On the other side of the phone , hardly knowing how everything had happened, Israel Rojas talked incessantly, he treated me with absolute undeserved deference, about my views on chronicles non worth quoting here. I began blushing, with nothing to say, speechless, but stayed there until Israel also said he had read Banda sonora (Soundtrack), that text with a deadly line: "At fourteen I adored Buena Fe , but at fifteen I acquired critic conscience ".
That left me in an awkward position. I had prayed internally, during the few seconds of the phone conversation, that the man had not read that work that he had misplaced that chronicle, specifically that one, among the many others I write as secret antidote against apathy and chaos.
Later I babbled something, perhaps a ridiculous excuse. I, of course, would have avoided the subject, but he mentioned it because if it´s really going to emerge a relationship between us it would be better to settle our pending affairs. He wasn´t very explicit, but clear, we both understood that this was about it. We talked for a while and then hung up. I kept thinking, dissatisfied with me, and turning again to the risks involved with writing, with the cliffs and capsules that every sentence means.
I have been misinterpreted an infinity of times and I’ve made people to do it in many other occasions. However the sentence on Buena Fe was so sharp that it brooked no objections, and it has also been written with despotic consciousness. At fourteen I adored them but at fifteen I look at them over my shoulder.
I was thinking a number of specific details that cannot be removed from there. Israel could never know, through those lines, when I was thirteen I had the greatest conversation I’ll ever have with my father, at a dawn in Cárdenas, as we listened to over and over the hits of Déjame Entrar, a CD that no longer exists. Israel, or any other reader, may not know that my first girlfriend sang Intimidad in high school and my first dives in the wells of real hunger, in sex as discovery and fall, the body of a woman as warm shadow and fear from failure, were driven by the chords of that song. In short: from my brief allusion could not be inferred, even in the most unfortunate of interpretations, the importance Buena Fe had in my early youth.
I certainly left them aside over time. A couple of songs and that´s all. But Israel Rojas did not bother on my somewhat spoiled view. Never false, but spoiled. On the contrary, he ran over it and kept talking and did not pay more importance to that matter. He did something I could not do, something few do. Israel did not know, but he was giving me a couple of lessons on a couple of basic things.
There where others would not have taken more work and had just kicked me, he handed me his right, he reminded me without declaring it that I had to take each of my reports with absolute criterion on what I said and that I should not afford myself to be beaten by miseries. He prescribed me, almost unconsciously, a good dive in literature.
I recovered myself a bit; I grabbed the phone again and called my house. Even though I knew she could make me a lot of questions, and she would require me to tell Israel that she loved him and ask him, please, a CD or a signature, I decided to tell my mother, because that would make her proud of me, and she would have a news-that burned her mouth- to tell to her neighbors, because she would think, for the umpteenth time, that I was the best son in the world and such certainty is something that mothers need to survive.
Believing they have brought to life a chosen person and that they, indeed, despite the Special Period, were able to give us a tremendous education.
Author
Carlos M. Álvarez
