The Enigma of Love
Antonio Almas
Translated by Luís Costa
“The Enigma of Love”
Written By Antonio Almas
Copyright © 2017 Antonio Almas
All rights reserved
Distributed by Babelcube, Inc.
www.babelcube.com
Translated by Luís Costa
Cover Design © 2017 Antonio Almas
“Babelcube Books” and “Babelcube” are trademarks of Babelcube Inc.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
The enigma | of | love | António Almas
Reader’s Note
Reader’s Note
Reader’s Note
Reader’s Note
The enigma
of
love
António Almas
Love is transverse to time, for it there are no barriers, limits or preconceptions. For him everything is possible, only because who loves knows that can everything, owes everything and never will be defrauded, when this love is intense and profound as the Universe.
Datasheet
Title: The Enigma of Love
Author: António Almas
Translation: Luis Costa
Edition: Own Edition of
António J. F. Almas
Apartado 111
7160-999 Vila Viçosa – Portugal
Design and Paging: A. Almas
Printing: P.O.D.
ISBN: 978-1-326-65836-6
Legal Deposit: 410236/16
Vila Viçosa, 10 de Junho de 2016
All rights reserved in accordance with the legislation in force
Gabriel during his long life was a lover of the eternal feminine, the Woman was always for him a perdition. As a young man, many young women passed through his life, many were slender, and over the years he learned to curb this insatiable desire for the conquest of women’s love, for the pursuit of perfection. He used to say that the Perfect Woman was a summation of all the women of the Earth, possibly an excuse to continue to venture into the conquest of the eternal feminine.
He married several times, and in his midlife he realized that this diversity of passions were destroying the conception of love that he had been searching for, since childhood. This frequency of love and dismay had destroyed the magic and the essence of what true love was for Gabriel. He had often wondered if it would be a psychological problem, his obsession with the women, he even consulted a psychologist, but couldn’t find a logical explanation for his huge pendency for the desire for conquest in the feminine. He decided to accept himself as he was, and he was reluctant to continue on the clinical side, because the psychologist was a temptation for himself, that cost a lot to come around.
As the years passed, he began to convince himself that only in the world of imagination could he design and build a relationship with which he always dreamed. Real life was too possessive, and all the women who had come across him had something that did not fit his notion of perfect love, or because they were mostly possessive, some because they did not like his gender, others were unattainable, but in general there was always something that ran from the motives for which he had fallen in love with them.
He wrote, drew, and in this relentless quest for a perfect balance, but it was only within himself that woman lived. Even when he fled and took refuge in his world, closed and inaccessible to others, he always ran into one or another woman who detonated his concentration in keeping himself from problems, and again fell into temptation, sinning against all the laws of his eternal love, he thought, it might be this time, but it wasn’t. He died and was born several times, each fall destroyed his world of illusions, at every discovery he drew everything again, dress in his best clothes and plunged blind eyes in love. Many were the weeping tears, the pain of suffering, the disappointment and the desire to disappear from the world, so often fell on the ground begging for divine mercy, a crazy will to not sin again, an astonished desire to die to be reborn another, but it was of no use to him, he had to love and suffer to live. Life brought him to a bed, trapped in a body that no longer had the form of a former, but his well-awakened Soul was now punished by the apathy of days, by the monotony of the ever-changing scene.
The children hired a girl to take care of him, once again, the Woman would be his fate mate until the moment of dying. She was a pretty young woman of medium stature and black hair with pronounced curves, who left once again that poor old man, unable to move, in love with death. She read to him, talked about the world and life, cared for him and was worried about him, and all this led him once again to the dream of thinking that even then, in that state, almost wrapped in the shroud, dreaming about love of the Woman of his dreams.
She wrote to him, little prose, since she could do nothing more, than showing him the immense Soul that inhabited that wrinkled, inert body she already knew.
Luana was twenty-three, had not studied and started looking for a job as soon as she left high school after finishing her junior year. She made some internships, but she had not been able to stay in the places where she had the internships.
