Carlos Fentanes

Conversations with Virgin Mary

I’m in Milwaukee right now. We developed a new cashbox, safer and easier to handle, and we’re about to test it in ten buses as a pilot project.

During the past week, I received several rejection letters: from the ELY Center in New Haven, from E-Flux, the art magazine, and from the ABS Digital Art Prize.

But I don’t really know if those are bad news or good news.

After all, rejection means I am still applying, still testing ideas, still insisting.

I submitted a conceptual monument impossible to build, a digital artwork, ballpoint pen drawings. Different techniques, different art hubs, different audiences — all approached with the seriousness and rigor they deserve.

So yes, perhaps it was simply a bad week.

But I am still alive. Still experimenting. And, strangely enough, that experimentation is one of the few things keeping me alive.

The situation with my mother is not good.

There is no cure for Parkinson’s, and my sister — whom I prefer to call my former sister — is not helping.

I am not asking that she become my mother’s caretaker. Not at all. I only wish she would stop worrying her, stop complaining in front of her as if my mother had become an obstacle to her own fulfillment.

My mother did not want to go to my sister’s house for Mother’s Day.

She is afraid.

Afraid that one day my sister will decide to place her in a nursing home.

So no, I still do not know how to handle the situation with my mother, and receiving a pile of rejection letters at the same time does not exactly produce a state of nirvana.

I have postponed my next drawing.

Now I have an idea that I think might work, but it would move me away from my previous body of work. I seem to be in a transition period — with my mother, with my art, perhaps with myself.

Before coming to Milwaukee, I visited Jorge.

He prepared a cold brew coffee for the road and handed me an envelope.

“A letter from Virgin Mary.”

He told me she had asked him personally to give it to me.

“That you need it right now.”

The coffee helped keep me awake during the drive. I made the trip almost straight through — nearly twelve hours from home to the hotel, interrupted only by stops for food and brief moments of rest.

I did not open the envelope until the next morning, after I had slept and felt ready to understand whatever message had traveled all the way from Jorge to Milwaukee.

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Monday, August 6^th

The bus stop is an imaginary point. It doesn’t really exist. It is a spot in the middle of nowhere.

Why was it placed exactly where it is right now? Why there and not fifty meters further north?

There is no mathematical formula, no scientific law capable of determining the precise position of every bus stop in a city and making perfect logic out of it.

Of course, there is data. Endless amounts of data. Information about where people go, where they come from, where they board, where they disappear. Then a group of experts gathers all those numbers, bylaws, maps, traffic studies, and street reports and feeds them into a black box.

And after all that, someone still decides mostly by feeling.

Someone traces a route across the city almost the same way an ancient sailor once traced invisible paths across the ocean.

And then they decide: Here. This is where people will wait. And then by I don’t know what God design you are waiting there.

Welcome to the Nowhere land.

A bus stop is one of the few remaining places where strangers still publicly do nothing together.

It is a place in between. It is not your starting point, and it is not your destination.

Bus stops are spaces designed entirely for waiting, hesitation, transition, and temporary coexistence.

A liminal place, a place that exist between one state and another. It is not home. It is not work. It is not arrival.

It is suspension.

And waiting there long enough can make you understand the relativity of time. A seven-minute wait in winter can become metaphysical.

Every rider performs tiny acts of faith: believing the bus exists, believing it will arrive, believing the schedule, believing the city still functions, believing movement is still possible.

The bus stop suddenly is our own Schrödinger box, uncertain whether we truly exist or are merely passing thoughts inside somebody else’s commute.

There is always a moment of doubt.

A moment when you wonder whether you will arrive at your destination at all. Or when.

Waiting for your ride beside strangers with whom you share no affinities, no history, no future.

Perhaps this small glass shelter is only a temporary chapel where your faith is being tested before the next part of the journey begins.

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“Nowhere” and “Now Here” share the same letters in the same order.

I don’t know when I understood that this is where I was supposed to be — waiting, uncertain, present. But I think it started two years ago, after my father died, when the silence he left behind became the loudest thing I’d ever heard.

I’m still in this crystal chapel. Still waiting.

But I’ve decided which bus I’m taking.