TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

Rodrigo Fresán

The pillows that start a fight or are used to silence a scream or hide a smile or suffocate a dream.

The mattress beneath which is hidden the fondled money or nudie magazines or secret letters (letters that for a while now are not written with good handwriting, with written handwriting, with ideas considered deliberately and at almost the same speed that it took letters to reach their recipient, always with a trace of the sender’s DNA in the saliva that moistened the backs of the stamps). The sheets that function as well at the hour of escaping as at that of hanging yourself and that are the stitched shroud and raw shell of a ghost (it was never clear to him if sheets are the underground fabric that the ghost slips into to acquire shape and solidity or if sheets are, also, phantasmagoric and were sewn on looms of air).

And so many things fit under the bed: monsters and lovers and the dust that we came from and the dust to which we return.

And the ideaof counting beds—like a historic encyclopediaof the horizontal—is, if you can’t get to sleep, at least a way of reaching the sanctuary of your own bed, at the end of all those other beds. Like on the good cover of that bad Pink Floyd album, for many (not for him, that title was taken by, yes, Yes) the greatest band of somniferous music in history.

Draw me a sheep!

No!

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