Story based on a graffito photographed in Beijing´s 798 art district. “However bad things may seem, if you’re positive, you’ll feel like Cleopatra, even without high heels or anything… –says Marina”.
She says she really wants to talk to me and that I’ve called her at exactly the worst time, with all the noise there, in the restaurant where she’s eating. But it doesn’t matter. She says she’s happy, even though things aren’t going so well—she doesn’t understand why—but in the end what does it matter if she’s happy. My friends, she continues, if they’re not unemployed they’ve got health problems or their parents are on their last legs, so whoever I talk to, there are always problems… Nevertheless, I feel good, even with the allergy after coming back from my travels, and I can’t breathe without sneezing. But as I said, things look good, I’m positive. And that’s the main thing.
However bad things may seem, if you’re positive, you’ll feel like Cleopatra, even without high heels or anything… And you should see the week I have ahead of me… But all in all, it seems as though life smiles at me, or maybe I smile at life, but say what you like, and eating with my friend, the one I’ve told you about, who’s like one of the living dead, it’s been very nice and we’ve laughed and I also laughed with my friends having a drink earlier, and I really enjoyed reading the text of the Faces this morning while I ate my breakfast. So I thought that today I would give you the nicest face I have, and I also thought that we have a few faces of our own, that sometimes we show the world, and other faces we’ve learned, like the hipsters and the jihadists you were talking about…
It’s just that there are faces or flags we find on the floor and that we unfurl, even if we don’t totally believe in them, because these are the faces or flags the tribe demands from us. The number of times I haven’t been me because of the tribe! By the way, I didn’t understand the last sentence in Faces, the one about the many declentions of the face, or maybe I did understand, like those verbs in Arabic that have different forms depending on their function, and each form represents a function, the second emphasizes the idea of the verb, the fifth is reflexive and the fourth inchoative, so maybe faces are like that, each with a function… Yes, I say to her, and also that in Beijing, in a place called 798, that’s a kind of huge arts center with walls where it’s legal to paint graffiti, I’ve seen these faces that you’d love. Don’t get carried away, she says, before hanging up and reminding me of my function: I mustn’t forget to buy her the silk handkerchief she asked me for.
I also wanted to tell Marina that I really wanted to talk to her.
