David this David That

David this David that
By David Salas

David this David that, It’s hard getting used to hearing your name on TV or Reading i ton the paper, but when you are famous you don’t get any other choice. In my particular case I became famous because of some stories I wrote a couple of years ago while I was murdering some time inside a 4 walled office. During the time in which I worked there I became a very good friend of the accountant Martin. He is the kind of weird guy that nobody seems to like, but I liked him, for some reason I liked to talk to him.

He is the classic portrait of an accountant; everybody hated it when he sent you all over the company looking for double or triple signatures just to get some miserable cents out of the company. But I used to like walking all over the company meeting everybody. Besides during the time I worked there he was the only person to whom I showed my writings just before publishing them. His reaction when he read them was very particular…  He didn’t understand them, but as any good friend, he encouraged me to publish them, and following his advice I did.

A short time after I published them, my friend and family started buying them, and Little by Little more and more copies were sold, and after just a few months I acquired an unexpected fame as a writer, and that is how I became famous.  In the moment I got my first check from the editors I quitted my job and prepared myself to live a life of smoking fine tobacco from a pipe and drinking blood colored wine.

It’s not strange that the only person with whom I kept some contact with after resigning was Martin, the only person with whom I shared a fundamentally opposite yet distinctive social dysfunctionality that made us friends. With an occasional call or e-mail we kept in touch; one afternoon, I remember, we spoke over the phone and an invitation emerged from his side to grab a meal at his home. At that point I was fueled by an enormous curiosity to say yes, but it wasn’t a friendly curiosity it was more of a scientific thirst to meet his wife. Don’t get me wrong, there was nothing sexual about my curiosity, I was interested in finding out what type of woman marries someone like Martin, a man that doesn’t even look at you in the eye when he speaks, how did someone as dysfunctional as him managed to get a woman, get married and bring a child to this world; and how some like me, being a socially normal person haven’t had a serious relationship in years. Therefore I accepted the invitation, and the next Saturday I dropped by his house bringing some writing sketches.

When I got to his house, he introduced me to his wife and his 7 year old girl, At firs there was nothing particular about his wife, a sparely kind lady that attended me with a reception that reminded me of Homer’s Ulysses in the odyssey. A woman with smooth character that seemed to be the perfect counterpart of Martin, and his daughter, a beautiful child that had inherited her mother’s face (praise the lord) and didn't seem to have any of Martin’s curious behaviors. Anyway that day went away very fast. We ate and chatted about nonsense, and I ended up reading the sketches to Martin, he exposed his critique, and made some arguments against me, for instance: he didn’t understand the poetic language. He asked me why I described the sunset as, “the dying flame of the wintery sun”, I tried to explain myself, I told him that the words shouldn’t just express themselves by the meaning, that word must transcend for their beauty or vulgarity, with the argument of giving an incentive to the story and a challenge to the readers to use their brains. My efforts were in vain, Martin as any accountant advised me to change the complex analogies to their simpler forms.

I never listened to him.

That Saturday afternoon we started what later became some sort of tradition, he invited me for supper on a Saturday, we ate, I read some stories, he made his critique and we ended discussing peacefully drinking a bottle of red wine.

A few months, several stories, and lots of bottles later, the tradition kept going on, and in time, it adopted some tacit and mechanical qualities. It was Always on Saturday and we followed the same routine.

One Wednesday came on a random week, in which I got suddenly inspired, I had written 3 stories in a row, I couldn’t wait for Sunday to show them to Martin, so I ran to his house to see him, breaking the tacit rules of our meetings. When I got there, a woman opened the door for me, a woman that wasn’t Martin wife nor his daughter. With my imagination on the run, I built a plot in which Martin was a womanizer, and inside his house there was a Roman style orgy to which, I his best friend hadn’t been invited. In these thoughts I was when I got interrupted by a couple of blunt questions. Who are you and who are you looking for? Said the woman waking me from my internal darkly monologues. With what I remember now as a shaky voice I responded veraciously, I am David Friend of Martin, and I come to see him. To which she responded, I am the maid and I can’t let you in. This being said she closed the door and left me talking to the door.

It wasn’t until that moment that I realized the incredible beauty of the woman I had just laid my eyes upon. At this point I have to make a pause in the style, because after many versions and reengineering on these paragraphs, I realized that I cannot describe the beauty of this woman, so it is best if I don’t keep trying. It’s enough for me to say that she is the most beautiful woman I have seen. You my reading friend can imagine your own woman, and when you have it in mind, forget her, because I’m sure that what you thought of isn’t half as beautiful as what I saw.

In that moment after gazing that woman, everything else in the world seemed dull and gray, the stories that got me there in the first place were nothing now, the terrible words printed on the paper that just moments ago I praised as just and airy, were just a straight line that was going nowhere now. I tore the sheets apart and threw them to the garbage.  I slowly returned home, and in the way, enlightened by the beauty I rethought my stories, by the time I got home I Sat in front of the computer and rewrote them. This time Inspired by the divine beauty of my muse, I wrote 3 long stories in just a few minutes. It seemed as if I was being chased by the death itself because of my speed. Needless to say these have been the best stories I’ve ever written.

Saturday came, and as always, I went to see Martin. There she was, she had been hired to lighten up on Martin’s wife amount of work, we ate and I couldn’t stop staring at her, she immediately realized this and she smiled to herself like she knew she was being looked at. It wasn’t some sort of flirting towards me, it was more like the type of smile a mother has when she catches you playing pranks to the neighbor and decides not to punish you. The evening passed, and as it was accustomed I read out loud my recently improved new stories to Martin. Even he recognized them as my best work, the maid was around all the time, coming and going, I knew she had been listening and that probably she even liked them, but I received nothing from her, not a word or even a discrete look. Dazzled I returned home, there was no space in my head for nothing apart from those subtle eyes with an immortal stare.

Soon I felt the necessity to see her again, I was in love but not in love with her, I was in love with just seeing her, I didn’t mind to be only a witness of such beautiful creation of nature, as long as I had a first row sit. Out of my anxiety, some pretexts began to rise in order to go to Martin’s house more often. The inspiration from her beauty, lead me to write many stories, and I visited Martin as often as I could during the week with all kinds of excuses. Not after a long time I was out of ideas and the stories I wrote were each gradually worst than the last. One particular afternoon I wrote a story about some midgets living in a forest and climbing trees, now I wonder, why would a midget want to climb a goddamn tree? Martin never said anything about the crescent mediocrity in my stories, and I didn’t care, I was ready to throw away my career for just one stare at this woman.

One day Martin was very tired, and fell asleep on the couch while I was reading a lousy story to him, when I realized I was sleeping my audience, I started packing up my things and getting ready to leave, I sat on the table’s chair to reorganize and I saw her coming. The maid of measured words and silent glances, walked straight at me, he lifted me by the armpits as if I were a child, and kissed me.

I was shocked, and merely left myself go, and when the magnificent kiss ended, she said to me with this quoted words:

“So you have something to write about”

She said this and went away as fast as she came, I ran to my house, I’ve sat upon my computer and written this.