Circles, fire and water, Alejandro Leibowich

Alejandro Leibowich 


Circles, fire and water

                                        Eventually, the fire purifies everything

                                       Saint Agustin

                                      But in the end we are water.

 “You don’t light a pyre. You light a labyrinth of fire. If you joined all the fired that I have been, they would not fit on the Earth and the angels would be blind”.*

His eyes had seemed to receive strange red and yellow flashes and these words had been sounding as if they were printed in fire in his brain.

He had felt a smash, and a mix in his senses at the same time. He almost could say that he had heard hot things and had seen sounds.

Sam Spade*walked down the dirty ninth avenue under a leaden sky. He didn’t care about the blindness of the angels because he was not living in the sky, but the fire would destroy his house which was on the Earth. The words continued dancing in his mind, as if they were dictated by a killer hammer.

Maybe he could say that he was living in a dream, but the reality was hurting.

He felt this had happened before. A circular situation, a straight way to vanish.

I’m going to silence my mind with a bottle of Scotch whiskey- he said to himself before entering the bar.

He sat down at a table, and picked up a newspaper that someone had forgotten.

He asked the waiter for a Scotch wiskey while he was reading something in the newspaper. First what caught his attention was an article by the Christian children of Harlem.

The headline read: Agustin wrote that Jesus is the straight way that saves us from the circular labyrinth in which the unbelievers walk.

At that moment he touched his face, as if touching a mask.

He began to feel something under the skin. Something was burning under his skin, somehow he seemed to feel smoke coming out of his pores.

All this happened in his circular face.

He didn’t know why, but a mystical mood was taking the most atheist of citizens hostage: Sam Spade.

Ancient sighs like made by dead people, and it seemed as if people from other times were watching his actions.

Watching the people passing by that place, he lit a cigar and allowed himselves to sink into the rings of his mind.

He blew smoke circles of different sizes from his mouth. He was mentally rereading the article of the Harlem Christian children.

At his side at another table, was a man drinking a coffee. At that moment he felt magnetic sources stirring in his mind. He had to read the most important article in the newspaper. His last case must be there somewhere.

In capital letters, the main headline said:

“Justo Gobby, the boss of the smugglers of Harlem, known by his esoteric inclination as the Christ of the circular runes was surrounded on the ninth avenue by agents directed by Sam Spade, private detective.”

Prisioner of anger Gobby doused himself in inflammable liquid that he was carring and shouted:

Circles, fire, a person, a way, the same blood…

“You don’t light a pyre. You light a labyrinth of fire. If you joined all the fires that I have been, they would not fit on the Earth and the angels would be blind.

Agustin wrote that Jesus is the straight way that saves us from the circular labyrinth in which the unbelievers walk.”

After setting himself on fire.

In life, lions, dragons, boars, trees, persons, fire and water appear. The world  seen from different points.

The good Christian childrens were publishing information codified in the newspapers, Sam thought. At that moment the waiter came with the Scotch whiskey, and while Sam was looking at the man at the table to his side, who stirred his coffee, it seemed to him that the spoon was melting.

Later Sam sank in the Scotch whiskey and in the urban oblivion.

Water…

 Paragraph used by Borges,Los teólogos, El Aleph, 1949.*1

Name used by Dashiell Hammett. *2

Jorge Luis Borges

                                          
                                                                     Thelonious Monk Dinah (Take 2)