Hoje*

Early in the morning, I catch a train from Barcelona to the town of Mataró, a ride that lasts a little less than an hour (though later a taxi driver who takes me to the outskirts confirms that coming up from the city by car would slash trip time in half ). The women sitting in front of me, one of them nestled asleep in the cushions of her seat, both have very Latin American faces: the sleeping one is dark red-brown with a thin, worn Indian face, the other, a round and middle-aged mulatta. A common sojourn, taking them perhaps from one periphery to another, to their quotidian chores of cleaning or caring or simply keeping afloat.

Heading north along the coast, a still-empty Mediterranean beach stretches out alongside me, and I imagine by the time the breakfast hour has gone by it will be sprinkled with bathers and beach goers. The towns we pass seem almost to repeat the density of the big city we have left behind us, but are not all the same: in one, a reddish brown medieval church spire rises into the morning air; in another, the houses across the road from the railroad tracks have quaint Spanish balconies and weathered wooden shutters and, finally, closer to my destination, become the neat but rather desolate rows of cinderblock constructions that as my new friend reminds me, house immigrants from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan countries lying below. And then, the rise of short green bushes and slender trees as we head by cab through this sparse countryside, toward the equestrian center where I have an interview to carry out. A brief conversation, a half- hour or so spent watching a woman of about my age – a non-practicing veterinarian of about my age who has told me she is the mother of six children – take a riding class, and another, younger, blonde, who exercises a monumental dappled gray . Today, though, nobody tells me anything I don´t already know. Moment of impasse in my work? In my life? To cross an ocean looking for love and change and knowledge, e dar de cara com (a falta de) o desejo do Outro. Or perhaps just more of the same old story: one person´s work is another´s leisure; one person´s pleasure, another’s pain…Again, it seems I cannot avoid handing myself over to the crueler moments of life. O vazio onde esperava a resposta. The stilted choreography of breaking loose. Maybe I didn´t think it would happen again. Maybe not quite this way. I wait, though today rather impatiently, for my ride back to the station.


* Or: "Today I kind of feel like going home..."