Foreword.
Some time ago, the Meyers mansion seemed to have a life of its own. The land provided everything necessary and a generational milestone was brewing in its providential lap. Inspiration spread like wisps left to the wind, filling a family dedicated to the study of art and lucid thinking with talent. Ded Meyers, was trained as a master lyricist, unequivocal, in musical composition, screenwriter, and great creator of the theatrical monologue. But life and its changes turned the prodigy into a wretch, precipitated all the love contained in a noble soul, to a cliff, where it is impossible to turn back... Where not even his beloved Madeleine could stop the flight and come back at sunset. Giving a turn to the events, and thus, to the mind of the teacher.
Ded Meyers
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"I saw the silhouette of a woman climbing onto the terrace. The heat blasts at a distance prevented me from detailing anything, however, being closer, I could make out the fringes of Meyers Mansion. I also noted, timely, that the woman disappeared..."
As if time had not passed, filled with an anxious desperation I was forced to remain standing, like a statue, in convenient position in front of the main door of the house. Near the railing insects fluttered in my face. As much as I covered myself with my nightgown and clapped my hands around my head, I couldn't avoid the exasperated attack of the drones like a kamikaze weapon wanting to finish me off.
Meanwhile, with a stiff face and sandpaper skin, I managed to see the arcaded gallery between the bars of the fence. I played the carillon insistently making it sound like an acoustic cowbell, but not a soul deigned to come out, no one found out about my pitched battle against the bugs.
The air was really dry and the outrageous pollution in the Meyers fiefdom steppe caused me to suffocate suddenly like a strangling knot which throttled the blood, added to my brutally reddened face, at this point, already almost stony, plagued with poisons, I I allowed myself to barely agree with myself and think about when someone would open the damn door.
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The surroundings of the house with weak maintenance dressed the fateful landscape, dry, between waves of nostalgia that tied me from the beginning of just seeing the moldy contorted timbers, the nests of termites shaking the crown beam that threatened to detach and the cladding of the walls, ocher, sprinkled with clay due to the leveling rain.
An accumulation of chaos and disdained images showed the lack of desire to live in that tragic place, as well as the owner's unnecessary detachment from what once shone like a jewel. The Meyers Mansion, comprised of a lot of acres where springs once gushed and there was no place on earth, without being covered, by the greenest carpet of grass. And the flowers in the wind dancing in the blue, filled the lucid mind of the poet, with rounds of exquisite inspiration.
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"The unique location of the house spoke a lot about its inhabitants, who with deviant customs lived crowded, undercover, in a generational ban so that no one touched them in time or interfered in their private affairs that bordered on dark art and at the same time discretionary."
Illogical, bordering on absurd, the house perched on the edge of a prominent, immaculate cliff of expansive depth which gazed calmly at the horizon. Rather, resembling the worst mistake that engineering could have made in its entire history, the terrace of the Meyers defied the law of gravity, in addition to looking, today, in its worst state of abandonment, it remained occupied only by the last link in the family tree. A reluctant being, determined to stay out of contact with the outside world.
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"Ded Meyers cracked open the gate. After a thorough and delayed facial recognition, he unraveled the chain. He looked at me willingly, crestfallen, beyond the terrifying aspect that overwhelmed him, which he made no effort to hide, he just threw a dilated sight over me that probed my recognition."
With all the years on him, Ded looked grim, without energy, with half of his body neutral and apparently limp. A deep depression was the tawdry of his brown eyes, which allowed him to lose his gaze without any interest in looking at anything other than nothing. He tried to show grace, but in vain. He raised his face and dizzily staggered with the tripod clamped in his left hand. He straightened up forcibly, then, he revealed a tumorous set of teeth that pretended the insane smile, faded, with the vague turn of his body giving me his back.
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Understanding the invitation to enter, I joined the anteroom and took a seat in a plush armchair, where I remained silent for several minutes thoughtful. He took a seat on a folding chair near the window. I detailed Ded, in his constant survival maneuver, staring at the terrace in a prolonged mental dialogue, as if he found relief there.
My spirit shuddered when I saw her skin like a poem, worn and ashen, withered, like one of those songs that no one wants to read. His color was like nicotine and the gray bush of his hair contrasted on the skull with the clear, empty spaces of the scalp and the smear of glitter. The wrinkles on his forehead told me everything. With a gesture of helplessness he tried to swallow, and grasping at the same time, a graphite bar, he wanted to conclude something, which, left on the table, he had already begun to write before I arrived.
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"Really scared. Ded confused his emotions and was thrown over the sentimental cliff. So terribly, lousy, and closed in on himself, that his bent will shattered as he wrote. Ded chose the Meyers mansion for the prison, deep, gloom of an artist whose depression brought him to the end of his career."
After several minutes inside the house, sitting motionless, facing what he now represented to me, a total stranger. The ghostly conception of my mind that lives in the middle of fiction, was overwhelmed, between the crumbling partitions of the Meyers mansion and the reserved attitude of that dark subject. It seemed, in its invariable languor, to be prowling the paths that lead to death, rigorously studying all my movements, perceptive, only with its eye socket, without gestures, or words, without nodding, or denying. Gradually it led to trauma and defection, to the desire to abandon the horrifying idea of my visit and change it for the daunted flight back to the front gate.
