Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta lives. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta lives. Mostrar todas las entradas

viernes, 6 de noviembre de 2015

Secret of the woods

   The last day they saw each other, they didn’t say a word. They just stared and finally left, each own his or hers on way. They were six people and they had all been there as the war had happened. They had been useful servants, slaves if you will. They had done everything they were ordered and even then the ones that ruled over that place had beaten them with sticks or solid rods. Everyone was cruel and sick during the war and the secret that they all shared was proof of that. When it happened, they all shared that moment but they never really spoke about it. First, because there was no time to do so and, second, because it was extremely hard for them to do it. The war then pressed on and reached its desired end; they were liberated one morning and found themselves to be free.

 Clara was the youngest of the group and the first one to leave that horrible place. She noticed, as she left in a truck filled with liberated people, how the surrounding forest was still dark and scary and how it had no life inside of it. It had been rendered lifeless by the atrocities of war. Eventually, Clara made it to the nearest town and there she desired to get to a port and then away from that forsaken continent. But she never got to do it because she had no money. She decided to work in the town, doing small chores all over. It was doing so that she met a nice young man, a baker, and she fell in love. They eventually married and had a very large and happy family. She was almost seventy years old when she received a phone call, one she never thought she would get.

 Robert, the youngest man, left in the following truck. Its destination was another place like the one he had come from, which made him sick. He vomited several times and made the soldiers think he was sick with something. They left him in a provisional hospital, not too far from there. He wasn’t sick, just nervous and scared. In the hospital, one of the doctors asked him for help, as nurses were very scarce. Eventually, Bob followed the medicine man to a big city in the south and there he paid Robert’s studies to become a doctor. The man turned to be a second father who loved Robert as his own son had died months earlier in battle. Bob turned himself into a great doctor, getting the call too after one of his lectures.

 The oldest was Irina, a woman that didn’t say a word and that left the place by foot. She was not that older but she had seen more of life than Clara and Robert. She was hunted by the violent deaths of her family, which she couldn’t forget. Feet bleeding, she collapsed and was rescued by a group of women, who nursed her back to health. They were also escaping violence, so she joined them. The group eventually settled in the east and became of the first feminist groups of the area. They were adamant in their convictions and Irina proved to be a real fighter. She did good things for women all over the region and was in a frail state when she got her call.

 Next was Alexander, who was the first one that talked publicly about the atrocities he had seen. He became a renowned writer after been able to travel abroad and reunite with his family. He was member of an aristocratic family who had disowned him but now that everything had change, they recognized him again and even more as his fame grew larger. Alexander published books about the war, all very successful. He did novels, and documentaries and short stories. He even sold his rights to make movies about the subject. By the time he was an older man, he was one of the richest persons on that side of the world. Privately, he had grown tired of the subject but as it was his life, he couldn’t drop it. His call caught him in the middle of the night.

 Marissa was the only one that had been transferred from a proper prison camp. She had seen other atrocities and when she was transferred she thought she would have a better life but she didn’t. After the liberation, she had to be institutionalized because of her mental state. She received shock therapy for several months and was even the subject of several dissertations about paranoia. She was finally released to a resting home when she was a woman in her forties. She had no skills and had been permanently damaged but that didn’t stop people at the home to make her clean floors and bathrooms, use her as many had used her before. Then, one morning, someone came and took her away.

 To complete the group, there was Louis. He had been a musician but after the war his fingers were not the same ones. He couldn’t play anything and he did not have any other skills. He tried finding a job as a waiter or as a chauffeur, but he would always ruin it by having awful breakdowns that involved hitting himself repeatedly. His guilt always showed itself to others, and it couldn’t be controlled. He was violent and unpredictable so, when one day he shot himself in the head, no one really made a fuss about it. So many people that had been liberated were committing suicide, so it wasn’t a real shock. When they called Louis, trying to locate him, the news hit hard and deep.

 The person who called was Clara. She had started to contact everyone else for one simple reason and that was because she had received a call by a state officer who was investigating the events that took place in that place in the woods all those years ago. They had identified her as a resident for some time, as well as some others. They wanted to talk to them in order to know exactly what went on there because there were these rumors and it was necessary to know if they were true. Clara just hung up, asking her husband never to pick it up again. When the government came to her doorstep, she chased them away.

 For her, it was too much. Her children and husband didn’t understand, but for Clara it was all a disaster. She was an older woman now, someone who had already done what she had to do, and someone that was already planning to come to terms with her existence as a human being. Clara was almost ready to meet her maker and she had no intention to face the human justice. That was when she had the idea to track all of the people that had been there with her, in those basements with rooms with no windows or proper lighting. She looked for them and after some time she had called them all. They had all agreed to meet, no questions asked, in the town where she lived.

