A Tangerine dream

"A neverending, perhaps cyclical, and mostly erroneous perception of reality, like a movie of Fellini, a Hell of Hieronymus Bosch, or an imagery of Dalí, does not consist in the art of illusionism, or in the condition of being happily deceived: it just consists in four things:
fever, mirror, dream and the neverending quest for happiness."

(D, "The book of Beelzebub")



















"A Tangerine dream"









When my father arrived in the port of Buenos Aires in the 1950s, being himself a teenager, the city was the centre of a prosperous country, a place lost in the oceans of the southern hemisphere, full of cows and sheep.
It may sound like crazy exaggeration, although it's true... and so different to the day of today.



In those years, the self-proclaimed regent, and head of State, Francisco Franco, was leading Spain toward a transition held by an iron fist -transition that would last until his death in 1975-... transition from the II Republic to the parliamentary monarchy of today.

In the 1950s Spain was poor, poor... and there was hunger, because everything was scarce and the country was mentally and culturally isolated from the world.

The north was particularly harassed and chastised, due to the amount of anarchists and leftists, specially in Basque Country, Catalonia, and in Asturias: the miners (strangely like today).

The ship (years later, and by his own lips I knew it was an English ship) did weigh anchor from the port of Vigo, in Galicia, Spain, having several stopovers:
Dakkar in Senegal, and crossing the ocean road, Santos in Brazil, and finally Buenos Aires.

But the first stopover was in Tangier, Morocco.








II)

In my dream I was in that ship, a little child, 5 or 6 years old, breathing the marine air, feeling the travel like something natural, without any fear or doubt.
My father was there, but he was just like a ghost, like a known-unknown, who was?... my father... who was that man?


He...

he was maybe a shadow, a shadow that was taking care of me, slightly, rather distant, silent, to some extent a stranger, that shadow..... a blurred image blended with the rest of the people aboard, diffuse... a shadow that never knew me

I just travelled, happy, naturally.



During the whole travel there wasn't any night.



...When the ship arrived in Tangier the afternoon shone like orangeade, the Sun was in the streets, and an aroma of fried damasks floated and got blended with an intense perfume, like the strong coffee.

My father took me by the hand for a while, why?


Sometimes I wonder if someone would ever understand what I write.



I care, but I don't know. I just don't know.

There were children there, playing football, on bikes... they were there, and I just was another child, playing, falling on the sidewalk, getting bruises in my knees... Everything was natural, as natural as the orange color of the Tangerine afternoon, that seems to me now, something seen through a cylindrical glass.
Everything was children there, children, children under a fluorescent and orange afternoon, which would last forever.


My father disappeared.


I didn't even realize, and just kept playing... but suddenly, the atmosphere started becoming strange, the light became more intense, the color became unreal orange

in-real.

My vision turned out to be every time more obtuse, lineal... the sounds became more ample and profound: everyone and everything seemed to move slower, not realizing about anything outside of themselves from their slow motion.

Only I felt this.

...In a moment, I saw several smiling little faces looking at me, laughing. I saw them all like someone who observes an orange dream through a kaleidoscope, they were just at centimetres of distance, but I saw them as if they were kilometres away

lives away.


The orange became offensively intense, the horizon became tubular, conic; as if it was filtered through a plastic sky.
Because the afternoon never ended, instead of it, the light was more brilliant at every second, like the glorious afternoons of Melilla... or Tangier.

I felt a strange sensation of warmth two seconds before the lights would fade away violently.



Then everything was a free fall.
I didn't see anything else, and everything and everyone were one only verb: to fall

to fall into a neverending abyss, absolutely black, without any sound or light at all.
Maybe similar to the death itself? To fall
for hours?
Days?
Years..?


When I woke up, I couldn't tell if they were days or years.
Or seconds.


But... did I wake up?






























... As the Tangerine, orange afternoon goes by...


and by... 


and by.