The bifurcated patios

... Of course I don't know why we were in that house
in that big, white and irregular house... actually, let me tell you... it was a house...

... a house in which the frame of the doors was not exactly parallel to the line of the floor.


To a certain extent it... reminded me (and it reminds me) of some mental institution I must have seen on "Tales from the darkside" or those "Spielberg's Amazing stories"... but the coincidences were only structural.

While those houses of TV series were just weird and -at times, also- funny manors designed to delight the imagination, my house was an otherwordly, cold and painfully real home, tranced in a vague, but permanent feeling of drama.




A home of silent steps and blurred visions, homestall of presences that are guessed but never really seen
like roaming by a home sunk into the ocean, 1000 years ago

I was a fantasm, we were.

Of course I don't know why my very brother was in that house


In that airy and funest manor of Greek tragedy, where the windows were like blind eyes observing empty patios of winter.
Patios, how many?

5? Maybe 11? 13? 100? 500?


The floor of the patios consisted of red tiles, the frame of the windows consisted of rugose wood, its color was crème, same as the color of the walls.

I cannot remember the interior floors of the house, which my mind imagine capriciously built in a cumulation of materials, and ants.

But all the windows observed the patios...and how many windows that house had?

6? Maybe 12? 14? 101? 501?

Later I suspected, ventured that that mansion was, in part, a school of my childhood
and in part, it was something else.
It was a suspicion that I never could eradicate completely from my mind.

Every patio seemed to flow into another, though that was not really seen
it was a sensation

like gardens that seemed to flow into another in a sequence of Y-shaped angles.





In the next sequence we both were seated around a small table, like those of the cafés of Europe, with tables on the sidewalk for the tourists.

But we weren't on the street
we were trapped in that house, gently, cordially trapped by a sort of sanctuary that breathed fear in our ears, silently... that robust fear of the tragic and real things.




The table was close to one of the windows, I laughed, why?

Our words cannot be heard, they're just graphically understood by our mouths moving: after some brusque movement of my hands, my brother holds my right arm with a hand

the hand turns into a claw, like the claw of a panther

automatically my stare is fixed on his face... is the face of a hybrid animal, with traces of bat and cat, all covered in white fur, his head ends in two long and sharp ears covered in white insects, and white fur

his eyes are white, his smile is immense and full of hate:

some sibilant words, at last, escape from his immobile teeth, his voice is modified, like the voice of another being, the words are cutting, like an unappealable sentence:

"Mental death, spiritual death."



A limb, like a hosepipe emerges violently from his thorax or abdomen, and it gets stuck on my spine, like a suction pad
a plunger

he makes the limb sway brusquely like a brutal whip, which gets unstuck ooff my spine, taking something with it
I feel as if something is horribly pulled up, ripped out, a liberation...

He's not there, disappeared.


Dumbfounded in panic I stand up, I seem to be taller, the chair looks smaller, the chair, sunk into the floor.... with that ineffable sensation that we feel when we know that something terrible happened, though we still can't see it, I run.

Run... instinctively I run to the bathroom and observe myself in the mirror
no image is reflected, just the empty space and the white azulejos of the wall.

Tranced in horror I finally got out of the house running toward one of the exterior patios:
in the air of the patio floats a perfume, it's like a painting of that "Garden of Earthly Delights", the infernal Eden painted by Hieronymus Bosch, but empty

slowly my view started getting blurred as the red Y-shaped floor acquired a surreal profundity, and the general linear perspective got diffuse to my brain.

As if I were beholding the world through a prysm, as if I were beholding the existence through someone else's eyes, my cognitive state didn't recognize my own existence, which acquiescently was falling into a sort of sleep:

the images disappeared almost completely as I was falling into a deeper and deeper numbness, only vague shadows remained, as vague as distant grey steam, vague shadows that my ¿brain? Received with dead indistinctiveness, unaware of its own existence as

brain?

Or...brain, brain, HA HA! BRAIN, YES!

Brain, yes! Yes, yes! A brain that...already, almost, hadn't cognitive stimuli
brain that, already... had lost any perception of the existence itself! 

MY BRAIN! MY VERY BRAIN, HA HA HA!

A BRAIN!







The horrid taste of the absolute assaulted the last vestige of self that remained in my... brain when the asphyxia woke me up in a denaturalized and only shout to the weird perfumes of the world of the living.







The summer night still was rolling profound out there
rolling for an aquatic and feminine moon 

that lighted my face 

through the window.