He opened the drawer of nostalgia, as he did every time he missed her. He rummaged through it until he found her photo, the only one he had. With his fingertips, he traced once more her face in black and white, veiled but not concealing her defiance. That was the last time he saw her. At that precise moment, he wished he could scream a name he did not know. Now, after months since she stopped occupying his insomnia, in the solitude of his terrace, he laments not having had the courage to cross the few meters of life that separated them, not having rung the doorbell of the fifth floor left apartment in the building with rosy cheeks and wrought iron eyelashes where, every night for the past half year, a light would come on that allowed him to tiptoe into her world.
Gabriel discovered her expression, somewhere between pensive and proud, one night when he found it impossible for Morpheus to do his job. He had gone out to the terrace of his penthouse, weary of tossing and turning on a mattress that returned more embers than his body wished to shed, a pillow stifling with thoughts that entangled him like a ferocious vine fed by the drops of relentless, constant sweat that his forehead produced like drip irrigation. There she was, in the darkness of an improvised theater, flipping from balcony to balcony, waiting for a sign, a wink that would gift him an image to bring back the drowsiness sufficient to turn into smoke all the faces his camera had blurred throughout the day.
Gabriel had spent half his life trying to capture from his models something more than figures of exact and meticulously perfect proportions, faces with falsely whitened smiles and hair that even the best sculptor could not dishevel. He dreamed of finding unpretentious emotion that could pierce through the fragility of paper that almost bears everything. And that night, unwittingly, in the chiaroscuro of the dim light, he found in front of a bathroom mirror the playful gestures of a woman that hypnotized him instantly and to which, without realizing it, he became addicted.
This became a kind of sacred ritual for Gabriel; like someone who drinks an herbal tea as a magic potion to invoke the gods of sleep or idly kneads doughnuts with the smoke of a cigarette while watching them vanish, ephemeral in the transient universe the nameless woman inhabited, which she dissolved with the mere act of turning off the light, an act that each night brought her closer to the life of her unknown observer.
Gabriel, without permission, without anyone inviting him to be part of a world that did not belong to him, slipped his junkie eyes eager for blinks, silent expressions, and downcast looks into a sink that could not wash down the mixture of pride and disappointment of a face that seemed to falter at times. And so, every night, he became a thief of gestures, a pickpocket of emotions to fill the emptiness of the next day's photographs. Until gradually, the afternoon won over the dusk. Until that leaden gray sunset arrived, like a sticky and sweet chewing gum, refusing to peel off the asphalt while Gabriel waited, like a lighthouse keeper on the coast of his terrace, for the darkness to become an accomplice to his daily tryst as a stealthy voyeur.
Then, without warning, he saw on the rooftop of the building with rosy cheeks and wrought iron eyelashes, a figure silhouetted against the horizon. Instinctively, he reached for his camera. The false glass eye returned a clear and magnified vision of the woman whose soul he had wanted to steal so many nights. His silent muse dressed as a bride, presented herself defiantly and seemed to shout from above that now he could photograph her, now, finally, she granted him permission to approach her, to be caressed by the click of an immodest lens that was immortalizing her.
Wrapped in a bitter aftertaste, Gabriel returns to his open wound of insomnia. With a bittersweet gesture, he places the photo in the drawer of memories and locks it with the key that keeps them safe from memory. The same drawer he turns to every time nostalgia grips his throat.
Susana Muñoz C.
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