Days that go by quite unnoticed, between leaving home and getting to the gym, J. woke up at half past seven in the morning, had a green tea, wondered what the point of it all was, her lower back pain was an underground rock gig, J. looked in the mirror after brushing her teeth, made an affectionate, cheeky face at herself and left…
Turning the corner, J. comes across a man carrying a bundle on his back, a guy of about 40 who talked non-stop and to someone only he could see, and, with a repetitive gesture of hand and head, twisted his torso and said:
“Days that go by unnoticed, unnoticed, the days go by unnoticed, look at what you have in your eyes, in your feet, in the palms of your hands, tell me, what do you have in your heart, olive oil or tragedy?”
J. turned away the eyes, but not the ears, walked on intact on the outside, stomach churning in search of answers and solutions to the man’s question.
The street gave off the typical smell of Raval mornings, the bike shop on the street below J.’s place was opening its doors. What better thing could happen before noon? J. thought, taking in images of bodies crossing J.’s path, their gazes, and everything becomes a mix of pity, powerlessness, admiration and desire. Bodies cross J.’s everyday life daily. Look at them, bodies are alive, still.
The sound of a siren echoed nearby, people exist, still, everywhere.
Spring causes allergies, it really does, ask whoever you hug. Spring has colours, but it causes allergies, and summer comes so fast, which kisses would J. choose today?
The church bell was warning of the hour.
Blem Blum… blem…
J. left home simply, could have thought about painted nails, a chocolate croissant, but, at that hour, what remained were traces of dancing, of night, of clothes forgotten along the asphalt, traces of a human climax between human women that happened. It happens every day and at any moment, a climax that only well-trained bodies know how to receive and give, and there, on the next corner, J. came across a body spinning, a spin without choice, maybe twenty-something years spinning, face covered, fragile arms, the air of someone who exists without existing, marks of everything, even of a dry film. Of a no-way back. J. didn’t know what to do, whether to float, to kneel or to hug that spin of bone, flesh and exclusion.
It seems to me the body was looking for some leftover, be it in the rubbish, sometimes in the rubbish or always in the leftovers of the rubbish, be it in the world, in a passage between one street and another, we are always searching for something meaningless to make up for a hug denied.
The young body was there searching, in an empty bottle inside the bin, for the rest, the forgotten drops of vermouth, and it spun, staggered like a dance at the national theatre, all very precise and instinctive, its presence changed the rhythm of whoever passed by, it looked like slow motion, actions with minimal movements dismembered anyone seeking an answer from the body, or an understanding, a judgement.
What does it matter!
That body seemed invisible, but it wasn’t, and J. didn’t even know which it was, but felt like sitting down, watching and then inviting it to whatever that body needed, and it’s likely that even J. knew what that body needed, but the cars and the leftovers, the noises of early morning, no longer mattered to the body, the thin legs, the thin knees, the clothes bigger than the body, an identity that no longer even communicated with its surroundings, and J. passed by, watched, was left uneasy with J.’s own existence, maybe with me, who keeps seeing what I shouldn’t, J. sometimes knows I’m following J.’s steps, but I feel that a film script could save it like this: Ext. Day. Street. And a stage direction about the now. A subtle now that disconnects the trees from the streets, and J. saw something strange and got scared.
J. may think I just sit here being a lot of nothing, it’s by being nothing of much that I reconfigure the noises outside!
The body spun with greater intensity, almost with violence.
Time slips through the fingers and erases friendships made of year-ends, how distant bodies are from other bodies. How distant bodies are.
Ah, because I was afraid to invade that bodily spin seeking a dose of anything, a betrayal, a realization, a truth, a packet of sweets, and everything keeps drifting further away, so far that it terrifies, and truly disfigures.
J. seems like a body meeting another body that spins among bins, cars and petals falling from the trees, the wind and the sky as witnesses, a shadow of itself. J. seems to feel life’s detour in that instant.
Cut, cut, cut.