 It was fun, at least for a while, to see how different everyone was. Clara had been a housewife all of her life so she did an effort to look good. She was the one who picked up Clara and, with the help of her husband, nursed her back to a better health in order to be more aware of the world. But Marissa was gone and would rather play with the dogs than talk to those people she didn’t know anymore. Bob and Alex looked fantastic. They were all so dapper and successful in their respective fields. But once there, once they got all together, they went back to being young and simple. Irina walked slow and needed to be waited and helped. But her demeanor was strong and resilient, having struggled all of her life for others. They reunited and, once again, just stared.

 But those empty looks turned into tears and hugs and kisses. They had never done that while at the woods, they had never shared a moment of love because love had been outlawed. They only law, the only real thing there was violence and cruelty and they had been poisoned by it. They talked about their lives and about how everything had changed but had stayed the same in some parts. They also spoke about Louis and Marissa was the first one to smile when hearing his name. She had helped him once and they were the only friends in existence in that awful place. They went there and the cold wind that greeted them made all the memories come back.


 The place was now a museum with a park. A young woman came to them as asked if they wanted to take a tour of the place but they told her they knew it too well. They each told the story of how they had gotten there and how they had gotten out of it. They also confessed to have helped to the killing of several people, including children. The place was used as a testing site for several weapons: biological, chemical and radioactive.  They also tortured them with other experiments and them, who were prisoners, were made to watch and help. If they didn’t, they died. So they did. That place had been hell and now they had liberated themselves from it, in order to leave it there forever.

miércoles, 7 de octubre de 2015

Unexpected

   Adam had always been, to the eyes of others, perfect. He had always been taller than others, but not too tall. He was also smart, but not exceedingly intelligent. He was a very sporty guy but also found time to enjoy and participate in so many other activities such as theatre and dancing. Besides, everyone loved his physique, his smile and his nice and gentle way of being. He was perfect, as said before but the only thing people judged him for was the choice of his career. He had envisioned, at first, to become a professional footballer. Then, as he was stopped everywhere he went, he was asked to be a model several times and he enjoyed every experience he had doing that. He even acted on a couple of TV advertisements for products aimed at young people.

 So it was a surprise, to everyone, that he ended up being a porno star. Yes, Adam had found a way to earn his life honestly by taking his clothes of and having sex on camera. As a model, he knew he looked great on camera and as a sports player he knew his body was more than enough to be able to pose naked. The sex part was the most awkward for him but once he got to know the people, it was more comfortable. He had chosen this path, solely because his family was having money issues and he wanted to help them as much as he could so the best way to do it was with porn, as they paid fast and generously. Before he realized, he became one of the favorite actors and he was doing movies in other places, travelling for conventions and getting more and more in the industry.

 Different was the life of David, who was not a perfect guy, or at least he would never be named as such by anyone he knew. He was not good at sports and he didn’t really like any of them. And the concept of going to a gym, a “cage for monkeys” as he put it, was not even in consideration. He was smart but not intelligent and he had no special talents, at least not that he had found in himself. Physically, David was rather short and not fat but not skinny either. He didn’t really like to take his clothes off at the beach but didn’t mind doing it in his house. David and Adam were very different but, somehow, they ended up in the same place.

 But not in the same capacity. David had gone to college and studied to become a film director. He loved movies and wanted to make his own, mainly science fiction and maybe some action ones. He loved everything that had to do with creation and writing and he was ready, at some point, to take over the world with his ideas. But that didn’t happen. Finding a job, specially when you’re young and have no experience. So David sent his curriculum everywhere and only one company responded. He only found it was a porno production company once he went there for an appointment with the head producer. But he saw it was money and he needed experience so he took the job.

 The two guys didn’t meet immediately or anything. Adam was too busy getting famous in his medium and, eventually, he even told his family about what he really did for a living. They were shocked at first and even prone to convince him not to keep working on porn, but then they realized it was that money that had put them through rough times, so they couldn’t really say much. With time, they learned to respect Adam’s decision and they would simply not ask him anything about his job, except maybe when it was him that brought it up, normally something from a trip or a funny story he had lived. He understood those unspoken conditions and was fine with them, as he knew his family would eventually be ok with it.

