#2 Magic Mirror on the wall, who on earth am I at all?

The little girl that I was

I was a very shy little girl, and I hated to be asked to shout “Merci Saint Nicolas!” looking up at the sky when I received my presents, because, from a very early age, I felt that there was some kind of odd manipulation going on there. I could not understand why the adults around me did what I felt as a way to twist my reality, adding to their made-up story some truthful elements to make the whole thing seem believable. Why would they do that to me? Did they want me to go crazy? My tiny guts were telling me that “this” was something wrong that tried very hard to fit in the disguise of being right. I had a hard time accepting it, and I knew, deep down, that when it feels wrong, it is wrong. 

Obviously I was happy with the presents that “whoever” had brought to me though. But I would rather kiss my parents thank you, instead of shouting thank you to “Him”. I was a little parsimonious in that kiss department too. When I was tired of the whole thing, I would simply say “I can’t kiss you now, my trunk of kisses is empty”. But it was soon replenished when I received books, which I literally gobbled. Apart from my love for reading, my favorite toys were Barbie dolls because, through them, I imagined my adult life. I would spend hours and hours making up great scenarios. I very much enjoyed projecting myself in the dolls’ activities, either riding a horse or driving a camper van towards new adventures in remote locations. The feeling of freedom was totally awesome. Life could be a rodeo in my games! I guess not a single Barbie knew, then, that I’d end up living close to a Western movie set in my adult years! 

 If you took the ‘R’ out of that toy, to turn barbies into “babies”, I was no longer interested. As an only child, I seldom had (human) babies around. As a teenager, I would still feel very awkward with tiny creatures staring at me with eyes as deep as void was my ability to verbally communicate with them, exactly what my dad would feel towards me as an infant… Once I had the ability to talk and organize my thoughts, that was another story and he would spend time playing with me. This is exactly what has been happening to my grown-up self for a long time, as if babies triggered some kind of dyssemia in me, although now I’ve been working on my non-verbal abilities, that I prefer to call my sensorial intelligence. I would usually leave babies to other females who fell in what I saw as a close-to-idiotic mimicry of what is supposed to be baby talk. I always focused on older children, who usually feel drawn to me too. Many times, at social gatherings, I end up playing with all the kids, a circumstance which brings me torrents of gratitude from their parents who can’t believe that I would “sacrifice” my adult self in the process. Although, frankly, even if I don’t dare to tell them, I find it way more exciting to create childhood wonderlands instead of having to listen to some adult (Spanish) conversations, usually focused on politics, food, TV, sports or gossip... 

Apart from my own circumstances as an only child, it always felt obvious to me that I would not be a mom. I have never heard the tick of the so-called biological clock. Actually I hate conventional clocks, since time, to me, is very relative, like in Dalí’s soft clocks or in the Mad Hatter’s mind. Both characters happen to wear an item that I love: a top hat. I remember wearing one that had belonged to my great-grandfather Balthazar. He bore the name of one of the three Wise Men, although everybody called him Joseph, like my dad... As in a magic trick, he had switched his nationality from Dutch to Belgian: a Belgian clerk in an office near the border, when filling the papers for a new ID, had asked my ancestor what was his nationality. Dutch didn’t seem to please the man too much, so instead he had written Belgian, because “things would be easier that way”… And voilà! Here were we given our brand new identity, like a rabbit coming out of Balthazar’s hat! When I wore it, magic indeed happened: I found myself dumbfounded at how much magic can be held in borders, amidst the fumes of Balthazar’s Prussian pipe hung on a rack in my dad’s office. Does a name or a nationality really define our essence and who we are through time?

I see time as a black hole, like the one in which Alice endlessly falls into the rabbit’s den. It was a very familiar sensation for me when I was a kid. Sometimes I fell in a tunnel, some other times I found myself in a huge dark barrel, trying to go forward without knowing where I was rolling. Back then, I was so very convinced that “someone” pushed me from outside the tunnel or barrel, every night before falling asleep that, one day at Mass, I had even held a grudge against a friend of my godmother. The poor woman sang religious hymns in the choir, unaware of the fact that, meanwhile, I cursed her for being “so mean to me” for pushing me into that thing… Childhood and its odd logic. Although, in the end, I was pretty happy to fall in the never-ending tunnel or ever-rolling barrel, because once there, I could meet characters as strange as the mad-hatter, to try to ask them about the secrets of a HE-time… To the hatter, time is condemned to always freeze at six, just like the time of what I feel is Federico García Lorca’s death, just like the time I saw on a long-forgotten wall clock that had fascinated me in the Jewish quarter of Fez, Morocco. In that strange place, where ghosts are more conspicuous than the living, an old curandera had come from nowhere to bless me and then vanish again into nothingness. Time really felt as if it were frozen there, as if the sun had turned into a broken moon petrified in an eternal waning gibbous. Curiously enough, the name of that moon phase sounds very similar to "Gibus", the name of the inventor of top hats! There’s no such thing as a coincidence... especially not in dreams. 

There’s no wall clock in my room. I wake up only to sunrise rays and bird songs, be they roosters or not. Where do I go when I dream? Do I end up, like a shrunken Alice, on the mad hatter’s shoulder? The only thing I know for sure, is that my soul hears, clearer and clearer, only one type of tick: that of the cosmic timing of awareness, nothing more and nothing less… 

This particular painting has always fascinated me, throughout my life, and the longer the journey, the clearer it appears to me that many of the artworks that I see as part of myself, somehow relate my circumstances to the artist’s life, beyond style and taste. Dalí’s personality is a fascinating world in which I always get sucked. Only recently did I learn that Dalí owned a rooster. He liked showing it around on his shoulder, from time to time… This has to mean something for me too, maybe that I, myself, would love to be able to sit, like Dalí's rooster or a shrunken Alice, on the shoulder of whom I love. As for female painters, O’Keeffe and Kahló are two major figures in my own “gallery of the heart”, and both have lived some accounts that really hit close to home. For instance, both of them loved lands that give me a taste of paradise. Neither of them became mothers. Throughout my life, I’ve always had flashes from the future, and as mentioned above, there was no baby in there, in any of the visions, maybe because I knew that, instead, I would take care of others’ children through education. 