Production, protect the character.
Parasol.
Chair.
Water.
Cut.
Which scene will be next?
Cut, J. thought.
And a white man, one of those straight macho types, throws a bottle against the wall and goes, furious, for his girlfriend, and she, trying to escape a dangerous caress, tries to cross the street and…
And next to it, cars, cloths at the windows waiting for the sun to dry them.
Pain, screams, horns, lots of phones and their hungry cameras, the spinning body kept spinning, and J., unable to make sense of that start to the day, couldn’t think, walked a few metres and stood still…
Next, five men, the masculine sort, very masculine, who are gay, walking along with a certain laugh, three white men and two Black men, with moustaches, the Black ones, the white ones looked like tennis players. They looked like tourists, they had that air of time-wasting and pre-planned destination. All of them were in shorts. Men love showing their legs, and in summer it’s a hallmark. Yep, that’s just how it is, one of them was wearing a T-shirt: eat me, or I’ll devour you. He was the most festive of the group. Imagine.
There was J., crossing J.’s own place.
Being invisible space of the eyes that watch everything.
It’s so magical to look around, between and beyond.
Anyway, J. watched the Rambla as if looking for a photo that would make the world show itself kinder. How incredible, there’s always some petal falling.
And several fell.
Pigeons took flight at the slightest sign of food.
Teenagers were doing school explorations.
A Black woman with reddish hair was talking on the phone with the conviction of finding the love of the world at the next dusk.
J. quickened the pace.
The spinning bodies were still spinning in J.’s mind.
And, out of nowhere, a hand grabbed J.’s hand.
And dragged J.’s defenceless body to a corner full of rubbish.
Empty street, empty even of life!
J. tried to scream and at once the hand covered J.’s mouth, knocked J.’s body down, and a silence settled in.
A few minutes that felt like thirteen years and twenty-five days.
The hand over that mouth silenced any sign of hope in J.
J.’s eyes were in utter despair.
Panting, J. thought it was a robbery, but couldn’t move, the attacking body restricted everything, even breathing.
The most deserted places in the world are alive. Someone has to help me, J. thought.
Roses grow on dormant volcanoes.
Human women are erased on the asphalt.
Idle gazes allow invasions every day.
Some existence breathes in tatters in an ICU next to a pornographic smartphone.
— Let me out — said J., almost breathless!
— Don’t you dare react! — said the smothering body.
And, pressing J.’s face into the asphalt, it said:
— Existing is the most expensive dish of the day. Non-masculine beings killed for wanting to exist as non-masculine. Lakes in mourning dry up, communities too. The dominant are breaking dreams, forcing hangings, diluting their days in gin and tonic. And you, who do you vote for, the letter or the machine gun?
I am not J., when I think it’s necessary, sometimes I just watch, that’s all. And there was something there to be resolved.
J. lives, and lives more when watching.
J. was trying to plead and from that mouth came a sound almost like pleeeeeaaaahhhsseeeeepleeeaaaasssseeeehhh.
J., faced with the moment, thought of the sounds of the parties that cut through the neighbourhoods. J. always sleeps after three in the morning. There’s a bar next to J.’s place, and J. went there only once and the waitress charged for a beer as if charging for J.’s invasion in walking in, and J. has been very sensitive lately. Well, it’s understandable. J. changed everything, even the vegetables J. believed were healthy, J. was in such a peaceful moment a few days ago.
J. may miss the air, but misses the people who laugh and share sweetness, laughter and some kind of not-knowing.
The bar’s dance floor, right at J.’s window, is packed with guests who exploit misery, they are the benchmark for the applause of the exploited who wish to be successful. Live music in bars near your home can be enlightening, for a new direction in life, believe me. It’s invention, they’re young people who sing and cross through everything before the flood.
J. was still beneath the abductor’s body, no one was passing, there was no longer any way out, any possibility of love, the final scene seemed a matter of time.