 He would travel a lot, going from city to city, country to country, visiting all conventions aimed at adult entertainment. The funny thing the first couple of times was the amount of people that recognized him. Both men and women knew who he was from ads online or his movies and that, to him, felt very strange but very good too. He would pose with many fans for pictures and would sign various deals in those places, to put his face on several products sold to adults, toys and so on, but he also signed on for more and more movies, in other countries and with actors and actresses he had never worked with. He had good experiences and bad too but he was always “the perfect guy” and that was even the name of one if his movies.

 David, on the other hand, was working very hard for not so much money. At first the pay was good but then he was transferred to another production company, one that was smaller, and his workload became much larger and his paycheck much smaller. He endured for a bit as others praised him because of his technical ability, something he didn’t even know he had in himself. He did so for several months until he was transferred back to the place where he had a better workload and was surprised to know they wanted him to do the lighting for all the top movies they were releasing. That meant, that all the movies he would do would be the ones the production company was going to push harder on their clientele and that meant also that David’s work would be known.

 The young man was happy to see that people know respected him more, even if they didn’t always knew his name. He had control over a whole section of these movies and, even if they weren’t what he wanted his life to be about, it was a good beginning, as his technical expertise would suffice to make someone important look at him. But at the beginning it was all about porn and filming in these crazy locations such as lavish mansions and fantastic forests and even a rundown train station. It was funny to him how everything got into porn in such an easy way and no one even doubted it would work.

 After returning from a filming in Japan, Adam had several hours on the plane to think about his life. He was as perfect and gorgeous as he would ever be and he had the favor of many people that surrounded him but he had started to wonder if he didn’t need something more in life, maybe something to call his own. He had the idea of starting a pizza business but the idea remained there on his mind because of the amount of responsibilities he had and that he couldn’t ignore. People were also asking why he didn’t have a girlfriend or a boyfriend but he would never answer those questions and he didn’t really know the answer. Maybe it was because, in that line of work, it was best not to combine your personal life and your private one and adult movies are something not every couple would understand fully.

 Meanwhile, David had been contacted by an independent filmmaker, who had asked him to pitch him some ideas for a mystery movie. He had seen David’s work in the adult industry and had also read some of his stories that he published online and had been surprised by his ability to tell stories. So now David had a way to slip away from porn and reroute his life towards what he really wanted. But as he developed the mystery film, he didn’t stop working with the company that had paid him for so long. After all, he had commitments to them and he didn’t wanted to just drop everything and move on to something he didn’t even know if it would work or not. So he opted for patience.

 Eventually the mystery film went into production and David decided it was time to leave the adult film industry. He announced it to his boss and they scheduled together his last film that would star none other than The Perfect guy, in other words, Adam. Curiously, it was Adam’s last film too before he decided to move along and create his pizza business with his family. The filming was very relaxed, despite being quite ambitious for a porno film. They had amazing cameras and lights and costumes. It was a true film being made and it was, for many, the first time porno films were being done in such magnitude, with such grandeur and potential. It was supposed to be a game changer.

 The truth is, Adam and David only spoke once and it wasn’t even a conversation. It was David telling Adam to move a couple of steps backwards for the lights to hit him in the best way and Adam complying. That was it. Adam was of course no interested in David, as he didn’t even acknowledged him at all. David, on his side, did look at Adam extensively as it was stupid not to but he got bored after the first half hour. He was just too “up there” and he was just himself. So after they wrapped up, everyone went home and carried on with their lives.


 Adam’s business was a success, although only in his hometown were the pizzas sold nicely and people would often ask him if he was who they thought it was and also asked for a picture. David’s mystery film was well received in festivals and he went on to win a couple of awards for it. He moved on to be a prolific director, notably adding very intimate scenes in many of his movies, all of them beautifully lit.

jueves, 25 de diciembre de 2014

Airport

So many people, coming and going. So many people busy or pretending to be easy. Some with their families, some alone, some others in large groups were they never really meet. Other are there to work hard, give away tickets, checking people on their flights, tending to their many needs or cleaning the large spaces filled with light and energy.

At the entrance, the men that guard the trolleys to put the bags on, chat about how many tips they have received today. They live on them so every single coin and bill count. And many people prefer to carry their bags inside, not wanting to spend the little money they have on a trolley they have to return to the entrance. They prefer to spend it on one of the restaurants or in some gift to the person they are going to see at their destination.

One of the men hasn't had the best week. He really needs to win some money and tries to attract clients by telling them how easy it is to help them with their bag. He greets foreigners specially, as they are more likely to ask for their services or women alone traveling with a lot of baggage. At home, his wife works doing laundry for neighbors and their daughter works as a secretary. Life is hard and, sometimes, difficult to bare but they are fighters and never give up.

