“What will happen after he looks at me as I am
after having gone down into my interior
after rescuing me from the dragon
that almost finished me off"

[that almost finished you off].

​

Del perdón (Of Forgiveness) - Alejandro Filio

​

Aquí tienes la traducción fiel al inglés del texto:
Part II
He simply didn't know how to tell her. He was about to drop her off at her house and it was raining hard. They got out of the car and were soaked through in an instant. She was amused, although at the restaurant she had noticed him stranger than usual. She took his hand and led him inside; back at home her mom would already have the coffee ready. But he stood there, without letting go of her hand. She stroked the back of his hand with her thumb while looking at him, waiting for something to happen.
Then she recognized that look; it wasn't the first time she had seen it... in an instant, all her fears came forward to become real.
Tears and rain streamed endlessly down his face. He was not going to continue. It was a nightmare come true: a month away from the wedding, with everything almost ready, house and furniture bought, everything.
She remained in limbo for a moment. By inertia she pulled him again, wishing with all her might that the past seconds had existed only in her imagination.
«You can't do this to me...» —she said with a broken expression—. «What am I going to tell my family?»
She expressed this while bringing her hand to her forehead.
He knew what he had to do and it was inevitable. She understood that the thrust was already cutting through the wind and approaching her relentlessly amidst the raindrops, while he remained silent.
«Why?! Why?!»
She asked desperately, like when one questions God in some sudden tragedy (she still hadn't let go of his hand).
«Answer me! Answer me!»
She shouted at him amidst the salty rain, rage, and pain.
In total silence, with no words that could suffice for any explanation, he remained quiet, crying facing the rain. Like someone on trial for involuntary manslaughter who pleads guilty for having fallen asleep while driving.
With his left hand, he unbuttoned the top buttons of his jacket; on his shirt, almost transparent from the water, something could be glimpsed. He unbuttoned his shirt as well, and she was left dismayed.
At the height of his heart, he removed a fragment of his chest, as if it were a piece of a shell that fit to perfection to cover the hollow. Inside there was something like a small bulb of carbon filaments, shining with a warm and soft light to the rhythm of a thump-thump, thump-thump. That amber light in the hollow of his chest managed to illuminate a little of what was happening, and by the way, it contrasted with all the rain blues and downpour grays around him.
Then she lifted her gaze and saw it; she brought her hand to her mouth and her eyes grew enormous. He took her hand in such a way that he could also hold her index finger and slowly guided it to the hollow in his chest. Inside sounded a strange heartbeat, like the machinery of a most complicated clock, with an amber core, assembled with pieces of crystal and steel. She couldn't believe what was happening, and barely refused to leave her hand captive between his fingers.
Finally he made her touch, at the height of the right ventricle, some gears that were not turning; part of the crystal had cracks and it seemed there were missing pieces. The amber light coming from the core created interesting flashes among the cracks in the glass.
She remained with her other hand over her mouth. He didn't say a word, but looked at her as if telling her: «Do you understand me now?»
«No!» —she said—, «I still don't understand anything.»
Why did that make him feel the void even deeper? Could it be that translating the language he was trying to understand himself confused him even more?
«To take care of you, to love you as you deserve, I first need to assemble this puzzle, decipher the functioning of this machinery, I need to find the missing pieces... Only then will I be able to. Please, tell me you understand that» —he said it with a pout that begged—.
«No, I can't...»
She replied, honest and shattered. But what did that fragmented guy expect? For her to say: «Of course I understand you... Go, repair whatever you need to fix and come back»?
She knew nothing of fragmented hearts or broken machinery; no one had ever shattered her heart to the point of not understanding herself. She was well-made, she was complete, she had always been cared for and loved. How could that fool expect her to understand him? Him, a man with a warrior's soul and a child's fragmented heart.
At last she let go of his hand, let him go, no longer wanting to ever know anything more about him. Rage and helplessness: all that love she felt for him filled with cracks in an instant and burst inside her.
«Why did you bring me here? Why not sooner, if you already knew about the stupid hole in your chest! I don't even know if it's real, if you made it up, or if you're lying to me...»
He returned to silence. Nothing he could say would be enough. He couldn't explain that he had just discovered the cracks in his chest, even though he had felt the tingling forever. He couldn't explain that it was love for her that had led him to the edge of the abyss, to the edge of the hole within him, into which he had to jump without knowing the outcome. He couldn't explain to her that she could not accompany him on that journey. What did it matter! All that explanation arrived late and had been terribly unfair.
«Go away» —she said, gathering strength who knows from where, becoming judge and victim at the same time—. «Go away, please, I don't want to know from you ever again. Go away... Forever, this day will haunt you forever.»
She said it as a sentence, and the sentence was final.
He returned to the car, living awake that terrible dream, that horrendous nightmare that seemed not to end. In his gaze, the vast and profound pain he felt simply petrified. He would never see her again and he knew it. She had saved him and didn't even realize it. She had shown him the path that would lead him to reality, to reconcile with his childhood, with himself. She had taken him to the place where he could finally find the pieces he was missing.
He swore to piece himself together, to find the pieces, he swore to do it for her; it would be the way to find his redemption.
She watched him leave. Then she heard it... her heart fragmenting, like when a lightbulb wrapped in a cloth is pressed and squeezed tightly, that hollow sound of a broken shell.
She immediately brought her hand to her chest and knew herself broken. A flash of lightning, thunder, and the rain turned into a storm. At that instant she knew what it is to have a fragmented and formless heart.
Then, finally, she understood...
Part I
He woke up abruptly, with ragged breathing and sweating. The rain, the car, the goodbye, and that horrible moment that would haunt him forever... What had all that been? A horrible nightmare? He touched his chest, rummaged through the heart area, and took a deep sigh.
