Still I Miss You

by Inês Pedrosa

  I always lived in theory, afraid of the black voids between flashes—much more so than you. And that’s how we are still—I, the daughter of a slovenly God, and you, a fervent devotee of unthinkable distances. I can’t think without you. I slip through the spongy walls of death and find you orphaned—you can’t love without me.

  We were made for each other. We coincided even as we rejected coincidence, with the peevishness typical of the impoverished, confined in the prison of their penury. We were made for each other and never figured it out, choosing instead to respect the protocols of our time, to prioritize the urgent voice of the body. We were made for each other another way—a way that was dark, dense, transcendent. What could we, slaves to the Supreme Intelligence, know of transcendence? How could we, illustrious servants of history, grasp the tremulous light of the small miracle granted to us? Every morning I leaped from the sheets like a flame. I was going to eradicate human brutality. I was going to do away with the banality of evil. And I was going to do away, truth be told, with my own painful anonymity. I left the earth without ever getting it any closer to being free of savagery, but my God faults me only for the inadequacy of my love for you.

  Immortality is irrelevant. From this side of death, it’s mortality that shines: knowing that I was mortal gave mass and color to the stones that paved my path; because I was mortal, the moon reminded me of love and mystery, and my desire to persist into the future trembled in the star-flooded sky. Mortality, which only human beings know, is the only incomprehensible substance there is. The dizzying disorientation of mortality led me to teaching: groups of eager-eyed youths arrayed before me in a succession reminiscent of wispy clouds on a summer night. Until you appeared, with your assortment of ages all rolled into one, and restored my nearly depleted youth.

  6

  There’s a sort of ethical energy at funerals. A desire for goodness that flings stardust in people’s eyes and snuffs out little everyday resentments. Tomorrow we’ll go back to envying one another. Bad-mouthing our neighbors behind their backs. Betraying close friends in business meetings. Being nice only once in a while. But tomorrow you won’t be here to cry out that it’s the once-in-a-while that matters. You won’t be here to wipe the dust off humanity and make those souls shine again. What is a soul—can you tell me that? You used to toss your head back and intone theatrically, authentically, “The soul is a vice.” “Those aren’t your words, they’re Fanny Owen’s in Dona Agustina’s novel,” I’d remind you. You’d shrug and laugh: “Sure, but that sentence changed my life. And the things that transform us belong to us, you jerk, whether you like it or not.” And then, to annoy you, I’d decline that noun in the key of north flat: “The soul is a slice, the soul is a price, the soul is fried rice . . .” You’d run your fingers through your hair and sigh: “All that too, yes, even if you don’t dare acknowledge it.” Did you once tell me I was the echo of your soul, or am I making things up now?

  When things stop, they change. The simple fact of ceasing to be changes them, however much we try to make them stay the same. I’d love to have tapes of our conversations, movies of the walks we took. But when I watched the recording later, I’d be somebody else. Somebody else pondering an image that was no longer me, that was no longer you, only an aura—the aura that films manufacture, light cast by what no longer is, by what we now never were, even if we once had been. The final montage of Annie Hall that you loved as if it were your own life—and it was your life, the fervent, chaotic life you dreamed of at fourteen; the avid, energetic life you built like a castle from scattered LEGOs. That montage was at once the apotheosis and the negation of the film itself, because the only love that endures is that of dark apotheoses, a love that can’t stand montages. Silly girl. Go on and laugh at me now, a castaway from you, adrift on my own brain. It’s got woodworm, my brain does, and nothing sticks. Pascoal gives me a long hug and apologizes for not having hurdled the barrier of your aloofness to save you. I tell him, “There wasn’t anything you could do, forget about it.”

  And I’m angry at myself. So angry that I get angry at him in order to survive. We do so many stupid things to survive—if you only knew. You didn’t want to know; you wanted to see the firefighters who save people, the Mandelas who resist, the young military officers who hand us carnation-shaped freedom and then head home. Where others counted knife wounds, you’d tally up kind gestures. Ever sensible, you were wary of heroes who were propped up by the press or swathed in exotic robes. Not even in the ferment of adolescence did you get swept up in romanticized views of terrorists designed to supplant Russian chauffeurs in the hearts of thrill-seeking rich girls. You always had a gift for seeing things clearly, that rare gift known, with a disdain proportional to its rarity, as common sense.

  And so, nonsensically, I direct my anger toward the gentle eyes of your friend who had a premonition and could not save you. If he’d just called me, damn it. I’d have gone looking for you—but no, I wouldn’t have, because I never believed in premonitions. Still don’t—they’re always in hindsight, calling attention to the enlightened party after the misfortune has already taken place. I don’t believe in anything, actually, except what you used to call “goodness” and I, allergic to the whiff of churchiness that abstract nouns give off, preferred to call “the possibility of human renewal.”

