El sentido del ridículo

El 10/10/10 en Babel en TVE, una venezolana contaba la siguiente historia:

"Venezuela es un país de contrastes. Si vas allí te puedes encontrar cualquier cosa. Esto forma parte de una especie de surrealismo caribeño... lo podríamos llamar así. Una de las cosas más cómicas, para mí, son los nombres, que han pasado de los nombres tradicionales a nombres como Usnavy (porque viene de U S A Navy) o Ronanis (porque estaba tomando ron y anís y nació el niño, y entonces lo llamó Ronanis). Y así vamos de generación en generación. De alguien que se llama Yosmar porque viene de José y María, y se casa con Superman, porque se llama Superman, y tenemos a Josumar; hasta llegar a un punto en que se convierte la sociedad en una especie de comedia."

Malena Cáceres, Venezuela

La he transcrito aquí porque al escucharla pensé en cuánto mejor sería este país si nosotros, al igual que los venezolanos, dejásemos a un lado nuestro desmesurado sentido del ridículo e hiciésemos las cosas que nos apetece hacer sin importarnos lo que opinen los demás. Y que conste que a mí, más que a nadie, me vendría bien aplicarme el cuento. Y lo intento.

ハードボイルド・ワンダーランド

     “You must not let fatigue set in,” she warns. “That is what my mother said. Let your body work until it is spent, but keep your mind for yourself.”
     “Good advice.”
     “To tell the truth, I do not know this thing called ‘mind’, what it does or how to use it. It is only a word I have heard.”
     “The mind is nothing you use,” I say. “The mind is just there. It is like the wind. You simply feel its movements.”
     (...)
     “Did you come from some other land?” she asks, as if the thought had only then occurred to her.
     “I think so.”
     “And what was that land like?”
     “I cannot remember,” I say. “I cannot recall a single thing. They seem to have taken all memory of my old world when they took my shadow. I only know it was far, far away.”
     “But you understand these things of mind?”
     “A little.”
     “My mother also had mind,” she says. But my mother disappeared when I was seven. Perhaps it was because she had this mind, the same as you.”
     “Disappeared?”
     “Yes, she vanished. I do not want to talk about it. It is wrong to talk about people who have disappeared. Tell me about the town where you lived. You must remember something.”
     “I can only remember two things,” I say. “That the town I lived in had no wall around it, and that our shadows followed us wherever we walked.”


     Yes, we all had shadows. They were with us constantly. But when I came to this Town, my shadow was taken away.
     “You cannot come into Town with that,” said the Gatekeeper. “Either you lose the shadow or forget about coming inside.”
     I surrendered my shadow.
     The Gatekeeper had me stand in an open space beside the Gate. The three-o’clock afternoon sun fixed my shadow to the ground.
     “Keep still now,” the Gatekeeper told me. Then he produced a knife and deftly worked it in between the shadow and the ground. The shadow writhed in resistance. But to no avail. Its dark form peeled neatly away.
     Severed from the body, it was an altogether poorer thing. It lost strength.
     (…) The Gatekeeper brushed the dust from his hands on his shirttails and threw a big arm around me. Whether this was intended as a sign of welcome or to draw my attention to his strength, I could not be certain. (…)
     “And what would I have to do if I wanted my shadow back?”
     “I swear, you are blind. Look around,” said the Gatekeeper, his arm plastered to my back. “Nobody has a shadow in this Town, and anybody we let in never leaves. Your question is meaningless.”

     So it was I lost my shadow.

Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Vintage Books, London, 2003 (p. 61-64)

Katakana syllabograms:

ハ = ha
ー = long vowel
ド = do
ボ = bo
イ = i
ル = ru
ワ = wa
ン = n
ダ = da
ラ = ra