One day she decided to put an advertisement on a commercial floor to work as a helper for the elderly and children, even without formation in the area, she was willing to do anything to take the reins of her life and not depend on her parents. After a few weeks she received a phone call from a man asking for information and saying he was interested in hiring her to look after an elderly man who lived alone and was mostly bedridden and with reduced mobility. Luana volunteered and arranged to meet at the house where the old man lived. The young woman was introduced to Gabriel on a September afternoon, the man in his ninety years was bald, had balding skin, had long hands and was thin, was in his room, lying on the bed. The house was small, a ground floor, with a bedroom, a bathroom, a small kitchen and a small room with a fireplace. They agreed on the terms in which the young woman would be working, the lord’s son handed her a key to the house and explained her father’s routines. Luana sympathized with the space and with Mr. Gabriel, who received it very cordially and with a smile. She started working immediately, got her first job and could already dream about her future. In addition to cooking for Gabriel, Luana would help him in his personal hygiene, would also read to him, and set up the house, cleaning and grooming some of his clothes. They talked a lot, Gabriel had been a very traveled person, knew many countries and had a vast experience of life, had been a teacher, and despite the age was a person who tried within the limitations, to continue cultivating his intellect. Luana, who had always liked people with comprehensive general culture, quickly created a very great empathy with Gabriel. He was, in a way, a docile and delicate grandfather, with a very special sensitivity and a way of treating women as it was rarely seen nowadays, a true gentleman. The affectionate needs of this young woman found in this man an almost absolute fulfillment, he flooded the emptiness of a childhood where love was exchanged for difficulties, the hardness of life had left little space to the affections, Luana had pass really bad, slept in the open and made a complex crossing, that made her matured long before the most common of the girls, Gabriel, was wise and observant caught it as early as the first moments of coexistence.
The universe had conjugated here the factors necessary for the complementarity, between help and communion of two people who in a common way would never meet, and would never find themselves interesting, but love has many forms, many ways and many ways of finding those who drink from it.
Gabriel slept a little, spent his time between the bed and the sofa in the living room, with the help of a wanderer, with the vagaries of age. He liked to draw and write, the drawings accompanied him since he was a kid,
the writing discovered it in an overwhelmed passion, which untied his fingers and gave him wings to fly to infinity. He was never a great artist or writer, he published a few works, sold few copies, gave many more, and portfolios, gaining dust and oblivion. Little was written or spoken, it inspired more than it was promoted, and in despite of everything, he realized that its mission had been that, to inspire the next one. Today he only wrote little prose, to occupy the time and to do scribbles in his black cape. The theme was as always, as never before, the Woman in her splendor, naked and charcoal faces, drew hundreds, eyes, glances and also sketches of semi naked bodies, writing love, eternal, deep, intricate, always Woman, his Goddess, for Gabriel his deepest religion was based on Woman as the center of the universe to which man was worshiped. Gradually Luana entered the pantheon and became the last Goddess, who would eventually close the temple door at the time of her worshiper’s departure.
In Gabriel’s dreams the young woman was already a company for adventures almost always intense and perfumed with sensuality, he knew that this body no longer responded to the stimuli and that the woman, so young would not look at him as he saw her, but in the enchanted world of his imaginary she was a central figure. One early morning of insomnia, the old writer bends over the bedside table to look for paper and pen that he always kept in the drawer, turned on the light, put on his glasses and wrote:
It is in the honey of your lips that I feed the life, which in pieces condenses on the translucent veil of a naked body, imagined by me in lost dreams. I keep silent in the silence that leads me to the incessant temptation to want you more, every moment, with each sigh, looking sidelong the desire you give me when you walk, when you come to me for the affection that you need. It is a deep source, where I want to quench thirst, it is an abundant and fruitful woman, who welcomes me in the pronounced curvature of the glass, wants me. It may be illusory what I live, what I feel, only fiction of my meager imagination, but I feel, even if utopically, that you wait for me more and more to embrace me fully and to receive me in the intimate space that confine us.
The next morning, when Luana picked up the breakfast tray to wash and clean the used utensils, she found a small folded paper, handwritten by Gabriel, with the text. She leaned against the small kitchen counter and traveled in the old writer’s words. At the end she folded it again and tucked it into her pants pocket. The day went smoothly, with neither of them commenting on the subject. When she returned home, the young woman read it again, that piece of inspiration she realized, it was addressed to her and she had been the inspiration muse of the writer’s words. She was extremely sensitized, she was never an inspiration to writer’s, with such sensitivity. Fondly, she put the piece of paper in a journal she kept on the bedside table, where she had not written for years.
Luana had awakened the sleeping giant inside Gabriel, for him, it represented the motivation he had lost long ago, a breath of fresh air that propelled his soul to create again. Any moment was good to dream of that Goddess who had come to his house. With her, the desire not only to write, the desire to draw her, to dare to look at the woman again without preconceptions, clothes and taboos, as in the times when models volunteered to be drawn by the artist.
The nights began to be too long for Gabriel, Luana’s absence was a martyrdom only surpassed to idealize her, dreaming again, generating an amalgam of feelings that went from desire, which his fragile body no longer could accompanied, but the fertile mind drew in the dark air of the room, as if the traces were of smoke and the curves drawn by the winds of pleasure. There she was, slender, naked, and, in a breath, fading in the air, to return to a form of a delicate smile in an instant again inspired by the beauty of the eternal feminine. The few hours of sleep were alternated with imaginative delusions, making the poet and artist, relive his distant past.
This phenomenon had a visible result in the aspect of the old writer that was evident to the son when it came to visit him, even going so far as to comment with the caretaker that the coming of her to accompany Gabriel had made him rejuvenate. He was looking better and with more energy. A living soul feeds the body that wears it with the dynamics and resistance it needs to stay alive.
