martes, 7 de julio de 2009

El palacio de la Luna

Fue el verano en que el hombre pisó por primera vez la luna. Yo era muy joven entonces, pero no creía que hubiera futuro. Quería vivir peligrosamente, ir lo más lejos posible y luego ver qué me sucedía cuando llegara allí. Tal y como salieron las cosas, casi no lo consigo. Poco a poco, vi como mi dinero iba menguando hasta quedar reducido a cero; perdí el apartamento; acabé viviendo en las calles. De no haber sido por una chica que se llamaba Kitty Wu, probablemente me habría muerto de hambre. La había conocido por casualidad muy poco antes, pero con el tiempo llegué a considerar esa casualidad una forma de predisposición, un modo de salvarme por medio de la mente de otros. Esa fue la primera parte. A partir de entonces me ocurrieron cosas extrañas. Acepté el trabajo que me ofreció el viejo de la silla de ruedas. Descubrí quién era mi padre. Crucé a pie el desierto desde Utah a California. Eso fue hace mucho tiempo, claro, pero recuerdo bien aquellos tiempos, los recuerdo como el principio de mi vida.

El palacio de la Luna, Paul Auster.

1 comentario:

María dijo...

Por eso de seguir la tradición, escribo el primer comentario de tu blog. Espero que lo llenes de cosas bonitas como sólo tú sabes.

Aqui te dejo mi parte favorita de Moon Palace.
Un beso!

"According to Cyrano, the moon is a world like this one. When seen from that world, our earth looks just like the moon does from here. The Garden of Eden is located on the moon, and when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, God banished them to the earth. Cyrano first attempts to travel to the moon by strapping bottles of lighter than air dew to his body, but after reaching the Middle Distance, he floats back to the earth, landing among a tribe of naked Indians in New France. There he builds a machine that eventually takes him to his destination, which no doubt goes to show that America has always been the ideal place for moon launchings. The people he encounters on the moon are eighteen feet tall and walk on all fours. They speak two different languages, but neither language has any words in it. The first, used by common people, is an intricate code of pantomime gestures that calls for constant movement from all parts of the body. The second language is spoken by the upper class, and it consists on pure sound, a complex but unarticulated humming that closely resembles music. The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry – actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself. The worst crime is virginity, and young people are expected to show disrespect for their parents. The longer one’s nose, the more noble one’s character is considered to be. Men with short noses are castrated, for the moon people would rather die out as a race than be forced to live with such ugliness. There are talking books and traveling cities. When a great philosopher dies, his friends drink his blood and eat his flesh. Bronze penises hang from the waists of men - in the same way that seventeenth-century Frenchmen used to carry swords. As a moon man explains to the befuddled Cyrano: Is it not better to honor the tools of life than the tools of death?"

Moon Palace, Paul Auster