Twin Souls. Raimon Samsó

      Chapter One

      The alcohol and the soda from my whisky soaked the painting, and dragged the paint down the canvas. To me, it seemed a dreadful painting, and it was a hard time to believe I had made it. So, as enraged as I was, I smashed the glass against the recently finished painting. Then I contemplated how that capitulation gesture decomposed everything.

      In my interior, a similar abandonment precipitated me to an abysm from which I was dissolving as well; I was blurred and bursting into smithereens. My recent pieces of art were a cartoon of what I used to do; and as a consequence, my sales lowered alarmingly. I wasn’t going through a shortage of ideas period, to which I had already gotten used to lately, but rather it attended to apathy’s consumption. Apathy oxidized my fingers and my brushes until they screech over the canvas, blurring it with mistakes.

      That one was a lack of interest, which impregnated everything I touched and resumed itself in the reluctance of representing a world so imperfect to my eyes. I painted hopeless and emotionless worlds because my empty heart sounded filled by the loneliness of the echoes.

      I came out to my studio’s balcony to breathe the night air. I closed my eyes, stopped the whirlpool of thoughts; and then I waited for a moment for my soul, a few steps behind, to catch me. The balconies from the old Town of Barcelona are like the shelving of an antique library full with un-catalogued and worn lives. That is how I felt.

      During the day the streets are a noise museum. Peeling dishes, children crying, elder remembering, simple and sounding things. This is during a regular day. But this New Year’s Eve came filled with desolation, and the hardest to bear emptiness. I shivered; I was stiff with cold and the abandonment on my second end of the year, alone at home after my wife Clara passed away.

      From nearby Royal Square, I could hear people’s voices, their exclamations of joy and their imminent aphonia. All of these got to me after spreading over the sidewalk, climbing through the centenary building’s facade, and reaching my balcony to finally beat me on the cheeks. The world is celebrating a new year that added life to their lives and I coursed a new year that deducted in mine.

      Two years ago, Clara and I were visiting Kenya. She wanted so badly to portray the late afternoon of the African savanna that I gave in, as I always did. Clara was a photographer. I