But for Gabriel, Luana was much more than a mere muse, she was the incarnation of his Goddess, the one who he has pursued all his life through the various bodies of the women he loved. So, in this final stretch of life, he gave his best to live up to this challenge, perhaps the last. When the young woman arrived that morning, as in most mornings, the man was already sitting in the highchair, he asked her tenderly to bring him a small easel and a charcoal. She asked him if he was going to draw and he answered, nodding yes. But after leaving everything in place he had asked her not to see him draw. The day passed and the sheet remained blank. Luana glanced around whenever she could, and nothing. Before she said goodbye, she asked him if he had given up drawing, and Gabriel replied with a shrug.
The old artist had spent the day observing the young woman, imagining her silhouette, noticing the shadows and shapes. As soon as the door closed behind the caretaker, he let go of his hands and let the scent of perfume was still in there by the woman lead him into the paper scene, where the coal marked the edges and fingers softened the shadows.
In the next morning, when Luana arrives in the living room on the easel, she discovers, realizing what had happened the previous day, Gabriel had seizes his body, undressing it and passing it to the paper, as if he knew of color every inch of your skin. She was embarrassed when she realized she was being watched by the artist who was leaning against the door frame of the bedroom door, shuddered and reacted immediately asking him if he needed help. He thanked her and held her arm to lean back to the kitchen where he sat down at the table for breakfast.
Before leaving, she asked Gabriel if he wanted the picture case to be cleaned, he answered affirmatively, and as she rearranged the easel, behind the drawing was a writing:
I keep a secret this moments when the toes are wind blows lifting your hair. My hands plunge into this rough sea, caressing your senses, curling your thoughts while your sleeping face makes me want a kiss. I want to taste your taste, to penetrate my senses in your body and to discover the source of your pleasure, of the one you hide, that you fear to show and deny, allowing me to advance. I am confused, I do not know if I should insist, persist in this reverie, or if I let myself be of modesty and defiance in this look, which baffles me, which impels me to venture to seas never before navigated.
She put the paper away and finished the chores, said goodbye, and left to go home, without mentioning the subject.
That night Luana did not sleep, she thought about everything that was happening, why at this point in her life, when she had gone another way, she was married a little while ago, had passed so long without ever having experienced the love in a deep form. Her parents never gave her the deep love she dreamed of, even the present husband and great love of her life, was a little boy given to the things of love, because Gabriel had to appear, she wanted him to teach her this way of loving, without asking for anything in return, giving only his dreams, and leading her to the dream of something she had long thought impossible. What to do? There was no way to nurture something that could not exist, a love between people who were at a great distance from each other, not only because of their age differences, but also because it was out of time for Gabriel, in the final stretch of his life, or for Luana, who had already chosen a way and loved the man to whom she gave herself, body and soul. But, seeing it still made less sense, how can there be space for love in a heart that was supposed to be full of it? She did not understand, but she knew that it was forbidden to walk there, much less she could feed this illusion to that man.
The next day she was ready for a face-to-face conversation with him, it had to be, he could not let himself be carried away by this fantasy. When she arrived she opened the door and no sign of Gabriel, called him, ran in desperation all the compartments of the house and did not find him. When she decided t
o call his son, it rang the house phone. She ran to answer, it was the son, she heard him as if she guessed everything he had to say...She was silent, could not utter a word, the overwhelming silence at the end of that call had taken care of her soul, Gabriel she had left without warning, without even allowing him to say goodbye, to explain that although he was very fond of her, having learned to love him in a completely new way, they could not be together, and fate came, in anticipation, to tell her, that’s right, you are not to belong together. Life wanted only to give her the opportunity to be loved as she would have liked to be loved, Gabriel was only an archangel, a noble soul warrior who came to her to show her the purity of love, if without taking possession, without touching, kiss or without feeling the heat of her lips, but above all, to exist, at any time of this life.
She cried, she cried like no one, washing her face with the salt of a love so deep that it ached in her chest, choked the cry, and distressed the mind in such a way that it collapsed on the floor.
She heard Gabriel’s voice declaim a text:
I leave you with the fragrant breeze at the end of the morning, giving yourself in a hug, leaving at the mercy of my mouth the bare curvature of your neck that I kiss with the tenderness of those who feel with the tip of their lips the path of your desire. I delineate the course of my will as your arms open to welcome the desire you try to suppress, but what you want to feel. I feel your hand slip on the back of my head, while my tongue tastes the lobe of your ear, I feel the shiver down your arched curvature. Today my hands avoided the contours of your skin, leaving the desired kiss in the mouth, but I want to draw the complete silhouette of your body, like the one who draws a picture, naked of modesty, given to the designs of the desire to travel as a whole, revealing the enigma that perfumes you.
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