I'm In Love With My Babysitter

Keeps on raining (Billie Holliday)

yesterday. like a summer rain in Mexico City. As a night in Paris in Rayuela. A hundred and one days and nights in Macondo. As a long day in Santiago de Compostela.

For those addicted to Hopscotch, rain always brings back memories of something we have not lived, but we've recreated again and again. We carried, for example, a night of any year in the fifties. We are in Paris and the Serpent Club meets at the home of Babs and Ronald, a loft that smells of vodka and blues Arato, dimly lit by candlelight. Rain, since I read Hopscotch, always seems to be accompanied by the rhythm of jazz, the decaying stage for magical transformations notes A guitar, a trumpet, a saxophone.

The rain also reminds me that first time, having nothing more to do ("in the rain", Horacio and La Maga was for a hotel, a sad hotel bedspreads yellow walls with old carpet, curtains faded, theatrical gestures and fearful. And how to forget the umbrella of Maga, who found that old and broken down and used more to sink into the ribs of the people on the subway and the bus that shelter, which attempted a rainy afternoon and "all hell broke his hand in a disaster of black clouds, lightning and cold, shreds of cloth torn down between disjointed flashes of rods that ..."; umbrella which ended in a ravine in the park, and is reborn from time to time, in other hands, in other parks, and also loses its leaves in the wind.

also remember that afternoon when, having nothing else to do, evening the rain came and went undecided, Oliveira enters the concert piano of Berthe Trepat. I like to reread constanteme Rayuela, leaping into the sky boxes, disrupting roads, inventing new, following the instructions and other times completely ignored. But mostly I like to reread it when it rains, when jazz hurts more and more recalls with nostalgia vodka (although I never took vodka), when the evening is more like an afternoon in a Parisian garret listening to old records. (And more pain and nostalgia because today the 11-M, remember Atocha is one of those days that can not be avoided, the pain can not be forgotten, as the 19-S 85, as 11 S, 2001 as today.)

Mexico is a city that causes much read Rayuela. In the words of Carlos Fuentes in The Years with Laura Diaz, in Mexico there are no seasons, but there are two seasons: rainy season, dry season. So we have six months to jump from square to square. Here, last year there was little rain, but it seems you want to recover these days, overflowing the river Arga, the Bidasoa and the Ebro, and putting the environment to sit and have once again a meeting with Julio on the board of directions, to see if we can agree on where to go this time.