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"The moon has a blushing smile, if only we
care to see it.”
Efren Hernandez
from Tachas
The night the moon fell down onto my patio I realized that astronomy
was a load of hogwash. To start with, the moon isn’t spherical, as the
astronomers would have us believe; it’s round.
It is flat, almost a perfect circle, barely 25 centimeters in diameter,
with nothing like a face on its other side. To be precise, there is
absolutely nothing on the other side.
One night, while in bed waiting for sleep, I gazed through the window
and up at the stars and clouds. It was then that I saw the moon fall. I
went out onto my patio to pick it up. I lifted it up off the ground,
dusted it off, took it back to my room, and hung it on a nail like a
mirror. I switched off my bedside lamp because I no longer needed
electric light. From now on, I thought, I’ll have my own lunar light
to read by at night. But the moon is fickle, inconstant.
As time passed it started to diminish. One night I couldn’t find
where I’d left it. The nail had come out of the wall and the moon had
fallen to the floor and rolled under my bed. I put it on top of my
bookshelves, resting it against the wall. Each night I noticed it
getting smaller. At first it had the look of an eye without an iris or a
pupil. Then it lost a piece and resembled a slice of watermelon. Later
it diminished to a broad smile. The following night it changed to the
horns of a bull, finally assuming the shape of a fingernail paring. I
came to the conclusion it was going to disappear entirely, but it didn’t.
It halted when it reached its minimum form: a very slender ring like my
grandmother’s wedding band, worn to almost nothing by so many years of
work washing clothes at a laundry sink.
The centre of this ring was totally black and was in fact a hole.
Holding it up in both hands, I slipped the ring over my head for a few
seconds. I put it on like an oversized hat till it touched my shoulders.
Inside was a world of seven dimensions which my senses and my brain,
accustomed to handling only three, couldn’t tolerate. I pulled it off
at once to stop my head from exploding, wandering around in a daze until
the following morning.
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That was the day the moon started to grow back, passing through
the phases I’ve described to you, but this time in reverse
order: from a fingernail paring to the bull’s horns, from the
smiling mouth to the slice of watermelon, and then to the eyeball
until once again it became a perfect circle.
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Yet for all that, I had a feeling it was restless and sad. It would
light up as soon as night approached, but it started wandering back and
forth around the room. It rolled miserably across the floor. It explored
the walls and the corners in search of a way out. It bumped against the
ceiling and finally threw itself down, defeated, into a corner. It broke
my heart to see its wretched state -- the moon in a cage, so I opened the
window and let it climb back up to the celestial vault once again.
For the whole month nobody on Earth had noticed its absence. That’s
how infrequently people today raise their eyes to the heavens.
Ricardo Martínez Cantú (Monterrey, Nuevo León, México, 1949) es
Licenciado
en Filosofía y -en los años 1997-98- estudió una Maestría en Artes,
siendo
la convivencia con los artistas que fueron sus compañeros de maestría lo
que
lo llevó a retomar (a los 48 años de edad) una carrera literaria que
había
abandonado 25 años atrás.
"Luna libre" -dice su autor- puede considerarse como un intento
(imposible
de realizar, afortunadamente) por ver las cosas con ojos limpios y por
describirlas tal cual se ven, haciendo a un lado las concepciones
científicas (en este caso astronómicas) que nos fueron inculcadas desde
nuestro nacimiento. Claro que también es cierto que esta explicación es
una
consecuencia y no la causa de la narración.
Ricardo Martínez Cantú was born in Monterrey, Mexico in 1949. He
received a
BA in Philosophy and then, in 1997 to 1998, studied for his Masters in
Art. While associating with artists during his MA studies, Ricardo returned, at
48, to writing poetry after having set it aside when he was 23. 'Moon on
the
Loose' is an attempt, admittedly vain even in its pretension, to see
things
with innocent eyes, denuded of scientific preconceptions.
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