And the voice coming out of the body said, drooling on J.’s ear and piercing J.’s eardrums:
“People go around begging for the day to end. Animals keep watching the price of therapy. Films reproduce the despair of hopelessness without secrets. Artists display themselves on social media in search of bread and diamonds. Look at me, send me jobs, they write. They are starving and dazed. Some spinning wounded, others trying to bite their own tailless destiny.”
— What do you want? Let me go, I haven’t done anything! — said J., in a state of shock.
The voice went on:
“The child who matters is, perhaps, the one who lives under your control. The others, most likely, are simply not your children. All peoples are in the same burning boat. Theatres have become a scream that doesn’t get past the stage. The salary doesn’t pay for the pains of the everyday scene, the characters have run far away, the housewife fell asleep before the soap opera started. Who blew up the sand on the beach, made the hole for the seawater to drain and dry up? Who will set my heart on fire? Who?”
And J., in the middle of the exercises at the gym, remembered the body spinning in search of the simple, maybe a bath, a plate of food, a not-giving-up of those thin legs. And the girlfriend run over by yet another case of horror from the man who adores the female body as property.
Why on earth did J. survive, and how did J. get out of that unknown onslaught?
— Disappear from here, disappear!
The voice tangled J.’s senses, and J. quickly leapt over the wall of fear and ran, and still heard, at the end:
“Disappear!”
And once again the hand dragged J.’s body.
Now holding a broken bottle beside Botero’s cat, and J.’s neck was ready to be slit.
The voice said:
“The almost-zombie white thinker devours his almost-zombie steak, time ages the steps of that corridor stamped with recognition.”
Sequences of exercises to keep J.’s body activated, J.’s head doesn’t stop, turns into everything, even its own termite, how outrageous, and, in the middle of it, people shout goal.
Goal!
Goal!!!
The cars are varied and many, someone feels more than hunger and madness right now. What can I do if the heat has taken over the city? I narrate my film, every day I have a film to narrate.
And the drownings, the others smothered, discomfort floods ideas of survival. What is that person, splashed like a chosen headline? Chosen for what? To live, to shine on a treadmill made of what? Someone wishes to be you so as not to die. Weapons, intolerance, perversities or vanities, is it worth being important without being important? The gaze lost in the forest. Invented laughter announces that tomorrow may be tears after the saliva.
The sky is going to collapse in a single drop.
J. left the gym, all those complicated machines, the time on the bike wasn’t solving so many ghosts at once wanting space, it was too much influencer for too few followers.
J. went into a Pakistani shop and stayed there, as if asking what J. wanted, besides going home. J. heard clouds passing by and repeating some unwelcoming mantra.
A woman with a letter appears, frying under the sun:
“We are not, we are not, we are not!” she said.
“A single drop bigger than all the planets is going to fall, full stop,” she declaimed, almost as if speaking to an audience at a street market.
“I know when the price of a kilo of aubergines is going to go up,” and then she came out with that line.
Just so we don’t stop at the foretold tragedy:
The call may be to reading, the information that you make no difference whatsoever, alive, dead or missing in the middle of the drop that fell.
Your faith is what matters least when money is needed to save God.
And God is in a state of absurd exhaustion!
My God, God’s burnt out!
He even closed his bank account, his own account, God doesn’t want a current account any more, nor a like, nor a candle, nor a vow, God wants a sabbatical holiday of a thousand years and two days.
God cancelled the credit card, the debit card, God went surfing on the clouds he built on Uranus. Preciado bought a flat up there too and is pretty happy, God’s neighbour, and has nothing to complain about, on Uranus.
Attention.
God said the other day:
— Paul, I love you!
— I love you too, Paul B. Preciado.
J. stopped the exercises, stood watching those people at the gym, sad eyes, but eager for some meaning. The universe has managers and roads, and sometimes they will be closed. Roads aren’t confused, they know where they begin and end.
