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    Gaston Forgets: A Spell for Remembering
    Gaston Forgets: A Spell for Remembering
    Gaston Forgets: A Spell for Remembering
    Ebook108 pages1 hour

    Gaston Forgets: A Spell for Remembering

    By Juan Pedropablo

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    About this ebook

       When Gastón and Valeria’s eyes meet, a new reality is awakened. Gaston forgets, but the look exchanged between them strips everything bare in the face of eternity and he begins to retrace his steps along the path of remembrance. Meanwhile, Juan is searching, although no one, not even Juan himself, knows what he is looking for, yet he has become a master of the art of looking. Valeria, in turn, looks at the world and at Juan and Gastón and finds herself living two realities. One, her everyday world with a boyfriend and with friends like any other group of young women. Her other world is a memory, a Bohemian rhapsody performed by cicadas and narrated by a poet, or an inner voice that sometimes says uncomfortable things and other times penetrates to the essence of the soul. 

       This story features an unusual square in a city that might be any city or might be Córdoba, a blind aunt who can see truth, and ants, many ants. And there is a canine revolution that takes over the city with fleas and dog smell and humping. There’s a birthday party, and there are further paradigms of the ephemeral in this story of true love that extends beyond the boundaries of time and space.

       Gastón Forgets is in turns tender, dreamlike, enigmatical, painterly, earthy, shocking, grotesque, obscene, thoughtful and lyrical. A parable peopled by metaphorical characters who are perhaps more real than those of the real world, Gastón Forgets will linger like a light in the shadows of your memory, moving you to ponder life, love, time, art, dogs and more, long after you have finished reading it.

       Warning: Contains strong language and shocking content that some readers may find offensive or disturbing.
       Warning: Contains philosophy and poetry that may provoke some readers to fall in love, or to think deeply.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJuan Pedropablo
    Release dateJan 23, 2018
    ISBN9781547500239
    Gaston Forgets: A Spell for Remembering

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      Book preview

      Gaston Forgets - Juan Pedropablo

      Gastón Forgets

      A Spell for Remembering

      Juan Pedropablo

      For thus it was, is, and ever shall be

      Dedicated to all those who have at some point in their lives experienced the miracle of the Sacred Communion in the Reflected Gaze

      One day, the elephants will meet to forget / All of them, except one

      –Rafael Courtoisie

      If I, Socrates, forget myself, then I am not myself

      –Platón

      Guided by the trail of ants, Gastón finds himself in a sewer, where a group of foul-mouthed, toothless hobos regard him with the haughty courtesy they are in the habit of extending to their unknown peers. But within minutes, they have scented that the newcomer is no ordinary tramp, for he has a certain air of distracted aloofness. They interrogate him: how is the cardboard harvest going, is it true that such-and-such poorhouse has opened a soup kitchen, has he heard anything about the fellow tramp who found a six-month fetus in a trash bin and stewed it up with potatoes, onions and squash? And Gastón listens attentively to their questions but only lifts his shoulders in a shrug or lowers his head. Either gesture means the same thing: he says I don’t know with his body, or he says it with his voice, I don’t know, I don’t know anything, I have no idea. And then the hobos look at each other, spoiling for a fight. The next moment they are firing a volley of insults and spittle in his direction. But if there is anything Gastón knows, it is about being scorned and rejected, so it is no skin off his nose to turn his back on them and resume his quest. Now on hands and knees like a baby, he continues following the winding trail of ants. Crawling and drooling, he follows the trail into an art gallery exhibiting paintings by local avant-garde artists, passing below the notice of the guard who only looks around at his own eye level. As for the visitors to the gallery, not only do they not lower their eyes, but they turn up their noses, breathing the rarified air of an art meant for the few. At first, moving about at floor level, Gastón goes unnoticed as he follows the ants here and there, until they take a notion to explore the unknown territory under a woman’s skirt. Her shriek of indignation echoes in the minimalist gallery. It alerts the guard but he is unable to lower his gaze far enough downward in time to catch Gastón, who scuttles out the door.

