The Perfect Circle

by Pascale Quiviger

  I hear the last night passing over our motionless skins and your insomniac body watching over us in silence. Hold me in your arms all night, the bedroom was blue and the window open, through the sheer curtain the stars took on impossible dimensions, and you even got up to check that we were still on earth. I hear your voice saying half the words and in spite of everything, the words alight on my heart. I hear very clearly the last night drawing to a close, with no respect for my distress, I hear the rooster’s cry make a sound like crystal, I hear the wool of the blankets slipping, reptilian, I hear your eyes open when I open mine, your eyes wide open, your eyes never closed, your eyes that since the night before haven’t stopped looking at the huge star sewn into the fabric of the curtain. I hear myself tell you that I want to be in your arms, and I hear you tell me that I’ve spent the night there, and I hear you growing old while I zip my suitcase, I barely touch my pain with my fingertips, I entrust myself to time. That morning, like all other mornings, smelled of rosemary, dew and dust.

  You told me: “I knew I’d lose you, the way I lost the dogs before you.You’re right. I have to learn to let all of you go. One day maybe you’ll come back this way, we’ll be old and it won’t matter, what matters is that we have recognized each other.”

  THE GREAT HAPPINESS

  Shortly before I left, a woman had knocked on the garden gate. She was dressed in turquoise silk with no underwear: a febrile, slightly scattered woman whom I’d met by chance and invited, without really thinking she’d come, to drop in for tea in the empty house. I had no tea to offer her, I gave her a glass of water, and we sat in a square of sunlight.With no introduction whatsoever she told me about a friend of hers who’d spent years doing nothing but walk. What does he do? He walks.What do you do? Me? I walk. He doesn’t have a house. He eats whatever he finds — hazelnuts, apples, peaches, mushrooms. When she’s in the area, she locates him by tracking the plants of mint whose leaves he’s eaten. He eats what he finds when he finds it, whether he’s hungry or not. In summer, he sleeps under trees or in caves, in winter he squats in a house of which some unknown person always leaves one wing open. Before, he also played music, he still carves flutes sometimes. Apparently he never lacks for anything.

  What a pointless life, how dirty he must be. Psychiatrists would surely have a suitable diagnosis.

  And then you wonder if the man really does live a marginal life or if, on the contrary, he’s at the centre of things. At the centre of the necessary mint. Without the fear of loss that is associated with owning. Then you wonder where you are yourself.You realize that you’d forgotten the fabulous coincidence of the mushroom given, the natural connection between the need to eat and the fact of finding some edible growths on the ground. Generosity, in the end, cannot be a coincidence.The mushroom grows because he’ll come along to pick it. It’s for him that the cave is empty, that the wing of a house is open, for him as well that the apple made the nonchalant effort to become an apple. Everything is in order. He asks no one for anything, neither money nor lodging nor work: nothing. He takes the things that are offered him, they are no more his than another’s, they are there, that’s all: there’s an apple, I’m hungry, I take it, it’s neither fair nor unfair that it comes to me, it comes to me, basta. The anonymity of living things is a fundamental fact. He doesn’t take, he recognizes. Recognizes the apple in its vocation of apple and himself in his own hunger. He is in the order of things.

  He represents a rare, essential, anonymous witness. Of what? Of nothing. Precisely. His life is devoid of all the things that fill our lives, yet it goes on. It is something that, compared with useful activities, always risks being forgotten. It is the possibility, stubbornly postponed, of being merely one’s existing self.As if living were enough to make one alive. As if humans were asked to do nothing but honour the unassuming offerings of nature.

  Nothing else is asked for.

  Extreme asceticism speaks a terrifying truth for those of us who work so that we won’t die tomorrow; it’s that we won’t die tomorrow in any case. It’s that in any case, even if we were to die tomorrow, it would be another trivial event in the order of things.We should keep going with an animal trust in life’s resolute affection for itself.There will be food and there will be drink.

  It’s a truth that is as ample and light as the turquoise woman sitting with her glass of water, yet a heavy truth too, because it collides with acquired knowledge, with the surreal, contradictory, terrifying collage of prescriptions for being. Our convictions weave a net and when we try to free ourselves from it, in many cases the effort itself becomes part of the weave.Which is normal.There’s no precise rule about existence.That walking man undermines the work we do every minute, he makes us suspect that maybe there’s no charge for the fact of being alive. Terrifying: there may be no other meaning for existence but the simple fact of existing. A grandiose fact. A miracle repeated unobtrusively by every springtime on earth, by every morning. To owe nothing to life and, for that very reason, owe it everything, that is to say: owe it life itself.

