Colher, faca e garfos, Löffel, Messer und Gabeln, Spoon, knife, and forks
One by Thomas Spallek with artwork by Joana Hintze and texts by Filipa da Rocha Nunes

Zurita said to me
all that is in you, the sky, the fire, the earth,
the sun, the planets, the water, the air .
A few days later, I find relief in the book of poems by
Fuensanta when she realizes that
the golden soul of the arms into which she
wanted to fall was herself (2)

and, all of a sudden, without announcement, the new life becomes complete: the sky, the fire, the earth, the sun, the planets, the water, the air, and You, all this is in you.
Litle by little the images are lodged inside the own-body and the logic of their filing is difficult to understand. We spend years studying the hierarchy gradually established among them – order in which they can be accessed, since some arrive in single file whereas others can no longer be accessed except through smell and other tricks, such as colors or the days of the week, triggers to classify memory.

For example, today is Friday:
The water drops fall in a half-frozen state, piling up in weed meadows, devoid of cattle at this time of the year. Frost is not snow, neither is it rain, and it misses no chance to turn the morning landscape pale, ready to gift the children painful chilblain that silences the playground. The green meadow retains the frosted drops for a few minutes until the sun decides to stay. Leaving the white sheets in winter mornings is harder than eating without a sense of taste and not even the warm milk comforts when all things white seem frozen and even when drunk from a scalding mug it is as if the brain does not recognize its true temperature.
We used to have lunch together every Friday, after school. We would leave school at 13h30 and walk for fifteen minutes from school to her house. It was a route with many curves, along a dangerous road, which you kept teaching me how to travel with no fatal mistakes. It seemed simple, we always had to walk on the side of the road facing traffic, the cars coming toward us, with our feet fifty centimeters from the roadside, steady steps, looking at the ground and up, ground and up, ground and up. After lunch we would go on our walk through the surrounding fields, traces from a pre-industrial rurality, which in the Spring would fill with chamomile flowers, which we would pick so that we could spend the rest of the afternoon making necklaces using thread and needle. These were heavy jewelry, full of flower heads of yellow pollen and light-colored petals, half-broken by the steps and the thread. In the end, I would always give you the necklace, now without petals, pure aligned pollen.

The sky, the fire, the earth, the sun, the planets, the water, the air, and You.

Of all the meals we had - and there were many, I only remember the turnip rice, which was delicious, moist. The dish itself inspired no desire because of its chromatic neutrality, after all it combined rice, already white, with stir-fried turnip, off-white, the onion, transparent, the garlic, ivory, and the diluted trickle of olive oil that would be one more shade of white in the sun. This image was saved by a leaf of fresh parsley, very green, opening the meal. On the day of the turnip rice, and already on the task of collecting the chamomile, reaped using a mini Opinel, I epidermically slit my index finger while trying to push away a blackberry bush that encumbered our way. A draught of blood flowed out, which gradually dried. We remained silent the rest of the day, which was not a bad sign, and I offered her the golden jewelry again, a testimony of our time spent together. Later, before I left, you finally told me that you could not fully understand the red blood escaping through the skin when I cut my finger, since we had just filled our bodies, up to our gullets, with that huge plate of turnip rice squalid, white, faded to the limit, except for the meadow, green parsley.

The golden jewelry piled up in the pantry, hung a little all over the place: here on the neck of a bottle of wine that was too big, peeking from the wine rack, here on a leather shoe box, here on a coat hanger packed with raincoats, - until fully dried and shining yellow-brown. Every three or four months they would mysteriously disappear, and we would begin, all over again, to build the altar of time passed. The yellow of the aging chamomile flowers was a clock, keeping track of the hours, and seeing the full pantry always gave us a sense of nostalgia because there is an inherent mathematic that tells us that the time passed subtracts from a total time, defined, the time of life, and if some of it passes, that means that less remains. But this feeling of nostalgia should not last long, only an instant, a small moment enough to take one breath and go back to walking, to lunches and the collecting of flowers, to again fill that room with precious bright garlands, which when seen make us think: what a good life sun resplendent center of the world pulse returning to you all this light.

Filipa da Rocha Nunes
March 2025