Mr Procrastination

By Gabriel Aziz Loutaif

Chronic medical student Jorge Cemborain has only one subject left to earn his degree. His unfinished medical career, the coexistence of guilt and oedipal with a dominant mother, the intense memories of the suicide of his uncle Aldo Conforte, his love and heartbreak with Mariana Cisneros who cohabitates his hyperactive sexuality, his ethical-existential conflicts, his esoteric, psychological, mystical inclinations; are determinants of the indecisive, reflective and contradictory character of the protagonist. He spends his days between opposite and unresolved planes that frame the thought of a man who postpones his life and the great decisions. Work of marked reflective tint in the best tradition of the psychological novel of our time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SkYeDiToRpUbLiShEr
• Release date: Nov 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9789915939704

Book preview

MR. PROCRASTINATION

Gabriel Aziz Loutaif

MR. PROCRASTINATION

Gabriel Aziz Loutaif

Mr procrastination

Gabriel Aziz Loutaif

2nd edition October 2021

Translated from Spanish by María Alejandra Lagos Prieto

Edited by: Sky Publicaciones.

Montevideo-Uruguay [phone]

[e-mail]

ISBN: 978-9915-9397-0-4

Printed in Uruguay

Layout, design and production:

Editorial Sky Publicaciones

© 2018 Gabriel Aziz Loutaif

© 2021 Sky Publicaciones

They are strictly prohibited, without the written authorization of the copyright holders, under the sanctions established by    law, the partial or total reproduction of this work by any means or procedure including reprography and computer processing, and distribution of copies of this edition through rental or public loans.  Likewise, its translation and commercialization in any language is prohibited without the express consent of the owner of the reserved right.

This novel is dedicated to José Américo Rched

and

María Alejandra Aloy.

Eternal gratitude to my great friend for his collaboration,

Prof. Dr. Luis M. Defagot, Head Professor of Legal Medicine, Faculty of Medical Sciences, National University of Córdoba.

Mr procrastination

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 1

The beautiful flowers that decorated the small garden suffered, trembling under the impious drizzle, although their beauty, exalted by the colors, was more similar to an impressionist painting perpetuated in time

—with the fragrances of the moments perfumed into oblivion— than to the fleeting perception of a mere sunset.

This was how Jorge Cemborain captured the moment, looking through the kitchen window at the yellowish walls getting all soaked up, the hen house rattling by the pounding water, and those flowers his mother cared for so much, enduring the rain.

His gaze was wistfully fixed on the jasmine, as if a capricious insistence of fate had transported him to the candor of his childhood... the Sundays at the amusement park after he visited his grandmother Genoveva, and also the bumper cars, the ghost train and the planes from where he looked at the immensity of Sarmiento Park.

He also recalled the flashes of panic at the first day of class, when his mother let go of his hand at the school yard to later lose her in a blurred figure, as if he experienced the absurdity of not finding her ever again. A series of images began to appear in his mind gradually, overflowing it in turbulences of memories of moments he had lived, and others, rescued from the conversations with his ancestors, such as the aftermath of the Second World War, which ended up in the flourishing fifties as the Golden Decade.

Jorge Cemborain, analyzing life from his skepticism towards love, evoked that laureate era of romanticism and mysterious tranquility; in 1959, his parents started dating, and especially his father, a frustrated political scientist, who stayed out of his intellectual activity to work in his hardware store and not to lose his wife, over the years, would say that the sixties marked a turning point in the history of the American people and in the world: the conspiracy to assassinate the president of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, marked an entire generation. Meanwhile, from the Old World, precisely London, a group called The Beatles fascinated young people and made them go mad with their music, which spread into the remotest corners of humanity.

Slogans such as sex, drugs and rock and roll, and hippie movements with their antiwar protest marches tensed the spirits of the men at the White House and the security agencies, who were facing the pressure and intolerance of large corporations. And almost at the turn of the decade, the whole world was amazed, expectant in front of their TVs watching how a man called Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon for the first time.

And he started recalling parts of anecdotes, like the pull of the ear his uncle Aldo the singleton gave him, after his insisting with morbid curiosity on seeing the euphoric display of the working class advancing through Colón Avenue, which later Argentine history would remember as the Cordobazo. Then his first communion would pop up, the photograph of little Jorge taking the host. The other photographs with a slightly forced smile next to his family. Very short hair, thick-framed glasses and an unbearable snitch face.

