Free Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia by Jose Manuel Prieto

butterfly, a sight that attenuates the fury in its eyes and creases the blue skin of its formless snout into a human grimace. In the brief instant of the miracle, the prey has a moment to give thanks to God, reevaluate the monster’s perversity (“No, you’re not bad, it was the years of isolation, the terrible conditions, I knew the changewould come, I had faith in you”), and sidestep the monster’s charge. Once on safe ground, shielded by an overhang, the escapee shouts the truth to the monster and spends all necessary funds to capture it, so as never to have to put the goodness of its nature to the test again.
    I NDIGO ( the color ). Lying back on my deck chair, the red P ACKARD parked only a few meters from an intensely blue sea, I devote myself to studying the golden glints in the air churned by the bronze thighs of women emerging from the water. Seeing them, I thought of a superb slogan for a brand of shampoo or conditioner: “ Mientras por competir con tu cabello, / oro bruñido al sol relumbra en vano . . . ” a line from Góngora that could have been put to excellent use by Vidal Sassoon, the celebrated California hairstylist: “A rival to your hair, the sun / flashes on burnished gold in vain . . .” The bathers were advancing with that special clumsiness of terra firma, sirens dragged to shore by the sea to exhibit their magnificent colors, their backs treated with vitamin-fortified creams, their taut bellies, visually centered by the dark point of the navel: ideal graphic statements for the great cover photos of the nineties which, dreamed up in distant international centers, reached every beach in the world with the mandatory force of a ministerial directive. For a second, I imagined an impossible collision between the motley decor of the beach before me and that same bathing resort at the beginning of the century, its sepia tones entirely incompatible with this pure indigo. The terror those beige ladies would feel if confronted by the color pale TTE OF THESE VERY BLONDE GIRLS, ALL OF THEM FORMER K OMSOMOL MEMBERS, DELIVERING CARELESS KICKS TO BEACH BALLS THAT WERE VERY RED AND BLUE AND YELLOW . Full, vivid colors, straight out of a magazine printed on expensive coated stock; the metallic glitter, the fine film that overlay their human souls with the finish of an industrial product, the high sheen of an inanimate object that the hard gazes of certain fashion models seek to copy, the distant bearing, the contrived expression. Already we were being blinded by the first flashes of the neon look with its tremendous artificiality, and those girls on the beach, made up in indelible lipsticks and pencils, were all resolved in an infra-human gamut of color, cruel mannequins. As for me, educated by long years of watching a multichromatic Trinitron TV, I observed them without any particular astonishment, taking note of the season’s colors, those “natural” tones we believe have been captured documentarily when we leaf through a fashion magazine or go to the movies. Perhaps you are unaware that it was French couturiers who, in the wake of World War I, imposed the fashion for tanning and spread the fallacy of its healthful effects? Nowadays you’d do well to wonder whether the vivid, blinding yellow of this sun is the same as it always was; perhaps it was launched two seasons ago by an influential fashion house, a “canary yellow” sun, “very youthful”—or whether the greens of the palm trees were “Panzer green” or “Chevalier green.” And, of course, for a very long time now we’ve had a blue that is “Prussian.” Prosit!
    I NQUIRY INTO THE N ATURE AND C AUSES OF THE W EALTH OF N ATIONS . At the end of 1989, I left for the OCCIDENT via Berlin. It was the quickest way to the kingdom of heaven, the only place in the I MPERIUM where the nerves of that other organism were just beneaththe skin’s surface, just beyond the wall. When the delicate membrane gave way and the two bloods intermingled,