La Vida sin Maquillaje.

By María Isabel Rueda

During a strange time in my life, in which I had decided to take a voluntary “pause” in order to figure out what I wanted to do for the rest of my days, a trip to Paris followed; I ended up living in a small apartment in the 17th arrondissement.

Each day I would wander about with no particular destiny until dawn; perhaps emulating the cliché of the flaneur, of the books I had devoured in my adolescence by Baudelaire and Rimbaud.

By pure chance, one afternoon I ended up visiting a free exhibition that brought together objects of the surrealists.

In the center of a museum table:

a one-eyed metronome.

Perhaps due to the effects of the hashish excess

I saw it as taxing

That eye

moving side to side,

tried to set rules to my dispersion.

Against my will

I was sinchronized.

Out of nowhere,

an inner voice,

almost ridiculously uttered the following sentence:

Study Arts.

I stepped out of the room.

I was annoyed.

What a stupid idea!

Although I had devoured Blanchot, Sade and Lautreamont.

Breton and the surrealists, were my enemies.

My thing was the low materialism

My thing was falling from the top to wallow in the mud;

Besides, surrealists were sexists,

I boasted that I had reread Bataille’s “The Story of the Eye”

and having discussed it with a male friend.

Now another eye

a surrealist one

tried to get into my frequency and gave me orders.

A paper eye spoke to me.

In my paranoia it was an enemy eye.

a spy of my own life.

However, I studied Arts.

In my college entrance interview, I was asked for reasons

I told them I had heard a voice

Maybe it was Man Ray’s,

but I was not completely sure...

They laughed.

But they accepted me.

Tic, tic, tic, tic…