Koro’s Diary

I met him one month after he was born. I went to cinematographer Tiziana Panizza’s house in La Reina. I could tell that Zafira, Koro’s mother, was tired but also satisfied that her litter had found a home in several parts of Santiago. I took him in a shoebox to an apartment in Estación Central that holds an analogue metaphore: a matchbox. I spoke with him the whole way. First on the bus, then on the metro. Every time I stopped, he started meowing, so I had to tell him stories and improvise along the way. People were amused every time he stuck his tail out of the box to connect to the world. They kept asking me to show them this combination of flesh, bones, and hair that I kept in there. It could also be the shoelace of a lost shoe.

This is no diary. I am not measuring the days. I’m not counting my errors.

He puts his head under my arm and gets comfortable in the warmth emitted by the notebook and myself. From time to time, as to wake up, he stretches and pushes his paws towards the keyboard. Then he writes. He presses hard on the keys and letters appear on the screen. In the beginning the paw would slip and I would return it to its original position. Then I starting giving him more space. We are a family of two and this is a challenge of writing with four paws.

The first record I kept of him made me think of his own writing diary or confinement diary. His experience of accompanying a human, which I imagine is a move that can be derived from Beuys and the coyote, a way to escape anthropocentrism and turn into an animal. I showed Koro photos of this installation, photos he looked at with indifference and little liking.

I examine the letters he typed on the screen. In these moments, this is my land, I am the crazy king of a desolate island in the Mediterranean. A tiger follows my steps until hunger creeps in and I turn into its prey. Reference to Noé León’s Missionary Being Eaten by a Jaguar (1907). I look at the letters once more. This could as well be a date in Roman numerals.

I place my hand on his belly, I can feel the rhythm of his breathing as if it were groundwater. Koro is a city, I am an intruder with no papers, planning to hide in its streets until everybody is gone, everybody is asleep or everybody is forgotten. Dawn.

Sometimes I believe I can see the edges of an old, yellowed map in his eyes, and I look at it like a seafaring merchant or like an intrepid traveler or like one more stowaway in the eyes of others. How easy it is to embark as if there were nothing to lose on the other side of the shore.

Tears of oil stuck on the electric stove. Rust in damp corners. Time peels the face away.

It’s not illness that motivates me to write, nor the irremediable warning of death. This is no British hospital. Death passes outside in the form of a siren. There are no blue scorpions and no other radiation than the one of the screen on which I type. From the land of the healthy, Koro says hi with a yawn.

The room breathes and changes its breathing over the hours. I take pictures of trainers on the floor, faint shadows, water running from the tap, Koro’s paws, tail, and ears, bits and pieces of everything, simple things.

Pass the brush, pass the days, pass on things, pass a thread, let it pass, past things, pass by, pasture, pawsture, pawssage, come to pass, past.

Richard Serra’s undulating forms, the calligrapher’s drive. Koro’s hairs on the sheet resisting the sign’s paranoia: not everything signifies. Movable type pieces, fonts, matrices, and presses. Like a linotype compositor, Koro arranges the pieces in their frames. The noise, the concrete, the material of the sign, in front of me, like dried fruit peels. I misdial, I type a wrong e-mail address. I insist on error: “Even so as to repeat, daily, tirelessly, petty routine gestures” (Bombal3).

Disinterested wandering of my pupil across the frame, contouring of the shape. Koro cannot discern distances. He clings to me; I am an extension of his body. Two misprints, too close to each other. The page as a gallery with poorly displayed paintings, arranged in an arbitrary way, uncomfortable to the eye that is accustomed to the distance of things. To caress each other is to squeeze the language. I join and cram words as in a neologism. A simple way to connect to one another. Together, letters make up foliage.

I take some pictures of him with an analog Konica S2 from the mid-sixties, a camera that crossed the Andes in the middle of the pandemic through a CL intermediary, all very last century smuggling. It is a telemetric one, this is why I calculate well where to frame Koro; the parallax mark prevents going out of frame. All this is a language I’ve only recently started to learn; I feel like an illiterate. I try to measure the light in the room with the eye. I adjust the aperture and the shutter speed to portray well someone who, in half a fraction of a second, stretches as in the best Passions of Christ, with the dramatism of Antonello’s Dead Christ supported by an Angel, of whom Berger says that “painted as if he was printing words.”

I pour two glasses full of water, Koro sniffs both and decides which is his. He drinks and splashes everywhere. I take the other and try to quench this thirst that won’t be satiated even in two or three lifetimes more. I am the barman who accompanies the last drunkard at the local bar. The frequent client that knows your name and demands to be called by his. I look at the movement of Koro’s tongue, that syntactic premise that assembles my language. He phrases from top to bottom, from left to right, like foxtail (the grass, in this case4). I try to follow Ron Padgett’s advice: “Don’t be afraid, for instance, that the building will collapse as you sleep, or that someone you love will suddenly drop dead.” I desire everything, hope for nothing. I know little about the present. I try to see the future in Koro, to understand some kind of truth while I am entrapped by his crystal marbles. I know that once the night is over we will close together the metal shutter of this bar that is our home.

Translation: Ifigenia Doumi

• Τhe header is a still from an ongoing video archive of thylacine sightings compiled by Michela de Mattei. The archive features all currently available footage sourced from online communities and regarded as evidence of its existence. The archive will expand as new evidence emerges.