There is an unknown belly stuck in my right ear. Rush hour stuff. If I turned my face towards the corridor, I reckon I would put my nose in the navel (covered by a red T-shirt, mind you) of this lady who resists the situation wholeheartedly. The two travelers, she standing upright and me sitting, exchanged glances before adapting to the environment.
On the commuter train, you embrace humanity. Those of us who have taken a seat still maintain half an individualized body, but the people in the corridor merge into a single human flower, to say it with affection; there are necks tucked into armpits, breasts to collarbones, knobs of feet. Once I’m into that, I put on my headphones to listen to Ravel’s Bolero on loop, and see what happens.
Let’s see if the situation improves or worsens, incorporated, as a soundtrack, this barbarity that the French genius assured that he did not compose to create music, but to experiment. The musical result, then, could not help him. The relentless rhythm of the drum and the obsessive melody take over the scene and intensify it. The train now moves forward like the classic metaphor of life, because of the orchestra.
Rush hour people take part in a ballet. Everything is noticed; every elbow, buttock, sigh, hair. Anything can happen, I think. Indeed, I could, for example, turn my face to the right and relate intensely to this woman’s navel, but I choose, out of cowardice, to look towards the window. I see the landscape of the outskirts of the city, or of life, advancing towards a future that opens on the horizon, with the breath of the French musician on the nape of my neck. Everything will come, I think. The old woman who, making signs, asks me to change her seat, to go in the direction of travel because she is getting dizzy, does not know that she is participating in a contemporary art installation.
The bolero reaches its climax and begins again when, from the new seat, in the opposite direction of travel, my view of the landscape has been turned upside down. The metaphor too. In life, everything is left behind, I think now, seeing buildings that disappear. With a simple twist, or change of perspective, the landscape can also be an accumulation of pasts, which, however, may be worth letting go of. With Ravel in the body, finally, nothing is harmless anymore.
