Ice Cold Water Ice Cold Water

The palate clears, but the flavor of regional words sticks to the roof of the mind, salt, style slapped to theme: the categorical difference between a shooting star, otherworldly as it is, and its oceanic twin, slippery as a child at the playground, contracting its five arms toward its center, twirling, turning around, riding itself and abiding in its secret pleasures, neither bitter nor dour, which would suggest preference or its absence, something that simply goes from here to there, from one port to another, from this to that shade of meaning. Listen carefully to what is whispered in your ear: bring me “a glass of ice cold water” which, no doubt, will be found in the “ice-box.” But this request has nothing to do with quenching thirst. It has a twin meaning, maybe Siamese. It’s a highly personal way of considering and particularizing a universe that, all of a sudden, belongs to everyone, a currency, the familiar voice of all who open their doors and respond the same way with the same gestures and by so doing come to be themselves. What, otherwise, are a provincial’s daily pleasures? At ease speaking the vernacular God mandates and calling a spade a spade, avoiding any direct link between what was requested and served and what truly corresponds, the said and the received. And so what in other places might be called falling head over heels is rendered here as “a bucketful of ice cold water,” an expression derived from purely metaphoric “snows.” (translated from the Spanish by Forrest Gander)

Nov 21, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Pura Lopez Colome