I was looking for something today and came across an old short story/rose by one of my favourite writers ever Jorge Luis Borges. it’s a great little piece called “Borges y yo”, that always resonated with me and as time passes by and I get older and more defined by my work, my age, my COVID constrained present in front of a screen instead of being out there, the echo is even bigger. So I decided to adapt to English his words and apply them to my path in this life… knowing very well I don’t even get to the level of his feet.
Gracias Maestro Borges, y por favor no se ofenda por mi pobre uso de sus palabras (thanks master and please don’t get offended by my poor use of your words)
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The other one, the one called Francisco, is the one things happen to.
I close my eyes and I stop, perhaps mechanically now, to remember a sunset at sea, tiredness in my body after a day on the deck, the happiness to know we heading back to port to unload…
I know of Francisco from the emails and see his name on a list of speakers for a seminar or in a report about some obscure aspects of fisheries.
I like sextants, maps, the names of the pacific islands, the taste of coffee and the feel of warm seawater in my skin; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of a consultant.
It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living so that Francisco may contrive his work and this work justifies me.
It is no effort for me to confess that he has done some good work in fisheries, but that work cannot save me, perhaps because what is good in fisheries belongs to no one, but rather to the ocean and to the tradition or fishers.
Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.
Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the catching of fish to writing and working on the controls in fisheries and capturing with my camera images that most never see because they happen at sea.
But those jobs and images belong to Francisco now and I shall have to imagine other things.
Thus my life is like a wave destined to reach the coast and hopefully be surfed, yet so I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has written this page.