8th entry to the Colonel´s Scrapbook
born today
1877 Hermann Hesse Switzerland, novelist/poet (Steppenwolf, Siddharta , Nobel 1946)liked Siddhartha much better. 1884 Dr Otto Bohm Prussia, scientist (helped create England´s Radar based on the studies made by Italian priest Lázaro Spallanzanni on the flight of bats)
1925 Patrice Lumumba patriot from Zaire, peerless revolutionary revolutionary, who would end up tortured by the CIA
Deaths
1566 Jewish doctor and seer Michel de Nostradamus, French astrologer dies exactly as he predicted in Salon
1882 James Garfield assassinated by "job-seeker" months after his wife accused him of harbouring a sinful and bottomless passion for another lady1961 Ernest Hemingway finally shot himself to death in Ketchum ,Idaho. Bullet through his head. Wasn´t his first attempt, once he was drunk he wished to walk into a running turbine. Feel sorry for his cats, though.
Shock. The word has electricity.
Try hitting your elbow against a sharp object. There it goes. Not only pain, hissing sensation that makes you overvalue your skin. Or undervalue your mortality. No eternity is worth it. The sweat trickles furiously down your back. Adrenalin, that powerful hormone which is underestimated as a powerfully addictive drug, surges through your bloodstream and creates delicious havoc. Every nerve becomes wonderfully alive. Watch out. You can get addicted to it.
Have you ever been really scared? So scared you could die, your heart freezes in your chest. Spooks ,ghosts, goblins anyone? Isn´t it funny that someone like me, raised on the fat and warm teat of Marxist doctrine, can be a lightning rod to scary, eerie experiences?
I, who can never believe in anything, chased by spectres? Come off it. I have seen war. Remember once I told you I had yarned with a dead guy? In the 1980s.
Okay let me take your big hand and wrap my bony hand around yours. Your touch is comforting, as I imagined it would be. Let me tell you ghost stories that really happened.
1963.Downtown Managua, the posh quarter of San Antonio. My grandmother´s enormous two-story townhouse. I am finished with my nap. The wind howls. I am in the big bedroom, on the second floor, that has the corner balcony. My eyes are fuzzy. I am little more than a toddler, but I can already read and write. There was a thunderstorm brewing.
Rain had begun. The sky was a deep grayish blue. The wind was blowing. I got out of the room and went into the big hall,looking for the staircase.there was an inner balcony at the entrance of the attic room. You could see the angry sky,and there was a multiple coat hanger at the entrance of the attic. The curtains were flapping.I am breaking into goosebumps as I tell you this, my pal. Hold my hand tightly,pleae.I am supposed to be fearless, dauntless. I have been condecorated, remember the jingle of my medals. I need you to remind me that they exist. That they were laid on my chest. There were two raincoats, and black hat and a sweater hanging there. The staircase began just at the entrance to the attic So down I went slowly. I was getting scared.My heart was pounding. The wind got wilder. Suddenly, the multiple coat hanger tipped,and almost fell on me,and one of the raincoats did smother my face. I couldn`t get rid of the garment, and I felt something gripping my neck. I was choking but I didn`t find my voice. The raincoat tangled fiercely around me.I rolled down the steps and landed at the beginning of the huge marble staircase,in the dining room. My grandmother ran to pick me up. I was crying I can`t hold back the tears as I write this, and I am so embarrassed that you should see me cry. Death looked into my eyes, but I ran away from it. My grandmother picked me up into her soft lap, but then she let me go suddenly with a jolt. Around my neck, after she removed the tangled raincoat, was a welt. A huge hand had left its imprint in deep red around my small neck. I was taken to the doctor. He believed it was a case of child abuse. That is so common in our country. People still hit children here. But in my case I had not been almost strangled by anything from this world. With the passing of time I wrote a short story about it and published it in a book of 13 short horror tales. I called it The Coat Hanger and painter Emilio Gonzàlez made a beautiful illustration for it. Every time I read it in public people would start fidgeting. I still have no explanation for that.
