Bread Man When I was a child, days began at eight or nine in the morning. I was still too young for school, so I enjoyed the luxury of waking up late. When I started elementary school though, it was a different story. I had to ride public buses for an hour before arriving at school. I used to get up so early, at about five a.m. It was then that I saw him for the first time. Bread Man arrived in his bicycle at five or five thirty in the morning. The felt hat slanted to the right, his pants tied with a rubber band at the cuff so they wouldn’t be caught in the bike’s chain. A big basket in the back seat with a huge table cloth wrapping the varied pieces of bread he sold: French bread, monkey fingers, large loaves, small ones, semitas, triangles, all warm, right out of the carbon oven his wife had at home. Eating that bread with real, homemade butter, soaked in cafe con leche, was a heavenly breakfast, with frijolitos, love eggs, you know, real eggs, made by hen and rooster, with a brown shell, good sized, orange-yellow yolk. Not like the ones we swallow today, all pale like if they had leukemia. But when Panaderia Jumbo, the Jumbo Bread Factory opened in the late sixties to early seventies, all that changed. The owner, some Dutch immigrant who spoke funny, had brought all that modern machinery from Holland. He opened the factory in the middle of the barrio. Some people were happy to work in a clean environment making more money than what they were used to, wearing a distinctive uniform with the word “Panaderia Jumbo” threaded on their chest. So, Bread Man started to lose clientele. It wasn’t necessary anymore to madrugar, to wake up at 5 in the morning in order to buy bread. The Jumbo squarish, white pieces were available any time, day or night in many pulperias, neighborhood grocery stores. You could store it longer without it getting hard as a rock. It was cheaper and they had a wide variety of types also, all of Bread Man’s and some more; different shapes, colors, and flavors. When I entered seventh grade, Bread Man had stopped delivering. I don’t recall why by brother and I remembered him once and wondered his whereabouts. We decided to visit his house on the other side of the creek. We rode our bikes and got there. It was his house alright, but he didn’t live there anymore. Some unknown tenant was there, he had moved out and away, the old man said, I don’t know where. “I bought his property very cheap, including his oven and molds”. And he showed them proudly, like trophies hanging on the wall. The oven, dusty, with spider webs, and little bugs; the bicycle with flat tires, the headlamp broken, the seat torn out. Where are you Bread Man? Where did Herr Gerster drove you to? Did you go back to your loved mountains in Matagalpa? Are you delivering bread to the saints in Heaven?

