lalo borja: November 2007

Sunday, 25 November 2007

My mother- April 23, 1922-Nov 25, 2007

I know tears must be spilled privately but not today. My mother, Marina Salazar de Borja, has died on this day November 25, 2007 in Cali, Colombia, and I will not be there to bury her.
I am here, in England, mourning her passing and crying silently in my kitchen, thinking about Life, God and all those things one tends to think when destiny strikes another blow to our hearts.
Here she is, in all her innocent looking first identity card taken somewhere in Bogota, around 1940, well before she met my father and made me and my brothers.
They say the Internet makes private matters very public and this message proves it correct.

Sunday, 18 November 2007

Manos, paloma

Two young hands rest on the comfort of the warm concrete on a sunny morning of the parisian summer.
A pigeon has, perhaps, (do they ever?) lost his way and is inquisitively looking around for human company.
Everything is possible on days like these...

The Memorial, Paris

The site is almost empty.
The surrounding area is stern and silent.
The granite speaks for the dead.
The place of full of unknown memories.
There is a heavy feeling in the air.
It is the Holocaust memorial in Paris.
Just behind the Cathedral of Notre Dame, that other place of the memory of France.

Music without a smile

There she was: silent and full of stoicism.
Not a smile, not even a request for a coin in return for her efforts.
But she played on, and on. All the way from Bulgaria.
She was sitting on the concrete slabs of the plaza at the Centre Pompidou striking her mandolin, or whatever it was she was stroking, subsumed and possessed by her silence under the curious gaze of the tourist's camera.

Caballito

You come from the cemetery in Montparnasse and after seeing so many buried memories you want to see life. And you don't find it right away.
But all you find instead is this petit cheval going around forever atop the carrousel.
It should be enough to restore a sense of rhythm in your life.

On the Sunny Side of the Street

You walk. You explore the sites, bit by bit.
And then you walk on to a short lived sidewalk and on the other side of the street there is a sight.
You look and think: Damn, this looks good.
Out comes the Rolleiflex.
The rest is what you see here.

Two men by the river

The city is luminous and beautiful.
Two men talk by the shore on the other side.
Life goes on as life goes on summer days.
I am a spy with a camera. That's all there is to it.