I give myself to the world every morning through my kitchen window. I do not open another one, I prefer this one because it is through it that the birds’ songs come in stronger. For me, they are just birds, I don’t care about the names of the species and subspecies in which men subdivide them, I think they are also in pains for that. In fact, they don’t even want to know if I’m not a bird myself, as long as I leave ground grains on the porch to give them strength to fly free.
And from the kitchen window I see her, beautiful as a movie diva, the kind that everyone knew the names of. She was in her window, on her balcony some forty meters, confined, I don’t know if she is comfortable in this new way of existence. It is not like birds.
I see the contours of it, in the shorts that Luanda always cuts higher up in the endless days of heat and in the strap of the blouse that falls carefree to the side. I don’t know his name, nor his voice, nor his eyes, we never spoke … well, now we speak, without hearing, without reading the irises, almost forty meters is a lot.
I can hear your hello in the morning, pretending you don’t see me. He never stopped looking at my side. I never smiled at you, I never waved at you. But our mutual indifference has a reciprocal message: you are beautiful; you are handsome. You are there, life too.
We need to maintain this communication, the gesture that opens the window of one is joy for the other, after all we are here, breathing, human, confined, but knowing that there is another person to be too. All of our humanity is locked up in others, that’s why we see them all so beautiful in this ocean of fear that we try to survive. We are afraid of missing people, we are afraid of leaving. We are afraid of death.
I had my requirements, my standards of beauty, now they are reduced to something so simple that only childhood can explain, people make the beauty of the world, we don’t need to be close, we need them to exist, to be beautiful too .
- Director of the newspaper O País, in Angola
Editorial note: By mistake, today’s story by José Kaliengue should have been published yesterday and yesterday’s by Ana Sofia Fonseca should have been published today. We apologize to the authors and our readers for the unfortunate lapse.