As I lack explanation for other strange things that have happened to me. Is that why I became a terror short story writer? When I went to study college in France, my first year was spent in Strasbourg, at 300 kilometers away from Paris. I used to take lessons with a burly drunkard who happened to be a great percussionist, Jean Batigne. He taught at he regional Conservatoire, and he become sufficiently enthusiastic about my tympany and piano playing that he decided to take me to a building called Le Maillon, located in Hautepierre, the suburbs of the city. There the famous and noisy ensemble named Les Percussions de Strasbourg used to rehearse. One day they were practicing the peerless Music for Percussions, Strings and Celesta by Hungarian composer and pianist Bèla Bartòk. They had been practicing all afternoon, so they decided to take a break. I decided to stay inside. It was really cold. I wanted warmth. I sat at the piano and started to ply. Not anything from the piece they were playing, but some small piano pieces by the same Bartòk, specifically from Mikrokosmos. I was getting carried away by the music.I have always admired Bartòk`s music. I was starting to sweat. Suddenly I felt a cold hand caressing my nape, but I continued. Then I turned around and saw him as he must have been when he fell in love with his first wife Martha Ziegler. Bartòk. As real and tangible as your hand gripping mine.. Pure human flesh. I fainted. Seconds afterwards I regained consciousness and I found myself on the floor under the piano seat. I just got up and ran like crazy outside.
My teacher Batigne was alarmed. He had never seen me thus. He just plunked me into his old car-his bagnole.and took me to the hospital. After being checked by a general practitioner, I got sent home. But he wouldn`t trust me to be left alone. He took me to his apartment, where he had a pair of caged blackbirds who instead of warbling or singing just said boing boing. I just glared at the birds while Batigne`s wife gave me some hot tea. That night I could barely sleep. When dawn finally came, I got up to get a shower. On the mirror of the cabinet was scribbled in soap. Vege(Hungarian for the end,) Useless to say I screamed for some minutes until the concierge came in to calm me. Was it my musical version of a delibab, those mirages that appear on the Hungarian plains during nights when the moon has a halo around it?
Could things like this drive someone like Hemingway to put a bullet into his head at last? Did the bullet instantly kill all the memories he had of his beloved cats? If Nostradamus were on hand, or I were back in France, fleeing from the crass and grotesque advances made by a bearded Eastern version of the monster in the Castle, Bluebeard, the wife killer, would he have something to explain for all this?
Fear. It is uncontrollable. I have felt it tonight, looking into the crazed eyes of a stranger trying to grip at the soul I am not sure I have. Never the intense passion for your own survival that I had on the battlefield. There you are afraid of tangible, touchable, concrete stuff. A bullet, a booby trap-the helicopter being hit. But don`t ever let longing become a formula with fear. It rips you heart out like the scene in Francis Ford Coppola`s flick titled Mary Shelley`s Frankenstein. Remember when Robert De Niro playing the monster pounces on Elizabeth.being played by Helena Bonham Carter-who is writhing with sensuality on her marriage bed, still a virgin after she has wed the doctor, and DR. Frankenstein helplessly watches as his creation rips the beating heart out of his bride? Blood splashes,gushes out of the torn organ. I have felt that. It is to never be forgotten.
Stephen King may tell you in any bestseller he is about to publish that this fear has no bounds. I felt it in 1999.
Already married for 12 years, my daughter for whom I would kill any molester who dares approach her, was already a preteenager. It was Valentine`s Day. My spouse and I were having lunch with her at home. I placed their gifts on the table beside their plates. Not only should couples salute their love-even if it is a lion figment of our cat imagination- but also remind their kids how much in love they are with them. My daughter opened her gift and was delighted. My husband was reluctant to touch his. Bad omen. He cleared his throat, as when he is going to let out a big bullfrog of a lie-and said he had not gone to pick up my gift, so I should expect it when I came back home from my job teaching English grammar at the same posh but useless school where I had graduated from in 1978. I smiled and bit back my tears. I was profoundly humiliated. I remembered my parents and how my dad would give Mom and I thirteen red long-stemmed roses on Valentine`s Day. I thanked him warmly, got up from the table,got ready to go and left. I was fuming.
