Still I Miss You

by Inês Pedrosa

  You suffered so much, in the torturous marathon of passion. Show me how to suffer. Show me a pain that does not fade, that can gleam in the furrow of my tears once those tears have dried, that can leave a heaviness on the table where my head rested in despair. Show me the gentleness of that despair where past and future joys seethe, the splendor of mortal ecstasy. Show me your death, which in life I knew so little about.

  15

  There are some insignificant-seeming things we never forget. I was quite young, and that couple was, for me, the very picture of happiness. I was at that age when it’s still possible to live happily ever after. They were radiant. Like they lived in a Gershwin song—rhythm, energy, color. I spent happy hours just watching them, wondering whether I’d ever enjoy that kind of harmony. I knew it wasn’t likely—people know when they’re misfits, even at twenty years old. They were the only married couple I knew—the only young married couple, I mean. They had a delightful son, interesting professions—she was a paleographer, he a psychiatrist. They didn’t argue. They laughed a lot, about everything, about nothing. On the weekends, their house was always full of lively conversations. And one night, as we were going back down in the elevator, one of my colleagues said, “You know them pretty well, so spill: Is it true he likes boys and she likes girls and their marriage is a sham, a sort of secret deal they’ve made?”

  The significant moments of my life didn’t come back to me in the hour of my death. But now, floating in this nolus, my spirit, hungry for trivialities, takes pleasure in recalling these phrases, phrases I was never able to understand. Expressions of ingratitude, I think. How many similar things have I said, without realizing it? Because the opacity of evil is inside us. An unwitting wall in our hearts. We never see the harm we do, only the harm done to us. I know you always defended ingratitude as the invincible driving force of life on earth, but I never understood why. What the mechanism was. That understanding eludes me still, in the starry night from which I’m watching you, asking your forgiveness. I was so ungrateful toward you. I watch you now in the hope of discovering, at an unbridgeable distance from everything I was, the root of that wind that carried you so far from me. You were so ungrateful toward yourself. Toward your memory of me.

  You were the first image in my brief death reel. I was rising in the hot-air balloon, when the light started melting and I heard your voice. You were saying, “Don’t run away, Tink.” We lived in Neverland, where people don’t grow up so they never die. You laughed and assigned me the piercing dejection of a jealous fairy. “Don’t run away, Tink.” You said it really slowly, and then you were running across a field of blood, your slow feet fighting the wine-colored mud. And I wanted to tell you my name isn’t Tink. I wanted to tell you my name, but I didn’t have a voice anymore.

  15

  I tried many times to shut off one body in another, the banal trajectory of human nights. But I remember one particular occasion when I failed. I was with this beautiful woman, the opposite of the one I was trying to forget. She wasn’t even really a person—she was a lounge chair. With features so perfect you forgot them even as you gazed at them. She looked like she was right out of a drawing handbook; the other one, the one I couldn’t forget, had a gap between her front teeth, a slight strabismus, a hooked nose reminiscent of birds of prey.

  They say beauty corrupts. For me, it is a blank canvas, innocent absence. I’ve met a lot of men like that, who are moved most by flaws. The women I’ve loved were an active violence against the principles of aesthetic harmony. As were the houses.

  My mother’s house. An overpowering odor of ripe apples, jam, red velvet, dented frames where sepia eyes closed to the mystery of life. They never smiled in those old-time portraits, with the snow of the Hungarian winters beyond the windowpanes, and the velvets and silver candlesticks. Moments of solemn posterity, staged to dazzle the unimaginable future.

  Back then, the future was everything that exceeded the imagination. Now, the future doesn’t exist; time was swapped out for space, where everything that was converges with everything that will be. That’s called being contemporary. Living in the postmodern assumption of the infinite present, understanding everything without truly knowing anything. And you wanted to teach history, kid. One day, one of your students told you that all history is fiction so there was no point in outlining the phases of the Industrial Revolution. “All right. So it’s also a fiction that I’m here at this moment looking at you, waiting for an answer. Get out.” You had no patience for sophistry. You were exasperated by rhetoric. And you found half-truths unbearable. You were candor personified.

  The plains of Alentejo looked like a child’s drawing. A felted, undulating green sprinkled with red, white, and yellow dots. It was the first day of spring and we were on our way to Mértola with a five-year-old girl, the daughter of a friend of yours who was in mourning. The child asked us to stop and swim in a blue lake amid the green. We stopped, and you undressed the girl, put on the bathing suit you always carried in the car (“You never know when you’re going to come across a good place to swim”), and strode into the freezing water with the girl clinging to you.

  “Is my father up in the sky?” the girl asked as she dried off in the sun.

  You reassured her that he was.

  “All alone?”

  You explained that, no, her father was with her grandfather and with your parents, who were dead too, playing cards. And watching over all of us down here. Then the girl wanted to play ball and then she fell down and got hurt, and you made up a story with cats, bats, and ghosts that made her laugh again. You were great at making up children’s stories, with lots of adventures, excellent good guys, and terrible bad guys who ended up dying or coming over to the good side.

