I wish I could open a storybook and there would still be real magic.
I wish I could read a book of stories from the earth that could still look the stars and the spirals of light in the face.
I wish there were stories that invoked the scores of the tectonic plates and they suddenly responded with a movement. Strong. Unexpected.
I wish those stories would stay in that place of the imagination to which you can return, that place where the stories do not warn you and take root, and make you come back and see again, unexpectedly each time, their landscapes and music: mountains of memories, caliphs , Sufi brothers, students of literature; a Mr. Silla, a fat man, in the middle of the desert, in a suffocating hut, a storm; very smart girls, very cruel boys; an automaton with a green dress and the name of summer, a device that will surely, surely fly; snails and rats examining sacred writings, “the sacred scriptures”, sorry; children on the beach, mothers who read and apply sunscreen; retired farmers – somewhere in interior America – who lie naked and look at the sky; actors asking for work; offices in Kafkaesque ministries; houses in theaters; scenarios with houses, giant geometries in unplowed fields, gods of the sea, wads of straw, candles, coins, games of chess, epistles from brothers, grains of rice…
I wish a storybook was still a Pandora’s box. I wish there was no bottom. I wish the ghost portraits would also fit. Because although everyone knows that ghosts do not exist, they are the only ones who can walk around and look out onto the balcony of our miseries. I wish before you fell off that balcony a hand would stop you.
I wish the stories did not evade the enigmas or the questions. I wish a grandfather would still tell and ask his granddaughter about death, without answers. Because death… is not understood.
I wish there was a garden. I wish they would just look at the plants. I wish a love letter that predicted the future. All possible futures. The beautiful and the terrible. I wish a couplet said it all. I wish then the eternal yes would be shouted. I hope Albert and Mileva dance it.
Rodrigo Cortés (Pazos Ermos, Orense, 1973), magician and scientist, says that words order themselves… I don’t know if it is true, but it is true that in that alchemy where half science, half magic operates, These stories emerge, a prodigy in language, music and light.
If only Terran science had to look at magic honestly for a moment, and magic felt bound for a second. Sometimes stories are vomits of questions, sometimes flights, sometimes expeditions with dust, sometimes a look, a scare, an exercise of the mind, or of the chest, sometimes a multiplication table of words and meanings, sometimes crack, sometimes slap, sometimes a love letter to the light, sometimes science, sometimes magic, sometimes they are just a trick…
Rodrigo Cortés (Pazos Ermos, Orense, 1973), magician and scientist, says that words order themselves… I don’t know if it is true, but it is true that in that alchemy where half science, half magic operates, These stories emerge, a prodigy in language, music and light.
Taking into account, furthermore, that real magicians, as the first story of this book maintains, the real ones, the real ones…, are the ones with tricks. Because as Georges Méliès said, everything is always a trick, and if the trick allows someone to find a meaning that not even the author himself knew he had, he would be done…
Good stories are usually full of revelations, which is why a real magician never reveals his tricks. Come and read.
THE TOKEN
‘Telluric tales’. Rodrigo Cortes. Random House. Barcelona, 2024. 297 pages.