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The bedroom windows were long shutters under the canopy of skylight curtains, like eyes slowly closing in response to the setting sun with the best intention of achieving the opacity and degradation of a faded atmosphere, perspiring in a maddening sepia tone. From his bed, excessively soft, with the form of a body framed in the center, it would be unnecessary to contrast his appearance with that of a coffin covered in the cruel shroud. Not even a draft entered that infinitely sad and inadvisable room for someone morally empty, as was his case.
A trigger for the depressive conflict that ruined the life of Ded Meyers, who was once the best writer I had ever known; capable of enlivening the soul of still life, shading any ambiguous or forgotten object into colors until it becomes prismatic, as well as the most expert reciter, playwright, and script speaker in the theater of the absurd.
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Now mute, paralyzed, immersed in a dark world without form. Without the slightest principle of art or the lucidity necessary to create, something, anything logical,
that you gave away from the decadent and morbid feeling, widower, inquisitor of his own arrogance and the good fortune of another time. However, seeing his state, I diligently accepted it with boldness and total indifference, so that in no way would he intend to attack himself thanks to some recurring thought that passed through his head. I dealt with his anxiety with caution, since he did not take his eyes off me, becoming really disturbing and insinuating.
"Ded Meyers, my admired and influential teacher of all time, from whom I learned several of the tricks and intricate nooks and crannies of writing, was ill, reason enough to give him some understanding and honorable company in what was to be his episode. more difficult, dementia."
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I decided to lightly review the master's things, without attenuating his order, nor profaning any of his manias or strange conceptual habits. Only an optical inspection of the compulsive hoarding disorder he suffered, on elements that only made sense to him, despite the fact that deep down, it also generated in me a certain alien pleasure by observing his cloudy world.
I paid special attention to a bunch of letters written on parchment, which, neatly deposited in a velvety leather bag, referred to the addressee, the name: “Madeleine”. His late wife, who has been missing for many years, is now reported dead under mysterious circumstances.
To be completely sure that I could help him, which is why I was at his house, I had to first understand that his state of mind was restless and thriving with the loneliest peace. His simple and conformist life, quite disheveled, was also shared in an immutable and captivating silence, of one who loves life with austerity, even in the worst circumstances. Apart from other simple things, such as empty boxes, stamp collections, classic ebony wood pipes, junk bags, blank sheets of continuous sheets, inkwells without ink, etc., there was nothing else to hide.
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I took the set of letters addressed to Madeleine and wanted to disappear them, remove them from her reach, but, thinking about her unusual deranged state and her annihilating way of looking, I sensed that it would be a bad idea to play dumb.
I consecrated myself to the front of a vade mecum that I extracted from his opulent library and I began to leaf through the pages to gain some time. I continued to see the emotional details of the Meyers Mansion, full of profound significance and the most subjectively arrogant appearance of an author and his work.
"Reincarnated objects in the vintage. The collection of amulets, the polished bone statuettes. The holy oils, the ancient porcelain vessels. Works of pictorial art of realism and costumbrismo hanging on the partition wall. Original volumes of gothic, romantic, surrealist novels. A whole lofty count of antiques and any other source of inspiration that could reach to widen the heart of a poet, unfolded in the environment, a suprasensory and captive aroma, they allowed to see the other face of the previous one, Ded Meyers."
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Until my eyes rested temporarily on the terrace. Looking discreetly over his shoulder.
Without the slightest intention of violating the intimacy of his personalized and gloomy room, even for the slightest moment that would delay my contemplation. I saw, when they suddenly entered through the window, in a swarm, the insects of the tropics, the same ones that attacked me on my arrival at the doors of the mansion.
The thunderous and annoying buzzing made me rave in hypnotism. Which, in turn, triggered in Ded, an insane smile, with the placebo effect of someone who enjoys poisons digging into their skin.
Inevitably, I had a belated vision of a body. Someone passed slowly, running through the doorway. Substantial and ephemeral. He poked his head out, and then suspiciously retracted the same shadow. Adding in the environment the psychological presumption left by the retracement of a soul in pain, that fireball, molded formless, among the mass of plagues until it is indistinguishable.
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It seeped into my eyes, passionate tears of horror falling to the floor, causing that spasmodic exhaustion that befalls someone who has seen a ghost.
"Synonymous with misfortune, it left me paralyzed, drowning in the subconscious. If my eyes didn't deceive me, if that didn't go away, an imaginative trick caused by my emotional shock at seeing Meyers in his current dilapidated reality; Surrounded by insects, submerged in the joy of a sick agony, I would say, without a doubt, that this was the effigy of the woman I saw when I arrived at the mansion."
In the ceaseless paralysis of my body and my mind, aghast, I knew it was Madeleine. I just focused on her, for a second, without time to recap. But I knew it was her. She stood on the terrace beside Ded Meyers, sickle-shaped, wrapped in a sullen black silhouette from beyond the grave.
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I wanted to save Meyers from the event, but in me, the forces diminished. Not wanting to cause him any additional deplorable concern, I also noticed that he, endowed with the most incongruous ecstasy, was always aware of my sudden hallucination.
"He looked at me sinisterly like someone looking for complicity. Sinuous, getting up from the folding chair where he was sitting, he dropped the tripod cane to the floor, he walked, dragging half his body and stammering an unintelligible gasp, he referred to me, while pointing imperatively to the writing left on the table."
Without more, the teacher Ded Meyers, jumped from the terrace...
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END
Venezuela
2022
Resources: Unique image