The truth was that he had been feeling a strange tingling on the surface of his chest for a long time. However, in the early hours of that Friday, around three in the morning, the sensation became more intense. It felt like small insects walking over his skin, first around his neck, then near his collarbone, and then all over his thorax.
It was like when nerves make one feel an itch but one doesn't know exactly where; simply exasperating. He had already spent several weeks, perhaps months, feeling unusual dryness on his hairless skin at the height of his heart; he had even developed a kind of tic, constantly taking his hand to his chest, conscious that he felt something weird.
During the last few weeks, before his wedding, that habit had intensified: he no longer just touched his chest, he began to scratch the area at random, looking for the origin of that incisive itch, but nothing. That Friday morning the itch became unbearable. It drove him mad not knowing how subcutaneous the tingling was and that, no matter how much he scratched, the tingling wouldn't go away; he didn't even feel like he was touching his skin.
He looked at the clock and it was already late: it was 7:30 a.m. Without his usual coffee and with an empty belly, he plunged into the day's routine and decided to hide his anxiety in his work briefcase.
All day long he thought about going once and for all to a specialist doctor to find out what the heck was happening to him, but deep down he didn't believe that matter was merely a medical problem. Anyway, who would he go to? A dermatologist? A cardiologist? A... psychiatrist?
The truth was that, among so many things he had to untangle in his office that crazy Friday, the intentions of attending to that which he couldn't even classify as a rare dermatitis stayed in the drawer of postponed things.
More relaxed in the afternoon, lying on his sofa, he fell asleep for about an hour, until the mysterious little feet of those damned insects began to walk on his chest again. It was as if they had their nest there, as if they had found a home in an abandoned hole, and they came and went. When he opened his eyes, it took him a few seconds to recognize the reality of his room; for some strange reason, that usual reality seemed different, subordinate, but he didn't give it much importance.
He received a message on his cell phone that said: «Are you picking me up at eight?» «Of course», he replied. «I love you», she wrote. He knew what he had to reply, but... why did it take him so much effort this time to type those words? It wasn't that he didn't love her, or was it? He really cared for her, that's why he had proposed marriage. He admired her, missed her, thought about her all the time... Why didn't he reply immediately with an «I love you too»?
At that moment, sitting on his sofa, he became aware that something was not right; like when a daily reality is taken for granted for a long time and, suddenly, one day it becomes an epiphany that brutally strikes the present to let us know it exists and is irremediably there.
Something in the mechanics of his heart sounded strange. He knew it was time to love his girlfriend, his fiancée, with all the strength in the world. She was simply a good and precious girl who loved him and accepted him with all his complications. (He still hadn't replied to the message). Why did the parts activating the strength of this type of love, in the engine of his heart, simply fail to start?
«She doesn't deserve this!», he repeated to himself over and over, and began to despair, to feel the fear experienced when one is incapable of explaining an absolute and crushing reality. At that moment he felt alone and enveloped in a most profound void.
Sweating and trying to regain calm, he went to the bathroom, turned on the shower faucet, and stepped in without taking off his clothes. At first he felt how the cold water brought him back to tranquility little by little. He brought his hands to his face over and over to clear away the water streaming endlessly. After a while he turned off the faucet and decided to take a proper shower. He came out with soaked clothes and water dripping everywhere, but he didn't care. In front of the mirror, he began to unbutton his shirt... then he saw something extremely strange.
What were those cracks on the surface of his chest, on the left side? They looked like fissures chipping away his dermis and epidermis, with the texture of an eggshell, skin-colored. Of course they grabbed all his attention. He tried to shake off that strange texture, like when dust impregnates one's clothes, but nothing. He was scared and his breathing quickened.
He never considered the possibility that he was dreaming or that his imagination was simply playing a trick on him. Then he focused on a peculiar crack, one that almost seemed to peel away to reveal a faint flicker of light that grew slightly more intense to the rhythm of a thump-thump, thump-thump. Something was happening behind the shell of that skin.
What did he expect to find other than viscera and arteries? First, he barely touched that little piece of nearly detached crack; then, with extreme care, he moved it slightly with the nail of his index finger until he finally managed to detach it. A whole fragment came off, as if it were a piece of a shell.
Definitely, something was happening in there, something he couldn't accommodate in his mind and yet was happening in his reality. He was seeing everything through his reflection in the mirror; he was engrossed, so absorbed rummaging in that extremely hollow space, that not even the water streaming down his eyebrows distracted him.
Finally, there was the discovery, after who knows how long without even imagining it. In that deep hollow, his heart machinery beat and grated among loose gears and crystal pieces illuminated by a small amber light. For the first time he had access to that secluded space; he saw it and was conscious of it.
He raised his gaze and met himself in the mirror. It was him and no one else; this time he couldn't evade reality: it was him with his chest completely open. Between memories and forecasts, his fears and hopes grated among his gears, which, forced by sheer courage and determination, kept spinning.
There was no more tickling, no; the itch had gone. The wandering little feet were gone. There was, instead, a hollow in his chest shaped like a path toward the depths of an out-of-tune and powerful machinery. The journey was not going to be simple, he didn't even know how long it would take him to reach the core to readjust the pieces.
He placed the piece of his chest-shell back in its place. Then he knew exactly what he had to do. That terrible dream was still not over. The machinery of his heart began to grate more and more among the crystal, the steel, and the amber light. It was 7:30 p.m.
It was unbelievable that those un-oiled parts were capable of activating revolutions of such opposing and uncontrolled emotions.
Without her, without the perfect woman waiting for him at eight, he never would have been able to find the way to the edge of the abyss, to the epicenter of his cracks. She had climbed down into his interior without him knowing, to rescue him. She would have jumped with him without hesitation, but now it was his turn to save her. He had to enter that cavern alone...