I didn’t see myself as the average "girlie girl" either, something that kind of scared my mom who wondered whether it was ok to let me ride ponies and play with a sheriff’s kit, or spend hours on a jigsaw puzzle depicting an Indian warrior... Weren’t those supposed to be boy stuff? I guess she felt better when she saw me perform at the annual school pageant as Chantal Goya’s clone. But still, why on earth, among the myriad of songs by the famous singer for children, would my teacher pick stories of a Wild West legendary figure such as Davy Crockett, who shot a bear that collapsed at my feet on stage, huh? When I was older, at a further annual school pageant, I danced with a huge cow boy hat, guns in my hands, to perform a more “adult” song by the Ottawans: “Hands up, give me your heart!”. I guess at least my mom felt better to see me dance and hear me sing about love.

 I also guess our spinster teacher hadn’t seen the video clip of the English version, which depicted cowboys cheating at a cards game, shooting at each other, grabbing women by the hair and staring at a topless Wild West Woman, who wore only chaps, dancing frantically in a cowgirl gear… Thank God she didn’t see it, it would have traumatized her. As a matter of fact, now that I mention it, I think that I myself was traumatized when I saw my childhood icon, Chantal Goya, being destroyed, live, in a reality show called Le Jeu de la Vérité (Game of Truth). The principle of the show, a very 'voyeur' kind of show, was to let people, from the audience or at home, ask a question to the guest star. Chantal Goya agreed to take part in the show in December of 1985. What was supposed to be a special Christmas show, made by and for children, turned out to be the average format in which people started to ask personal questions about her adult life, or to criticize what they saw as keeping the kids in a stupid la-la-land. I saw the show, and buried it in my subconscious until this very day. Why? Because, as I watched Chantal Goya, I saw her die before my eyes when someone asked her “Do you think that it is really necessary to appear as a little girl in the eyes of children to keep them in a mind-numbing system?”. She was in shock, and so was I. Petrified in the magical pink outfit of her character, Marie-Rose, she started laughing hysterically, pulling faces and singing out loud to stop hearing the fury of the world “out there” lacerating her own, fragile world. She totally fell apart because of her incapacity to face criticism or harsh comments. The thing is that, together with her, the whole myth died, and my own childhood world, too, fell apart… I was 14. I learned, then, that being an adult supposedly meant to scornfully laugh at the precious magic that embodied my dreams. When I think of what happened to her and her admirers then, I am reminded of the lyrics of a song that I’ve heard for the first time last April, just a week before my birthday. The song by Ben Howard is called Only Love, and part of the lyrics made my heart sink, for different reasons: “Give me shelter, show me heart, watch me fall apart… and I’ll be yours to keep”. I started to shout a silent call to whom had played it, to no avail…

I know, today, that being an adult does not mean to completely abandon one's magical world, a realm that “serious adults” call that of the inner child… I guess it’s why I still love to dress up, like in Almería when I become a cow girl on the set of old spaghetti westerns, just like when I played cow girl as a child. It enabled me to imagine myself in a setting similar to that of The Little House on the Prairie, a TV show I adored! Obviously, I was attracted by Laura Ingalls’ style, not at all by her too-angelic-to-be-honest blue-eyed sister, who appeared to be always lost in lace and ribbons (even before going blind… Oops, maybe I’m getting too naughty here), nor by the expensive toys, dolls and dresses of Nellie Olson, the evil little devil… 

My tastes, I think, explain why I wasn’t too fond of playing make believe with who were supposed to be my “BFFs”. In the first place, I wasn’t interested in the topics that they would pick for the game, usually the ‘mommy-daddy’ thing which I found extremely boring. I remember being told many times by my playmates that “this or that” was not the correct or expected reaction to whatever they’d say, making me feel like a fool who didn’t fit in there. My peers’ disagreement might be reinforced by a “je ne t’accompte plus” tantrum, which in Belgian child language means “I no longer want to stick together with you”. Many times the punishment was inflicted by that particular little girl who would always hang out with me. She felt that we were in an everlasting -and, to me, totally meaningless- competition. As a grown-up, she even told me, on the day of her wedding, “This, at least, I did before you!” Good for you, I thought, although getting married was -and is- not at all among my top priorities in my “wish list”... When I was a toddler, another “friend” was way more radical though, opting to “just” bite me… Young children can be very cruel until they develop a sense of empathy, so maybe this explains why I preferred to withdraw from others’ world. It was not my intention to Ieave children’s world of make-believe too soon, though. It’s just that I saw my world as a bit different from other children’s world. So I chose to hang out with my Barbie dolls by the horse’s hand-made stable, with my puppets in their hand-made theater or with the Smurfs and their hand-built Lego house. Let’s leave out, for now, the chapter “hang out with my cousins in a fake tepee”! 

 A Lego toy is what I have recently “turned out to be” in a personality test. The test talks about my imagination and creativity; it says that I can explain things putting them into layman’s terms, that I like to build my life thoughtfully, and that I have a good capacity for adaptation. I agree with all that: I need to build, mainly bridges between people and cultures. But I think that the most interesting thing of all is that the test results are accompanied by a Lego mask covering someone’s face… It looks like a clown, and maybe it tells me that I should look beyond that fake, watermelon smile to really learn who I am… For now, the process has taken me back to a toy that I had forgotten about: Perruchet (“tiny parakeet”), a rag clown I had received from an ex fiancé of my godmother. I can even feel the touch of his face and long rag legs at my fingertips, although I can’t visualize him as a whole. He keeps appearing in fragmented pieces, like in a jigsaw puzzle. I see either his blue redingote and pine-green flare pants, or his mane of orange hair and his very long legs wearing red and white socks. It is something strange. If I don’t have any old picture to ignite a memory in my mind, I usually have a very hard time recalling details of my childhood. But all of a sudden, the vintage doll came back to me, popping from the black hole of time after being buried in the oblivious depths of my slumbering memory. He came back to me as vividly as a jack in the box (or rabbit in the hat?). In French, the scary popping thing is called “diable en boîte” (devil in the box), and in my Walloon dialect, “cacafougna”, which in turn suddenly sounds to my ears like “cafougnî” in the same dialect, which means crumpled. In French we say “chiffonné”, a word that also came back to me through a song by Isabelle Huppert, “souvenirs chiffonnés”. The song talks about a “little girl” abandoned among crumpled memories, faded love words and scattered kisses. The melody was obsessive to me, back in the 80s, but I’ve just remembered it today. Chiffonné means “crumpled”, but its literal meaning is “turned into chiffons (rags)”, like my rag clown and like… Chiffonete, the New Mexican Pueblo clown also named Koshare. 