  After she’s told the story of the man who walks, the turquoise woman puts down her glass, stands up, and says goodbye; she’s going to catch a train that will take her home, to Rome, where she teaches Latin to teens.

  We humans have struggled against the progress of time. We have looked at nature and even though he has seen evidence, we have succumbed to the temptation of the malignant Eternity that is defined negatively, that is the opposite of becoming; we have succumbed to the temptation of the Certainty which helps us neither to love nor to die, rather helps us forget the sadness implicit in both love and death. And there we are, incapable of a faith that has no need of Certainty and Eternity.Yet true faith is blind, which is its virtue and its great beauty. In that sense, it is a form of love, love being nothing but a sudden gathering of strength in preparation for absolute risk. Love is blind, by definition. Love, by definition, is a journey courageously aimed in the direction of uncertainty. When this Certainty appears to protect us from the fall, love is on the decline.

  True eternity is not a duel with becoming. It is conditional to the passage of time, and, to gain access to it, one need only place an empty chair in the path of things, so that it can sit down and, while seated, open the peace and quiet that belongs to it. It would be enough to expect nothing from it, it would even be enough not to wait for it, since waiting would mean making it disappear again behind the time that is so obviously passing. Eternity would be that of being present to oneself. Not to oneself as a closed and suspicious entity, but like winter, like the lake, like the feather. Eternity would be nothing but the fruit of a true presence.

  You restored to me a childhood still intact in spite of what school and work had made of it.You restored a childhood of games and astonishment, the childhood that accepts from the outset everything it sees, because what it sees astonishes it, and astonishment gives it pleasure without excess. Our bed was that empty chair where eternity came to settle, and precisely because I knew that I’d have to leave soon, tomorrow, because our time would be brief, eternity came and sat on the chair, came to tell me when I was crumbling and bereft of my own language: take a good look at him, he has always been there, you loved him in advance, and after you leave, he’ll be there always, you won’t stop loving him.

  There was the art of presence, you were its prince and you taught it to me in secret when I thought I was waiting for you.That waiting for you which caused me so much suffering held a promise that unlike ordinary promises didn’t need a future.There was faith. My awareness of it was sudden and abrupt, though the faith was very ancient; a prehistoric faith, a faith forever young in our surprising story, once upon a time there was a faith that took on your voice to knock on my door and when, blind, I opened it, I understood at the same time that I’d lost you and that nothing is ever lost, that everything accompanies us in the madness of love. Since that time, since all times at once, I have been my own life, which is to say, the universe. I follow in
the footsteps of an absence that love forces me to examine head-on, and where I find, when I am strong enough, the great beauty of poems that no one can write.

  I’ve changed the time on all the clocks, it’s spring now in my country. I prefer that feast to the feast of your language, which surprises me, pleases me.Your name has gone back to being the name of a man. Truth escapes from it. I have walked on words written as if they were stones, I didn’t know how broad was the water to be crossed, the shore is close now, I’m surprised. I arrive home, I forget nothing about you, without you I remember everything, and holding that memory in my hands I see that they’ve stopped shaking. My faith has followed me. Perhaps it arrived at night, entered surreptitiously, it is there in front of me as I write these lines, it points to the edges of the sidewalk where the snow opened onto the long-awaited soil.

  I have not stopped loving you. I don’t intend to stop loving you.You’re busy elsewhere. It’s April, you walk your dogs earlier and earlier.You rarely think about me. It’s chilly. All is well.You don’t even have a cold. Soon you’ll shave your beard. My country is vast, I dream every night. I have lost you. I’m relieved. I won’t have to lose you again. I won’t have to step again into the dizziness of that loss, in whose depths stuffed ducks and dogs that look like snowballs are playing. I am here.

  My body taken away from your body, my soul a soul minus yours: I was a subtraction.Today I exist like a prime number, indivisible, alone, on one paw, one, round, three, seven. Eleven, thirteen: you no longer have a hold on the taste of soup.

  I sit in the middle of happiness as if on a hardwood floor that creaks and swells in the sun. I am sitting where the light is at its white centre. In that great happiness there is a great misfortune too. It is like the kernel of happiness. It is the misfortune of life that moves and that by moving causes pain. Happiness asks to move along with life, it requires that perfect circles be broken.

  She sits in the middle of happiness, surprised that she’s been able to travel so far.