It has been a little over 15 days since my birthday. 51 springs, literally. Here, in self-imposed exile, searching for refuge, at my age, the books and stories I remember already outnumber the ones I still read. Today’s subject, my dearest readers, is nothing other than a new painting by your friend, the amateur. This time, as has been the case recently, I have devoted a great deal of time to self-reflection.
It has become increasingly clear to me how difficult it is to stay quiet, how hard silence has become for me. Even now, as I write, I must — cuasi per forza — read the words aloud to keep going, to sustain the permanent conversation with myself that, apparently, is now open to anyone who happens to pass by where I am. The truth is that since I quit smoking, an endless faucet of words has been turned on — words that had been pressing against me with enormous force, so much so that they extinguished the flame of my eternal cigarette. Nearly four months without inhaling the silencing smoke. In the middle of that disordered torrent of ideas, the structure was so elusive and overwhelming that the painting appeared, the way important things always do: without warning, without asking permission, as if they had always been there, waiting their turn.
The “work,” or painting, that accompanies this text is called Silence. Because that is what I lived for many years: silence.
Not a silence of peace or contemplation, but the kind of thick silence that lingers in rooms after conversations that never happened.
As the celebrated Broadway musical Hamilton puts it: “No one else was in the room where it happened.”
That is exactly the kind of thick silence that floats through the rooms where I was present and things were happening. Silence that does not rest in the mouth, but instead settles into the bones and learns to breathe alongside you.
In the painting, there I am. It is a self-portrait.
My eyes are closed, like someone sleeping, but I am not asleep. There is a difference the body learns over time: closing your eyes is not always rest; sometimes it is resistance, sometimes it is endurance, and sometimes — in the middle of terror — it is hiding, disappearing. Sometimes it is the only way to avoid seeing what cannot be changed, or what must not be said.
From my mouth comes smoke. That smoke is the only way my voice finds to come out without betraying me. Words that become that thick air, that fog, something that occupies space but leaves no evidence. Smoke does not accuse, does not point fingers, does not leave witnesses. It dissolves as quickly as one learns to stay quiet. Smoke covers and distorts and changes. It changes because silence has consequences. Staying silent gradually shifts one’s face, blurs its contours, turns one’s own identity into something uncertain — as if one were slowly erasing oneself so as not to inconvenience the world, just to survive in it. Perhaps like those rules that are never written down but that everyone understands.
At the top of the painting is the word “Silence.” And below it, almost as if someone had whispered it so as not to wake anyone, is the phrase: “who are sleeping.” A nod to the bolero by Rafael Hernández Marín (Puerto Rico, 1932): “Silencio, que están durmiendo, los nardos y las azucenas, no quiero que sepan mis penas, porque si me ven llorando morirán…” A breathtakingly beautiful song that has been running through my head lately. I first heard it in the voice of Chabelo — that unforgettable Mexican comedian and television host — who would sing it whenever a contestant on his show asked for silence while trying to hold on to the crazy ladder. Chabelo would then shout and startle the contestant while belting out at full volume: “¡Silencio! ¡Que están! ¡Durmieeeeeendooooooooo!…”
Today, looking back, I realize for a moment that during my years of smoke, I was nothing more than a child clinging to the crazy ladder while Mexico, like Chabelo, was shouting “¡Silencio! ¡Que están!…” at me the whole time.
Why a child, you might ask, dear friends. It is important to explain that in the painting, on the left there are tuberoses. On the right, white lilies. Flowers of farewell. Flowers that perfume absence. Flowers that remain when someone is no longer there. Flowers for the dead.
In 1999, my grandfather died.
With him went something more than a person. My way of being in the world went with him. He was my father figure, my silent reference point, the place where things made sense without needing to be explained. When he died, there was no replacement: there were adaptations, new names, new voices, new paths to learn to walk. When he died, the silence began. That deafening, like a slow transformation.
I learned to stay quiet.
I learned that silence is often not a choice — it is survival.
I always tell my children: “Don’t put a name to what doesn’t exist.” And yet, there are things that exist even when they go unnamed. Those things broke me, and many times my way out was to turn them into smoke. Smoke that rose, yes, but also lingered. That wrapped around, that covered, that ended up distorting me without my fully noticing.
This painting is that moment of recognition. A silent revelation. An instant in which I see myself from the outside and understand, perhaps for the first time, the cost of having stayed quiet for so long. And also, in some way, the meaning it had. Every silence, when held long enough, eventually speaks.
I paint this without thinking too much; that is the gift the painting is giving me. The hand moves before the head: when I write, the head leads; when I paint, the hand commands.
And so, painting, I feel that I am not staying silent.
That I am speaking.
Even if it is in smoke.
Even if it is in layers of paint.
This is what I am, and only I know what I know and what I have kept quiet in smoke.
Octavio Paz writes in his essay “Mexican Masks”: “ The Mexican appears to me as a being who shuts himself in and preserves himself: a mask for the face, a mask for the smile. Rooted in his sullen solitude, prickly and polite at the same time, everything serves him as defense: silence and the word, courtesy and contempt, irony and resignation… in his silence there are withdrawals, nuances, storm clouds, sudden rainbows, indecipherable threats. Even in argument he prefers veiled expression to outright insult: ‘a word to the wise is sufficient.’ In short, between reality and his person a wall is established — not the less impenetrable for being invisible — of impassivity and distance. The Mexican is always distant, far from the world and from other people. Far, too, from himself.”
And so, upon finishing this painting — whose colors remind me of my life close to Mexican politics — I find myself compelled to draw near to my past, to my reasons, to my sorrows, to my grief, to my sins, to my regrets, to my achievements, to my good decisions, to my excesses, to my restraints, to my outbursts; but above all, to my silence: that silence which today, broken, allows me — at least for moments — to draw near to myself as well.