 Chiffonete seems to be a "Spanish version" of the Tiwa name, Tsiponah, which means Black-eyed. Those clowns started to talk to my soul last year on Christmas day, in Taos Pueblo, during the Deer Dance. The group of dancers coming from the different directions was awe-inspiring, a procession of deer-like humans, whose stomping feet on the glittering snow made me feel that I was part of the herd. As I stared at the distant moon that was still apparent in the daylight sky, I was taken back to my baptism place, the Belgian parish of Saint Hubert, under the protection of the patron saint of animals. While pursuing the deer on a hunting party, Hubert the hunter had had an epiphany: the deer suddenly sprouted a crucifix from its antlers. The man then dropped his weapon to kneel before the deer. Even though I didn’t kneel before a deer, I had my own epiphany while looking at dancers and clowns facing each other and holding spruce twigs, a symbol of everlasting life and renewal, just like the deer, a representation of the Celtic God Cernunnos, by the way. I felt as if the clowns were willing to take me to a deeper understanding of what was taking place. They looked scary and funny at the same time, mimicking spectators in the crowd, making fun of everyone and everything, and taking away some of the tiniest deer dancers, little kids barely visible under their deer hide and head. 

For a second, I saw the “kidnapping” of a boy as the reenactment of “my” Zwarte Piet, the Belgian embodiment of darkness within innocence, taking away naughty kids. The conversation of the people next to me really started to annoy me, and I tried to make total abstraction of the crowd, focusing on what I was seeing as a cathartic theater. I no longer laughed. It was as if the dancers were all pieces of a cyclical wholeness, glimpses of eternity, parts of one’s shattered soul that the clowns were stripping down in front of us all. Was I seeing myself as a Koshare’s prey? Was I falling into the black hole of his eyes to see myself from a different perspective, to go back to the child that I was? It was as if the stripes, both of my Perruchet’s socks and of the Chiffonete’s bodies had let me widening the space between them, as a light shutter opening a new portal, showing me the way to my inner world through the layers of a zebra blind that I was allowed to open to get a sneak peek at the meaning of my own life within the ritual. Although supposedly totally foreign to me, I felt that it held the key to my inner soul. It was a story without words, or at least without words that I could intellectually understand, but it went way beyond any spoken reality. The hallucinatory stripes had the same power as those of the Cheshire cat, whose forced grin invited Alice in her particular Wonderland, which I see as the mad world of each and every one of us. The cat’s grin looked like a slice of watermelon to me, and now I know that this is THE Koshares’ fruit. If the clown was to be found eating a slice of the fruit in front of my soul’s door, maybe it meant that I was to study the existing conflicts between my internal and external self. 

Was the clown about to eat my mind, like a praying mantis that rips off its mate’s head after securing their permanence on earth? Last summer, a storyteller told me that he saw the praying mantis as the animal symbol of storytelling. Now I think that I have come to a profound understanding of such image, at least of what makes sense to me. To really thrive from one’s personal story, we need to get rid of our (conscious) head, to totally rip it off so that the deepest meaning of the story can sprout as a jack in the box, even, or especially, if it is a devil. Now that I think of it, the female corn dancers who faced the male deer dancers on that Christmas day In Taos had a lot in common with the Hindu Goddess who watches over my dreams, here in Spain… As Lakshmi had just popped up in the pink skies of my daydream writing, so had a Corn Maiden freshly emerged from a huge sugarloaf mountain of clouds. Both women, as I write my story, bless me with a downpour of “irrational knowledge” under the form of cornmeal, pomegranate and watermelon seeds, which are all worth way beyond their weight in gold. 

 

The clown was my guide in the reflection process. He, who could straddle two worlds, would let me find order out of disorder and peacefulness through chaos, mirroring my deepest fears, hopes and beliefs through buffoonery and silent stories. Aaah, stories… What would we be without them? I was reminded of two reEl storytellers that I found reAlly endearing in two wonderful movies: Smoke Signals and Pow Wow Highway. Both were portrayed as “innocent” souls, who grinned exactly like the Cheshire cat (him again…). In Smoke Signals, this attitude profoundly irritated Victor who tried to take Thomas’s stupid grin out of that face, because a “real Injun has to get stoic and look mean, like a warrior, to be respected by white people”… But he would also agree that avoiding to show one’s teeth was not too normal either, hence the anthological song dedicated to John Wayne’s teeth and the existential question: “are they false, are they real, are they plastic or are they steel?” I just loved it. The character played by Gary Farmer in Pow Wow Highway was also really moving. No matter what his friend could think about what he called stupid fairy stories, his story of Wihio, the spider trickster of Cheyenne mythology, was very deep.

Wihio the trickster is sometimes a man and sometimes an animal, but mostly he likes pulling antics and telling dirty jokes. One day, he saw some plums floating on the creek. Now Wihio loves to eat, so he reached for those plums, but they disappeared and he fell into the creek. He crawled out, all soaking wet, saw them plums again, shimmering in the water. He kept diving and they kept disappearing. Three days later, his wife found him still splashing around. “Woman,” cried Wihio, “during the day you, see plums floating this magical spot, but at night, they go away…” His wife screamed at him: “Stupid dog of a dog, these plums are still on the tree, you worthless fool of a husband! Chasing shadows when the truth hangs over your head!” and she hit him with a pan, and he never did get any plums.