  It used to devastate you that people were unable to inhabit a solid, unbreakable goodness. For example, you gave the little five-year-old girl’s mother money, a lot of money, to build a darkroom so she could become a photographer. Then you hounded all the gallery owners in Lisbon to set up an exhibition for her. You suggested a topic: street children. You pulled every string at your disposal to make sure the exhibition was a major event: politicians, actors, TV anchors. And then she thanked her husband (who’d died of an overdose), her daughter, and the gallery owner for the inspiration. Not a word about you. Oh, my dear. You never learned to give for the mere joy of being able to give. For the divine power of standing outside to observe, with an intimate, omnipotent pleasure, the multimedia spectacle of human greatness and disaster.

  I imagine you must have been hurt by our mutual friends’ indifference to our breakup. They made no effort, however half-hearted, to get us back together. The friends you’d introduced me to said we weren’t made for each other after all. That it had been clear from the start. One of them in particular started inundating me with little gifts, phone calls, messages. We called her Fish Stick after the foodstuff she used as a rhetorical flourish: “And as to that, fish sticks.” One night you called me under the pretext of letting me know that a former colleague of yours at the university was getting divorced, having found her husband in bed with another man. Then you repeated that joke about how a modern woman prefers the Big Bad Wolf to Prince Charming because he sees her clearly, hears her even better, and finishes things off by eating her. Ten minutes earlier, I’d gotten an identical phone call from Fish Stick, who’d anticipated each and every one of your words without ever mentioning you. I didn’t say anything, obviously. Why hurt you, when I was no longer able to soothe your pain? When even your retorts were gentler on me than you were?

  Our friends were relieved when we split up. You were getting close to power; you’d become an employment agency with a bright neon sign, and they wanted all the jobs for themselves. And I was a bachelor, ideal for emergency exits. Or as bait for indifferent boyfriends. Apart, we were much more useful for the group of eccentric friends we’d assembled than we were together as lovers, glittering and dangerous. The people we’d created needed to kill us in orde
r to survive. And we let ourselves be killed, because it’s in love’s nature to silently shatter, splinter into shards of glass that weigh on our hearts until death pieces it back together.

  16

  “Faith prevents us from living,” you used to say. “It postpones all pleasure into the future—that’s why the poor find it so useful.” But how can we imagine pleasure without faith? When my parents died, I decided God was laughing at me and turned my back on him. The priest who buried them talked only about sin. Hell and contrition. The aunt and uncle who took me in told me my mother and father were in heaven watching over my future, and I became furious at those mute parents who’d left me in the solitary night, interrogating the stars. I never heard them, just like you don’t hear what I’m saying to you now. But God’s smile touched me, proving, in its swinging back and forth, that they were there, somewhere, in the blackness. And it seemed to me that the trick to existence was to look for voices in the night—a night whose tail sweeps along the bottom of the sea and through the interior of the earth, a night that the sun’s white vapor opens only a little more. So I fell in love with books—with the night that invades us in them, when we open them, with the night that resists us in them, after we’ve read them, reread them, and shut them. With the night that continues, indefatigable, between the words, ownerless words, written from absence to absence.

  16

  Most of the time, people lie to protect us. When I asked about you, nobody had seen you. If I ran into you with one of our friends, it was just a coincidence, pure chance. We always think the world’s much bigger than it really is. We always think too much—except you. That’s what you used to say: “Stop thinking. You end up not understanding anything at all.”

  An innocent passion—inexhaustible. A sky that the blue didn’t abandon, fastened there by the force of justice. You loved friendship with a bodyguard’s devotion. Friendship solved the ephemeral arbitrariness of love. Silly girl. As if it were possible to explain the pleasure I felt in looking at your tousled hair dancing down your back.

  You didn’t want to change the world; you wanted a perfect world in which affections were as solid as houses. But houses die too. What would you do when you discovered that the world never actually changes, or at least never changes the way you want it to?

  The blue sky changes to pink, orange; soon it will be black again. This is the excruciating hour, that time of day when the dead smell alive again before becoming a little more dead. I miss you. I see you walk past the café on the corner of my block, where I never came with you. I often see you at this time of evening. There are so many girls who look like you, and none of them is you. I see you in the mirror beside me, in my eyes, which look like yours, even in my habit of seeking out mirrors. “I spend my days imagining / Your shadow walking / From across the sea / On the other side of my sun / I thought I already knew everything / About this vast, tiny love / Contents and container / Far-flung as a lighthouse beacon.” That faith you used to talk about is entangling me now, gnawing at me, in the banal despair of the songs where you now dwell.

  17

  I know you can’t hear me. If you could, for starters, you’d choose another photo—I look so ridiculous in the one currently gracing your bedside table. I’m laughing too much—I’m all teeth, and I’m wearing an awful blouse with garish polka dots. I always had a complex about how skinny I was; I tried everything to put on some curves. But you liked to take pictures of me from the worst angles, in the worst situations—with my mouth full, coming out of the bathroom, with my hair standing on end, or recently awakened, bleary-eyed. When we’d go to the opera and I’d put on my best dress, you never took any pictures, not even when I asked. “Call a photographer from Hola magazine,” you’d tell me. “Uptight princesses aren’t in my wheelhouse.”

