Cover mouth and nose. I narrow my eyes. I dodge the cloud of mosquitoes, the road dust, the rosin sprinkled on the metal plate. The African Marlene Dumas, before the earthy and floating Parcae of Goya, covered his mouth to prevent the devil from entering through it. I’ve been looking at the dust for three days, seeing in its siennas and its grays, and in the changing forms, the three Fates that weave the passage of time. I observe the whirlpools that the wind lifts from the ground and stretches into the air: it rips them from the ground with force and veils everything in their path. Some people dodge them or try to slap them away. Others go through them. They adjust the mask, protect their eyes with their hands, and advance with a firm step. I have been observing the dust for three days, the strength of its form that allows itself to be seen and modelled.
I also look at the faces of the people I come across. I dip the brush in the ocher tablet and bring it close to the paper previously moistened with water. In contact with water, the stain makes an unpredictable movement and stains the entire surface in an irregular way: the place where I deposit the brush retains a greater amount of pigment. I change the brush and do the same gesture when the paper has lost moisture building the dark areas of the face. I observe how the gesture remains on the paper even though the stain is deformed. With a finer brush dipped in Chinese ink, I draw the eyebrows, the eyes, the nostrils, the corner of the mouth. I wait for it to dry. The African painter affirms that she does not paint people, that she paints paint. People prefer to look at images to look at paintings, when they look at a canvas they usually see the reference of what is represented.
There is, in my notebook, a man with a turban and a candid look, a smiling teenager in a white T-shirt, a man who hides behind a black beard, a guard dressed in the ocher color of the colossus he watches over. On all the faces, with the spray can that I put in the suitcase, I manage to make the dust that rises from the ground dance. There is in the notebook a rabbit that kills a snake. A monkey guardian of pharaoh’s tomb. A drawing of Anubis. The leaky entrance to Hatshepsut’s temple. The photo of a torn sheet from the Winter Palace Hotel. Agatha Christie’s portrait. Stains and lines that do not represent anything.
I leave the Valley of the Kings exalted after seeing the painting of the tombs, which trembles between stain and line, firm in its non-immobility, and I find a piece of pottery on the ground. A piece of something that was also dust that someone moistened, shaped and baked into a solid shape and use. The ancient Egyptians also used ceramics as part of magical thinking: they wrote what they wanted to get rid of on the pieces and then threw them on the ground so that their pain would break with them in the middle of a sea of dust. In Luxor the wind raises here and there swirls of light ocher color that compete in chromatic elegance with the stones and the color of the skin of its inhabitants. Brown swirls are silhouetted against a bright sky, veiling the luminous blue with an aquatint texture. There is paint everywhere I look. In Africa I also cover my mouth with my hand.
A guide explains in the Temple of Karnak all the times that throughout history the sand has covered the constructions that we admire today. Sometimes the dust prevails, but many times we use it to hide ourselves, glaze by glaze we end up burying what shines the most. Looking at columns and statues through the cloud of dry land, I think of a giant hand capable of turning an entire civilization into a vessel that crashes to the ground. The third grim reaper is about to take out the scissors to cut the thread in a final gesture. The wind will stop. The powder will clump on dry soil.
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