      It is not long before the adrenaline of his escape subsides and he again takes up his obstinate ant hunt. He laboriously climbs up the facade of an old building, clinging to frames and moldings until he reaches the balustrade, where he pulls himself erect to an unsteady balance. There he would follow the line of black ants onto the metal roof like a sure-footed cat, if not that his attention is caught by ants of another kind. A human anthill, Gastón thinks, as he looks down on an avenue crowded with people. That’s what Juan told me, that the world is an anthill. Meanwhile down below, four or five of the people on the sidewalk in front of the building have looked upward and they begin to beg him not to jump. Don’t jump, man, please, you’ll find a job, there’s a solution to every problem, to everything except death. Their dismayed shouts infect more and more of the crowd and it is not long before hundreds of people have gathered in a throng in front of the building, alerted and aroused by the police and fire engine sirens. But Gastón pays no attention, and ends up disappointing the morbid desire of the crowd. He makes a casual half turn and carelessly hoists himself up, then crosses the corroded zinc roof, stepping on a projecting bit that pierces the worn sole of his shoe, but he pays no attention to the pain, and vaults down into a vacant lot where he searches among the weeds for the ant trail, ignoring the grasping thistles and the burrs that stick to his cloth coat. He leaps easily over the last obstacle, a low mossy earthen wall, and traverses a poplar-lined walk to end up in a small park, a treed and paved square. There, under a wooden bench moldy with damp, is the anthill. Satisfied, he sits down on the bench. He closes his eyes. He nods two or three times, and, when all indications are that he is about to be overcome by sleep, he yawns widely and looks around at the sculptures that line the square. A few yards away, a blonde woman catches his eye and Gastón suddenly feels naked, unprotected.

      Valeria is tall and blond, with blue eyes separated by an authoritative nose. A slight asymmetry in her face gives a twist to her mouth that at first glance Gastón mistakes for scorn. She works for a government agency that hands out crumbs to the poor, and is about to graduate with a degree in Social Issues. When she was a child, she used to watch the flowers in the garden of her house in the village sway in the wind. When her cousins played at boxing carelessly around the garden, little Valeria in her flowered dress would thrust herself between the threatened blossoms and the heedless children (she knew her left was her strongest side). When her parents divorced, she and her dog went with to live with her blind aunt in the city, a two-bedroom apartment on the eighth floor. She understood that from then on her garden was high up in the air. Even now, as she rescues the crickets that her aunt tries to stomp on the paving stones of the square where they have the custom of strolling in the afternoons, arm in arm, chatting about the old days, she wants to believe that the grass is not gray, although everything is gray in the city, Aunt, all gray, in spite of the fluorescent signs on the stores, the carnival of color and movement in the storefronts, because you lose yourself in the city, Aunt, it’s like a cold, grey wind, and that is when the color and the smells of Valeria’s village bloom in her breast, our home town, Aunt, where they called me our Valeria, where the sun shone on our skins and the spring water was fresh and clear.

      But pride was in your eyes, your whisper was redolent of cold inescapable light, and the shadow of your nostalgia quenched the ice in your gaze. And looking at you, Valeria, was like an empty space, emptiness in reverse, because when you noticed me, I felt naked, unprotected. And you looked helpless, Gastón, exposed, lying there on the bench in the square like a sack of bones, your empty gaze lost in the distance as though you were blind, because you did not see this world, for whatever you were looking at, it was much farther beyond. Because you looked at me as though you were asking me for help. Because I looked at you and I understood that when you looked at me I was exposed. Because you looked at me and I couldn’t help seeing you. Because I noticed you, Gastón, because it seemed as though I knew you. Because I wanted to know who you were, Valeria, and to know who I am. And you looked drunk or sick, wearing that ridiculous coat with worn and ripped elbows and frayed pockets, and disgustingly dirty, in the square where hundreds of university students were walking by, pausing to laugh at your old-fashioned coat, the latest style maybe, coming in next season, grandpa coats, they laughed. But you ignored everything and everyone. And you didn’t even notice the two women who bent their faces close to yours murmuring that you looked stoned, and maybe someone should call the police, poor guy, he looks like a drug addict. But all it took to turn their good intentions to grimaces of distaste was for you to wipe the drool from your chin with your sleeve and thrust your tongue out like a baby. You babbled something incoherent and they backed away in disgust and exclaimed what a degenerate, and the youth of today is a lost generation because you babbled, Gastón, you babbled, speaking by yourself, disconnected from everything, until you looked at me. And it was like a pity without pity, a mother’s tender love mixed with something else. And if I had known Gastón, I swear I would have spit at you or kicked you, or maybe kissed you Gastón, kissed you.

      "Are you all right?"

      Sure, are you?

      Me? Valeria smiles. I’m fine. But you, I thought that you were, I don’t know, I thought something was wrong.

      I was just looking at the statues.

      Yeah? That’s nice. Me, I love painting, Valeria says with slightly forced enthusiasm. And sometimes I make little things out of clay. Do you do anything?

      "No,

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