Risa y penitencia - Luz Aurora Pimentel

with an ochre, tobacco-coloured hue, with feline eyes and eyelids slightlyswollen with joyful sleep, with a headpiece like a cap that stresses the foreheaddeformation and on which a line draws a spiral that ends in a virgule8 (there thewind has written her true name), a dimple on each cheek and two ritual cuts, thelittle head laughs. The sun stops and looks at her. She laughs and looks backwithout blinking.Whom or why is the third-shelf little head laughing at? She laughs with the sun.There is a complicity, the nature of which I cannot quite decipher, between herlaughter and the light. Eyes half-closed and mouth half-open, barely showingher tongue, she plays with the sun like the bather with water. The solar warmthis her element. Does she laugh at men? She laughs to herself and for no reason.She ignores our existence; she’s alive and laughs with all that is alive. Shelaughs to blossom, so the morning may blossom. Laughing is a kind of birth(the other kind, ours, is crying). If I could laugh like her, without knowingwhy… Today, a day like any other day, under the same sun shining every day, Iam alive and laugh. My laughter resounds in the room with a noise like pebblesfalling into a well. Is human laughter a fall, do we men have a hole in our souls?Ashamed, I shut up. Then I laugh at myself. Again, the same grotesque,convulsive sound. The little head’s laughter is different. The sun knows it andkeeps quiet. He shares the secret and will not tell, or if he does he uses words Icannot understand. I have forgotten—if I ever knew—the language of the sun.The little head is a fragment of a clay doll, found in a minor tomb—with otherbroken idols and old pieces of earthenware—somewhere in the heart ofVeracruz. On my desk there is a collection of photographs of those clay figures.Mine was once like them: face slightly uplifted to the sun, with an expression ofunspeakable joy; arms in a dancing pose, with her left hand open and the rightone wielding a pumpkin-shaped rattle; round her neck and on her breast, acoarse stone necklace; and barely clad with a narrow girdle over her breasts anda knee length skirt, both ornamented with a zigzagging fret. Mine, perhaps, hadanother decoration: winding lines, virgules, and, in the middle of her skirt, oneof those so-called “spider” monkeys, with his tail oddly curled up and his breastcut up by the high priest’s knife. (118-119)… The sun has not gone yet. Stubborn, he is still in the room. What is the time?One digit more or less advances or delays my time, that of my final loss.Because I’m lost in infinite time, which had no beginning and will have no end.The sun lives in another time; it is another time, finite and immortal (finite:everything comes to an end, everything wears out; immortal: it is born, rebornwith childlike laughter and a spout of blood). Beheaded sun, flayed sun, rawfleshedsun, young and old sun, sun sharing the secret of true laughter, that ofthe little head in the third shelf. To laugh like that, after a thousand years, onehas to be absolutely alive or completely dead. Is it only skulls that laughperpetually? No: the little head is alive and laughs. Only the living laugh likethat. I look at her once more: over her headpiece a line draws a spiral ending ina virgule. There the wind wrote her true name: my name is vine, coiling aroundtrees, monkey hanging over the dark green chasm; my name is axe to cleave the8 Virgule. A thin sloping or upright line ( / , | ) occurring in medieval MSS, as a mark for the caesura or as apunctuation mark (frequently with the same value as the modern comma). (O:D:E)