my wings.

«On a million step journey,
the first step is the hardest one.»
Lao Tse

Today we begin to walk a path together, although it is an old one already. I've been leaving pieces of me, as footprints, castaway bottles or fallen leaves, since May the 11th of 2004. But I did it on my mother tongue, Spanish, the clay that my hands know better to try to express all the inner landscapes that dwell in my flying soul. The albatross is not a casual totem. There's too much of myself on that ending words of the poem of Charles Baudelaire: «ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher». It whispers something about my nature, sometimes silly as a penguin on plain land, always on its own element flying there above, with my wings of albatross.

I would like to beg your generosity, because my English is just a tool to survive among foreign people, a simple door open to new friends, but I am a million light years away from the literary English, I mean I will hardly become able to translate not only my own Spanish original words, but also the most important: what I tried to say with. At this moment I'm writing this message of welcome in English, just as my head uses that language to think. So there is no translation here today. Because I wanted to come naked and honest to your door, waiting for your smile, hoping for a long way together from this precise moment.

Day by day I will try to, with a little help from my friends —feel free to help with your comments—, translate some of my previous works in Spanish, to share with you... not sure about the best, but at least the essential of my letters. The posts will appear more often on my original binnacle, Alas de albatros, of course, because translating takes its time, and I love to do things quietly, in order to be honest and bring the finest version for you all. Hurry is a bad company for almost everything, but special to literature, and I'm not interested on numbers and figures with my weblogs. I just want to meet special people and, most of all, to share what I do.

Finally, I thought it could be nice to finish today, this first day of a new journey —the same as always, but a brand new one if I focus on a wider horizon— with the single thing I ever wrote on English, I mean, no translating —I did no version of that poem in Spanish—. It was something I wrote two years ago, trying to catch the emotion of one moment, but you should remember, from here to the future, that I did the best I knew and maybe the rithym does not flow on these words, and also that I am not a poet —neither in Spanish, it's something to do with the inner voice—, because real poetry is something higher, deeper, and, above all, hard to reach. My familiar terrain is the novel, maybe the short stories, a little baroque, perhaps, nothing to do with so many writers I do admire as Carver, Cheever, Chéjov or Cortázar, to mention just a few.

Well, I'm afraid it took a while, too much, you will know me, I'm sometimes excessive, I talk too much sometimes, although I always try to say something useful, something true, that remains inside others as an echo... I hope you will let me know, step by step, on next months, if you stay on these wings. I would be really grateful for that. Have a great weekend, and here it is which we could agree to call the «poem»:

Madrid, July 28th 2005

To a mermaid.

A warm high tide has come
from the misty cliffs of time
to fload my castaway's soul
with her eternal embrace of sand.

Nomade clouds have risen and gone
from open shells of islands so green
and rained her pearls over my shore
carrying along the clay of my fears.

Sadness, that once fogged up my voice
has been swept away by her lips of ocean
and the mermaid has illuminated my hopes
with her smile, shy and fair,
as a reddy amber sunset.

And now, while I lodge in her eyes I feel
free in that shelter of dark honey
the foam of the waves is at our heels
and we share, hand in hand,
the joy of a new journey.