Borges Jones wasn’t precisely a tailor. Neither a man who
got his education at an elite fashion school in Milan. He would surf his way
around as an ordinary fellow. The average colors on his American cotton clothes
squeezed from Bangladesh sweatshops. But nothing on him, superficially
speaking, was ordinary except for the number of limbs he carried and the number
of blinks per minute his left eye executed. And because he had a tic on the
right eye, I can presume, though not confirm, of his dubious eyes synchronicity.
By nature or nurture, Borges Jones’ way of seeing had the
manners of a lobbyist, usually negotiating asymmetries. Supporting lunch breaks
with antagonisms. Requiring cocktail talks with paradoxes. No white could ravel
in its whiteness without a black opponent. The radius of a circle would be
challenged as he made a counterclockwise revision. He would force verticality,
no matter how cruel the blow the slam the humiliation, to kneel down until it
broke off to horizontality.
Janus was the two faced Roman god trading his greeting and
farewell, permanently. A monster, as all gods are, Janus had been born out of
an alter ego explosion in a megalomaniac’s dream. Jones’ face was a lacerated
half of this monster. With a hello rising from the eastern edge of his lips to
a fading good bye by the time it reached the west. A mournful violin unveiling extremes without
transitions. (My own god, the result of my private monotheistic religion, is a
monster as well, but I dreamt of her, the illusion of a perfect synthesis –mind
not the oxymoron; yes, she fails me, I never expected perfection in my spiritual
Galatea.)
But Borges Jones was no different than any other human I’d
gotten to know until then. Intersected by beginnings and ends, his existential
journey was the constant disturbance of wishing for peace while enjoying war. As
the god of the past and the future, Janus held the door knobs, tensed the
bridges’ suspensions, kept open the mouths of tunnels and caves for extravagance
entrances or introverted exits. Borges Jones wanted to be the scissors for each
umbilical chord, the eyes and sockets of a traveller and the contents of his
pockets, the sender and the addressee almost as much as the script of the hand
written letter, which he’d straighten up to a tight rope wire and whip with it
every writer’s ass.
His job at the workshop was to craft custom orders of human
size crosses, gibbets or gallows. Crosses were popular, especially this year,
with the renovations of Our Lady of the Sea to commemorate her 800th
anniversary. A group of artists, philosophers & writers had been
commissioned to rethink and redesign the fourteen chapels of the Basilica that
flanked the nave. Creativity was finally permitted to land on fertile soil: the
Catholic Church real estate. I’m not sure this was the secret scheme of an
artist, a mischievous anonymous soul, or a Cardinal in disguise. What mattered
to atheist Borges Jones was the fact that the production of crosses was about
to increase and he might even try one for himself, why not. The new catalog of
crosses, available to individuals and institutions, offered a wide range of
choices. The wooden beams could come in a lacquered birch, assemble yourself
Ikea-style; or in mahogany from the Roche-Bobois top designers. Alternative
material to wood is the polyethylene cross, a commercial hit at first because
of its affordable prices. As a result of concerns about being green in the 21st
century and an ethical & conscientious industry rather than an
environmentally neglectful one, the engineers manufactured a bio-derived
polyethylene cross, made from sugar cane. (The question on the fair treatment
and retribution to the almost-slave Brazilian workers got lost among the roars
of the machines when the eight year old daughter of the principal shareholder of
the business uttered it in sad yet hopeful tones). There was also a variation
to this recycling cross: an ethylene-vinyl acetate copolymer, better known as
EVA, a material widely used in sporting goods, that would resist the pressure
and depth of any type of nail without scarring or breaking the beam.
Borges Jones was feeling some unusual satisfaction that
morning. He stepped out of the shop to get some fresh air and buy a pack of
smokes. Down from the alleyways of the barrio del Born the blue sky of
Barcelona looked like a suspended beam of light, one of those pieces by James
Turrell. He thought it was James Turrell’s turn to be his private secret God
during that stroll. Once he got his Ducados he walked down to Our Lady of the
Sea. Leaning on the medieval stone of its Gothic construction, he lit a
cigarrette and debated on the rhythmic nature of existing. I have the right to
interrupt my breathing, to skip an inhalation. What is one inhalation? One
inhalation, one as nothing, one such a short number, reduced to the minimal,
one as one unnecessary. What if I skip a day of my past, or a year, what’s a
day when I’ve accumulated dozens of thousands. History is on the H, on the capital ACHE.
