from mariana alzamora imagination/desireunbound

The river was no longer The Flow, no longer mirisa, and her feet sinking into the sparkling sands no longer the universe, made the going heavy and the giant creaking eucaliptus on the long avenue were no longer ancestors and home, crowded with furniture, weighed the past --
“What is the matter Cordelia,”
“ Nada mama”
She didn't want to tell her Narcis had come again
“Don’t come to the pool at my time Narcis, she had told him i need to be alone, wash myself of everything” but he had come regardless
“You need to go away, travel, go to school, find your life, find a girlfriend”
“Cordelia, all i love is here, we have everything, you are the one for me you once told me Narcissus was in love with his reflection, you are my pool, you are my reflection” she had pulled her hand away almost violently
“ Narcis, we are no longer children” she saw the sparkling bits of mica from her hand on his lips She so disliked him saying that she was his reflection taking for himself what she was. She didnt want him to be like her; could he absorb her till there was nothing left of her but an echo ? It made her look at herself and question herself; was she living an ilusion? twinkling droplets, prisms on his hair ? Trapped in a reality of her own making ? She liked to think herself as the pool, water, love, filling every countour that shaped her giving it life, and when still, calm, she mirrored the sky, trees and all that was even Narcis and she was clay, earth and water, she moulded clay or clay moulded her sometimes when she was aspiring if something was not right she would righten it with the clay, but ultimately it was the earth who would allow her to do something which was beautiful it would tell her what was wrong what she could do and couldnt do Now she was roughwinded water roughrippled and winded water Maybe it all was an ilusion Maybe i am Narcissus loving only myself in a world as i want it, people as i want them, and not as they are, not the world as it is She watched the small gentle ripples fan out into the pool They had placed stones perfetly to regulate the inflow and outflow from and into the river when there were no rains, that is
“..Narcis, you are like a brother, don't forget, you could be my brother” Narcis with the big black eyes the same as my own green so i was the pool and he was the night as he was mysterious Mother wasn't very expressive and much less about Leandra and Narcis who arrived the day of my 13th birthday he was two years old and such a beautiful baybe he was a present on a sunny gold day amidst the grey grey grey
Who are they i had asked of Leandra with her Ashaninka features and very long black hair
mother simply said “ She needed work and a place to live and we needed the help ” and went on painting with tones of greens and lavender blues and tan with a great bright orange stroke, strike. I told her it seemed off balance and she said that it was important to question fears and desires. I didn't understand the connection
Once i told Narcis that Leandra probably named him after an egoistic father who abandoned her with a baybe “NO! he almost yelled “My father was killed by the same people who killed your father!” He idealized his father like i did she said Leandra had named him after her own father who was named after Narciso Yepes a harpist, but she left out the o because she wanted an unending sound in the wind name. like harp music i had said harp music was more like water Sweet my flower Narcis My sweet and gentle like a flower Narcis Born for beauty for love for joy Narcis i would hear Leandra sing in her high voice , in her sad, monotous, strange jungle insectlike lullabye
Maybe he was my mirror and not i his mirror would i fade away not accepting love for each other?
“you dont know yourself yet Narcis, you have not been in different and testing circumstances” you need to go into the world grow up, become real”
“And you?”
He would always echo “And you? as if he were like me with the same destiny
She was saying to him what Rosalba, had always said to her: That she should finish her education abroad but she loved Huacraruco, the farm of her mother’s family. She loved the house built around the patio turned into a garden where the twisted trunk of the white rose protected from the winds could flower up and along the banisters and around the second floor terrace; its perfume would come in through her window with the first rays of the sun over the mineral world where the river began. Once they had gone to find its source to the cave they had heard about it was so large and spacious inside a dim light from another aperture shone on redish and greenish rounded shapes made by millions of years of lime from the water rounding organlike shapes as if in the inside of a greatbody there was the lake fed by an underground spring they had not been able to continue because it became too dark, dangerous, you could hear the sound of a water fall they said if in the dry season you followed the under ground river you would arrive to a highland lake blue as the sky It all was so far away from the world of people, from that which caused pain she thought looking at the moving dappled sunlit and shadowed magnification of the rose leaves Her father had become all he loved river, trees, leaves, the mountains, the sky,,, she could be with him every day, more so, she could live in him Cordelia never wanted the city she felt its values have the false flor which had caused the death of his father or rather what her father had given his life for; she was changing the way she saw it but still, it had caused her mother great pain which made her retreat thats how she saw it; she felt protective and responsible for Rosalba who did little else besides paint her abstract paintings; once in a while she would take them to Lima for an exhibition
“ So much needs to be said but she avoids it and paints nothing real ”
“Cordelia, colors and shapes are the language of feelings, and emotions, like music“ Genaro had defended Rosalba
“But how will she define, discover, inscribe, her thoughts and feelings and leave them behind? She doesn’t want to face what she needs to face, she wants to remain in her world ”
“Cordelia you should study art”
“Mother, you and father were my teachers. I want to do what is real to me, not what is real to teachers or culture or history ”
When she was little they had gone up river a to a clay deposit her father had showed Cordelia how to make figures and she had spent the whole vacation doing them. When they moved to the farm, clay became her passion , making bas relief scenes of everyday life, important events, thoughts, wishes, prayers, her fears, their resolution, talismanes. Now Narcis’ eyes which were like hers appeared in many panels, as he would follow her with his eyes, black deep holes one’s soul would get lost in Soon her walks along the river began to feel like she was pacing back and forth like a tiger inside a cage.