Lazarus

There is a karate sensei in my town, Juan, who always walks around tied to Lucas, a forty-something kid with an intellectual disability, six feet tall and a bit, with curly, bald, soulless hair that the entire neighborhood adores. Juan has been blind since my karategi hung from my shoulders to my waist because there were no ones the size of a tiny eight-year-old child. Between the two of them they run a dojo next to the Plaza del Olmo. When one does not tell his story, others make it up for him. Over time I have heard people say that he lost his sight fighting an Egyptian boxing champion, that his blindness was the result of a motorcycle accident, and even that if he was blind it was from birth. The thing is that Juan never talks about it and acts – and moves – as if all those stories told about him were false and true at the same time, so you can imagine him in a ring facing a bearded and robust Arab in a pavilion crowded with bloodthirsty spectators; or watching him, perfectly, fly off his Kawasaki Vulcan and wake up in the dark days later; or already being born with those hurricane-gray eyes turned north, learning to strike invisible enemies in the darkness.

Lucas is, for all intents and purposes, his guide. He accompanies him everywhere and even narrates the katas of his students in his eye, describing in great detail how and what they do at all times while Juan nods in the air, sometimes looking in the right direction and sometimes with the -no- lost gaze on the grained wood walls. Juan doesn’t see anything, but sometimes it seems like he’s pretending to be blind; Half the time he anticipates the narration and makes disgusted faces. Sometimes it corrects your posture in the dark. He once told me that what bothered him most was not not seeing anything, but missing a third of things; The other, he said, is what is heard and what can be felt. The defeats of the senses are usually exemplary.

Therefore, in the absence of logic or explanations, we look for other resources to hold on to reality, to know where we are going when we dissociate and to create in our heads the image we need so that everything fits together. Like when you’ve missed the concert of your life and your friends tell you about it; like when the girl you like talks to you about how pretty she looked for a night out in Cuba and you lack neurons in your head to imagine her.

What for one is hangetsu, For others it is a Red Hot or Phil Collins song, or an eyeshadow on a Caribbean night. It happens with punches and kicks as with life itself: we long to witness the things that fascinate us because sight is usually the only thing that separates us from fantasy; But all the senses are needed at the same time to understand what surrounds us, because the eyes will not understand windmills if we do not first talk to them about the wind.

#Lazarus