Garbage, dreams and the López-Gatell water tank

I have been working in the place where I live for years.

For years my routine has been like this: I wake up, I take the dogs out, I eat breakfast, I put coffee and I sit down to write.

It could be that the day is good or that it is bad, that he writes a lot or a little, that he gets something decent or any shit. The only certainty is that I will be focused and that I will be in the same physical space as always.

These days, however, as if it were the water with which I watered one of my plants, my concentration has evaporated. And, as it evaporates, as it rises and loses itself in the heights, it has taken with it a great part of myself. So I am no longer in the physical space in which I always found myself.

—How will the tinaco have dawned? I remember, right now, that I woke up wondering this morning, although I don't know if I did it out loud or in silence. However, I did not think about my water tank. I was thinking about the water tank in the place where Hugo López-Gatell lives: because of fate, a childhood friend could say that a sister lives in the same horizontal condominium as our Undersecretary of Health.

(It is really strange, by the way, the role that the prefix sub has achieved in Mexican politics and life; as if it meant the opposite of what it really means, as if it pointed out the opposite of what it indicates, I say to myself before resuming my memory of waking up, the one that got me out of what I was writing. There are Marcos and Hugo, right? There are the only soccer championships we have achieved, right?).

—Hugo, this was remembering: it turns out that, at the same time that the contingency exploded, a water tank broke down in the undersecretary's condominium. And Hugo is obviously the administrator of the place where he lives. So, while you are dealing with the pandemic, you are also dealing with the chat of your neighbors, who write to you, for example: "We know that all this about the coronavirus is really serious, but the tinaco is also serious".

But hey, I wasn't writing about how incredibly absurd the life of an undersecretary can be, nor was I writing about how absurdly amazing the life of a group of neighbors can be. I was writing that I can't find myself, that my concentration has evaporated, that, somehow, my head has fragmented, that its parts have each gone to a different thought. This should also be the reality of pandemics: cancellation, cancellation of the individual mode.

"Everything is different from how you think, from how I think," wrote Paul Celan in the middle of the last century, shortly after the Second World War, I suddenly remember. "Everything is different." I don't know why I remember this verse nor do I know why I write it here. It does not explain my loss of concentration, nor does it explain my physical loss; I don't really know what it explains, although I know it explains something. Something that I am not able to understand. Perhaps, that empathy is changing, that empathy, then, is moving to bluetooth.

Equal Celan intuited this. Or does this explain to me. Although maybe it's just what I wanted to write. That, instead of colliding with a story that overturns us, placing us in another body and in another life, in these fateful days we are desperately searching, vitally for any story that gives back a little, a principle of meaning and humanity to the revolt in which we are trapped, in a way, by everything else, unjust: damn shit country, this one in which to shut in, fragment and empathize is another fucking privilege.

"He picked up the doorbell for me." So I stopped writing again, just when I had or thought I had found a thread to hold on to. And now, of course, I don't know how to get back to where I was. The one who played was the lord of the garbage: incredible as it may seem, this is how the majority of Mexicans call them: those of the garbage. Not the ones who pick it up. Not those who work solving our problem with garbage. After opening and greeting him, I handed him two bags and, on the spot, he laughed at me: today it's the inorganic one, you bastard. Sorry, I said then, I'm more distracted than ever.

(I like the role of dreams, their relationship with everyday life, not with the deep unconscious. Today, more than ever, I lack the spirit to become psychoanalytic. The moment we are living, moreover, is much more present than Last, I said to myself barely and out there, because before I went back in, before going because of my inorganic garbage, Alberto said: oops, I brought distracted to dreams. Yesterday I dreamed of our president. We were on top of my truck and I I was teaching to sort the garbage. Then he gave me two fireflies. And I woke up.)

—In addition to the inorganic bag, I gave Alberto a box with one hundred face masks: my friend Oswaldo redirected his compulsion to buy online photographic articles, towards sanitary ware, so I have been able to distribute several boxes, there where I think they will need more. While Alberto thanked me, my cretinism led me to say: you are worse, you are still working. Luckily, my stupidity got its due in a second. I don't know ... each one his own shit, he told me: we are working, but we are never alone. And here it seems that everyone is well alone.

But hey, I wasn't writing about Alberto or about the contradictions in me. I was writing, I think, about the contradiction that I have become these days, a contradiction that prevents me from fixing my thinking on a single idea. Right now, for example, as I write this, I think, no, I don't think, I wonder, that is, I ask myself in a cluster: what do those fireflies want to say? What compulsions will I have? Will the undersecretary be fed up?

Have they fixed the water tank of that condo? Will the Government be counting the sick as it should? Are you counting them as you can? Will our State, a shattered, frayed, evaporated, ubiquitous State, be able to confront and overcome this pandemic? Will we citizens be ready to face this cruel adversity and act as we should?

Is it normal for there to be a country where the authority relies more on need than accumulation? Is it normal for a government that appeals before the dispossessed to stop the owners of the money? Is it normal for a species to become slaves to a tool - the economy - that it has created for itself?

Is there, in continuing to work, in continuing to go out, a drive for life? Is there, perhaps, there too, a death drive? What difference does it make, if all, what was left was so little that it was nothing?

Between all of them, a question is imposed, it becomes a thread, although it was not the one that was looking for: shouldn't a fortune tax be assigned, right now, for health reasons?

This, however, was not what he wanted to write nor is it what he would say, if he could speak out loud.

It is, yes, the only thing I can spit these days, when I'm not in a single space.

In these hours when everything is different.

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