The warm October wind that blew through Colón Square. Boys abruptly dashing off Carbo School, the smell of praline permeating among the crowd. The fat woman with a strawberry pie-like face who sold ice-creams at the school entrance. The visits to Aunt Anita, who served him a chocolate pudding for dessert as soon as he arrived. The delicious apples from Don Antonio's grocery store. The unbearable noise the knife sharpener made going around the neighborhood on his bicycle. The beggar woman with ashen hair who wandered through the streets of Alberdi, frightening them with her blank, crazy stare, as if the terrible moment of her true love leaving her at the altar had tormented her, and everybody, ever since. Ortiz, the bald-headed man who emptied the nine-millimeter chamber on his wife, when he found her and her lover making love in their own marital bed, to later turn himself in to the police authorities.

The San Jeronimo cemetery and the enduring rumor of the souls in pain, who wandered tearing themselves apart at the indifference of the living for not being able to tell their noblest causes, those that were postponed on Earth. All the hours spent losing track of time having a snack and watching Super Hijitus. The nights with Rolando Rivas and The Man Who Returned from Death. Whole afternoons spent with his parents watching SábadosCirculares. Flying a kite and running on the premises of the Hospital de Clínicas. Spinning tops, ludo-matic, scalextric, soccer, the so-called pirates of Alberdi. The oldest boys’ terrible blows, and their wounded pride holding back their tears. And then the summer, the club, the pool, the wide cuffs of the peach skin pants. Flaco Spinetta’s, LittoNebbia’s and the Cats’ magic.

The first cigarette that triggered a persistent cough, long hair and the face of a cool and more experienced kid. The first girlfriend from the neighborhood, the long- awaited kiss that made them blush to the point of having to look down for the complicity of enchantment. The return to classes: putting away winter clothes, preparing the folders, buying the books. The inexorable routine that school rigor demands, the boredom of high school. The runaways to play foosball, the days wandering at the zoo, downtown or at Tampico’s café after playing truant. The porn magazines, the little but very important secrets shared between friends. The disciplinary sanctions, the divine but irresponsible idleness of adolescence. The prolonged and immature guffaws, the first barbecues on Fridays. The crazy drag races with his father's car. The hysterical flirting with the good girls, with the easy ones, and with those who have a little bit of everything. Jokes, couples at the corner of the street, the smell of the neighborhood, the screech of the bus braking, private student accommodations, jam sessions at the folk clubs where people play the guitar until dawn with that university air of Santa Rosa Street floating around.

The nonexistence of the rule of law. The search for identity, the moral crisis of the Argentines, the double morality that became so natural, and therefore, a bipolar mood was implanted in society as if it was a common denominator of our idiosyncrasy. Admission to the Faculty of Medicine, the illusion of being a doctor wearing a white coat and with academic excellence. Finishing freshman year with outstanding marks, the pride of his parents and the early Christmas holidays. The trip to Rio, so longed for as a reward, with two of his friends and a summer love who blew his mind. However, he started classes not much convinced of continuing studying and with a strange interest in astrology, numerology and paranormal phenomena awakening in his spirit. Contemplating the sky, fixing his gaze on the stars, discovering some fantastic worlds among deep thoughts.

Experiencing omnipotence, spiritual arrogance, discrediting science, minimizing everything, questioning everything. Studying at half-speed, facing the inevitable family arguments, and then feeling absent, devalued. Postponing the rhythm of study with silly excuses, failing to keep up with the academic requirements, taking the course again to hardly pass the exams, with the stigma of being a chronic student, and watching life pass by with that black solitude of incomprehension that pierces you to the soul, like a knife in your stomach, with the atrocious abyss to have become, all throughout those years, Mr. Procrastination.

Jorge Cemborain turned thirty-eight years of his existence with a pending subject to get his degree: Legal Medicine. An only child, taking care of his hypertensive and depressed mother, he looked away from the jasmine as if he woke up expectantly.

Perhaps the inevitability of the lived circumstances would have been too real to be just reverberated indications of a dream, although the still persistent drizzle accompanied him in his melancholic state of mind. He stood in front of the mirror, and when

he saw his hair more grayish and his face more wasted away, he began to realize that he was getting old. He brought his face even closer to the mirror, as if it was difficult for him to recognize that he was in a prolonged mourning for his adolescence. It was only then that the mirror returned those faces impossible to reproduce that arise from madness, and the more he observed himself, with that obsession that crosses the limits of the pathetic, the more respectfully distant reality seemed to stand back, or to shut itself away in a parallel universe, from where it could contemplate the infinite events that made the enigmatic, and sometimes turbulent, life of Jorge Cemborain possible.

