In Memoriam

Her name was Asunta Basterra Porto.

She was born under the name Fong Wang in Yongzhou, in the Hunan province of China, on September 30, 2000 - but, as she was raised in Santiago d Compostela since she was little more than 18 months old, she would likely have thought of herself as Asunta.

She died September 21, 2013 in Teo, in the Spanish province of La Coruña, killed by her adoptive mother, with the likely complicity of her adoptive (and most likely, sexually abusive - in an anodyne, do-not-leave-proofs and especially coward way) father.

From all records, she was a bright girl though, - possibly - a bit of that brilliance may have been forced on her.

Beyond school hours, she studied four languages - among whom, Chinese- as well as ballet and violin.

In other words, seen from a cynical but all to often accurate point of view, the usual way many well-off  parents have of getting rid of children that they do not really like to have around, since time untold.

By filling their kids' time with extracurricular activities, usually handled by external aid -  ancient Greeks had slaves for the job, the Pedagogues.

While she was intelligent, good looking and a nice kid all around, they never really wanted her but for appearances sake and to satisfy the wife's parent's desires-  of her two killers, I shall speak no more. 

She wrote a couple of entries in her Wordpress blog, about ghost hunters in Santiago de Compostela, in a naïve English with some slight fault here and there. Not a bad effort for an 111/2 year old Spanish kid, I shall say.

She used a photo with this legend in her blog - I added the man, but couldn't manage to draw her as a ghost. 

To illustrate the story, she had a friend take her two photos, that are "the source" of  these drawings.

She didn't leave much else behind... well, neither will I, but for this blog and an awful lot of dreadful, sexually charged drawings.

Even while living a mere thirty miles away, I do it immersed in an informative bubble - all my information comes from at least two thousand km away.

I like it better this way, free of the constant propaganda from asses trying to sell me their crap that passes as local information in our era.

But this made me one of the few - in a hundred km radius - to be unaware who the girl in the photo was, when I came across the image in a G...le search for "Asian Girl".

All I saw was a pretty girl, in one of the dismantled houses above  the Belvis Park.

I like the short, steep uphill that climb from the park to the ancient complex of Iglesia do Nostra Señora del Portal, with the ancient  popular houses on its right side tore down and reduced to a set of walled terraces.

It is eerily beautiful, but I somehow never manage to have a camera with me when I pass through the place - and there there was a picture of a beautiful girl in the very same spot I'd chose.

Probably, she felt much the same, deciding to use it for the little ghost story she had started.

In my ignorance, I stored the picture for future use...  something I often do.

So, I took the girl image, sized it up and slightly elongated the body while keeping the head the original size - heads famously variate less with body sizes than any other part of the visible anatomy - and hands, added generous boobs and drawn a new, older face.

In the end, you need to know what was there, to see the Chinese girl in the Viking in Chains in the final drawing - not that you'll ever see that drawing, ever - but I know she is down there.

Unfortunately, some time after finishing that I discovered - only a little time after... but one never discovers this things before doing the crap, the Universe being the sarcastic bitch that it is - who she was.

And I felt deeply, deeply ashamed of myself.

And then, I felt  a bit worse, and today I feel still a bit worse, while I write this.

She died nine days before turning 13.

She was born only a week apart from my nephew and they could have hit off, if she'd been around by the time he started athletics in Santiago.

She may have been a storyteller, some day, or avoided the dreadful curse of that call.

Almost certainly, she would have been someone worth knowing, once she survived what ought to have been a monumental phase of adolescent rebellion.



My apologies, Asunta.

Fargo (A Parable)

Fargo.

Not the city, nor the TV series.

The Coen brothers' movie.

I like that movie, almost as much as "The Big Lebowsky".

For those whom did not see it, "Fargo" is a small parable over the sins of stupid greed, or of the American mania of measuring one's life on how much he earns, and the virtues of just going on with your life, do the work that makes you happy - do it well - and go home to your loved one at the end of the day.

- If you did not see it, you should stop reading now (plenty of spoilers, ahead), and go watch the movie. For once, even by renting it... unlike Uwe Boll and his BloodRayne (I felt so ashamed in renting that crap, I stopped going into video rentals altogether), the Coen merit to earn something, for their work in this film.

The parable is wrapped in a crime story, that of a kidnapping that derails and ends with the death of the kidnapped, her father, one of the criminals, the loss of the ransom and the imprisonment of the whole mess' organizer. In three words, an ugly mess.

I remember having watched it in a cinema, when it came out, some 19 years ago.

Its nature as a parable was evident to me, the characters may be seen as divided in two fields, the money-driven (William H. Macy's incompetent car salesman, Steve Buscemi's inept, logorroic - and chronic backstabber - criminal and his insane accomplice Peter Stormare, the hard-assed father in law played by Harve Presnell) and the happiness-driven side (essentially, Frances McDormand's pregnant chief police, his husband, her colleagues).

Peter Stormare's character is a case apart, because he is part of the money driven plot but all he really wants is just to kill everybody that happens to annoy him, which he very gruesomely does - as soon as he feels the urge. 

This makes him somewhat likeable, to me. After all, he just likes his job (it just happens to be killing people),  and I can relate to that.

The chief police, donning a slightly mystified air all the time (McDormand is marvellous, in this) , unravel the whole plot - not before a chain of stupid decisions and attempted back-stabbings results in three deaths - and arrest Stormare character, right after he finishes feeding Buscemi's to a wood chopper.

She then goes home, to her mallard-painting husband, that has finally won a concourse for the 3 cents postage stamp.

He'd liked more to have his art used in the 29c stamp but, she points out, as soon as postage rates will rise, the 3c is going to see even more usage than the 29 cents.

She's a bit unsatisfied of having missed the organizer of the whole mess, but the husband reassures her - they'll catch him soon. 

And they slept happily ever after... - not really, but soundly, till the day after

Out of the cinema, while going back to my car, I was thinking about it.

It was a beautiful movie, though it convinced me that I will never, ever, ever go to live in Minnesota.

The parable, the moral of the story was a bit 'in the face', but it was right.

Parables are about teaching people something, not showing how smart-ass the author is.

Opening the door of my very clunky clunker, a 1984 Alfa Romeo "Nuova Giulietta" (Type 116 -  I am an hard-core Alfista), I thought that Fargo's message was one that I could like, though a bit self-evident.

As I sometimes do when I am a bit tired, and at 2 o'clock in a wednesday night tired I was (half price feature), I murmured myself "A bit too evident..."

 

Right behind me, two women were coming out of the same cinema, having seen the same movie - it was the last non-multiplex in town.

The two were dressed in some nice fur, and talking animatedly with each other...

-"What a stoooopid movie! It has no meaning at all!"

-"Yeah, I feel bad, that I followed their suggestions"

-"Ah, but our friends [] will hear from me!"

They climbed into their brand new Range Rover, and drove away, while I watched.

I believe I was left with the same mildly mystified expression McDormand used in the movie, when I finally ended my phrase

"... indeed???"

Now, I could be a smart-ass, and leave you the toil of deriving the moral of this small story, but parables are about telling something to your public, not you showing off.

What I learnt, that night, it is not just that the Coen Bros make movies that I like - I already suspected it.

It proved to me that there is no such thing as a self-evident truth, and that where we stand in life can change our perspective so much that we miss what's obvious for someone else - and viceversa.

For me, almost all the money-driven decisions in the movie are pretty much idiotic. And that drives the overall message forward.

For those ladies... they would have done the same as William Macy? Made the same choices? I do not know.

They couldn't see the idiocy of the "money field" and, for this, the parable was lost on them.

And that, in itself, was another parable.