setembro 07, 2006
Tanked (1)
I share a two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn with a black man. He has his bedroom, I have mine, and in between we keep an empty room with no furniture, no phone, no painting, not even a closed umbrella leaning against the wall close to the entrance door. It may sound like a statement now, but we didn’t plan to have this no man’s land, we simply got used to it. Before entering my room, I decompress there when I get home, looking first at the street through the window, then turning around, to notice the numerous imperfections no one bothered to fix, the layers of dried out dripping white paint on top of white paint that the Latinos apply without any finishing or pride before a new tenant arrives. Except for these brief moments, neither of us spends much time there, and I have begun to refer to it as our “leaving room”, but Joe – that’s the black guy’s name – doesn’t get it. It must be because of my accent. I haven’t been funny for the last 32 years.
His room is packed and so is mine. No matter how light we live our lives, at 52 we end up with a lot of stuff. Joe is 47, by the way, not that a five-year difference really matters for housemates our age. We’ve been living together for the past four years but the cumulative time we have spent interacting is probably less than a week. Our schedules and culinary preferences are not quite compatible, to put it simply. We share the same bathroom, nonetheless, and seeing one of Joe’s curled pubic hairs engraved in the white soap does not prevent me from using it.
I haven’t been this obsessed with a bedroom since my teenage years. The room is a fortress; I feel it once again and more intensely than before. My severe, yet steadily increasing, lack of concern for the things that interest others must fuel this rediscovered passion. I lost my country first – though it’s debatable that Spain was ever my driving force - then my close family, then my career, then my interest in sex, and only after, my already vestigial interest in women. This list is incomplete, implying that I lost interest in all the missing items to the point of oblivion. Naturally, I would have expected to hit rock bottom after such a grand series, and then to eventually resurface. As it turned out, I’ve stayed in the bottom and it feels cozy here. I’m not really a masochist nor prone to depression. Such general lack of drive was and still is liberating, particularly after investing so many years in being an achiever. Out of boredom, I had to eventually focus on something and out of laziness I decided to keep it within these walls.
Someone entering my room ¬— not that anyone ever does — would immediately notice the wall opposite the door. I started buying television sets at flea markets, and soon I had collected more than 20 different sizes and brands, all in color — except one — a Grundig from the early seventies. With some degree of improvisation, I began to pile them from the ground up to the ceiling, leaving no space between the sets, thus building a wall of dead screens that looks a little sinister, but only in the morning and afternoon. Every night, not later than 8:59 pm, I take my position on the edge of the bed, with the lights off and a tray with snacks on my lap. I’m always slightly anxious, waiting for the wave of electricity that, running through the screens with the sound of distant rain, anticipates a climatic burst of light and cacophony, when all televisions are turned on at the same time. Only then the room comes alive, just like an amusement park after dusk. I took great care in synchronizing all sets so that there are no delays, and now they unanimously react as a single television with a huge screen broken down in small units. This makes me proud; it wasn’t easy to reconcile Japanese, American and German technologies, all united to give me this long-awaited daily kick, precisely at 9 pm. Over the last few days, I have noticed that the sound has been set at increasingly higher levels and that the colors are more and more saturated, but I take some comfort in knowing that TV addiction is epidemic as never before. I just do it in style.
The unleashed sounds invade my room; a wave of uninformative complexity at first, as if I were given God’s ears while keeping the same old mortal brain. After a while, I start noticing female voices taking over the baritone narrators, birds chirping, machine guns firing, and birds still singing in the rare instances when there are no catchy jingles from commercials on the air. I hear the ocean, broken conversations and laughs, languages I can’t understand and music, music being played simultaneously on forbidden tonalities and incompatible rhythms, creating a funny acoustic phenomenon that makes my heart race. Because this can’t go on for much longer than a few minutes, I reach for a painter’s palette with all the remote controls glued and disposed around it like the points of a star. I’ve learned to which remote control each TV set corresponds and I aim accurately, to avoid accidentally shutting down the wrong model. It took me some time to master this technique but now, one by one, as a patient conductor selecting which members of his orchestra to mute, I make silence for the soloist. Then, I clearly hear it for the first time: a harsh, frantic and disturbing sound, the opposite of a slow tune played by an oboe: Spanish.
