IMMIGRANTA

 

~ A Portrait ~

I knew she was there all along, like my shadow- an undeniable presence. When I woke up at night, I could feel she was there, in the corner by the bed... I pulled back the covers over my head. She was the darkness…

When I woke up one morning, looking out at the sun-scorched landscape and the faraway mountains, I could suddenly see her. The image, fully exposed to daylight, formed before my eyes and glowed as if through a strange prizm. The image of her reflected in my retina for a long time, and afterwards, continued wedging itself in, forming and reforming the landscape of my daily existence.

Later on, I found her in the mirror, my lens focused sharply on her cellophane-masked face. She’d been baiting me for a while now, often as a hasty shadow disappearing around the next corner, but she has closed up on me now and she caught me. I was a fish stranded in a silver puddle of the mirror, reflecting back her hideous disguise. Her taped-up mouth mumbling, jibbering something hardly audible, clash of symbols, an emotion, barred. It seems to me that she is saying: “Do not let me disappear into an image, a memory, a thought without a body.”

But look for yourself, maybe she is saying something different to you?

Early in April, I was crossing the stony paths of the campo, the narrow streets of the village, the town roads, the river with its precarious bridges, mountain paths, various manmade borders, boundaries of cities and many countries, the image became clearer rather than quietly receding into the distance of time.

Abril, 2017