He then lit the stove in the kitchen, as if he wanted to escape from the ghosts that were stalking him, and he put down the kettle with enough water to drink some bitter mates with his mother. From the next-door room, a feminine voice with a sorrowful tone managed to say:

—Jorge, Jorge?

—Yes, mom. Here I am.

—Where are you, son? Where...?

—Here, in the kitchen, mom. Can´t you hear me?

—Yes. Now, I can. I’m a little dizzy, you know...

Is the water ready?

—It’s already boiling, mom. Get up, don’t stay so long in bed, you know it’s no good for you. It’s a pity you don’t want to understand that.

Mrs. Franca Conforte made a gesture with her hands.

—Wait... I’m coming, I’m coming... I’ll put on my slippers and I’ll be right there, son.

—Well, well, you seem to have slept well - Jorge said enthusiastically, and he started pouring the water inside the flask, while he listened to his septuagenarian mother moving with some difficulty, until he could feel her presence just a few meters away. They sat, as usual, facing each other, until his mother asked in an inquisitive tone:

—What were you doing the whole afternoon? I’d like to think you were studying.

—I was reading Legal, but truth is that I didn’t read the whole afternoon. I was looking for information on the Internet, things related to the subject.

Frowning and with a gesture       of disapproval, his mother sentenced:

—That crap is destroying the minds of the young... God save us! So much technology and so little reading will ruin the future of humanity! I don’t understand anything, son. And what do you want me to think if young people grant a privilege to those stupidities?

—Mom, as far as I’m concerned, I’m no longer part of that young generation you’re talking about. I’m about to turn forty, I don’t know if you’ve realized that, but I don’t think that a tool that is useful and helps me do some research on the course of studies I’m finishing, and other stuff, will change my principles or my personality. Not everything you find on the Internet is porn. If you only knew all the knowledge you can have access to so quickly by just clicking and waiting a few seconds; information appears as if by magic.

His mother looked at him with resignation.

—Of course, I understand, Jorge. Unfortunately, this is the way it is, my son. Sacrifice is not as common as it was before when ideas were solid because there was a structure, effort and a great deal of responsibility. As you say, things appear as if by magic, and it is for those same reasons that the world is as it is. Look at the girls now, look how fast they take off their panties. When I was a young girl, a lot of water under had to run the bridge before your father could touch my breasts, sweetheart. There were values, now everything is insane. It’s the easy way, drugs, opportunism and anxiety that devour young people until they become real idiots.

Jorge Cemborain bent his head trying to nod.

—Maybe you’re right, mom, but these are the times we live in, and I think we have to adapt ourselves to what we have, if not we’ll be so screwed. As you can see, times change. We have to accept it, unless you want to remain longing for the past.

—No -his mother said thoughtfully, as if she was analyzing her truths, and then, looking up, she pushed back again energetically-. Times do not change, humans change -and she started to heat more water, since the water in the flask was no longer as hot as she liked it, and continued:

—As a good child of Italians, I would like to see you with a family girl and not with one of those tramps I know you are visiting frequently. You are almost a doctor; you could aspire to someone who is worthy. After all, even though we don’t come from a good family, we have always been nice and working people. Someday you’ll have to get married. I don’t know if I’m going to be around, son, and I want the best for you.

—And what is this all about, mom? We’ve talked about it before, and I think I’ve made my point clear on what I think about marriage. Also, bearing in mind what you say about women, you don’t leave me much hope, you know.

—Jorge, you know that I love you very much, you may have noticed that, son. I’m not a mother who lived her life selfishly without caring about anything.

—Mom, please. Of course, I realize that, I'm not so ungrateful as not to recognize it.

—Well... I’m glad you’re conscious of it, and by the way, don’t play dumb, that you and I know that there are still some good and decent girls left. I’d also like to tell you that I want to see your medical degree before I die, Jorge, because I feel like I’m dying, and I’ve been waiting for many years to see you become a professional, do you understand me?

—Yes, mom. I only have a subject left, and I’m going to get my degree, I swear, but don’t talk to me about your death because I can’t stand it. I still can’t get over the loss of my dad and you tell me these things... Please, don’t bring this subject up again!

His mother, lighting a cigarette and looking at him in the eyes, told him:

—Son, reality is reality, and it’s