  Yes, we shared a view of the world that scornful cynics find overly optimistic. For every act of horror, we found infinite acts of love. Our shared passion for history led us to human generosity: in the shadow of every dictator, we found a throng of democrats; in the creases of each massacre, thousands of lives devoted to other people’s happiness. The sowers of horror were always a minority—an effective minority, sure, but one that grows in exact proportion to people’s belief in their power. And the two of us refused to believe. That persistent refusal was, for us, a war against the propagandistic expansion of terror. You saw Christ in everybody, while I simply saw the person in everybody. Which was exactly the same thing, apart from your prayers and my conviction that bloodshed is sometimes necessary.

  Are you praying for me now? “Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here . . .” Is it possible? Even though you know I’d happily wring your God’s neck if it would bring you back to life. Is it possible? Live by the sword, die by the sword. You reap what you sow. Is it possible? Are you catching my drift here, in the jungle tongue of the vox populi you loved so much?

  You’re just a photo beside my insomnia now. A memory that, like all memories, is mostly about what never existed. With this photograph, I am forgetting you. Meticulously, every time I strive to retain you, and so I am beginning to invent you. Everything in you has wings now—your laughter, your footsteps. Even the few sentences of yours that I recall contain a rustling of feathers. And I slip into this too-human loneliness of not knowing how to be alone again, the way I was when you still existed, in this very city, and I didn’t even think about you anymore.

  7

  It’s three thirty in the morning, according to your clock. On this August night, you’re sitting in front of the TV watching the latest Rolling Stones concert. One day, to your great horror, I compared the Stones’ music to Vergílio Ferreira’s books: they’d both dedicated their whole lives to exacerbating the ache of adolescence. In his late fifties, Mick Jagger maintains the posture, the energy, the frenetic movement of an uninhibited teenager. It is what it was, but even more so—and that image-driven discipline, rather than being pathetic, produces a curious model of rigor and integrity. The other Stones look like old birds wrapped in peacock feathers—but in young people they inspired the notion of rebellious old age. Mick was pure fury, sex and innocence in cold combustion—and he still is.

  You were pre-Stones, and you laughed. You told me my obsession with that group of ill-mannered men only revealed my youth. You were right, and that’s why the Rolling Stones still exist: because they feed on the most fleeting of all mortalities and reproduce it, gesture by gesture, unto
exhaustion. Like Vergílio’s writing—singing and re-creating the voracious persistence of beauty, dismantling ugliness’s erotic core.

  Of course there’s an unquenchable desert of differences between all things—but why did you insist on focusing on that desert instead of seeking communion with works of art? I was annoyed by your erudition—life, for you, was a museum of contrasts. And look at you now, seduced by the Mick Jagger of eternal youth, seduced by me, in the foggy mirror of time. The shadow that I am falls over your body, and we shine, a blue glow in the cold of your dawn.

  7

  In the dark living room, the TV is giving off a blue haze that seems to pull you inside. This rush of moving melancholy summons you. Inside the screen, Mick Jagger is leaping around. A man who doesn’t even know you existed, who maybe doesn’t even exist himself beyond this stereophonic image that reminds me of you. “I wanted to see his real eyes and mouth and face, but they weren’t there. They were a diffuse, ineluctable apparition, like the light of the air that can’t be seen and is merely illumination.” Your voice saying those words. What book did you read them in?

  You had a habit of repeating aloud the sentences you found most striking, regardless of how silently other people might be reading other things. I’d muster my best fake smile, saying, “That’s nice, really nice.” And then you’d get excited and rattle out an entire chapter. It was incredibly irritating, in the moment—I was trying to read something else. But later, after you’d left, back when it was possible for you to leave, I’d remember your reading, the husky solemnity of your voice, and I’d smile, staggered by that sudden sweet memory of you.

  8

  I need your life to be infected with the flesh of my death. I need you to be me—not like a son or daughter, no, much more than that. A child is another hypothesis of life—in the best hypothesis, a child is all that we were not. They leave us detritus—blind anguish, impatience, modeling-resistant clay, what we didn’t want to be. We end up loving them wildly to avoid confronting the lack of love from which they are born—our hidden darkness, formed of dead passions and endless frustrations.

  I’ve met a lot of children produced in the fever of reconciliation, conceived in memoriam to yesteryear’s happiness. Others marked the precise apex of passion—the moment of splendor that precedes death. All children are born posthumous to a love that no longer floats in the air they breathe. Attempts, temptations to increase the knowledge of life, when life is known only through the shadowy door of ignorance, of misunderstanding. Of the asymmetrical energies that have made possible that thing we call humanity—detritus of detritus, born of the disequilibrium of matter.

  You used to say my imagination was absurdly combative; I’d retort, unfairly, that I’d rather it be absurdly combative than resignedly hierarchical, like yours. I was fascinated by Chew and Mandelstam’s theory that explained the gradual transformation of the universe via the collision of particles of equal value, and I tried to assess history using that notion of a world of pure differences in confrontation.

  8

  I organized my existence around infatuations. As a result, all love and all victories were permitted to me: I was already dead. I strangled love affairs in the cradle, which had the advantage of making them incandescent—and the disadvantage of making them sterile. No woman offers a child to a man who honestly admits he cannot be relied on. At bottom, that’s what the famous maternal instinct is all about: blood offerings to provoke commitment and guilt in men. When the plan falls through, the human jewel is transformed into a simulacrum of the beloved object—and the child serves as a glorious abandonment of life.