On their way to Santa Fe, his horrified friend finds a tarantula in the glove compartment of their “pony” (an old beat-up car) and he is literally thrown out of the car by the storyteller-driver in order to save the spider. Tricksters take many forms, and the presence of the tarantula in the car had to mean something, maybe that the two men would gather plums in the end… Some of the animals that most people fear hold much wisdom, like ravens or black cats, like spiders and snakes. The “stupid fairytales” have been held down from generation to generation, because that was the old way to solve problems. Wisely enough, the movie reminds us that “often the problems never change, nor the people”. How true…

This story of Wihio was identical to a tale that I had read in L’Alphabet des Sables (the Alphabet of the Sand), a children book in French by the Tunisian moviemaker and storyteller Nacer Khemir. He had offered me this token of gratitude for setting up a casting for his movie dedicated to Shahrazad. For each of the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet, the author had chosen an animal whose name started with that initial, and a fable related to it. Wihio was called Routayla here, “spider” in Arabic. There were minor differences between the two tales. In the Arabic tale, the spider carried a jar on its back to gather all the proverbs and fables that the animal wanted to learn during a worldwide quest for wisdom. At the end of the journey, Routayla was sure of being the wisest spider on earth, but, like Wihio, the poor thing was fooled by the reflection of fruit on the water surface. Instead of plums, they were figs, and instead of a scornful and violent spouse, monkeys in a tree were those making fun of poor Routayla, who decided to abandon his quest for wisdom after feeling so stupid for being fooled by a mirrored vision. When he signed his book for me, Khemir wrote in Arabic, but he spelled his name in mirrored writing: the nūn for N on the left, and the rā’ for R (as in Routayla…) on the right, like in the French spelling.

Apart from mirroring a Cheyenne tale, the Tunisian artist had mirrored the Pueblo clown, straddling two identities and ways of expression... I had told this anecdote in an academic paper dedicated to the Arabian Nights, which started with a quote by Rumi. This quote, to me, perfectly expresses the relativity of truth and certainties when confronted to different cultures: “Truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it, and thought they had the truth.” 

 Truth and mirrors are two concepts that really captivate me, maybe because both of them have a lot to do with one’s search for identity. Who am I ‘truly’? The real search has started on the first morning of December, in the midst of a whirlwind, when my amber eyes somehow drowned into my cat’s eyes and their huge obsidian moon… The precious gem, from time immemorial, serves both as mirror and scrying ball. Not only the future can be seen in obsidian balls, present and past appear in there too… As we would say in French, "je ne suis pas Madame Soleil", which means that I am no fortuneteller, but I think this whole introspection is helping me to make “psychic” thought associations, just as if I were to put together pieces of a broken mirror. As I have learned these past days, the technique of holding back my dream images, however trivial they may seem to my conscious mind, helps me projecting a renewed light on my life, as through Nostradamus’s “miroir ardent” (burning mirror). It is no easy task to assemble the pieces of the mirror, but I might manage to do it with patience, and with a little help from Lewis Carroll and cartoonist Philippe Geluck, whose cats are experts when it comes to turning absurdity into psychological wisdom through powerful storytelling. I don’t have an obsidian ball. I do own a beautiful obsidian arrowhead though, a present that was handmade for me in a volcanic setting of New Mexico, during a storytelling jamboree. As I sat on a stump by a fake teepee, I was watching an old cowboy in a buckskin shirt working on the gem he had found on that Jemez Mountain ground, replete with obsidian shards. It was a weird day, in which I felt the power of a hidden gaze in my back. While waiting for my present to be finished, I peered into a carved trunk soon to become a drum. From the dark chamber came a sound that started pounding to the rhythm of my heart’s pulsations, and I had a vision. The drumming exhaled a strange light that expanded in a toroidal shape, like a huge spring bathing the site in hundreds of light beams. A gentle rain starts mingling with the rays of light, creating orbs with images from my recent past, both in Granada and New Mexico. When I finally held my obsidian present, its extreme sharpness told me that, someday, somehow, it would also sharpen my inner and outer vision, revealing the flaws that I might want to correct. I felt as if I started to regain strength and to dispel darkness and negativity. I felt as if it would give me the power to discern right from wrong, blowing the smoke away from the mirror of Tezcatlipoca, the ancient Aztec god. The purple obsidian that also abound on the spot would enhance my spiritual awareness, strengthening my capacity for clairvoyance and introspection, bonding my intellect and intuition.

That first real sense of deep introspection was like foreseeing the end of a tunnel through which I had always failed to totally enter. I would, rather, always stay at the gate kept by a mysterious watcher in a Granada wall, which drew me like a magnet.  It was as if I saw myself in the wall, or at least my double. Every time I looked at the graffiti in a street of the old Jewish quarter, I would leave part of my mind lingering in the old stones, looking for parts of the puzzle that made up my personality. The pictures of my past were the best allies to help me define the different characters that built up who I have become. Browsing through the album was like surfing on a spatiotemporal wave from the edge of a fast frisbee decorated with a “man in the maze”, something like a Southwestern Native version of Alice’s labyrinth. From this precarious position, I contemplated the experiences, choices, twists and turns that made up my life journey so far. I wondered which of the dreams and goals had been accomplished, and which were yet to be fulfilled. 

I remember that my high school years had enabled me to develop a real taste for theater. A retired French teacher had set up a small company, and we would go on stage once a year. It was something fascinating to be someone else for an hour, getting to understand the realms of human psychology and personality. Apart from playing parts, I also loved to write scripts, a habit further developed in my college years, whose culmination was a very special show in which we -literally- ripped our poor professors apart, mimicking their teaching habits, compulsions, personal tastes or… vices, to an extent that really demanded a huge sense of humor from the victim / viewer… But I think it was healthy, somehow. Back to high school, it is funny to analyze the Saint Nicholas pageant that we had set up for our younger schoolmates when we were in our last year of secondary education.  Every year, the (Catholic) school organized the holy man’s visit for all the students, but that year we had decided to do something a little bit different, way more surreal, with a Saint Nick who came in a wheelchair after suffering an accident… We had a blast! I don’t exactly recall who had the idea of this invalidity, but the image has a huge symbolic charge as to my own “issues” with the Saint’s fake character… It is also interesting to see that for the “grand finale”, Saint Nick is standing next to me, miraculously healed, and even though he’s looking at me, I totally ignore him… Must be a reason to it!

