Confessions of an arsonist

Date2012
Category

Installation — Research project, Chacao Cultural Fooundation

«This confinement under constant surveillance began recently. I have said many times that it is not madness, just an uncontrollable compulsion, but I seem to have endangered a child. In my last meeting with the Phoenix I knew,I perceived it in the strange whistling goodbye, that sound of weakness I was so afraid would come.

The routine here is precise: when I get up four pills—blue, yellow, white and green—to keep my demons calm. After that, breakfast, a tasteless stew and an almost rotten fruit. Later, the morning walk in the enclosed courtyard.I have become a gardening volunteer to plot escape routes. After lunch, my favorite time, five hours in the collective area, hopefully, if by then the drugs have not taken effect, I can devote to chess, a hallway conversation, a book with safe content or my diary. They always read it looking for causes. They do not believe me when I say it is simple, that I know what is happening to me, that I am aware that I beg to be on the verge of suffocation so I could spend my lastbreath in a desperate cry waiting to be rescued by a female fire brigade.

At six o’clock, “she” is always trying to break me, and I eagerly try to ignore her, I imagine her dressed in uniform, carrying me in her arms on the folding stepladder. At times I try to reason, but she does not understand my appetite for fires. I seldom remember what happens after dinner, I guess someone changes my bandages, I awake invariably groomed, slowly they have erased my sweet smell of burning.»