Inside, the many women and men handing tickets are specially busy. They have to be smiling every single minute of their work, trying to provide the best service possible. They are many hundreds of them as all airlines make use of checking counters, wether they have fifty stands or only one. Most of the workers are women, dedicated completely to the old art of traveling.

One of them, Adrienne, is working for he first time. Every time she came to the airport when she was young, it was a whole experience to see the many people working and the planes through the glass of the main corridor. She loved to wonder how many people were traveling and to what exotic destinations they were heading. She never traveled a lot to be honest, her family couldn't afford it. Her first time on a plane was for the school trip on her senior year.

Children like it specially when groups of pilots and flight attendants pass by. Their uniforms are so pretty and most of them look perfect, like real size dolls. They are greatly poised, carrying their wheeled bags, always matching the color of the bag with the uniform. And there are so many colors and shapes of uniforms, pending on the country of origin of the airlines.

Padma, for example, works for Air India and, as expected, her outfit represents her country everywhere she goes. It is a beautiful traditional sari. Its bright orange in color with a red and black scarf around her neck and black shoes complementing it. She is very proud of wearing those colors every single day to work as it represents the rich tradition she loves so much. Being born in Mumbai, she learned through her mother about the gastronomy and many other cultural aspects of her country. After finishing school, she traveled through all of India and then decided to become and air hostess in order to bring India to the world.

But the most interesting part of the airport is were all the passengers and crew members gather: the duty free area. A tiny mall inside the airport, the stores sell every single thing passengers may want to give as a present to their fellow travelers or to someone they are looking forward to meet when they finally get home or to work. The stores are never deserted, filled with the scent of thousands of perfumes, the voices of buyers and sellers and even the taste of many delicacies made for the inevitable need to eat and drink.

In one of the stores, Roger works selling small crafts for people to go home with. There are refrigerator magnets, smalls pieces made of wood or glass or plastic and many sweets and other traditional pastries. Roger likes when people want to taste the pastries in advance, wanting to know what they are bringing back home. It's a pleasure for him to promote the country, its traditions and even the values behind it all. But buyers often go straight to the magnets and that's not bad. He has many, funny and not so funny wants. Delicate and detailed or just simple. He sells them all.

Meanwhile, in one of the many fast food restaurants, works Felicia. She puts fires on the fryer and puts salt on them. She also pours the drinks and sometimes flips the burgers. The ambiance in a fast food kitchen can get very annoying, all hot and sticky and smelly. But its a "safe" job. People work there for as long as they like. No one really gets fired, unless they do something really gross or awful. Felicia likes it and hates it at the same time. She loves the pay, that simple. But she hates to smell like a burger all day long. And she hates it too because there's no way to go out and smoke. There is no out so she really has to wait all day to feed her need for a cigarette.

At the waiting rooms, other hard workers do their thing with people many times not even noticing them. They clean up the place, making it look decent, unspoiled and perfect. They pick up every single piece of paper, every candy wrap, old magazine left behind and many other objects passengers may leave around thinking the airport cleans itself. But it doesn't, an army of men and men work every single second to provide high higiene standards, specially in the bathrooms were people tend to be even more careless than usual.

There, cleaning one of the stalls in one of the many women bathrooms, is Clara. She's a big woman, capable of cleaning a big mirror in seconds with the help of her many work tools: liquids, sponges, rags and mops. She loves it when no one enters the bathroom when she's cleaning. She cannot block people from entering so most of the times it proves to be a difficult thing. But when no one comes near, she feels like singing and even dancing a bit while cleaning the floors. Clara likes it a lot when everything is nice and clean. That is because if she does her job right, she wins more money. And more money is a better life for her and her children. She's not married but has three kids to care for and they are her reason to live. And with her kind smile, she greets passengers when she's finished working.

The other army working at the airport is the one working below and outside. The many people helping bags getting to their planes, the security guards caring for the safety of everyone inside the terminal, the ones with the glowing sticks helping planes to their stands and even those with unique jobs, that no one really knows about.

Henry, for one, is in charge of the birds around the whole area of the airport. Yes, that's his job and he has a companion. A small hawk called Flash. Henry uses Flash in order to scare other birds and animals and make them clear the runways. If one of the those birds gets sucked by a turbine, they may cause a fatal accident and no one wants that to happen. So every single day, from dawn to dusk, Henry and Flash go around the airport on a small four wheeled transport. They have fun together, pulling the danger away from the runways, looking closely at how the planes land, filled with people glad to get home or to a new beginning.

