The Irish Sea by Carlos Maleno

Author:Carlos Maleno
Format: epub

He guides his car without any more pit stops along endless miles of northbound highway. Because, contrary to Herman Hesse, who once said the only flight possible is always southward, Jorge is fleeing to the north. He needs to escape from that yellow light. This yellow light that lays bare all the squalor surrounding him, as it reveals that everything it touches is marred.

After many long hours of driving he arrives at his destination, there in the north. It’s a rainy gray evening as he approaches the ancient City of Stone. He’s come to this place of ten years ago where it all began, and he’s come back now to dig up the root of what was. He takes the last exit into the city from the northwest highway. He likes that view of the City of Stone folded into itself by the slow river, the view of the old bridge, and of the iron bridge where only trains chug past, and suicides who throw themselves from the steel tracks on cloudy days like this one. And there’s the new bridge as well, with its white, piercing modernity and its bizarre pedestrian footbridge tracing a fantastic eight at a great height over the road where automobiles cross above the river, which courses even farther below, slow and forgotten, with the slowness and oblivion of the eternal. The new bridge: future meeting place, no doubt, of the ancient City of Stone’s coming generations of suicides.

He’s reserved a room in the Hotel San Martín, an old monolith near the beautiful Parque de San Lázaro in the city center, a vestige of glorious, industrial times, when the Citroën factory and the booming textile and wine industries brought a never-before-seen prosperity to the City of Stone. He stays in his room, situated on one of the building’s upper floors. But rather than unpack his suitcase, he spends a long time gazing out of the large window at the enormous old black trees of the Parque de San Lázaro, the cathedral that’s hinted at to its right behind the buildings that line the Paseo, the blue pigeons seeking shelter from the fine rain, and behind all this the mountain, also blue, now sinking into black, in the background. The blue-black mountain, disappearing, with the night, behind the glass, which slowly, very slowly, shows back his own reflection.

And when all he can see is his mirrored image, finding this unbearable, he lies back on the bed, opens a small notebook with gray covers and starts to write. He writes about his life, about his memories, which course slowly, windingly over the immaculate white of the paper.

After some time, Jorge stops writing, gets up and goes over to the window, feeling dizzy. Undoing the safety catch, he throws open the window, and as the cold air rushes into his face he feels the temptation of ceasing to exist. This thought gives way to another, more abstract and disjointed, in which he sees his own body falling faster and faster into an abyss, and the fear this inspires in him turns quickly to panic.

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