I remember my father used to say that colors were trapped inside form.  Limited, imprisoned, suffocated within the limits of the objects they inhabited.

 

Would this be a curious form of faith?

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Isn’t that what happens to the soul, trapped inside the mortal body, according to most religions?

 

My father came from a Jewish family.  However, my grandmother had abandoned all religious practice in her youth.  My father never attended temples of any faith, he adhered to Socialist and Marxist doctrine.  Beyond atheism, simply, the religious idea, did not occupy his thoughts or concerns.

 

But in 1990 something terrible happened.  My grandmother’s body was found in a state of decomposition in a hotel in Buenos Aires.

When my father was informed, he traveled immediately from Cordoba to bury her.  His gas station mates pooled some money to buy him a plane ticket.

 

(I remember this was his first and only plane trip.  Later my father mentioned that the clouds he saw from above, seemed to be, at that moment, the most devastating landscape he had ever witnessed).

 

I remember when he returned he told us he had found his mother’s body “with eyelids painted blue.”

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Was his devastating impression, of the blue color of my dead grandmother, what triggered an obsession with color?