00 Where can I find you oh companions of my youth? We leave a place, a city, and the place, the city call us back again and again. We are born in a country, one of its cities, in a particular street and house. We are born in a country side, away from all traces of modernistic civilization, under the light of candles or flickering fluorescent beams. People gather around us or we stay in the company of Death alone. This is the moment when w e face truth, in a few seconds we will see it but will not share with anyone else. Or will we? This dying man has seen the love for his country come and go, the laughter of his countrymen sound and resonate, the cumulus of voices come to his bed, they increase in volume and tone, they collide with each other like sub-atomic particles in a thick quantum soup. All come to his side, the rope supporting the body of his dead father, the nurturing voice of his mother calling in summer, the strangeness of Greek, Albanian, Romanian, and French languages all mixed into one Babelic sound. The streets of Bucharest are laid before him: the Piata Unirii, where he stood as a youngster hearing his brothers’ call to arms for the fatherland and where he himself was, as an older poet, who aroused the masses to fight for their culture. His was a small apartment on Str Postel, around the corner of the Stavropoleos Church, where Alin sat and ate with him, where they made furious love and also with gentleness after strolling for hours the promenades of Cismigiu Gardens. Where is Aslin, their only daughter? He can only hear the toddler giggling and trying her first words ‘Abba, abba’, which makes tears stream down his cheeks one more time. Gone is the Caru cu Bere bar where he enjoyed cold beers with his brothers under dazzling stained glass windows, and where countless insurrection plots were drawn before convincing him that poetry was the most effective weapon. Where did the coal mines go? Now his fingertips are black, the deep blue eyes come to prominence amidst the carbon-soiled boyish face. Gone is the city of Constanta, facing the Black Sea where he taught political sciences for several years, where Alin and him bathed under benevolent suns, where his missing Aslin almost drowned once, and where Sophia Gerasimenko parted and departed more than once trying to remember and then forget the impossible love of a Hungarian immigrant. Gone are the Sunbeams his hero Skanderbeg inspired, gone the Dija Society he followed and later led, gone the Dreams and Tears poems his English friend Edith Durham appreciated so much. Silent felt the guns of World War I and the nightmares of World War II, silent –as always- are the compatriots who used him in Durres, Theth, and Shkodra. Forgotten are the Nazi forces captured in 1944 by sudden Albanian enemies –yes, independence has a price like everything else-, forgotten are the princes and princesses drooling for power from foreign lands. There are no more heroes in sacrificial Albania, only lambs. Asdreni will not see the Soviets preying on Tirana and ravaging, from 1953 on, every remnant of Albanian culture that dared to breathe in public. But Sophia Gerasimenko did. He will not see the rise and fall of Ceaucescu in Romenia or that of Hoxha in his fatherland Albania, jumping from Soviet communism to Chinese-style Cultural Revolution. But Sophia Gerasimenko did. In this time and place, when Death is a voice that rises above all voices, this dying man is a shadow and a beacon. In distant lands, like entangled particles separated by time and space, yet united in poetry and destiny, this dying man will connect to other poets, to other generations, to a lost daughter in unsuspected ways. In this time and place, when the breath of spirit escapes us little by little and our heart weakens with each struggling beat, the dying poet recites in his soul: Forgotten Memories Where can I find you, oh companions of my youth, That I might once more enjoy that beloved time, Moments which filled us with such delight When we played and frolicked in mirth sublime? Not a drop of sorrow did we feel in our souls, Our hearts were so fully transfixed by the spring, Little did we know that our lives would be sad, And lost youth would nevermore joy to us bring. Like the autumn leaves which the wind doth chase Like a fleeting moment of glee which escapes, Or a summer night's dream that veils its trace, You can sense, you can see how our elusive hopes Brought surprising delights to us now and again, Like the rays of the moon glowing on a parched plain! [Kujtime të shkuara, from the volume Psallme Murgu, Bucharest 1930. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie]

Visiting Miami

For Liam's first birthday

First day of 2012

Enjoying the first day of the year with breakfast at home in Miami.

Change is inevitable and always for the better if we know how to use it.

"The Unconsoled" by Kazuo Ishiguro

Consciousness reality (objective reality perceived by the awaken mind and the symbols of language) and sub-consciousness reality (the world of the dreams) are interconnected, inhabit the same realm.

Ryder lives in the dream and travels to reality the same way we live in reality and travel to the internal dream. In the novel both realms are switched: reality is dream, and dream is reality. This furthers Kafka’s technique, for it makes the full crossover to the other side. In the dream, Ryder is an omniscient being, the same way it happens to us in a dream, where we see all like in a movie and have access to all that happens inside each of the characters’ minds.

• Topologically, Ishiguro also furthers the physical Kafkaesque landscape:
• In a dream time and space are beyond the laws of mechanical physics
• The very dark and the very luminous
• The places we dream of from childhood in a recurrent manner
• Space and time lose meaning and substance and shift shape

"If on a winter's night a traveller" by Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino has been one of my favorite writers for some time. This book is clearly the epitome of meta-fictional narrative. There is one main technique similar to Kafka and Ishiguro: the multiplicity of stories. Except that in Calvino’s book there is a central thread, She-Reader and He-Reader relationship and their quest to uncover the mystery of truncated books. This is of course a mask, what Calvino is addressing is the relationship writer-text-reader. The supporting, side stories Calvino uses to make different points about the art of writing fiction. The variegated voices, styles, settings, and themes are just the backdrop to what is beyond fiction (hence, metafiction); in other words no matter what each story is “about”, the point is that this book is about writing fiction, how readers co-create in their minds the realities a writer tries to convey, this is a story about writing and reading stories. True there are powerful governments (portrayed as stupid even comical), that resemble Kafka’s omnipresent government, but the real intangible power is the structure of metafiction itself and the strong bond writer-reader via text.

