DIVAN 2. Gregory meets Jaime.

Gregory and Jaime speak English. Gregory wears blue t-shirt and chooses White divan. Jaime wears white t-shirt and choses black furry divan. Gregory faces the building. Jaime faces the garden. Between them the same black little table.  

The pine tree is invaded with parrots. Some years ago those birds were kidnapped in tropical countries and brought as exotic living commodities. For a while they decorated our bourgeois white boring apartments always needed of a “cosmopolitan” touch. At some point those birds escaped their cages and started reproducing in the new and alien environment. Nowadays they have widely and wildly colonized all trees in the city.   We are lying underneath a disturbing metaphor. 

These Le Corbusier divans result extremely confortable.  Maybe we are too tired and anything seems an invitation to take a nap. We could have just slept for a whole hour and our simultaneous dreams would have been the contents of our conversation. Birds go crazy at this point and make that idea vanish. We keep chatting.  

After a long period away from home I miss my bed. After a six week period away from home he needs to go back home. Home is Johannesburg. Home is Madrid. Home exists.

But usually, the unexpected doesn’t happen at home. The possibility of being out of place appears only if one is brave enough to leave. And one finds the strength in the call. This call is a promise of pleasure. I always expected a spectacular revelation; I always wished to be Saint Paul blinded in the desert in his way to Damascus; I always waited for an astonishing sign that would make me give up myself and invest all my efforts in producing potentia gaudendi.  But such shows require production, rehearsal, budget, partners and faith. And these are bad times for the spectacular. It is time to start exploring the unexpected. Maybe the possibility of pleasure remains hidden in the unexpected.

Lying on these divans we look like Rosario Flores and Leonor Watling in Almodovar’s film “Talk to her”. That could be the title of this series of informal conversations in the garden.