The black and white Grundig is hung in the middle of the wall and broadcasts the contemporary TVE (the Spanish National TV) emissions exclusively. None of the other televisions is committed to a particular channel. In fact, I reset them from time to time, roughly on a weekly basis, to kill any incipient craving for a specific show. The channels are from all over the world, with no obvious selection criteria other than the exclusion of the so-called mainstream media. Just to give you an idea, I’m currently watching news from Tanzania and North Korea; traffic reports from Rio and a Taiwanese version of MTV; a few European channels, including a Turkish one; soft porn from Bangladesh – if one could fathom – and Gregorian chants from the Vatican; the final hour of a morning talk show from Moscow for the elderly, the unemployed, and housewives; the history of Nascar races from a Kentucky station; a Caribbean soap opera; the Old Testament in a bloody Manga version; Finnish home-shopping, which almost got me to order a blender from Perna; and the Rain Forest Witness, this week’s favorite: an eccentric project financed by a multimillionaire fanatic ecologist that broadcasts around the clock from thousands of cameras strategically placed in the heart of the Amazonian forest. I’ll probably reset all these televisions soon, but yesterday, shortly before falling asleep, I am sure I saw a Golden Lion Tamarin, live, which was exciting since I’m in Brooklyn, it has been snowing and I had thought these monkeys were extinct in the wild. I may keep the Rain Forest Witness going for a few more days, in case a unicorn sticks its horn in one of those camera lenses - something I would not want to miss.
Everything in the room, except for my TV sets, is disposable. I keep no pictures of relatives or friends, and the case with the saxophone has rusted locks which I doubt still open. I don’t buy or keep any books, except the volumes I bring from the New York Public Library that I visit occasionally. My clothes are in a closet and the room has a lot of unused furniture, piled up as if I am about to move elsewhere. Organizing a tag sale would probably be a good idea, but I am not going anywhere and I don’t need the money or the extra space, as long as the access to the window is not obstructed.
There is also an aquarium. This was a recent addition and one I had not planned. I have no interest in fish except as food, and the burden of pets is unappealing. The tank was inherited from a dying colleague; refusing it was not an option. It holds 300 gallons of salt water and now hosts a few cheap tropical fish. The former owner told me to keep the decoration as natural as possible: that a few live rocks, some algae and a bed of sand would be sufficient. Just before I left him, not knowing it was a final farewell, he reminded me again that “fish like it natural” — but this hardly qualifies as a last wish. For all I know, these fish watch TV at night and they are close enough to the window to notice the snow outside. These are not natural landscapes for tropical fish. Anyway, this rambling reveals nothing but my own discomfort. I couldn’t resist sinking an iron miniature of a Roman aqueduct minutes after I had the tank filled with water again. I was given this recuerdo many years ago, in one of my then regular trips to Spain. If one can refrain from looking at it with pedantic eyes, it is a well-crafted two-feet long piece, a perfectly miniaturized replica, so old that very few copies must have been produced. Too embarrassed to display it, I was keeping it inside a drawer. The fish tank came as a solution. That, or I was plain immature. First, I submerged the aqueduct halfway and then, rather imprudently, I released it. The piece went down in the water gaining speed fast and the bottom glass might have collapsed, if the sand weren’t there to attenuate the impact. Due to the currents generated by the operating filtration system, it took a few minutes for the water to clear out from the sand in suspension. When it did, there was the aqueduct, standing on its multiple columns, the sand fully covering its solid wooden platform, including the metal plate with the inscription “Segovia.” How appropriate. How natural. An aqueduct from Atlantis would not look any different, if one tolerates the slight imprecision in architectural style. Granted, it is kitsch, but not fake. And then one of the clown fish got curious, came closer, swam graciously through one of the top arches, turned back and crossed the aqueduct again, this time choosing one of the lower arches. Such a daring bastard... I was born in Segovia, I lived in Segovia until my teens and I spent my childhood in Segovia dreaming that one day I would fly through the aqueduct. All that clown fish needed was a few seconds to live my dream twice.