Cristina Rivera Garza: The Taiga Syndrome

Look at this: your knees. They are used for kneeling upon reality, also for crawling, terrified. You use them to sit on a lotus flower and say goodbye to the immensity.


The man was right: The woman seemed determined to be found. Like Hansel or Gretel, or both, she had sprinkled crumbs of words in every telegraph and post office they passed through. As they progressed, the cities shrank and the transportation became more rudimentary. Airplanes. Trains. Ferries. Barges. Rowboats. Kayaks. She gave the impression of being unable to stop. As if she were falling; it was the same with the messages, as if they were falling. In truth, what she seemed to want was for someone to catch her, to wrestle her down, like in rugby.


This form of writing wasn't about telling things how they were or how they could be, or could have been; it was about how they still vibrate, right now, in the imagination.


Something tilted. So, she had somehow managed to create the forest and the paths of the forest that she'd imagined in the pages of her journal? She didn't seem like a strong-willed woman, but possibly she was. She didn't have the bold or brash attitude of those who manage to transform desires into reality, but if it's true that journals are full of desires, then this woman before me, leaning on the hard thighs of the man with whom she had fled, right after she had stopped breathlessly, without knowing what to do, on a dance floor, had turned those desires into a reality. Her desires. I was facing someone--I told myself several times, just to remember what was so obvious that it could become transparent and pass unperceived--who had managed to transform the world, at least what was around her, into the world of her desires. A trembling image, something that gleams. What is between imagining a forest and living in a forest?