There is also one main difference: no dreamlike landscapes, unless we take the central story column as a dream and the many frame stories as dreams within dreams. Where Ishiguro presents us with a fractal field of stories in one plotless narrative, Calvino presents us with many insinuated plots supporting one central story, which at times is irrelevant (crazy plot) yet it is the place where the act of writing is really analyzed. If Ishiguro works on the surreal, Calvino works on the unreal. If Ishiguro works in the realm of non-fiction, Calvino does so in the realm of metafiction.

Where is Kafka here? Kafka did not finish his novels. Calvino does not finish his plots, he is just playing with us, showing how he can mimic many styles and voices.
My favorite narrative is “On the Carpet of Leaves…”, for the richness of detail, the intensity of language, and the sensuality of theme. It is chapter eleven (p. 258) what reveals the fundamental thing of the book: the titles of the many stories form a paragraph that could be yet another story. And this is the virtual fractal: allegedly we can take any paragraph of any story and divide each sentence into the title and the beginning of another, brand new story, and that one into more stories, and that one into more, ad infinitum, like Zeno’s Arrow, never reaching our destination, the end of the story. Story telling never ends. Forget the one thousand and one nights. Calvino’s work forces us to peek into an infinite mirror, a book of sand, ever shrinking and at the same time expanding, universes and realities of fiction.

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Of how Aleks left his homeland to reunite with his brothers

Some men have the same face since they are born, except for a few little details here and there, a moustache, the gray hair, a random scar… the semblance of old souls is imprinted on them. They just die older and their soul keeps migrating from body to body in their search for eternity, for the union with the Cosmic Mind.

Such is the case of Aleks. Take away the thick moustache and the strands of gray hair on the sides of his head and you find the same air of defeat, the same longing for a state of being not achieved, the same anxiousness for searching. They are all present in his first photograph at age five, in 1877 after a labor day in the family farm in the village of Drenova in southeastern Albania, as in this other one dated 1947, a few months before his death in Bucharest, Hungary.
If one characteristic he must be remembered by, it should his curiosity for knowing his roots, his mad love for his country -no, not Albania as the Westerners and Soviets had renamed it, but Shquipëria, as it is called by the nationals in the ancient language of Illyrian. “Shquipëria, Shquipëria”, he repeats with languor like a mantra as if holding to the last vestige of a culture that survived the Greek, Roman, Slavic and Turk invasions.

“How was my mother?” he asked his father at age ten while helping his father toll the field with an oxen. “She was like autumn leaves chased by the wind, like a passing moment that escapes us, or a summer night’s dream that veils its trace”. He never asked again. Not to his father, who grew ill day by day, or his two older brothers who had left to Hungary earlier the same year in search of a better life. “Why did my brothers leave?” he asked candidly his father. “They grew tired of my melancholy and so will you, if I don’t beat you to it”. This last part was more a mumbling than a response, and less a thought than a menace. The sun shone hard on the squalid soil, away from the gentle breezes of the Adriatic. Two shepherds hushed in the distance to a large flock of goats. The ruins of a Roman castle where his brothers used to spook him watched from a nearby hill. Ideas boiled in Alek’s mind.

Later in his room he repeated in the language he had learned in elementary school: “”. Was it then when he decided to be a poet?These very same lines are found in his poem “Forgotten Memories” contained in his third and last book Psallme Murgu (Psalms of a Monk) published in Bucharest in 1930. In one of his diaries he wrote: “Maybe one does not decide to be a poet, one is chosen by the Muses, one is entrapped, incarcerated, and raped by them. They never let go of you. You do not want to leave”.

The day he found his father hanging from the high beam in the living room, he did not blink or cry. He readied himself to attend school like always. He presented and successfully passed his oral exams. He met with the Headmaster and explained he would not be attending high school after all. “I have to leave the country. My brothers need me”. “How about your father?” Mr. Noli inquired. “Not him, he does not need me. He has all he needs and is where he wants to be”. He walked back home at 3:00 PM. On returning to the house he did not look at the corpse. He went to his room, packed a few belongings on a small valise and took his diary under the arm. He went then to the living room and said “You beat me to it”. He then left the house and started his trip to Bucharest, in search of his brothers. He was thirteen years old.