When I got to the school, the teenagers I had in the afternoon course had prepared a little Valentine`s party. A chocolate cake with cherries, soda, ice cream and chocolate kisses. At least they had a heart. Ricardo, one of my pet students, overturned a glass of soda on my skirt and I had to go three doors away from our classroom to the bathroom to get the garment soaped,rinsed and dried with the electrical hand drier. I had just finished that when I was walking down the hall, and I saw the figure of a young soldier coming towards me. He was wearing an old World War II uniform, the helmet called poilu, and he had a bouquet of roses over his left forearm. As he approached, I saw his greenblue eyes, warm smile and red hair. He looked like a very young man. I was about one foot away from him when he made the gesture of handing me the roses. Then he disappeared into thin air. I shivered and ran back to my classroom. When I got there, my students were agitated, They asked me if the soldier had found me, and Ricardo recriminated me that he was aware that was not my husband. They had all seen him. Later on, one of the charwomen, Paya, who worked at the school as part of the cleaning squad, told me she had seen a handsome soldier come in, he had even asked where he could find me. Later on, the general bookkeeper of the school came up to my classroom, where I was already teaching the evening students, and told me a military man had sought me out at the administration office. Collective hysteria. They had all seen him.
When I got home I was sure it had been my dad. My husband was waiting with a gift. He took my daughter and I to dinner at a fried chicken outlet(I hate chicken). There I told him about the vision, and that I was sure it had been my dad who was still the only perfect man for me. He smiled wryly. When we got home, he showed me on the kitchen pantry the red roses that had arrived for me at about 5 pm when I was still teaching. They had a card. Frtom the man who will never stop loving you.
I called the flower shop after I read the card with its seal. The flowers had been bought with a credit card, by a Bernard Levallois Lenoury. My own dad, dead for ten years since he had died in a plane crash. Can love be so strong as to go across the Great Divide? Or was it just a compensation, in order to feel loved. The flowers took a long time in wilting. I still keep one of them among the pages of a book by Guillaume D`Aquitaine. But don`t tell anyone, dearest heart. Things which pant a seed of fear in your brain must be left there, alone,in peace. As Stephen King once said, in his book Pet Sematary, each one tends to his garden and sows what he can. The soil of a man`s heart is stonier than anything else. But it can still sprout roses, in a strange amalgam of longing as only distance and time can melt together.
.
born today
1877 Hermann Hesse Switzerland, novelist/poet (Steppenwolf, Siddharta , Nobel 1946)liked Siddhartha much better. 1884 Dr Otto Bohm Prussia, scientist (helped create England´s Radar based on the studies made by Italian priest Lázaro Spallanzanni on the flight of bats)
1925 Patrice Lumumba patriot from Zaire, peerless revolutionary revolutionary, who would end up tortured by the CIA
Deaths
1566 Jewish doctor and seer Michel de Nostradamus, French astrologer dies exactly as he predicted in Salon
1882 James Garfield assassinated by "job-seeker" months after his wife accused him of harbouring a sinful and bottomless passion for another lady1961 Ernest Hemingway finally shot himself to death in Ketchum ,Idaho. Bullet through his head. Wasn´t his first attempt, once he was drunk he wished to walk into a running turbine. Feel sorry for his cats, though.
Shock. The word has electricity.
Try hitting your elbow against a sharp object. There it goes. Not only pain, hissing sensation that makes you overvalue your skin. Or undervalue your mortality. No eternity is worth it. The sweat trickles furiously down your back. Adrenalin, that powerful hormone which is underestimated as a powerfully addictive drug, surges through your bloodstream and creates delicious havoc. Every nerve becomes wonderfully alive. Watch out. You can get addicted to it.
Have you ever been really scared? So scared you could die, your heart freezes in your chest. Spooks ,ghosts, goblins anyone? Isn´t it funny that someone like me, raised on the fat and warm teat of Marxist doctrine, can be a lightning rod to scary, eerie experiences?
I, who can never believe in anything, chased by spectres? Come off it. I have seen war. Remember once I told you I had yarned with a dead guy? In the 1980s.
Okay let me take your big hand and wrap my bony hand around yours. Your touch is comforting, as I imagined it would be. Let me tell you ghost stories that really happened.
1963.Downtown Managua, the posh quarter of San Antonio. My grandmother´s enormous two-story townhouse. I am finished with my nap. The wind howls. I am in the big bedroom, on the second floor, that has the corner balcony. My eyes are fuzzy. I am little more than a toddler, but I can already read and write. There was a thunderstorm brewing.
