telephone

Word Curve, by Tobias Oggenfuss

Telephone: prison of voices. Pulp of the mechanical life. Symbology of civilization by wire.

Telephone: Womb box of our refined gutturalisms enclosed in a pocket dictionary.

The “standardized” zeal of our men urban to the marrow is dictated by the command of the telephone’s loud ring, like a call announcing a slice of daily fate.

Chirrrrrr…………………. Chirrrrrr……………………

A chat with numbers? A disreputable meeting, and because it is disreputable, exquisite? Hour for a “cocktail” with blue flavor and Africa in its shaking?

Who knows… Only when the grating ring — appendix of the telephone — is silenced will the mystery be torn open.

I believe the conservation of the species is maintained because of this small latent transmitting device, which has courteously made love punctual.

And if the dawn of Humanity was sad, it was for lack of an automatic telephone that eased the understanding of the “eve-adam” couple.

Sensitive…

The First Woman — who had the supremacy of Uniqueness and Sin — walked five miles to invite the First Man for an aperitif.

Nearly unemotional…

Today… today the women of the globe “infantilize themselves” before the telephone.

Rather: They prepare for the day and paradisiacal well-being of the day in front of the earphones of the whole globe.

~ Hilda Mundy, trans. from Spanish by Jessica Sequeira

Hilda Mundy wrote ‘pirotecnia’ and ‘cosas de fondo: impresiones de la guerra del chaco y otros escritos’, published posthumously.

Jessica Sequeira is a writer and translator living in Buenos Aires.