Man Brought to Gallows

By Pablo Palacio

This story goes from here to its start, at the first morning of May; follows through these same pages, and when it arrives here again, again it starts there... Such was his enlightened hallucination.


The problem of art is a problem of translations. Decomposition and sorting of forms, sounds and thoughts. Things and ideas are getting old. You only have the power to cover them with saliva.
It is clear that every thought, every gesture, word and happening can be interpreted differently; there lays my severe intention to communicate directly the dense metaphoric language present in Palacio's writing. I want the reader to question the writing as one looks for signs on the streets or in forest. The streams of art I have perused beyond writing capture the narrative and sensations from texts in order to translate them into movement. It is always a decomposing and sorting of forms indeed; from an idea into concept, into words to be spoken, enacted.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador
• Release date: Jun 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9789978777206

Book preview

FIRST MORNING OF MAY

It happens that men, once the day is over, tend to deliver a farewell to their parents and friends, isolating themselves into big ad hoc cubes. After somberness arrives they strip, they stretch over their backs, they cover with many colours blankets, and stay there, thoughtless, motionless, blind, deaf, mute. It also happens, generally, that this idem men, once the time has glided, suddenly feel like coming back to life and start motion, and they see, and they hear as if from a far distance. Now closer, a minimum number of those idem men insert their languid skin into water, they rant, quiver and whistle. Following, they wrap their bodies inside special attires, leaving aside only indispensable organs to relate with their neighbours, and abandon those big cubes, showing yellow and overblown eyelids.

That said: in this moment I have awakened. It was sudden, as provoking light, as turning it off. I stretch my leg, friend of mine, and I see where I have awakened. This is a cube similar to the one where all men have awakened. It can be mediumly seen. Now that there is daylight. Presently now, it is the hour it was yesterday, companion. All is in its right place.

But the eyelids close again, but today is the same hour it was yesterday.

-Andrés - whistles a light voice.

I come around in a jump. I listen. Who has called me? Here it can’t be another voice but mine.

I hold my breath. I wake up on tiptoes, all senses exposed. It is required to observe that inside this cube there is danger.

Come, enter, bourgeois ladies and gentlemen, proletarian ladies and gentlemen. Enter; the ones expelled from all shelter and those discontented with them all. Enter, compatriots of this tiny little country. You, obese compatriot; you, fellow compatriot; you, sausage-nose compatriot; you, fellow compatriot; you romantic fellow compatriot; you, bored compatriot; you, you, you.

Do not fear of having no place here. Rather come to admire the capacity of this cube of great smooth and naked walls, inside, all enlarges or shrinks, swells or narrows, to adapt and locate just in its place, as made of rubber. Look at the obese compadre Tixi, how he has lost his huge belly to make room for the cheerful and soft hearted comadres¹, and look at the soft hearted comadres, they outlined and flattened their happy faces, to avoid nuisance from the voluminous rumps of that savvy stretched gut. And look at the venerable bourgeois Heliodorus how squashed he looks like a poor drawing on the floor. Inside this cube there is a place for the whole world.

Come, enter to see things and things.

Don’t you want to hear? Are you deaf? Do you hesitate? Do I instil no confidence?

Well, it does not matter.

I will bring you here my way, and I will lock you in this bucket that has a place for each man and for each thing.

I wanted to explain that I am a proletarian petit bourgeois who has found a way to live among the bourgeoisie, with the good and estimable bourgeoisie.

Here it lays a product of the dark capitalist contradictions in the middle of the ancient and the new world, in the suspension of a breath, in the void between what is established and the mess of it. You are also there, but you hold a tremendous fear of confessing it because one of these days you must jump and you do not know if you are going to fall on this side of the swirl or the other. Yet you are here showing the racks, friend of mine, you, enemy of the bourgeois, that ignore the side where you’ll plunge after the jump.

But now you clarify everything: I am living the transition of the world. Here, in front of me, there’s a bell overturn, on the other side of justice, and right here, inside me, all the frozen centuries, aged and gravid. I hold a love in these centuries; I hold a love in this overturn.

My father and my mother are there, unable to comprehend me. My father and my mother are my first enemies. The voice didn’t arrive on time for them, and