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the tyranny of miserable contingency to offer the devout marveling populace an ascetic’s severe serenity honed by penitence and fasts, the aloofness of a Brahmin martyr cheerfully confronting the preparations for his own death, the grave fakir lying calm and graceful on his bed of nails : but the body gazing at you from a corner of the table, from that garish LP cover, evidently in violent protest, almost screaming, it will never, no never, in the unlikely event the idea has ever entered its head, accede to the highest stage of transcendental meditation, the austere albeit ineffable joys of the holy life of contemplation : neither anchorite nor fakir nor Brahmin : pure body : matter in motion : child of the earth and tied to the earth : rather than tight clean lines, rigidly confined surfaces, spare austerity, ostentatious displays of rotundity and curve, festival of flesh, baroque splendor : opulent and fertile, generous and succulent, firmly rooted in the nether world by virtue of its feet, outside the sleeve’s artistic frame, but by all accounts rivaling everything else in their grandeur, prodigality and excess : unshod, naturally, seeking the direct symbiotic contact that extracts the vital impulse, genitive powers from the primeval substance : the rich sap that nourishes and gives life, selflessly helps it thrive, invents magnificent convexities : the dipping neckline’s oppressive rim strains to contain them and triggers off a huge rush of waves, that, though hidden by stretchy velveteen, still tempt the eyes of the alert onlooker : from the commanding flowing chin-line down, erect turbid surfaces unleash furious eddies anticipating full-frontal apotheosis : a twin-crested tsunami the fearful Caribbean cyclone has catapulted to incredibly dizzying heights : the lethal wave rearing up horrendous magnificent moments before crashing on the disaster zone sweeping away with wrathful precision homes, chattels, settlements, industries, crops in an area brimming with life, transforming it in the blink of an eye into a sad desolate quagmire, the preserve of wailing victims, barking dogs, hovering vultures, pillaged by looters and the starving and the rushed last-minute zeal of fleur-de-lis’d international do-gooders : but the wave advances no further, collapses and the photographer’s snapshot calms, assuages and stills : the corsage’s Maginot Line suggests rather the hypothesis of two ovaloid tumescent hillocks, their distant salients trapped in precarious unlikely equilibrium : mountain ranges, riverbeds, hills, passes, ravines? : no : geometry gives us a better route in : circles, disks, spheres, orbs that invite study and scrutiny, the discerning speculations of a land surveyor dreaming of sole ownership of the sumptuous grandeur of this spectacular semicircle : and doesn’t the goddamned woman know it too, an arrogant broad smile on her open voracious fleshy lips : simultaneously extending her huge arms, lewdly inciting a stranger to penetrate the arcane sites of earthly paradise : carefully permed hair, smooth bulging forehead, bushy eyebrows, broad flat nose, large gleaming white teeth, pink flickering tongue, dark tanned skin : two gold-plated earrings dangling, apparently jangling sweetly while she gleefully guarachas to the bilingual legend on the LP sleeve : THE QUEEN OF RHYTHM, LA REINE DEL RITMO : a right royal body respecting no law but her own sovereign pleasure : rising proudly above experiences of detachment from self and meditation : resolutely partial to a very precise hic and nunc : a here and now situated beneath the undulating folds of the flowery dress she flourishes and flaunts in a whirlwind of laughter, letting all comers know that she, the fat lady, aspires only to give and take pleasure because life is juicy and must be squeezed dry without qualms or theories, crudely but acutely aware that there is no other reality beyond what you see, fancy and touch, that there is no such thing as a sweet tamarind or immaculate mulatta : her cyclopean mass is silhouetted against the blurry buildings of a sugar-mill and, making a detour around her, you step inside : the faded tobacco-colored photos that presided over the conclave of ghosts from your childhood aren’t here to light your way and probably still adorn the walls of the old mansion in that country whose name you would rather not remember : severed moorings, withered roots, scant supporting material : scattered over the table, on the board over the brass sink, across the shelves of a ridiculous and shabby filing cabinet, the explosive fat lady’s Seeco Record brings an extravagant touch of color and relegates the remaining props to the back of your memory : the soft greenish covers of the book with the engraving that explains the various numbered parts of a typical vacuum evaporator : the photocopy of a spine-chilling “Exposition of Christian Doctrine Suited to the Mentality of Docile Blacks” : images, that is, from those not-so-distant dead and abolished times when the rebellion let its hair grow long and its hurricane of hope shook the stunted existences of millions and millions of beings sentenced over centuries to the ideological servitude that comes with your language, dazzling you all with a spectacle of violent unpolished beauty, before your tribe’s age-old predisposition to suppress the vibrant freedoms of today in the name of the imaginary freedoms of tomorrow subordinated creative invention to the imperatives of production, sacrificed nation to plantation and once more crushed its children like cane in the mill, restoring Fidelity Island to its loathed perennial condition as a one-sugar-crop landed estate : no other element in the room could accompany your steps down the arduous path of your return to the gene, to the sin of the origins they oppressed you with : and adrift in the vast expanse of the refinery, back turned on the fat rumbera, you must still appeal to the faltering, almost moribund glimmer of those antique pictures while you wander like a shade, past press and drying shed, warehouses and purging room : down the twists and turns of memory, in search of the slave huts : long before your aborted birth a century or so ago, invisible and ubiquitous now, but liberated from the stigma of skin color, ever ready to embody and begin the cycle anew