I want to stay in the present, to live in the present;

feeling the burden of a past that has never passed

and monitoring the future that is already here.

Donna Haraway

There is no soloist, only accompaniment.

Fred's Types

I

He put on the sneakers, the light coat, closed the door and, through the twilight of the third floor, came to the house of Luz Izaro. Without knocking on the door, he waited. From the hollow of the staircase was heard the slow moaning of a child.

They took the elevator. In the living room, Rober was snoring at the boy's chest and was helping Mari, the neighbor on the second floor, take off her chest. He greeted them with modesty, grabbed the tip of the little finger in the child's mouth.

The wind from the south had a whipping odor. In the quiet plaza of the house, bicycles and toys were wrapped in the shed. By night walks, the two old had reached rhythmic equilibrium. Old professor Mirko was reading at the bedside rocking machine. A dim light illuminated the road through the ground floor of Bintu Okina. Through the road of land and sand they reached the path of the shore through the communal gardens. Izaro pointed to the flight of the owl, around the belfry, and followed them with a lazy soul.

They had descended almost to the level of the Rio. There was no light in the Trojan district. Luze's grandfather had wandered around like an anguler, selling sand for the day, and dragging in the night into an angulero or a small and a broom. "And to me, who will sympathize with me?" The murmur of the river sang to Luz the voices of the dead. For years he took the clay of guilt, the swamp in his chest, abandoning his widowed father and his impotent grandfather in Madrid, convinced that they were at the ends of life's desires so that no one would complain and be an architect.

“Since when has Odei not been reported?”

The two ladies spoke the sign language; the Izaro was deaf at birth. They met in Madrid, in the feminist group of the school. To one answer, Luze was able to hear the rumor of the marshes: towards dizziness. Millions of panting bubbles at the bottom of the river. The racket began to revive from the regulation of industrial activity. They kept walking against the current. An owl lay in the chestnut branch. In the distance, they saw the factory district, which has now in part been transformed into habitats. In a couple of windows, shadows were distinguished. Night artists also had to work in the Elkarlan Space.

“Did you get in touch?”

"A few weeks ago. You may come and see me. I was waiting for permission.

Light was silent. Sometimes it was thought to be built.

“You are his mother, Light.

He touched one cheek with the index and the length of the index of the right hand, and then touched the other. Luz believed that her mother could not be a building that could not be closed inside. I wanted every house the lockdown as a form of escape.

"I'm eighty-six years old, Izaro.

He took a few steps forward. Then, turning to his partner, he said:

“Go to Babylon. I'll wait for you here, it's not cold today.

The occupied dwarf of Babylon was about two kilometers from there. The river widened on that pair and formed an island in the middle of the river. The young people were now cultivating the land of the island and had set up a cooperative in the lobby of Babylon. The old woman moved to him with wonderful speed. The song of the Urubia did not move.

As soon as he walked away from the star, Luz held his back in a birch, raised his skirts a little, opened his legs and prayed on his feet. He felt the hot steam that was going up his thighs. He did a review of the landscape that I didn't see but that I knew very well. The designation of the place helped him to calm down, listing as a prayer the juncos, the alisos and the carrizal, the lush elms and the puff elms, the robledales of the valley bottoms, the isolated black nuts, the chestnuts, the cork of the hillsides, the birch, the hazel, the charm. He designated the fig tree and perceived the strong smell of figs. Then, while breathing seated at the bank on the shore, he heard the night train coming to the city and moving away from the city.

II

Around the dark walks, Luz had breakfast with Izaro and her neighboring dawn. The hustle and bustle of the living creatures, the smell of the waters, the toast and the fruits were delicious. Newspapers and magazines were exchanged, and under their houses they were subscribed to various editions. The role had a second life with the deurbanization of the population: the people who headed for the crowd did not estimate it at all times, it was enough with the soft smell of paper, of ink, with the gesture through which the page was passed. They developed language and sensory skills to think together, exchanging cooking recipes. At Txirikorda, they used the rotating expert system: realizing what one knew was for one and handing it over to others. They had left behind the post-it era; complex ideas didn't fit into the pieces of colored paper. The conceptual maps of the walls did not decay them in the body; they knew that, if they were somewhere, wisdom was nuanced, and they learned to listen in the five senses of that word: listen, understand, smell, feel, agree. They talked without intent. Aware of the importance of things that did not serve at all, the time and art of the conversation were not sold with delight: in the neighborhood it was appreciated above all to the good interlocutor.

He looked at the wall in front of him, where the neighbors stood up, behind the windows. He drank a sip of coffee. Forty years earlier, at the beginning of the project, they had had long discussions about the size of the windows. They didn't have much to convince themselves of the relationship between the inside and the outside. Some accused them of proposing "a hemorrhage to intimacy". Izaro's speech on the importance of seeing demonstrative fingers in the eyes was memorable. In sign language, I had to tell them that listening to others was also basic. So, forgetting Izaro, some neighbors hurled over the interpreter. It wasn't strange at this time. They opposed the interpreter arguing that being deaf it was easy to defend noise. Izaro patiently explained to them that the staircase of the twentieth century bourgeois house was only one hundred years old, that the idea of not leaving anyone's house was directly linked to the construction of productive individuals, that to feel one another was a moment of discomfort. No annoyance, no discomfort, no discomfort. The interpreter translated it with indifference, as was said in the home of Luzh: "Get rid of your slut, girl."