Rain had begun. The sky was a deep grayish blue. The wind was blowing. I got out of the room and went into the big hall,looking for the staircase.there was an inner balcony at the entrance of the attic room. You could see the angry sky,and there was a multiple coat hanger at the entrance of the attic. The curtains were flapping.I am breaking into goosebumps as I tell you this, my pal. Hold my hand tightly,pleae.I am supposed to be fearless, dauntless. I have been condecorated, remember the jingle of my medals. I need you to remind me that they exist. That they were laid on my chest. There were two raincoats, and black hat and a sweater hanging there. The staircase began just at the entrance to the attic So down I went slowly. I was getting scared.My heart was pounding. The wind got wilder. Suddenly, the multiple coat hanger tipped,and almost fell on me,and one of the raincoats did smother my face. I couldn`t get rid of the garment, and I felt something gripping my neck. I was choking but I didn`t find my voice. The raincoat tangled fiercely around me.I rolled down the steps and landed at the beginning of the huge marble staircase,in the dining room. My grandmother ran to pick me up. I was crying I can`t hold back the tears as I write this, and I am so embarrassed that you should see me cry. Death looked into my eyes, but I ran away from it. My grandmother picked me up into her soft lap, but then she let me go suddenly with a jolt. Around my neck, after she removed the tangled raincoat, was a welt. A huge hand had left its imprint in deep red around my small neck. I was taken to the doctor. He believed it was a case of child abuse. That is so common in our country. People still hit children here. But in my case I had not been almost strangled by anything from this world. With the passing of time I wrote a short story about it and published it in a book of 13 short horror tales. I called it The Coat Hanger and painter Emilio Gonzàlez made a beautiful illustration for it. Every time I read it in public people would start fidgeting. I still have no explanation for that.
As I lack explanation for other strange things that have happened to me. Is that why I became a terror short story writer? When I went to study college in France, my first year was spent in Strasbourg, at 300 kilometers away from Paris. I used to take lessons with a burly drunkard who happened to be a great percussionist, Jean Batigne. He taught at he regional Conservatoire, and he become sufficiently enthusiastic about my tympany and piano playing that he decided to take me to a building called Le Maillon, located in Hautepierre, the suburbs of the city. There the famous and noisy ensemble named Les Percussions de Strasbourg used to rehearse. One day they were practicing the peerless Music for Percussions, Strings and Celesta by Hungarian composer and pianist Bèla Bartòk. They had been practicing all afternoon, so they decided to take a break. I decided to stay inside. It was really cold. I wanted warmth. I sat at the piano and started to ply. Not anything from the piece they were playing, but some small piano pieces by the same Bartòk, specifically from Mikrokosmos. I was getting carried away by the music.I have always admired Bartòk`s music. I was starting to sweat. Suddenly I felt a cold hand caressing my nape, but I continued. Then I turned around and saw him as he must have been when he fell in love with his first wife Martha Ziegler. Bartòk. As real and tangible as your hand gripping mine.. Pure human flesh. I fainted. Seconds afterwards I regained consciousness and I found myself on the floor under the piano seat. I just got up and ran like crazy outside.
My teacher Batigne was alarmed. He had never seen me thus. He just plunked me into his old car-his bagnole.and took me to the hospital. After being checked by a general practitioner, I got sent home. But he wouldn`t trust me to be left alone. He took me to his apartment, where he had a pair of caged blackbirds who instead of warbling or singing just said boing boing. I just glared at the birds while Batigne`s wife gave me some hot tea. That night I could barely sleep. When dawn finally came, I got up to get a shower. On the mirror of the cabinet was scribbled in soap. Vege(Hungarian for the end,) Useless to say I screamed for some minutes until the concierge came in to calm me. Was it my musical version of a delibab, those mirages that appear on the Hungarian plains during nights when the moon has a halo around it?
Could things like this drive someone like Hemingway to put a bullet into his head at last? Did the bullet instantly kill all the memories he had of his beloved cats? If Nostradamus were on hand, or I were back in France, fleeing from the crass and grotesque advances made by a bearded Eastern version of the monster in the Castle, Bluebeard, the wife killer, would he have something to explain for all this?