Write a letter with letters, a poem that names red in the inks, J. thought. She quickly crossed the spaces between the machines and left the gym, saw people, some sure of where they were going, others not even thinking, some with an idea of soaps, but the spring petals were on the ground, she noticed, and the traffic…
Determined who was late for some meeting, delivery, funeral wake my foot, J. thought of bursting out laughing at such hopelessness, but put on headphones, picked a song and crossed the Rambla.
Someone was watching her steps, she was watching J., who didn’t notice her, in that wish to go home there was a state of bleeding, these are not red carpets, she remembered her trans friend who lives around there, thought of calling her, asking for help, the day was spinning at a speed that made her want to throw up, but she quickened her pace, looked for conviction, her old trainer showed her big toe trying to get out, walk, walk, don’t stop, J. thought… She was disoriented.
And some shoes in the shop windows wait for feet, but the shoes that tread proclaim infinite desires. J. thought: gosh, who, right now, is in the shape of pleasure.
Someone thinks of writing everything they always dreamed of, it’s a nightmare to look at the ugliness of how everything was built in the midst of the masked crowd.
Control has a surname and decides who may sit around the table.
Who can be like that, cheering every day as if in a stadium, who?
Others are less than nothing…
Combat boots without remorse obey orders that kill equals. But someone blindfolds the world’s eyes, silences the song of equality, suggests in torture a new spectacle for obedience. And some movement deceives you, without any shame.
J. went into a shop selling sweets and bread, bought a madeleine and a chocolate croissant, and drifted off wondering whether to eat them there or take them home…
And the spinning body in her head, the hand dragging her body towards a rubbish bin, the hit-and-run, the broken bottle, what else is left to happen? She felt a shiver, noticed a white man coming in the same direction, her body froze in the forty-degree summer… She thought about screaming… The man went into the shop and J. left like a rabbit abandoned by the Easter chocolates.
J. recognized a playwright walking by with his boyfriend, an actor very well sorted muscle-wise, they were laughing… at what, the community theatre scene, or the city and its festivals?
J., in the street, held the madeleine and the chocolate croissant. The sky remained undecided between collapsing or merely threatening. Some people carried bags. Others carried urgencies. The cars went by as if they had a destination. J. didn’t always believe that.
Crossing the street, J. saw the undefined body again. J. thought, for a moment, of singing out loud, trying to change the rhythm of everything. Two men were kissing in front of a Chinese shop, what a festive day.
The body was still there.
Spinning.
As if looking for some leftover among the remains of the day. Leftovers that are never left over. As if looking for something that wasn’t in the rubbish or in the world. Does the world have no voice?
The body’s legs were still thin an hour later.
The knees were still thin.
The clothes were still bigger than the body, the head, between hair and searching, still without identification.
And the city was still bigger than all of them, I mean the bodies.
J. thought about poetry, but what could that ever cause…
Thought of photography, the eyes are developing cases all the time.
Thought of writing, where, which letters to use?
Thought of inviting it to sit down, does one invite a body to sit down in the middle of such a happy city?
But there were things that didn’t need metaphors, they needed care.
Perhaps, for a moment, that body didn’t need affection, just a plate that would satisfy its hunger, whatever it was…
Perhaps it needed only a bath, baths are sacred, I think so.
J. thought of a hug.
But J. was afraid of the no, of time, of the non-certainty that sets free.
The body needed a clock that would point out the fingers of the world, perhaps a loving bed.
Of someone who would call it by name. That that body could exist.
The body kept spinning, spinning, as if looking for a rear-view mirror that would point to a dwelling.
J. watched for a few more seconds.
Then J. went on along the way home. What could exist beyond that, beyond the way home?
Turning the corner, J. saw her street…
Spring was leaving petals on the ground and J. walked past colourless.
The city left other things behind. Something like…
J.’s phone rang, it was her former neighbour… J., enthusiastic but not knowing what to say, said:
—Hello…
I’ll tell you more tomorrow…
Tomorrow I’ll tell more..
JFC – BARCELONA – 2026