QWERTY
I met him a month after he was born. I found him at the house of filmmaker Tiziana Panizza in La Reina. Zafira, Koro’s mother, looked tired but satisfied at the same time: satisfied with the litter that had found homes across Santiago. I took him to an apartment in Estación Central that bore an analogous metaphor: a matchbox. I talked to him the entire way: first on the micro, then on the metro. Each time I went quiet he started to meow, so that I had to make something up or improvise right there on the street. He cheered people up when he stuck his tail out of the box to connect with the world. They asked me to show them that mix of flesh, bone, and hair that I was carrying inside. The tail could have been the lace from a lost shoe.
This is not a diary. I am not marking the days. I am not keeping track of my faults.
VXCDV
He places his head under my arm and settles down between the heat from my body and that of the laptop. Every once in a while, he stretches, placing his paws on the keyboard. And so he writes. He presses the buttons down and the letter emerges on the screen. At the beginning I would take his paw and place it back in its initial position. Later on I started to leave it in place. We’re a family of two and the shutdown brought with it the challenge of writing with four paws.
The first mention I have of him made me think about his diary, or a diary of the lockdown. His experience accompanying a human, which I imagine is what Beuys was playing at with the coyote, a form of escaping anthropocentrism and becoming animal. I show Koro photos of that installation, photos that he regarded lazily and with little sympathy.
I examine the letters on the screen that he’s made. In these moments this is my land, I am the mad king of a Mediterranean desert island. A tiger guards my moves until he’s hungry and I become his prey. An evocation of Misionero comido por un jaguar by Noé Leóon (1967). I return to looking at the letters. It could perfectly well be a date in Roman numerals.
VSNRXS
With a natural, organic impulse I set myself to writing a paragraph in one long go, without looking at either at the screen or keyboard, fishing around in the images and scenes that my head has projected. I woke from all knotted up, my right side (I’m a lefty, sayings work the other way around for me), shifted over so that it dislodged me from the keys just a centimeter away, the distance between one letter and another. That’s how everything I wrote or most of it ended up typed one key over to the right side and its meaning totally cast aside, obliterated from existence. The right side, the correct one. Thus what was supposed be to be the horizon was now jproxpm, head was jrsf, as though Koro’s language had gotten into my hands, moistened by a kind of failed writing, with neither jrsf or jproxpm.
GNCNGN
I serve two glasses filled with water. Koro sniffs both and decides which will be his. He drinks and splashes in every direction. I take the other glass and try to calm that animal thirst that won’t be satiated in two or three lifetimes. I’m the bartender serving the last drink in the neighborhood bar to the regular who knows your name and demands to be called by his. I watch the movement of Koro’s tongue, that premise of syntax that splices my language. Phrases from top to bottom, from left to right, a fox tail (the plant in this case). I try to conjure Ron Padgett’s advice: “Don’t be afraid, for instance, that the building will collapse as you sleep, or that someone you love will suddenly drop dead.” I want everything, I expect nothing. I know little of the present. I try to see the future in Koro, to understand some sort of truth while I trap myself in his crystal balls. I know that when night falls we will, together, close the metal curtain of this bar that is our house.
VSTR
The meaninglessness of naming. Koro is…. All in an attempt at obliterating the reality of that initial arbitrary baptism. Animals in a wild state don’t name to distinguish their offspring or mates. Their smell or their way of moving says more about someone than their name, that code or combination of letters that like a magic word activates their attention. My voice moves toward Koro, the intonation perhaps or that form that I have of deleting, suppressing, the final S of words.
VR
Koro is monochromatic, he doesn’t try to compete with nature. His form is honesty; the simple trade of a graphite pencil on the page. A picture drawn freehand, an extended net web of light and shade. As Berger would say, he does not try to seduce the visible, he is a note taken on a piece of paper: a page rationed during war time, paper cranes folded out of napkins from a restaurant. The matter is in the paper, that which makes its nature transparent cut along the black line. Berger again: there are some paintings an animal could read. No animal could read a drawing.” Koro is the drawing, the complexity of everything that vibrates in him.
BTSM
Sans Soleil. We live without sun: thirty minutes a day, and then the building blocks out the light. We photosynthesize together, it’s a part of our daily routine of absorption. Like the pair of old folks who to to like an inscription at the sanctuary to their cat Tora (lost), so that death will know how to name her. A ritual that repairs the thread of time.
There are things that aren’t worthwhile; there are those that make the heart beat. Naming things for the pleasure of doing so: Koro. Adjectvitizing is in poor taste. Not qualifying a heron or a chrysanthemum but saying them, the transparency, perhaps because the Japanese see a homology between the sonorous, the visual image, and the real world. The kanji is the image: “Poetry is born from insecurity”.
MMDDDRR
The sun as fiction. During the thiry minutes that we have, we stretch and pose turning our faces to that thread that gets thinner by the second. I imagine that Koro evokes his ancestors’ savannah and feels like a leopard perched in a baobab; for my part I receive the light and would perfectly change my place with the rosemary, the only plant that survices the dust on the balcony. The rosemary, hero of the resistance, I take it take it in infusions to control anxiety and sometimes in food, not in excess, to avoid bitterness.
NCND
We play at tug of war, each one at one end of the chord. It’s a white rope with knots at its end. It’s Koro’s favorite to chase and trap, perhaps because of its form like a rattail or a rural snake. We draw it taught as we can, like the days that tighten, and then we pick them up, as we do with language.
RBRTCRL
The letters from outside: fake palms. I observe Koro, that which we are, being in common. With the word sunk into itself, I try to say that something remains in the object of the gazes that have touched them. In him, there are parts of me. I tell him to stop writing for me, that we aren’t alone. The errors affixed to the page and the days folded into paper cranes throne out the window. We open the door together. B and Olivia enter.
Translated by Judah Rubin