22 dic 2018

Man on the pink corner


Remigio Hardoy passed by that corner every day, every*.

Mondays to Fridays, and also Saturday mornings, since he worked four hours in the mornings of that day, which back then was known as "media jornada", or English Saturday, working days and hours that were strictly regulated by the municipal authorities.
 

The usual indumentary of Remigio Hardoy -who worked in a dim, subterranean and gray office in the center of the city- consisted of three suits (gray, crême, and brown), three shirts (bone, pale gray and verde-agua), two pairs of black shoes, two neckties (marron-caca and azul-cielo), and, if the day was rainy, an old, white raincoat, which the time turned into a sort of dirty-yellow piece of crap.

Hardoy called it perramus, or impermeable, and his mother usually washed said attire on Sunday afternoons -especially during the warm months, November to March-, though the yellow tone of the raincoat couldn't be white-washed anymore, not even using Limzul.

Yes, Remigio Hardoy -who was 56- lived with his mother who, besides widow, was a venerable old lady, who prepared a copious quantity of ravioles every Sunday morning, because her other son, Serapio Hardoy always came to lunch.

After the lunch, Remigio Hardoy usually went brusquely to sleep (a nap "to help the digestion", as he used to say), so he turned the radio on and -listening to the soccer commentator-, he fell asleep for several hours.
His brother Serapio stayed in the ample kitchen with his mother watching old movies on TV.

Serapio's wife avoided any visit to her mother-in-law after a bitter argument related to a Seat 600 1969 which Serapio bought (following Remigio's suggestion), ignited verbal altercation in which she and both brothers were involved, including scenes of pugilism and physical violence.


But Remigio Hardoy kept on passing by that pink corner, wearing his suits color shit, walking with diffident pace, and handling his démodé and brown briefcase with sweaty hand

the same thing same he did for the last 30 years

30 long years, since he started working in that office, when he was 26.




The morning after (when Hardoy celebrated his 31th year of uninterrupted labor in that office), he woke up vertically, standing, on his feet: he was on the street.

Astonished, Hardoy saw the cars passing by in front of his eyes, and made an inhuman effort to wake up, but he was awake.

His eyes still were stuck together with dried rheum, when he realized that he was on the pink corner which he saw every morning, though everything was seen from a weird angle:
instinctively, he tried to remove the morning rheum from his eyes, but he realized that he hadn't hands.

Still sleepy and slightly numb, Hardoy takes an incredulous and hysterical look at his own body.

Remigio Hardoy envisioned mentally the horrible scream that escaped from his soundless throat: he was not on the corner, he was the corner.


Three seconds later, submersed in-to the most abominable desperation, being something inert and still alive, something monstrous, mysterious and absurd, Remigio Hardoy, the corner, beheld the other Remigio Hardoy, passing by in front of his eye-less stare.





























* The correlation between this little narration and the Greek myths, in which the protagonist is turned into inanimate object is evident, possibly Remigio Hardoy was turned into a corner (this is, into wall and sidewalk), to be rewarded for some terrestrial achievement, like a prize in which he earned an unwanted immortality, an incorrect compensation, an error in the informatic system of the celestial bureaucracy.

For example this nymph Callisto, she took a vow of chastity in the service of the goddess Artemis, and is impregnated by Zeus on a prairie.
As a soft punishment, Artemis turns her into a she-bear: the chastity vote cannot be violated.

When Callisto gives birth, Hera, from Olympus realizes [sic], she gets furious because her husband cheated on her with a miserable nymph, and urges Artemis to kill the nymph (who is a she-bear now) and to kill the son, too.
Diana-Artemis is forced to obey the Queen of Olympus: she kills the nymph-bear and the newborn baby with a shot of her silver bow

Right away, Zeus, replete of (humane?) pity, sets Callisto and the baby in the sky, as the Ursa Major and the Ursa Minor, close to Libra.

Being turned into a constellation was, perhaps, a prize in which the love deleted the adultery and the broken vows, justified them with its immense warmth, and made them disappear.

A reward, product of some secret merit, or product of the pity.

What no-one says is if the reward was wanted, and there is, precisely, the crux of the matter.




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