  You remember me, which is another type of listening—the only one, probably. Why is it that you remember me only now? Would I have had parents if they hadn’t died? When I was a teenager, all of my friends complained about their parents, tried to get away from them. I wanted to hold on to everything. I lived every moment deeply anxious about the future—and look how my future turned out. I can’t let go of that future I never had, made up of recollections of the imagined past. Now that you have a photo of me at your bedside, even if it’s a bad one, I can leave you behind a little bit.

  17

  I thought I’d sleep better away from home. I sought the refuge of my childhood abode, which you never visited. But I can’t get away from you. Everything is touched by you. You’re in everything—night that’s black or flooded with day, mountains, night of mine, night of ours, night of your absent arms. Think. Build a logical barricade of words against the terrible imagination of life. Organize memory on shelves, little toy cars boxed up for other little hands, other toys. Slough you off the way I slough off the heat in these ocean waves where quiet dreams of my adolescence sparkle. Recall myself before you—but you won’t let me.

  You rise up through my life with that abyssal laugh of yours. “My story’s got to have a happy ending,” you’d say, back when you still believed you could ward off death with words. “That’s not in fashion, I know. It’s easier to drift in the immediacy of sadness than to rend it until joy is disfigured. I’m sick of this world of aesthetes.” You used to say that sort of stuff, prodding me just to see me buck. You won. I’ve become addicted to the joy of being with you, hunched over your words, burning for the first time with desire for your inexistent body. You won, Tink. Here you have me, agog and impatient, reconstructing the missing you in photographs, the conversations that perhaps we never had.

  18

  I’m looking for friendship that will make me happy. Saying it like that, it sounds laughable, and for good reason—friendship alone can’t make a person happy. Nor can love. And if we succeeded in being completely happy, what would be left to desire? In any case, I was happy when there were four of us living together: me, Teresa, Silver Tongue (her boyfriend at the time), and Pascoal. It was like I was living in a children’s story, the kind with three little pigs or seven dwarves, a small group that may squabble a lot but knows how to defend itself against a treacherous world. I believed in tribes back then. But the nest fell apart, slowly disappeared, leaving only a few tufts of cotton between my fingers—things that cannot be seen or snuffed out.

  “I want to draw warmth. What does warmth look like?” Lia’s daughter asked at two and a half. Corália had become “Lia” in an effort to leave behind not just her name but her origins. I was already protecting her back when we were in high school—first perched above her on the tender pedestal of pity, and later in genuine tribute to her faded plaid skirt. Students were no longer required to wear uniforms, the economy was booming, and American jeans were all the rage. But all Corália had was that pleated skirt, and she strode heroically across the schoolyard every day, trampling the girls’ scorn and the boys’ unwary blindness.

  I need to find Lia, I need to say good-bye to Teresa, I need to hug the people who used to know how to be loved by me, all those who allowed themselves to be imagined by the precipice, fugitive creatures whose leaving made my shadow longer. Does some shadow of me fall across their lives?

  I lean against the door of the house where I left my dead soul that day, thinking I was just leaving my flesh. The door of the house where a hundred times love held me, disguised as sex. There it is, lying on the floor where it started killing me, many years before my death.

  18

  You could have found yourself a widower who had his shit together. Somebody who’d be remembered afterward for the luminosity of his longing. When my friend Alexandre’s wife died, he quietly asked me, his voice deflated, “Why doesn’t death ask first, ‘Can I take this person, or should I take somebody else?’ I’d have told it to take me instead.”

  Alexandre’s wife died of leukemia. He was a doctor and lied to her, confident that his faith in that lie would work the miracle of transforming it. Actually, there was no such t
hing as Alexandre’s wife; it was Alexandre who was her husband, spouse of the painter who founded the neobaroque school and for whom love was not a singular noun but a plural one. If Alexandre had died first, his wife would have mourned him, painted him, and then forgotten him. But Alexandre lived off her blood, that unstable, fragile, over-the-top blood.

  If death had asked me, I swear I would have begged it to take me instead of you. But I don’t have the right to tell anybody that. Least of all you.

  If God exists, he’s one of those real snotty novelists—that I can tell you. The super-schematic kind who fires characters into whatever hole the market surveys have deemed most lucrative. That God of yours has gotten fat off the misery he’s doled out to his unlucky characters—you should see them in Fátima, on their hands and knees, paying alms for the rare graces His Excellency grants them to keep their faith alight. You used to say that these crawling people, almost always women, live happily, in a restlessness of faith: “They are certain the Virgin Mary will intercede in the highest divine proceedings. Because she was a mother and saw her son crucified. Because they identify with her tears. Because she’s beautiful and radiant as they have been and will be, throughout eternity.”