Shared anguish and desperation

A dear character from a book.

After giving it a lot of thought about what character from a book I haven’t been able to stop thinking about, and going over a list of my favorite characters, I’d say that the one that totally “came to live” in front my eyes and became part of my everyday thoughts was Ricardo Jordan, the main character of a play called La barca sin pescador (The boat without fisherman), written by the Spanish author Alejandro Casona.
The story is about a stockbroker who is having some trouble with his business and makes a deal with the devil for him to make his successful career go back on track. In return, Ricardo has to kill a man.
The tricks of the devil make Jordan believe that the scream he has just heard from the coast nearby is from a woman crying out for her husband, a fisherman who has just died at the very moment Ricardo signed the deal.
Ricardo can’t stand what has just happened and spends the rest of the story trying to make it up for what he has done to the woman.
As the time passes, he becomes a new man and somehow he realizes that he wasn’t to blame for the fisherman’s death, but the contract’s still due, and the time to give up his soul in return for his renewed wealth is getting closer.
Anguish and desperation appear, but he keeps on thinking about a solution for his dilemma until the very last second, when the devil is right there, wearing his black fancy clothes, the same as he did the first time he met Ricardo. It’s time to go… or at least it seams.
As the devil thinks Ricardo can’t deliver his part of the contract anymore, he burns the document, but things don’t go the way he has expected, as Ricardo, just in time, and while the contract is going to ashes, tells the devil that he’s not going anywhere, because the deal said that he had to kill someone, and someone has died. “Me”, Ricardo says. “I’m not longer the same man you met and dealt with. So, as far as everybody’s concerned, I’ve killed a man”.
Of course, by the time I reached this point, I’d held my breath so many times, and felt sorry and sad for Ricardo’s faith so many times, that I just kept thinking about how he could get out of the deal and remain alive. That’s why I felt so relief when at the end of the story everything worked just fine for him.

A man who loved life

Vincent van Gogh, a man who loved life.

For many years, I’ve admired Vincent van Gogh’s paintings, because behind his rough brushes strokes, there are so many little stories that want to go out to let people imagine what was life at that precise moment when the painting was being done.
This admiration for his work, took me to read two wonderful books about the artist’s life. The first one, of course, it had to be the Letters by Vincent Van Gogh. By reading this book one can almost feel that is right by Vincent’s side, seeing him writing all those detailed letters to his brother Teo telling him about his hopes and dreams as well as his darkest moments.
The second book, Lust for Life by Irving Stone, it’s to me an amazing piece of literature in which the author takes the reader to walk along Vincent’s life, from the moment he starts painting, to all those times in which doubt came to him filling his life with desperation. It also shows those few moments on his life that made him feel hope for a better future, and those other times in which he felt happy and amazed by the unique colors and forms of nature, and how alived he felt by seeing all this. In the end, Vincent dies alone, insecure and not knowing if all his efforts to paint better were even worth it.
After finishing the book, it’s really hard not to wonder what it’d have been if only Van Gogh could’ve had a glance of the future to see how admired his work is now?
May be he’d have been able to deal better with his maddness and he had kept on painting for many more years… Saddly, we’ll never know.

The simple things in life

Ice cream and imaginary friends

Not so long ago, while reading about the 119 anniversary of the creation of the Sundae, a book immediately came to my mind. Sundays at Tiffany’s.
The book by James Patterson and Gabrielle Charbonnet tells the story about a girl who loves ice cream and spends a lot of time sharing her thoughts with an imaginary friend. As the girl grows up, she keeps her love for ice cream and fells in love with her imaginary friend. Then, of course. things get complicated but in the end, everything turns really well for the girl and for her imaginary friend.
The story’s so fascinating that the pages simply go fast one after the other as the curiosity grows to learn what happens next with the characters. I also liked the sense of innocence that’s kept all the time as the story develops.
It also made me think about how simple things in life such an ice cream can make better your life, even as if it’s just for a short moment, and how our minds sometimes look for someone to talk and clear our thoughts, even if it’s just someone who comes from our imagination. Very common in children, not so common in adult, though. However, for us there are always those imaginary conversations we hold with people, trying to see how a specific situation will develop. As for ice cream, I think this is something we’ll always love. At least, I’ll always do it!

P.S. Here’s some more information about the history of the Sundae 🙂
http://www.visitithaca.com/media-services/birthplace-of-the-sundae.html