ഹയർ സെക്കണ്ടറി മലയാളം കുറിപ്പുകൾ - 2
“Light is Like Water” - Gabriel
Garcia Marquez
On Christmas the children asked for a rowboat again.
“Okay,” said the dad, “we’ll buy it when we get back to Cartagena.”
Totó, nine years old, and Joel, seven, were more determined than their parents believed.
“No,” they said as one. “We need it here and now.”
“To begin with” said the mom, “here there aren’t any more navigable waters than
those that come from the shower.”
Both she and her husband were right. At the house in Cartagena there was a deck
with a dock on the bay, and a boathouse for two large yachts. On the other
hand, here in Madrid, they lived cramped together on the fifth floor of 47
Castellana Road. But in the end neither he nor she could deny them, because
they had promised them a rowboat with sextant and compass if they got perfect
grades for the school term, and they had been gotten. And so it was that the
dad bought it all without saying anything to his wife, who was the most
resistant to making debts for pleasure. It was a beautiful boat of aluminum,
with a golden line painted around the draft line.
“The boat is in the garage,” the dad revealed during lunch. “The problem is
that there’s no way to get it up the stairs, and there’s no more space
available in the garage.”
However, the following Saturday afternoon the children invited their classmates
to help them bring the boat up and they managed to get it as far as the service
room.
“Congratulations,” the dad told them. “And now what?”
“Now nothing,” said the children. “We just wanted to have a rowboat in the
room, and now there is.”
On Wednesday night, as on every Wednesday, the parents went to the movies. The
children, masters and lords of the house, closed the doors and windows, and
broke the light bulb burning in one of the lamps in the living room. A jet of
golden light, as cool as water, began to flow from the broken bulb, and they
let it run until it reached a depth of four hand spans. Then they turned off
the current, got the boat out, and sailed at their pleasure around the islands
of the house.
This fabulous adventure was the result of an offhand comment of mine when I was
participating in a seminar on the poetry of domestic appliances. Totó asked me
how come the light turned on by just pressing a button, and I wasn’t brave
enough to think twice about it.
“Light is like water,” I answered him. “You open the tap, and out it comes.”
So they kept on sailing Wednesday nights, learning to master the sextant and
the compass until the parents came home to find them asleep like angels on dry
land. Months later, eager to go even further, they asked for submarine fishing
equipment. With everything: masks, fins, tanks and compressed-air shotguns.
“It’s bad enough that they have a rowboat in the service room that they can’t
use,” said the dad. “But it’s even worse that they want scuba diving equipment
on top of it.”
“And if we get gold stars for the first semester?” asked Joel.
“No,” said their mom, frightened. “No more.”
The dad reproached her inflexibility.
“It’s just that these kids don’t get anything for doing what they’re supposed
to,” she said, “but for a whim they could earn a teaching position.”
In the end the parents didn’t say either yes or no. But
Totó and Joel won the gold stars in July, and were publicly recognized by the
principal. That same afternoon, without their having asked again, they found
the scuba equipment in their room in the original packing. So the following
Wednesday, while the parents were watching The Last Tango in Paris, they filled
the apartment to the depth of two arm lengths, and they scuba'd around like
tame sharks under the furniture and the beds, and they rescued from the depths
of the light the things that had been lost in the darkness.
At the award ceremony at the end of the year, the brothers were acclaimed as
examples for the school and they were given certificates of excellence. This
time they didn’t have to ask for anything because the parents asked them what
they wanted. They were so reasonable that they only wanted a party at home to
reward their friends from school.
The dad, alone with his wife, was radiant.
“It’s proof of their maturity,” he said.
“From your lips to God’s ears,” said the mom.
The following Wednesday, while the parents were watching The Battle of Argel,
the people who were walking along Castellana Road saw a cascade of light
falling from an old building hidden among the trees. It was coming out of the
balconies; it fell in torrents from the facade, and it channeled down the great
avenue in a golden rapid that illuminated the city, to the Guadarrama River.
Responding to the alarm call, the firemen forced open the door to the
fifth-floor apartment, and found the whole place filled with light, up to the
ceiling. The sofa and the leopard-skin armchairs were floating at different
levels in the living room, between the bottles from the bar and the grand piano
and its Manila shawl which fluttered along midwater like a golden manta ray.
The domestic appliances, at the zenith of their poetry, were flying with their
own wings around the skies of the kitchen. The instruments from the marching
band, that the children used to dance, floated among the colored tropical fish
liberated from the mom’s fishbowl, and which were the only living and happy
floating things in the vast illuminated swamp. In the bathroom the toothbrushes
floated along with dad’s condoms, mom’s jars of cold cream and her retainer,
and the television in the master bedroom floated sideways, still on, showing
the last scene of the late-night adult movie.
At the end of the hall, floating between two waters, Totó was seated at the
stern of the rowboat, glued to the oars, with his scuba mask on, searching for
the lighthouse of the port until his tanks ran out of air, Joel floated in the
prow, still trying to measure the height of the north star with his sextant,
and floating throughout the house were his thirty-six classmates, eternally
preserved in the instant of peeing in the pot of geraniums, of singing the
school song with the verses changed to mock the principal, of sneaking a glass
of the dad’s brandy. They had opened so many lights at the same time that the
house had overflowed, and the whole fourth grade of Saint Julian the
Hospitalier had drowned in the fifth-floor apartment of 47 Castallana Road,
Madrid, Spain, a remote city of burning summers and frozen winds, without sea
or river, and whose original landlubber inhabitants had never mastered the
science of sailing on light.
December 1978
💦💦💦💦💦💦
മലയാള വിവർത്തനത്തിന്
ക്ലിക്കുക.
മലയാള വിവർത്തനം : ഇ സന്തോഷ് കുമാർ
