Memory is full of lost steps that always lead to a song and, in these days that seem like a Sunday, the slow voice of Kris Kristofferson accompanies me through the silence and the rain, while the lights of the night bars m invite you to push the door.
There was not a Sunday without a hangover in Cascorro, at dawn, when the Rastro stalls began to set up and the Vaquero appeared with his spurs, ready to place the goods. In a flash, he deployed his troops with Marcial Lafuente Estefanía at the head. Then come Silver Kane, The Coyote, Peter Barton and the whole gang of Western novels. Boom, boom!
Along with the gunshots, a song was echoing in my head. She walked through the mists of a bad dream, enveloped in the memory of a half-dressed woman on the open flesh of early morning. Those were times of alcohol and roaring, Sundays when I always showed up at Vaquero, at the end of the Rastro, to buy those novels with which I spent the hungover afternoon. In my palate I carried the baked taste of the last kiss and on the recorder Kris Kristofferson sang that song that now brings back the memory, the one that says there’s something about Sunday that makes you feel alone.
With Kristofferson’s death, I feel like all of this happened recently, say the other day, while I was walking around Madrid enjoying life to the fullest, busy in an endless game of dice, playing in poker with my own destiny; betting blindly, always bluffing, in the most indecent gambling dens in the city where I was born and where I crashed.
I’ve always been a frontier guy, that’s why I read Silver Kane, his western novels were full of badasses, capable of breaking you into pieces just by looking at their faces, but with enough tenderness in the heart to ride and caress a dog. .from the street without fear of fleas jumping. Years later, I met Silver Kane in person, a tall, popular man whose name was actually Paco, and who gave me one of his books and a harmonica with a crust of saliva from the post-war snack. With this harmonica I learned to play Knocking on heaven’s doorthe song Dylan wrote for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, film starring Kris Kristofferson and directed by Bloody Sam, the favorite director of my beloved Fernandito Marías. It’s looking more and more like a fucking cemetery. Damn.
Memory is full of lost steps that always lead to a song and, in these days that seem like a Sunday, the slow voice of Kris Kristofferson accompanies me through the silence and the rain, while the lights of the night bars m invite you to push the door. .
These are the things that come to me when I’m hours ahead of sleep, when I think it’s time to take the canoe and row with the butt of a rifle until I reach the other side , whistling this song that brought me here with the load of my memories.
I must hurry, before the current erases it from the shore forever and carries it away with my footprints and turns it into a handful of grammar.