One year later, I started to attend classes at the ISTI, a college-level school called Institut Supérieur de Traducteurs et Interprètes, in Brussels. I was delighted to see that, nearly every month, cultural activities, thematic dinners, concerts and conferences were organized. But that new universe would also be ‘fantasy’-friendly, allowing us all to keep our inner child alive. My preferred event was Halloween. One specific year, I remember being part of a strange witch gang called “The Witches of Istiwick”… It was, apart from a fun activity, a way for me to pay a nice tribute to the so-called witches of my past, who were, mainly, healers and wise women of my family. Another year, I had ended up being the Indian (from India) hostage of fake cowboys and outlaws, aka Lucky Luke and the Dalton gang, who had escaped the Belgian comic strip to attend the dinner…

  

Even though I would slip into others’ skin from time to time, my college years really built the adult person I was meant to be, in the first place because I moved to the capital of the country, and also because I studied what I had always dreamed of learning: foreign languages and translating skills. This is where I became “Nath” to my friends, and this is where I started to seriously think of leaving the country to live abroad. I had not been granted the opportunity to learn Spanish when I was a teenager, so I had to work twice as hard to reach acceptable proficiency in that highly demanding school. Through the study of language, literature, history, geography, fiestas, artworks and artists, I felt more and more attracted to la piel de toro (the bull’s skin), aka Spain, as a place to live. 

  

I flew away from the nest to live, respectively, in the Basque Country, Malaga and then Granada, for many years now. I was to become more and more "Spanish", although I would always take advantage of possibilities to walk in different moccasins from time to time, even though such moccasins were more of something like paws or claws... A friend of mine, also named Nathalie, had come from Belgium to visit me in the Basque Country (that I profoundly disliked), and we had decided to go south to attend "el carnaval de Cádiz" as Nathalie-Fifi (her as Pippi Longstocking) and Nathalie Panpan (me as Thumper). My costume made me look more like Alice's White Rabbit though... I guess destiny, more than conscious decision, takes a hand in picking a disguise, especially if we consider that, a year later in Malaga, I had dressed up as a... parakeet, like the animal "spirit name" of my childhood clown.

There in Malaga, I really learned what it meant to have roommates, a big challenge for me. I had had four years of boarding experience in Brussels, but I had never experienced sharing a tiny apartment with four other roommates, including a single mom and her little boy. I have a fierce love for independence and solitude, but that year taught me many human values, and what true friendship means. Even though I have lost track of my buddies Gema and Domi since then, I will always be grateful for their presence in my life back then. They made me believe that life can always be a beach if we look at it through pastel-colored lenses. The truth is, it doesn’t take much to make someone smile…

I then left Malaga for Granada, which became my real anchor and harbor for more than twenty years. From “Nath”, I slowly became “Natalia”, more and more andaluza, less and less belga…

What I find interesting is when people sometimes look sad or perplexed to hear my name in another language, or why some other get mad at me when I react in another language than theirs while talking to them. I don’t mean to be rude, it’s just how my brain works… I still know where I come from though, I still know my roots, and all those years, Belgium was never forgotten. Family members would visit and accompany me in their discoveries of my host province, like the one I got from one of my cousin’s sons and their dad. My own discovery, while they were home, was that of the kids’ personality. I fondly remember the day I had asked them to choose between two activities: either a donkey ride through the Albayzin, the old Moorish neighborhood, or a photo session in Moors’ costumes… Their choice reveals our family’s passion for History and foreign cultures! 

 A day trip to las Alpujarras, the mountainous region where the Moriscos took refuge before leaving Spain for good, was also an opportunity for us all to listen to the whispers of ancient stones… I can only be in awe when I look at these pictures from the past and ponder over my latest conversation with one of those “little boys”… in English, on Facebook! Living abroad is like being eternally jetlagged from the reality of your native land and roots. You tend to freeze people in the past, always remembering them as how or who they were when you left. Of course, life goes on over there, but you no longer live your life there, which eventually leads you to lose your sense of belonging, and of spatiotemporal synchronicity. My now adult “little cousin” gave me his opinion about a post of mine that had triggered his own introspection. 

Christmas is over, as I write these lines. But on the morning of December 25^th, the wind was as strong as on that first day of December, when I re-read my little cousin Thomas’s comments. He wondered if each and every one of us is really meant to see love’s shooting star crossing our skies, or if it’s just for the luckiest souls among us. He saw our constant yearn for learning as a way to pursue the understanding of tiny pieces of the Great Mystery. He said that our quest is aimed at reaching what we deem unreachable. His wise words reminded me of the lyrics of a song by our most international Belgian singer, Jacques Brel, who had morphed into Don Quixote to exhort his audience to love, even in excess, even when clueless; to try, with no power nor an armor, to reach the unreachable star…

My answer to Thomas was:

-Good point, cousin, and good English too by the way! Well, you know, what really is beautiful, to me, is the feeling in itself, that may last for a second or for eternity, a feeling that goes beyond ourselves, when we feel empathy and real, unconditional love, towards another human being, another living being, animal or plant, a feeling itself, or yourself. And this last point is, to me, the biggest predicament: to love ourselves so that we can learn how to better love those around us... I’ll always believe in the messages hidden in the stars, be they shooting or twinkling stars... Aren’t they supposed to be dead already, their glow being just a reflection of what they were? Skies can teach us so much... as dreams do...

This was our last conversation of the day, after exchanging other thoughts about the power of dreams. When Thomas and his brother had chosen the photo session, many years ago, our borrowed outfit felt like a treasured item found in an old trunk kept in the attic of our mind, like remnants of the old splendor of the vanished dreamland of Al-Andalus, a nostalgic past that Granada, like few others, still mirrors for its visitors. Al-Andalus is long gone, but its aura still lingers in the air and is yet to be seen in some of the town’s faded marks, like an evanescent henna tattoo, or in the Alhambra’s arabesques, so perfect that only nature fairies seem capable of having crafted marble blossoms as delicate as desert roses.