  I once told one woman, “I don’t think I can grow old with you, but I’d like to have a child with you before we break up.” It was a huge declaration of love, but my lover was unmoved by my sincerity; she packed her bags and took off the next day. That saintly woman had tried for three years to convert me to conjugality. She’d accidentally leave her shampoo in my bathtub. I’d return it to her, smiling broadly, the next time we saw each other. She’d ask permission to leave a spare shirt in my wardrobe. She once told me, “I know that deep down you truly need my love.” I replied with the easy stereotypes of your professorial discourse—and I hadn’t even met you yet: “Deep-down men are a fantasy that women came up with so they can keep being victims without undermining the advances of contemporary society.”

  And so I ended up an involuntary orphan of the child I never had. And I never knew what it would be like to love somebody beyond the brief flame of infatuation. And you, you scamp—I’d almost forgotten about you when you up and died on me.

  And here I am, trapped by the dark memory of your eyes, your leaping footsteps, your stubborn joy that eventually began to make my life too sweet. I can’t focus. I spend my days staring at the words in the books I’m supposed to be reading and can’t manage to process them. And over and over I listen to Pascoal’s song: “The shadow of the clouds on the sea / The wind dancing in the rain / A steaming cup of tea / Everything spoke to me of you / The shadow of the clouds has dropped / The wide sky has cooled / And the wild sea has lost / Its light that came from you.” How long has it been since my heart burned?

  9

  I was always the nostalgic type, especially regarding things that never came to pass. The marvels still to come. You must concentrate on happiness so I can continue to exist there in it with you. You differed from most members of your generation in your love of novelty. History is a school of optimism—despite everything. Fernando Savater used to say he’d have refused to be born prior to the invention of anesthesia, remember?

  The two of us took great pleasure in confirming the ways the world had improved—isn’t life today infinitely more agreeable than during slavery, the Inquisition, or Nazism? Others would argue that slaves, inquisitors, and Nazis, victims and torturers, still exist. But we’d respond, insistent, with this simple truth: they exist, but we’re aware of it. And we’re aware of it because we no longer participate in such savagery. We’re domesticated now—we created laws and rights and strove to make them universal.

  When we looked around, we didn’t see the much-bemoaned erosion of values, except in those who denounced it most vehemently. In our view, the great void lay in consensus stereotypes about a mythical past, Before the Soul’s Fall. As if souls plunged into the water in choreographed simultaneity, dunking their flower wreaths and long legs in Esther Williams–style illuminated tanks. As if the soul were not a vice, and therefore durable, a thing that even the pale Fanny Owen could, in classic Dona Agustina fashion, unveil. As if “the void” had not been, since time immemorial, what panicked people have called the blossoming of the new, now returned anew.

  So there’s an international network of Hawkers of Dead Values—High Authorities of this and that. They get cars, offices, and sky-high salaries for dictating the limits of morality. Their thinking coincides with that of those who pay them, yet they consider themselves genuinely innocent and free. But in what other era of history was there so much talk of ethics? What other era saw the establishment of so many organizations working to defend children, the disabled, women, animals, prisoners, people on death row? The philosophy of decline, so in vogue, seemed to us merely the democratic version of the philosophy of dictatorship. A way of pruning creative intelligence: take shelter, my children, the world is ending.

  Not a day goes by, in these years at millennium’s end, that one of these Great Creators doesn’t declare, standing before a euphoria of cameras and an eager audience, that literature, cinema, theater, or painting is at death’s door. I see them solemnly captaining the epic shipwreck of their enlightened posterities. I slip into the steamy air of a café in late afternoon and encounter a woman of about forty-five, sapped by the endless effort to appear no more than twenty-five, who lights a cigarette and says, “Oh, young people these days don’t fall in love the way we used to.” Twenty years before her, another woman of about forty-five, much older looking because surgery hadn�
�t yet made such strides, will have said, “Oh, we used to fall in love much deeper than these young people today.”

  The two of us never talked like that: Oh, back in our day; oh, young people. We never let ourselves get suckered into a retouched version of that ancient ideology that mistakes transformation for degeneration. I wanted, still want, to find meaning, stitch together stories, turn history into an intelligible sea—and you scold me, with good reason, a reason that always falls short of this impossible science I am groping toward.

  If voices could be displayed like the clothing in the fashion ads you loved so much, you would make up the entire catalog of masculine tones all on your own. You open every vowel to the utmost frivolity, then suddenly clamp them shut and whistle out s’s like feral cobras. After that, you delve deep into your body to find the slow melody of emotions, which you wave in opaque scintillations over your paper eyes. Thus intermittently illuminated, your eyes shatter the full list of the characters you have lived. You drape your voice over the words in a thousand veils, because you know that discourse fails—a grain of vanity, two drops of falsehood, a modicum of modesty. “Screw it,” you said. “Whatever,” you said. “You’ve wrung so much out of life, kid, you’ve ended up getting wrung out yourself. Now there’s not much left of you.” The words made a brutal contrast with your Italian silk scarves. They deceive and soothe, words do. Like silk.