Fear. It is uncontrollable. I have felt it tonight, looking into the crazed eyes of a stranger trying to grip at the soul I am not sure I have. Never the intense passion for your own survival that I had on the battlefield. There you are afraid of tangible, touchable, concrete stuff. A bullet, a booby trap-the helicopter being hit. But don`t ever let longing become a formula with fear. It rips you heart out like the scene in Francis Ford Coppola`s flick titled Mary Shelley`s Frankenstein. Remember when Robert De Niro playing the monster pounces on Elizabeth.being played by Helena Bonham Carter-who is writhing with sensuality on her marriage bed, still a virgin after she has wed the doctor, and DR. Frankenstein helplessly watches as his creation rips the beating heart out of his bride? Blood splashes,gushes out of the torn organ. I have felt that. It is to never be forgotten.
Stephen King may tell you in any bestseller he is about to publish that this fear has no bounds. I felt it in 1999.
Already married for 12 years, my daughter for whom I would kill any molester who dares approach her, was already a preteenager. It was Valentine`s Day. My spouse and I were having lunch with her at home. I placed their gifts on the table beside their plates. Not only should couples salute their love-even if it is a lion figment of our cat imagination- but also remind their kids how much in love they are with them. My daughter opened her gift and was delighted. My husband was reluctant to touch his. Bad omen. He cleared his throat, as when he is going to let out a big bullfrog of a lie-and said he had not gone to pick up my gift, so I should expect it when I came back home from my job teaching English grammar at the same posh but useless school where I had graduated from in 1978. I smiled and bit back my tears. I was profoundly humiliated. I remembered my parents and how my dad would give Mom and I thirteen red long-stemmed roses on Valentine`s Day. I thanked him warmly, got up from the table,got ready to go and left. I was fuming.
When I got to the school, the teenagers I had in the afternoon course had prepared a little Valentine`s party. A chocolate cake with cherries, soda, ice cream and chocolate kisses. At least they had a heart. Ricardo, one of my pet students, overturned a glass of soda on my skirt and I had to go three doors away from our classroom to the bathroom to get the garment soaped,rinsed and dried with the electrical hand drier. I had just finished that when I was walking down the hall, and I saw the figure of a young soldier coming towards me. He was wearing an old World War II uniform, the helmet called poilu, and he had a bouquet of roses over his left forearm. As he approached, I saw his greenblue eyes, warm smile and red hair. He looked like a very young man. I was about one foot away from him when he made the gesture of handing me the roses. Then he disappeared into thin air. I shivered and ran back to my classroom. When I got there, my students were agitated, They asked me if the soldier had found me, and Ricardo recriminated me that he was aware that was not my husband. They had all seen him. Later on, one of the charwomen, Paya, who worked at the school as part of the cleaning squad, told me she had seen a handsome soldier come in, he had even asked where he could find me. Later on, the general bookkeeper of the school came up to my classroom, where I was already teaching the evening students, and told me a military man had sought me out at the administration office. Collective hysteria. They had all seen him.
When I got home I was sure it had been my dad. My husband was waiting with a gift. He took my daughter and I to dinner at a fried chicken outlet(I hate chicken). There I told him about the vision, and that I was sure it had been my dad who was still the only perfect man for me. He smiled wryly. When we got home, he showed me on the kitchen pantry the red roses that had arrived for me at about 5 pm when I was still teaching. They had a card. Frtom the man who will never stop loving you.
I called the flower shop after I read the card with its seal. The flowers had been bought with a credit card, by a Bernard Levallois Lenoury. My own dad, dead for ten years since he had died in a plane crash. Can love be so strong as to go across the Great Divide? Or was it just a compensation, in order to feel loved. The flowers took a long time in wilting. I still keep one of them among the pages of a book by Guillaume D`Aquitaine. But don`t tell anyone, dearest heart. Things which pant a seed of fear in your brain must be left there, alone,in peace. As Stephen King once said, in his book Pet Sematary, each one tends to his garden and sows what he can. The soil of a man`s heart is stonier than anything else. But it can still sprout roses, in a strange amalgam of longing as only distance and time can melt together.
.
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