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By Root 913 0

That first touch of hands watching Fred and Ginger dance against a background of snow falling in Manhattan. Greta, Ginger, Fred. As he looked at the ruined theater, José Luis felt that the models we admire and pursue come out of ourselves. They are not imposed on us. We invent them, and they magically, gracefully appear on a white screen. Except they are our own shadows transformed into light. They are our most satisfactory portrait. They remain young even in death.

“I wander the streets like a ghost. I’ve left my image in a ruined movie house. Come and acknowledge it if you dare. I’ve lost everything but the memory of you. I no longer have a body. What I have is the desire to see you again, to talk to you again.”

Guy: A straight, slightly prognathous profile. Wavy hair, without the thin spots of age. Eyes that show interest in everything they see. He is sure he touched the sky one day.

José Luis: Round face. Pronounced baldness. Very large eyes, pools of a sharp, quiet intelligence. The despair of schemers. He never feels the need to challenge his companion. His rule is to avoid promiscuity. He would like to be located at the heart of a constellation.

Chorus of a Son of the Sea

the tip of the peninsula opens like the biggest fan in the world

the freezing distant pacific ocean crashes into the hot storms of sinaloa

displaying two hundred degrees of surf

Nicanor Tepa stands on the board waiting for the monster wave nine feet high

he takes it with audacity elegance reticence simplicity strength

always from the left

you never take a huge wave from the right

from the right the wave falls on the surfer crushes him drowns him

from the left Nicanor Tepa conquers the wave turns into wave

a vast white veil holds up Nicanor’s body

the white foam crowns his dark head

the tension of his muscles isn’t felt it is resolved with jubilation in his triumph over the

wave of blue crystal

it is august the great month for headlands in baja

in september Nicanor Tepa will travel to san onofre beach in california and its

forty kilometers of waves inviting him to tame them as if the sea were an

immense whale and the wave only the spout of the monster spewing sea spray

twenty-four meters into the air

in october Nicanor is in the burial ground of the freezing sea of Ireland in the bay of

Donegal and its waves of turbid green broken and enlarged by the barrier

reefs

and in december he’ll arrive in Hawaii to win the Triple Crown championship exposed

to the incessant hammering of the bay of Waimea and its waves thirty-six meters

high

Nicanor begins the new year on the peninsula of Guanacaste in Costa Rica and

in february goes down to Australia to the longest sandbar in the world where three gigantic

waves gather and explode and allow him to glide like a gull over

the heights of the sea

that hurls him at the end of the monsoon in Tahiti with its electrical storms

flashing into the sea where Nicanor conquers the most fearsome of all waves

the Teahupú

and now the wave shatters against the head of Nicanor who made a mistake taking it from

the right

and he comes to under a high-tension spiderweb in a hovel in the Capulín

district

and he tries to grasp the volcanic rock so he won’t drown in the marsh

and he wakes in his one-room windowless shack

and he’ll go out right away to see if he can catch what’s fallen from the trucks going to the

market

and he forms his pyramid of peanuts on the highway that goes to the airport

and looks without interest at the venders of gum plastic toys lottery tickets

hairpins

and tells himself in silence that if he were bolder he would clean windshields and even eat

fire at the crossroads

you have to eat fire to revive the six little brothers dead before their first

birthday typhus polio rabies

you have to bring in an ocean wave to demolish the district without potable water to carry to the

sea the mountains of garbage

but Nicanor Tepa trusts in luck

he resumes looking at the surfers’ calendar now they should go to Jeffreys Bay in South

Africa

Nicanor lifts one after