Cabello/Carceller

CABELLO/CARCELLER 360
_Uncomfortable Room (Fiction #7), 1998
We could not change where the two chairs were placed for a simple
reason: We could not find another way of positioning them. We would
have truly liked to do so, but when something becomes impossible,
it seems more reasonable to try to change its meaning than to keep
trying to change its appearance. The problem lay not so much in the
size of that room, as in the fact that its design prevented a comfortable
use of it. The floor was not only slightly slippery but
also had different degrees of inclination, so that it was necessary
to occupy a smaller amount of space with the chairs than would have
been desirable. The oddness of the position was strengthened by the
fact that both pieces of furniture should necessarily be placed facing
each other. At first, both the chosen place and its orientation
seemed satisfactory to us. Only after endless days did we realize
the peculiarity of this way of life.
Sitting face to face for hours, the countenance of the other
ended up constituting our only landscape. Gradually, we ceased to
perceive the appearance of an outside world in order to arrive at a
stage of visual seclusion which, had it not been that we knew each
other so well, would have made us suspect the existence of certain
religious reminiscences. Once we had reached this critical contemplative
state, we appreciated an infinite range of possibilities in
the orientation of the gaze. You can choose what part of the face
you want to focus on, you can choose to dilute the contours, look
sideways, you can even ignore the other’s look and analyze the color
of their eyes… After the first visual experiments, we concluded that
it would be more interesting to study the why of this situation.
Obviating the fact that human beings have almost never been able to
satisfactorily solve the whys, at least not if we take them to their
ultimate consequences, we fervently committed ourselves to this new
activity. And we obtained a mistaken deduction from it: The gaze exerted
so much control on our brain that it prevented us from hearing
the words, so it was too complicated to try to argue the pros and
cons of this our new way of inhabiting existence. They say that it
is best not to turn your back on failure, but the most interesting
thing about failing is that you can move on to another matter without
feeling remorse. So we did. Recognizing the impossibility of
initiating fluent verbal communication, and, since we had already
traveled the most formal paths of looking, we decided to focus, at
least temporarily, all our attention on what was looked at.
It was then that we realized that if you choose to focus your
gaze on the other you have in front of you, if you do it with pleasure
and you divest yourself of social conventions, you run the risk
of discovering the reason for such conventions.
EN