When my Mexican painter friend David Merino visited me in the garden one long ago summer afternoon he was suddenly hit by sun from behind. I told him not to move and brought my large flash from the inside and adjusted it with a narrow grid. “You look like Moses coming down from the mountain after having seen God.” His expression was so out of character as Merino is so quiet spoken that he speaks in whispers. He is gentle. He paints with the ochres, browns, yellows and reds of his native Mexico. They are the colours of the mountains in the dry season. They are colours that I miss in Vancouver with all those greens, blues and grays.
But the picture also reminds me of a short story by Julio Cortazar called La Noche Boca Arriba (The Night Face Up). This is the ending of the story in my loose translation:
But he could smell death, and when he opened his eyes he saw the bloody figure of the sacrificing priest who came towards him with a stone knife in hand. He managed to close his eyelids again, although he now knew he was not going to wake up. He was awake. That wonderful dream had been another, absurd as all dreams. A dream in which he had been moving through strange avenues of an astounding city, with red lights and green lights which burned without smoke. He had been on an enormous metal insect that had buzzed below and between his legs. In the infinite lie of the story they had also raised him from the floor, and also someone had approached with a knife in hand while he was lying with his face up, to him face up with his eyes closed among the bonfires.
