Twice living, twilight being

“What can I do? When, where, how? I’m just a man behind the curtains of my life. A simple life, a simple guy… a broken guy,” he said, and suddenly he covered his face with the hands, letting the tears run down his cheeks. He was truly pathetic, but Olivia comprehended his feelings. Everything was understandable. He felt abandoned but it wasn’t his fault. Also, it wasn’t his parents’ fault too because they were dead. They died in their own house because some murderers messed up their mission. They had to kill Don Alberto, but they entered the wrong house. That was Mexico, a country impossible to understand but magical in his own unique way.

           Gabriel woke up from his memories when the sunset was too powerful, when he couldn’t walk with his eyes exposed to the light of the sun. He was anxious, but he felt another intolerable feeling, it wasn’t anxiety, it wasn’t sadness but it could be some grief hiding between passions in the air. The floor creaked, his steps were frivolous, his eyes were heavy as when you are deeply disappointed by something and you think that the whole world fights against you. When he went downstairs, he felt a pain which was chopping his chest.

***

           “Hey, stranger,” Olivia said sarcastically, when she met Gabriel in the kitchen, propped up against the wooden table which was covered in a beige tablecloth with floral patterns. She stopped behind the high chair and looked at him in an enigmatic, sad way.

           “What? Why are you looking at me like that? It’s me, the same guy you married to, when we were 20,” Gabriel suddenly replied at her hostile look.

           “Are you…? I don’t think so, Gabriel, because if you were that guy I met 15 years ago, I should be watching the top of the mountains in Thailand right now. That was your commitment!”

           “My commitment? No, I didn’t say any commitments when we met in Mexico. I’ve just promised you that we’ll live in America someday, and here we are!” He was angry and also suspicious because he knew, since he walked on the last step of the staircase, a few minutes ago that his wife wanted to break up their relationship. Gabriel was meant to be alone since he was born, since he was running on the streets of the slum in Mexico City, expecting his life’s ending.

           “I want to break up with you. We are losers, both of us. I am because I believed your tall tales and you are a loser because that’s how your parents gave you birth. Adios, Gabriel!” She left the room, took her luggage from the closet in the hall and left the house. Therefore, Gabriel was alone as he dreamed a few years ago, sleeping on the meadow near his uncle’s inn, in Tenango del Valle .

***

           Somewhere on the wall near the closet in the hall, there is a painting Gabriel bought from the annual fair in the city, where thousands of people from all over the state come to show their crafts. Many of them are painters and Gabriel appreciates painters’ works, that’s why he bought the painting entitled Mystical ritual in the forest. Leaving the kitchen as Olivia broke up with him, being too anxious and very annoyed, his eyes met the painting which was enduring for eternity on the same wall, in the same place. That was the moment when he decided the beginning and the end. The beginning of his living, the end of his pain.

           The phone was ringing. He couldn’t think of the best way he could enter the world of mysteries and dreams, he already took the painting from the wall and placed it on the couch, in front of the TV, in the living room. He drank the liquid from the glass loaded with wine and went to the phone at the end of the hall. He had almost fallen when he touched the floor with his foot, because he was too drunk to realize that the end was coming faster and faster.

           “Yes sir,” he said with a terrible voice which seemed like he had just woken from a long sleep. There were terrible sounds coming from the other side of the call.

           “Gabriel? It’s me, Ralph,” the strange man suddenly said.

           “Ralph who? Ralph from the moving company…?”

         “Ralph, your friend. Are you drunk? Look, I’ll come immediately at your place, I have something to tell you,” he said with a serious voice.

           “I’m waiting for you,” Gabriel answered, a bit more woke-up to reality.

           After he placed the phone on the nightstand, he went up to the living room where he planned to drink another glass of pure wine, one of those perfect for special occasions like that one – when he broke up with Olivia, the girl of his dreams, but suddenly he fell on the stairs. It was to be expected that he was going to fall down the stairs, but it wasn’t a simple fall. Blood was scattered all over the carpet which was covering the stairs. Gabriel woke up from the miserable dream a few minutes later, with his head broken, his hands stained with blood and his sticky hair smeared by the bright red liquid.

***

           The midnight is the perfect moment for rituals. Since the last Sunday, he has lived an endless ritual. The painting was encouraging him to start his own ritual as he could get his wife back, but at the same time to get an improved kind of Olivia, that Olivia who’d be honored to please him, to love him, to sit next to him every night. There were some Indians circling the fire burning carefully in the middle of a forest. Their reflections could be easily seen in the burning fire. They were dancing a strange kind of ritualistic dance, like the ones you see in old movies with ancient people or contemporary tribes in the middle of nowhere. Right when his eyes met the full moon in the clear sky in the painting, the revelation occurred.

           As soon as he drank all of the Pinot-noir wine in the bottle, he left the living room, went up the stairs to the second floor, then he climbed the four steps of the stepladder to the attic. He didn’t leave the attic door open because despite his drunkenness, he maintained his intelligence and kept an optimistic view of his memories so he didn’t forget about the call he received from his friend, Ralph. It was pitch-dark in the attic and there he was, between lost objects, memories, hearts – because every little thing in the attic was at some point a part of his tranquil life. He survived, now he’s standing on the dusty floor of the attic, waiting for his death.

           “What is life about?” he asked, whispering, as he just felt that he was living at all this time somebody else’s life.

           After a few minutes, he woke up from the unfinished dream and started looking for a mirror among all of the things in thousands of boxes placed one on the top of the other. He found Olivia’s mirror in her personal box with her stuff like many mirrors, her beauty supplies and some old clothes. He took all of the stuff and arranged all of them on the floor as he was drawing a kind of a hexagram, in the middle placing the mirror. When he finally finished the beginning of the scary ritual, he took a candle from one of the boxes with the church’s Easter donations and lit it, trying to light a fire that would circle the mirror.

           Smoke, fire, sorrow and death. Dreams, hopes, but the death was the only assured. Gabriel started dancing and jumping each of the corners of the hexagram which had right in the middle a huge fire, burning the wooden floor of the attic and saying quietly, repeatedly the same words – “Me and you, the same thing. Two lives and one wing. In the moonlight I’m the king. At the sunrise you’re the queen.” The moonlight penetrated the room. In the mirror, there were two persons, two souls, two lives reflected in the glass. He was twice living. The floor had fallen, the fire covered the entire villa. He was suffering, burned to the heart. The painting was in the same place, but it wasn’t burning because it was just an illusion, which immediately disappeared. It never existed.

           When Ralph arrived at the front gate of the villa, he fell down on the cobbled alley, crying. Somewhere in the flames was his friend covered by dreams, sins and regrets. When he was watching the huge fire knelt down, some lyrics had come to his mind, Gabriel’s lyrics:

“You shouldn’t dream, dear earthling,

You are in the past, I am in the future.

Your death is not working,

I’ll always be just a life moocher.”