That is the heart of the airport. The planes and the passengers traveling inside. It is them who make an airport what it actually is. And they are some many over the course of a single day. People sitting on a small or very large planes, bound to a city an hour away or another continent very far away. they may get to sleep or just to sit around for the duration of the flight. There are some many going through the airport, running even, as they are making a connection. Those people, although not spending a lot of their time, end to know what the airport experience is all about and that is bringing people together.

We have the example of the García family. Maria and Manuel married three years ago and now they have a new member on the family: her name is Emilia and she's only one year old. It's her first time traveling and its a long flight. She will be visiting her grandparents, uncles and cousins, who haven't yet met her, or maybe only through a webcam. She can't speak yet but she's thrilled by the prospect of a new experience. Although she doesn't know where she is, she knows its something different: the sounds, the smells, even things feel different.
Her parents are excited to. As soon as they sit down, they put on their seatbelts and take each other's hand. They have that custom and they are not letting it go no. They squeeze hands when the plane's door is finally closed and the craft begins to pull away from the airport.

That's how one airport story ends but, as we know, many more are still ongoing and many others are yet to come.

sábado, 20 de septiembre de 2014

The Summit

They were almost there. Raul, the guide, had said it was only a hundred meters or so to the tallest point. Or so they thought he had said. Hearing wasn't an easy task, as the wind blew stronger in the altitudes Breathing was also difficult and the freezing cold made it even harder.

It was the first time any of them, except Raul, had attempted to hike such a tall mountain. It had been called Ritacuba Blanco and the name was fitting: the place was covered in a think layer of snow, that confused every sense and the mind.

Again, Raul, who was the first in the line to the top, yelled something but this time no one heard him. The wind appeared to be muting all of the members of the team on purpose, although that was obviously preposterous.

They walked another fifty meters and then they understood what Raul had said. Laura, the scientist from Pasto, fell in a crevasse and pulled everyone else into it. Luckily, Raul and Juan had their tools ready and held strongly on the white floor. Fast, the others helped Laura getting out and avoided the crevasse. Franco put a red flag by the gap on the floor, pierced the snow with all his strength.

They continued for a few minutes until they made it to the top. Raul warned them, breathing with difficulty, that they could only stay for a few minutes. As they had no oxygen tanks, staying more than necessary could mean dying there or on the way down.

There were six explorers, seven with Raul. They all sat on some rocks that overlooked the cliff, on which the tallest point was located.

Juan, as experienced as he was, took just one moment to see the scenery and then went back to Raul and started talking about the descent. It wasn't that he took it all for granted, not at all. Juan was just thinking of so many things at same time and seeing mountains from the top of another mountain didn't do anything for him. He had a wife and a baby girl to think of. At the cost of loosing what he loved most, he had to choose either a well paid job or loosing them both.

Laura, however, sat on a rock and filled her lungs with the purest air she might ever breath. It was true that oxygen was scarce, was somehow it felt cleaner and better than anything else. She loved how the mountains looked and how beautiful the world looked like this, just peaceful. It was different of what she had known her whole life, and the fact that this beautiful place existed not that far from home, was overwhelming to her.

Luis, an mature hiker with a thick beard, inhaled too but many more times, as if he defied the world. Only Raul knew that Luis was dying of cancer in the blood and this journey was a way of saying to life "you can't beat me up". The mountains and what he saw weren't as beautiful to him as the fact of having being able to do it all on his own, this last few months. He was going to die, true. But he wanted to imprint his mark on the world.

Veronica, a geology student, had come with a camera and started taking pictures as soon as they had reached the summit. She was a cheerful photographer, having documented her life and her family's life in huge amounts of pictures. Digital or analog, she didn't care. She only cared about keeping memories alive forever and this was her way of doing so. She had lost her father recently, and he had promised to go hiking with him. She wanted to take the most beautiful pictures to honor her father's memory.

Marcos and Tomás thought of each other as brothers. They admired the view, never kneeling or crouching or sitting but standing up to it, taking it all in as if it was a gift that one couldn't just let pass by. Both men, still young but already working through life, had decided to take this trip to defy their bodies and test, once more, the limits of their friendship. Marcos and Tomás were not real brothers, not relatives by blood. They had lived together from a young age as orphans, on the streets and under the care of others. But they never let each other go.

The six visitors came to the mountain, each one with a kind of mission. Some of them were successful, others not so much. But what was valuable wasn't the physical prowess as such. It was the fact that they had decided to take a challenge in order to honor something, to be true to themselves.

As they returned to the base camp, near a beautiful blue lake, their lives seemed to have improved, at least a little, even for a tiny space of time. They had learned no one defies a mountain out of courage or for the need of glory. All who do it, do it just for the urge, the need to define who they are.