 I had bought one of those natural marvels near Tangiers, Morocco, in the caves of Hercules, in front of an opening called the Mirror of Africa because its shape looks like the map of Africa seen in a mirror. It is situated below Cap Spartel, a cape facing the shores of Europe. Legend has it that Hercules took a nap here after separating Europe from Africa, thus creating the Strait of Gibraltar. I love the mirror image which is totally related to my present introspection, although, contrary to the official interpretation of its shape, I see the left profile of Nefertiti in there. In my mind, she is looking, from her native Egypt, towards Al Maghrib, Morocco and its setting sun, the meaning of the country’s name in Arabic. Africa or Nefertiti, it is interesting to see how this rocky window onto Europe is filled with optical illusions. By the way, am I the only one to see a triple sunset on the sea horizon? Maybe what I mistake for two additional suns are Europe’s coastal lights, but I prefer to believe in a Fata Morgana or mirage… which has the same root as “Mirror” and means “to look at, to wonder at, to admire”. The more I look at this opening in the rock, the more I see it as a huge keyhole too. Africa looks at Europe from here, playing with pieces of the mirror facing the sun to send light signals to the cold northern continent that blatantly ignores its southern counterpart. If they draw too close to the mirror ball Europe appears to be for them, the sons of Africa who want to cross to the other side only get smoke from the mirror, apart from hurting themselves with the shards and razor wire atop the border fences of Ceuta and Melilla, the two Spanish enclaves in Morocco. 

My first contact with Africa was through Melilla, and I will always remember the words of my local friend when we were about to walk across the border between Melilla (“Spain”) and Nador (Morocco). It was my first time. She knew me well, but she knew life on the odd border equally well. So she told me that, whatever I could see or hear, I would have to remain blind, deaf and silent. Injustice is an everyday issue on the border; cruelty, violence, abuse, suffering, poverty and despair too, but there’s basically nothing that we can do as simple citizens... or at least that’s the certainty of people who have to cross the border several times a day, and know what it means to live between two supposedly antagonistic worlds. I remember, then, watching a dove looking down on us from the checkpoint fence. Borders really had no meaning at all for the bird. I really wished I could fly by then… Back to Cap Spartel, legend has it that, a long time ago, a secret undersea passage connected the caves of Hercules to their twin sisters across the strait, the Lower Saint Michael’s Caves in Gibraltar. African monkeys were supposed to have used it to cross to the other side and live on “the Rock”. Or did they actually fly, like an army of Oz lured by the appeal of the golden cape in which Europe wraps itself? I don’t really feel a huge sympathy for those monkeys. I feel as if they imitate the careless attitude of the European tourists, letting them take “selfie” pics while they search their pockets, and making fun of other beings: African humans trying to have their share of the so-called wealth, waiting to be turned into slaves of the Wicked Witch of the… North. I can’t help seeing, in the macaque mimicry, a poor attempt at faking the proverbial (human) advice to “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” when confronted to misery. “No hay peor ciego que el que no quiere ver”... “There is no worse blind person than the one who doesn’t want to see”, nor worse deaf-mute than the one who won’t try to hear nor speak... A tragedy takes place every day on the Mediterranean shores, but many choose to hypocritically adopt the “pillars of wisdom”… 

Are these the pillars Hercules wanted to erect? What happened when he separated both continents? The legend of the underwater passage got me thinking… What if the mythical creature dropped the giant spyglass he had used to contemplate his splitting work? The artifact would have gone down, turning into that magical passage on the bottom of the sea... After so many centuries, it would have filled with bottle shards that turned the spyglass-tunnel into a huge kaleidoscope where all the colored-glass particles represent the stereotypes we hold in mind about human beings who live on the other side of the sea... 

  My first trip on the other side was so full of contrasts… From my friend’s terrace, one would lean over Spain on one side, and Morocco on the other side, as the little brother of my friend patiently explained. Their cousin, who accompanied us when we toured Morocco, had a hard time adjusting. Even though she is a Muslim and “looks” Moroccan, she considers herself a Spaniard only, and there was absolutely no way for her to understand locals or make herself understood in Fez, since she only spoke Spanish. When the two of us would go for a stroll in the souks, everybody would first talk to her in darija (the Moroccan dialect), after which I was compelled to explain (in French and some added Moroccan words) that she did not understand. Their astonishment turned into contempt when I said she was from Melilla, “the traitor town” as far as many of them were concerned… In turn, when we had hopped on the bus from Nador to Fez, her reaction had made me sad. She begged her older cousins never to leave her alone with “those Injuns”, meaning the Moroccan citizens who were on the bus. I guess this is what guided my choice of Sam English’s painting to illustrate the picture of the Strait: a “real” Indian looking at the Strait through a kaleidoscope that might as well be a well-needed peace pipe… After the first and inevitable cultural contrast, I started to feel at home pretty soon, and even saw in some of the locals' pets the very same little feline face that I had left home in Spain… Those tiny things bond people together!

But still, it is no always easy to cross boundaries, be they physical or mental… When you enter a world so totally different from yours, you tend to see everything as weird, hence the need to keep a journal of your thoughts. 

 I think that one of the most impressive experiences was precisely in that bus, nicknamed the smugglers’ bus. I remember that it was loaded with the strangest items, from used truck tires to carpets and blankets or antiques. When a policeman stopped us, one of the THREE drivers would spend a huge amount of time “speaking” with the authorities, putting in practice the so-called bakchich (bribing).  But still, even though the practices were different, I saw no reason to call Moroccan people indios, especially since it was supposed to be used in a derogatory way, a linguistic consequence of Spain’s colonies. If, in French, someone who barely spoke the language was said to be “parler petit nègre” (speaking as a nigger), in Spanish they were said to be “hablando como un indio” (speaking as an Indian). Different conquests, same mindsets…