Long Bloom cleaned the dishes and retired to sleep. Since the four-hour day was regulated, the imposition of sleeping for eight hours in a row had been extinguished and temples were common. Luz had recovered to old age the dream of the middle morning, abandoned to the time of the grandmother. In Madrid, I needed them to survive: I slept in marginal hours, I worked in marginal hours, and one day I realized that time, in general, had become an attempt to conquer marginal hours.

Going up the stairs he met Mari and the little boy. The smell of graveyard lilas and fermented milk emanated from the small's meat. Lucia was carrying a drop of oil splatter in her chest to sleep; she was doing so in the middle. It was fifty-nine years since Odei was born, and he did not know how to understand all his meaning. Something escaped, the wind leaked through its ribs. Getting away from anthropocentric thinking felt good. The idea of settling in lizards, butterflies and birds that lived free from the ties of their parents and pups calmed it down. Maybe she was never willing to be a man's mother. Perhaps I hadn't made sense that one day her son would become a man, that he would never become a woman, and that he would most likely try to find materials for that cultural architecture out of home. I hadn't thought about it in time, maybe I'd been too busy, or maybe, quite simply, there were some things I couldn't think of.

When he returned to the town, Odei was nothing more than a teenager, a schoolboy for Luz who would not have found it easy for the bones to simply settle in a village that had left behind for a long time, without being anyone to grow, representing only himself. If Odei was a child, he would have taught him to catch insects in pine resins, to hear the frog rain, to paint his lips with cranberry juice, or maybe all that was just an idealization, but anyway, Odei was not old enough to marvel at the phosphorescence of fireflies: The land where Luke was raised did not sing his son but crib songs. Two desires were distinguished by their memories.

I would look back, from time to time. I didn't believe that this region, inherited from tradition, would become a benchmark for feminist urbanism, let alone the one they would call to take the leadership of the project. But soon Izaro joined them, with the social temperament opposed to their island name, to gather the pieces of land. Then everything was easier at work and at home, as Izaro had a agility and an art by Odeire that Luz missed.

When he opened his eyes, he felt the need to walk again. He said to himself that he was in the penultimate phase, that he was gradually clearing from the swamp, from the forests, from the roads. It was not a dramatic exercise, but he stepped on the ground, which would receive him on foot, following the usual paths. I was walking with insects very carefully, and it wasn't possible to imagine who I lived with to understand who I would die with. Maybe someday I would come to the sea down the mouth. Out the window he saw the wind in the foliage of the thigh. He put on the jacket and the cloth hat. It was the time of the assembly; in the church the chosen people should have been chosen in the draw. It was a case of caring for dependents. Luze recalled that the issue was cyclically repeated.

It came out of the braid. His home was the oldest of the village’s collaborative homes, and he crossed the houses of Pikaola and Txulunbre and headed left by Basatxo. In Basatxo, the old people lived alone; the young people called it paxatxo, burlessly. Independent elderly people from intergenerational housing and many LGTBIQ groups gathered there. Izaro and Luz also knew what the fear of ending up in a conservative nursing home was. This was one of the reasons why they propelled collaborative housing; after all their activism lives, they didn't want to end up in a herd fashion house that would impose heteronorma and social control on them. He greeted the coffeemaker, the fishmonger and the bookkeeper. At the door of the carpenter, the chip looked like a newly cut loop. In the kitchen of Txiñortza, a group of children were involved in the production of stones. In Zuasti, they were eating. The neighbors greeted him from the windows. Houses had not had figures for a long time.

He crossed the bridge and headed to the railway station. Rasha greeted him from the other side of the street, coming from the composting area, still with the work monkey. That woman and her four children came twenty years ago to the people, when the last hotel on the coast was closed at the third collapse of the pandemic and left without work. He wasn't the only one. The decline in tourism plagued the entire region: the coast became a ghost town and people realized that they couldn't go where they wanted. The paralysis, forced, had hit many; the bodies that had trained for the march could not maintain the idea of stopping. The organisms that joined acceleration and bilingualism burst, without an apex of elegance. “I’ve picked them up at the curb,” Rasha taught him two white roses. He pointed to the sky: "This year you have carried." Looking through the fog, Luze retreated himself.

A few years earlier, the children laughed when they were told they were entitled to fly. The chiquillos, running along the esplanades, with their arms stretched out and legs slightly raised, never having seen anything like that in the sky, whose traces and the tingling of the wind remained at fantasy airports. Children were also played in motorhome cemeteries; children ' s groups occupied them, and adolescents and young people, in the absence of cars, touched leather on the investments of nuclear families of previous generations. At the rhythm of Death Beat music, they fluttered. Compositions with missing sounds and voices were in the foam, mixing with slow organic rhythms aircraft takeoffs, church choirs and AP-8 traffic ultrasounds. Some of these caravan necropolis became migrant neighborhoods. The viruses that, time and again, disrupted the world, forced the human being to observe the environment; the idea of progress was translated and had to begin to emerge among the rubble. By 2020, the population would circulate in flying cars, but instead Glovo’s workers were cycling. Water, electricity and gas became hugely expensive. The plagues made it clear how fragile the cities were, just like the economy at the time. The doors were visible, they did not serve to continue living. They only made some sense in the parameters of efficiency, productivity and speed. One factor changed and everything fell from the top down. The suburbs overflowed as the urban hubs were emptied, and the exodus to the interior soon began. Those who were able to return to their places of origin, repopulated villages that they considered boring and ridiculous, ripping smoke strings from fireplaces in neighborhoods abandoned during the winter.