The same kind of derogatory language is used in mainland Spain, obviously, where one can still hear expressions like “háblame cristiano” (“speak Christian to me” -speak well-), “hay moros en la costa” (“there are Moors on our coasts” -there’s danger-), “eres más falso que un gitano con gafas” (“You’re faker than a Gypsy with glasses on” -no Gypsy is supposed to study or to be an intellectual-) or “eres más falso que un gitano sin primo” (“You’re faker than a Gypsy with no cousin” -they are all supposed to have huge extended families and to do everything within “the clan”). No wonder that García Lorca would say that, as a native of Granada, he felt a natural sympathy for victims of persecution such as Gypsies, Black men and Jews. The poet is a massive icon for Andalusian Gypsies, and many artists still sing his verses today in what I see as the best example of perfect cultural syncretism: flamenco. A passion for flamenco is what enabled Japanese folks or a Comanche woman to be “adopted” as Granada Gypsies. La Presy, la bailaora india que se convirtió en gitana, had come from Texas to Granada, where she had found many similar traits between her Native culture and her new Gypsy family. Her essence still haunts la Peña Platería de Granada, where I used to go, eons ago, with friends that I miss. From our respective Belgium, Romania, the USA or anywhere else in the world, we would all find common grounds to which carry a toast to… 

For many years, my house was like a “posada” (inn) to many people. Everyone was sure to always be granted Nathalie-Natalia’s hospitality. I also considered myself fortunate, by then, to have so many different folks around. They usually came from very different backgrounds, but they all felt that they belonged. I wanted them to feel at home, like in a big family. When some left Granada, it was often tough to see them go, but we also knew that we had to accept this constant trait of this town, meant to be una ciudad de paso…

 Back in those times, some very good friends were to leave for the States, and I thought that they would never come back. They had had to marry in order to make things easier as far as immigration laws were concerned, but it was just a legal stuff with no celebration whatsoever, which seemed kind of sad to me. So, together with another very good friend, we decided to set up a surprise wedding. I will never forget those crazy times of sewing a bridal dress with an old curtain at 3am, getting up at 6am to paint the patio walls before our guests would arrive, rehearsing the ‘religious celebration’ with a friend from Mauritius who was to be the “exotic” celebrant, and most of all, seeing the bride and groom’s faces as they were greeted by the Nuptial March and clad in funky wedding gear… The next days were tougher, but I hid my sadness behind a clown’s mask when helping them packing. I knew that my friend Martina would love her new life “across the pond”, even though, before leaving, she let herself guide by the ‘anti-Yankee’ attitude so typical of Spain. That is why I felt sad, because I was practically convinced that I would no longer see them. But time proved me wrong. They did come back, with their two kitties and two kiDDies who are perfect examples of intercultural heritage… We don’t see each other very often now, although we live in the same village, but I know that when we feel like talking or visiting, it will always be as if we had seen each other a day earlier. Everyone changes on their life path, and the things I’ve encountered on my own journey made me become way more solitary, sometimes less eager to say “yes” to everyone and everything, out of a choice that leads me to more introspection and reflection. Recently, I have seen an interesting (anonymous) quote that might sum up part of the process that I’ve been through: 

“Empathic people -dreamers and idealists- have this sort of accidental power. Most spend their early years ridden with self-doubt, insecurity, and people pleasing habits. But their journey is inevitably derailed when this comfortable life gets uprooted by an unexpected darkness. Suddenly their trusted methods no longer seem to bring them happiness. At first this depression convinces them that they might never feel joyful again. But ultimately, it sets them on a quest for something more -for love, justice and wisdom-. Once this adventure begins, there is no stopping a dreamer. And when dreamers unite? Well, that’s how we start to change the world.” 

I don’t know if I will be able to change the world, but “exchanging worlds” for some time is the best way, I think, to expand my thoughts. That is why traveling means… the world to me! 

 My first trip to the States, in 1997, had been a true revelation, an opportunity to dive into complex sociological considerations. The Twin Towers were still standing when I visited New York, although what left a stronger imprint in my memory came from the museum of Ellis Island: a huge US flag, whose stars and stripes were made of tiny plastic cubes which depicted all the foreign faces that made the United States of America. It was as moving as seeing the European immigrants’ belongings displayed in nicely arranged cases, but I wondered how a family of Native Americans, who was visiting next to me, felt about it all… Visiting the Miccosukee Indian village along the Tamiami Trail after an airboat ride was by far the most interesting moment of those few days spent in Miami. I was not too crazy about what usually attracts tourists there, actually. I think Florida has the perfect initial for its name, since many things in the state of Wald Disney World feel definitely fake to me. Another nice moment was a trip to Saint Petersburg, to marvel at Dalí’s attempts “to make the abnormal look normal and the normal look abnormal” in paintings depicting a slaves market through Voltaire’s face or life’s fleeting moments through a couple of Columbine clowns toasting to their death. The museum dedicated to the Spanish genius was pretty big, in a beautiful venue by the sea, where I was to see my first pelicans… 

 

As for the Sunshine State, One of the most vivid images that I kept in my mind and heart was a tiny inscription at the bottom of a mural, in Carmel, that urged the viewers to think about the conquistadors’ impact on the native population. 

 

San Francisco’s Chinatown was beautiful, but a little too nice and “golden” to my taste… I was not too fond of the climate either, after roaming the Southwest desert… I agreed with Mark Twain, who allegedly said “the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”. Now I have read that it is also a myth, Mark Twain actually never said this… Who cares, after all, I still agree with whoever said it! Another disappointment, in California, was the frustrated attempt at really seeing the Golden Gate Bridge. The famous structure only showed its phantom skeleton, wrapped in a thick white mist which only seagulls and eagles seemed to be able to penetrate. I remember a specific “restless” seagull that ended up stealing my ice cream cup on Pier 39! Ice cream is said “glace” in French, which can also mean “mirror”… For a second, I had thought that, as soft as the ice cream felt under my plastic spoon, so had to feel the cotton candy cloud pierced by the bird’s beak. What was to be found in the misty realm? Was it like running through a soft mirror or diving into Dalí’s soft watches? As I was staring at the sky in wonder, a glint came from Alcatraz Island, as if a prisoner’s ghost was sending me light signals with a broken piece of mirror reflecting the sun. Why did this image feel so familiar? “Alcatraz” is Spanish for “gannet”, and I am sure by now that the light sign was sent by the winged cousin of my seagull, eager to show me that my dessert was fully appreciated by my birdie thief, now busy gobbling the vanilla scoops of its stolen trophy! The light beam was as eloquent a wink as a Cheshire cat’s grin! 

My true California bliss, though, was to be felt in Yosemite: my encounters with a bear and a doe, el Capitán and the Horsetail falls, the Half Dome... It felt wonderful to see, a few weeks ago on the Facebook wall of Charles, Thomas's first cousin and therefore another of my “little cousins”, a picture mirroring one of mine, taken 16 years earlier. Now that two generations of our family had visited it, I felt as if the Half Dome, somehow, had found its other half! Charles and I had contemplated the same rocks, bowed under the same giant sequoyas, and maybe shared the same memories and thoughts, as in this nice poem my friend Pablo had given me so long ago to recall our California trip. Only today am I really appreciating the deep value of his gesture, which was meant to remember moments shared with a friend. I don’t remember his last name, but I kept his poem.

‘Everlasting Memories’

Redwoods reaching for the endless sky

Branches dancing to the music of the wind

Clear blue oceans

With waves carving the rugged coast

And sands mingling with wild flowers

Mountains embraced by a rainbow

And surrounded by endless streams

Sea lions basking in the sun

Deer roaming the countryside…

Maybe I was not too responsive to his personal wonderments, then, because I was still in “shock”, processing in my heart and soul the true, real and definitive impact, felt in New Mexico. Through its land, its past and present, its cultures and an encounter with a nice old man, already gone today, I was discovering a new facet of myself, which I see as the shiniest twinkling square on the particular mirror ball of my soul. Bobby, the Toaseño elder, wanted me to love his “official” picture, in which he proudly (“stoically”?) stood in a feather headdress, before one of those tepees that are seen when entering Taos. I was not too sure, by then, about this war bonnet and tepee thing… And I’m even less sure now! I of course gratefully accepted the picture, but also bought a postcard of him wrapped in a red and blue blanket in front of his adobe house. He chose to sign at the back of the “feather” picture. The signature, to me, was an example of “real” versus “official”: under his Indian name, he wrote his Anglo-Hispanic name… Are “true” and “fake” appropriate adjectives to describe such identifications? 

 I’m still wondering, just as, by then, I was starting to wonder about many other things… The colors that Bobby wore in his “feather” picture reminded me of Nieuw Amsterdam, a sculpture of White Eagle by Charles Schreyvogel, which Dalí had acquired and painted following his famous method of optical illusion. The painter had transformed White Eagle’s face into an interior setting where two Dutch settlers toasted each other. Their capes were in reality red war paints; their hats, White Eagle’s eyes; their fruit basket on the table, White Eagle’s mouth; the huge Coca Cola bottle they shared, White Eagle’s nose; their expensive chairs, White Eagle’s earrings; the blue hanging behind them, the Atlantic ocean; the window or a painting on the wall, a cloth headband tied around White Eagle’s forehead. Dalí was a master at having us thinking about profound concepts through a farcical process. Such artistic choice invites the viewer to understand that nothing is ever what it appears to be first. The “stoic” demeanor of White Eagle doesn’t allow us to see what Dalí would have done with his teeth, something out of plastic or steel! Smoke Signals was aired after I visited New Mexico, but I can’t help humming the little “teeth song” now that I see the picture I had taken in Madrid, NM, of a Indian mannequin sitting by a life-size cardboard cutout depicting John Wayne. 

More recently, a friend showed me the old trading post at Kewa (Santo Domingo) Pueblo, an emblematic key stop on old Route 66. After a fire had nearly totally destroyed it, little was left of it, till its recent reconstruction. Both of us had smiled, though, at the sign still readable on the front façade: “Real Indians”. Here came again this confrontation between “real” and “fake”. What did it mean to be real, by the way? This trading post, and especially the name of its location, illustrates an interesting trend, perfectly summed up in one of Ricardo Caté’s cartoons about his own pueblo. A perplexed Santa wonders where he has to go to deliver some of his presents because the Native name, Kewa, doesn’t ring a bell. His elf tells him the former Spanish name, which Santa knows well: Santo Domingo. While talking about such concepts with the cartoonist, I remember that, as he mentioned his own mixed name (a Spanish first name and a French last name), he concluded that it was “just that”, just a name, fruit of odd foreign circumstances that did not define who he was in essence… It got me thinking. By changing my name from Nathalie to Natalia to Alya or Nathalya, according to the places where I live, the people to whom I talked and the forums where I express myself, do I alter my essence? Once, I met someone who feels that it is safer to withdraw from people, so that he can avoid showing his true colors and therefore be hurt. I told this person, as elusive as a handful of sand, that his real name was whispered in the wind. 

            Now what happens to the sand grains carried away by the wind? What happens when we start to think, love, dream in a language other than ours? What happens when we borrow artifacts from other cultures to make them ours in our games of make-believe? Does it affect us? Does it affect the culture from which it was taken?  Does it affect our matrix culture? This takes me back to childhood, and once again to the Flemish show about Saint Nicholas, in which an episode deals with fake Saint Nicks. Among several “interesting” impersonators, are a woman; a farmer with a vegetable fake beard and a cow instead of a horse; the owner of a toy store, who looks more like Saint Hubert the hunter than Saint Nick to me; a crippled thief who fell from the roof when trying to steal Saint Nick’s presents; a gay fashion victim who wears chains, black lipstick and a fluorescent outfit; and “an Injun” whose fake white hair is braided together with his long black hair, who wears feathers and carries, as a miter, what really looks like a coupstick... The only interaction Bart and Saint Nick have with him is through “speaking injun”. They raise their right hand and pronounce “ugh” in front of the silent (stoic!) impersonator. In “French” (and Flemish too), following an interesting case of cross-cultural difference, “ugh” has come to mean “hau”… From greeting to disgust! Language shifts would sometimes be worth a Freudian analysis… As I watch the episode, I am mad at Saint Nick for showing so little respect. By the way, he is not very gifted at pronouncing it either, although he usually is very good at foreign languages. Furthermore, he should be accustomed to trading with “Injuns” since so many Belgian kids (like myself back in those times) want to play Indians with a whole Indian kit. Well, there’s the rub… I guess he never really has to deal with them folks, thanks to little Black slaves, Zwarte Piet aka Black Pete’s clones, who work 20 hours a day in his secret factory to counterfeit “exotic” items such as tepees and regalia they call “Injun warrior gear”…

TO BE CONTINUED...(here :-) )