Better an idiot getting high than a cowering genius.
Whenever anybody sees me replicating someone else’s idea, they can shoot me between the eyes. When someone sees me doing only what others have already done, writing like others have already written, creating what others have already created, they can shoot me in the head. Because that’s when I will be dead. Completely (and we all know it’s possible to be only partially) dead. When someone sees me criticising somebody who’s done differently, who’s dared differently, who’s invented differently, they can shoot me in the head. I’m here and I show my face. I’m Pedro Chagas Freitas and I fabricate ideas. I am buffeted by them. I’m Pedro Chagas Freitas and not a day goes by without my inventing something new. It might be a bit of text, the construction of a line, some radical use of a piece of punctuation. Or a children’s game, a concept for a TV programme, a book that’s so special it doesn’t even have order. I’m Pedro Chagas Freitas and I’m an idiot: that’s all there is to it.
Better an ostracised idiot than a domesticated genius.
And the chapels. And the half-dozen enlightened souls. Those who define what is good and what is bad with a blink of the eye. Those poor enlightened ones. The artists. Those poor artists. Let nobody dare, one day, to call me an artist – because I’m merely a professional perspirer. A guy who works like a dog to create what he once dreamed of creating. And create it he does. And it’s not a lot. It’s never a lot. There’s always more to create. And when there’s nothing left to create it’s because it’s time to switch off. The machines, the heart, the breathing. Stop it all. When there’s nothing left to create there’s nothing left to live. Kill me before that day comes. And write on the gravestone the following words, nice and clear: here’s the idiot who just wanted to do what he wanted. And he succeeded.
All my fears fit in your lap.
And if God exists, He is the calm of your shoulders, the divine stillness that goes from your neck to your breast. And me, there, so small that I don’t even measure up to my centimetres, and yet so big that even the sky wouldn’t have enough space to keep me. We are creatures beyond the world, unique couples from a journey that even the end of our bodies will be unable to stop.
Even the worst of life is calmed when I am in your eyes.
There are bad people, mum. People who can’t imagine what it means to endure inside this body, behind these bones, beneath the debris of an age yet to be discovered. There are people who don’t know I’m a child who’s scared like all children (a person scared like all people: grown-ups get scared, too, don’t they, mum? – everybody gets scared, don’t they, mum?), and yesterday an adult told me not to show up till I’ve grown up, and a child who was less of a child than me grabbed me by the hair and threw me to the ground, and the whole school watching and laughing, and the adult saying ‘don’t show up till you grow up’ and the child saying ‘take that, this’ll teach you a lesson’.
Nobody knows how big a child is.
And it hurt so much, mum. The whole school laughing at my bleeding hair, at the words that just kept getting worse (‘let’s see if this son of a bitch doesn’t learn once and for all not to be different from everybody else’), and at that moment I understood, I understood that stupidity is always the same age after all, that all men and all women act in the same way however much their bodies grow or stop growing; school is what they call the place I go to every day but it might just as well be called world – because that’s where all society exists just as it does outside, in the obedient chorus of a tamed crowd.
Nobody knows what freedom is.
And then you arrived, mum. You and that look in your eye, your words (‘I love you, my love; I love you and nobody’s going to change that’), your lap (have I told you that even the devil can’t get to your lap?), and it’s as though my whole body rises up, my whole life is ready for another bad grown-up, for another bad child. You arrive and your eyes and your lap and tomorrow is a new day. Everything in life can be summarised in a belief that tomorrow is a new day.
If God exists His name is You.
What’s the point of a floor if not to be trodden upon by you?
You were a child and your body wanted smiles, running races on the street (where the cars won’t let you run now, you know the place?), playing hide-and-seek with your body the way you play it today with your soul; I was a child but obsessed with the idea that I was a grown-up, I didn’t want to run races on the street or to play hide-and-seek, I just asked my body to grow, school to end and life to take me far away from there. If I liked common-places I couldn’t like the place where you are.
What’s the point of a body if not to transport yours?
We lived different lives and we were so close, there was no more than a wall between us, and also your mother (she was so beautiful, your mother) and mine (she was so beautiful, my mother), their eternal words (‘better head inside, son, it’s getting cold’, ‘better head inside, girl, it’s getting dark’), the fear of the whole world collapsing down on to our backs; the first words I said to you were ‘better wise up, kid’ when you told me that one day you were going to be a movie star (you were in that grey dress your daughter has started wearing now, remember?), and then I turned my back on you and you stood there, I know you just stood there, watching me go, without even noticing your tears and your whole castle of dreams collapsing.
What’s the point of memory if not to bring you back?
One day the road stopped being ours, I went off to marry (Joana, that scowling woman who lives by the butcher’s, you know the one I mean?), you went off to university (I bet even then you already knew that you were a star without any need for the movies), and all time did was to separate us, separate us more and more, all roads carrying me far away from seeing you.
What’s the point of opening my eyes if you’re not standing right in front of me?
Even the street stopped with your steps all of a sudden, one after another, the office door opening and all my peace of mind closing. You came in, said ‘excuse me’, added ‘I’ve come for the editor’s position’, and no word in me could be edited, revised, rewritten; you said you’d come for the editor’s position and I understood you had come for the position of my owner.
What’s the point of obeying if your orders don’t exist?
I obeyed you, happily, for the happiest two years of my life, taking messages, bringing you coffees, trying to look at you so that you would understand how I wanted you, and after the happiest two years of my life you simply said ‘better wise up, lad’ when I told you that one day I wanted to wake up beside you. And you were right, just like I was right. I never got to wake up beside you just as you never got to be a movie star, but not even that made me give up on you nor did it make you give up on being a movie star. You went to Hollywood in search of a chance to shine and I went to Hollywood in search of you. One day one of us is going to wise up. I hope it’s you.
What’s the point of having a head if not to rest it on you?
(her on his lap)
‘If I could choose, I would have been born in your arms.’
‘…’
‘So as not to waste time. So that I might understand, then and there, what the reason was for my being here.’
‘All of us ought to be born in the arms of the person we’re going to die with. Just a question of saving energy. To start out, right away, saving time.’
(his hand on her face, slowly discovering each wrinkle in the corners of her eyes)
‘Every mother understands there are loves that are urgent.’
‘Every one.’
‘And that not finding the path until halfway along the path means half the path has already been lost.’
‘Before you I was seeking; after you I seek still. But I have already found. I’m seeking more than I have found.’
‘That’s what loving is. Seeking more even after having been found.’
‘At worst I’ll just find you again.’
(a t
ight hug)
‘Did you know that whenever I wake up I still look at you, I still touch you? To know that you are, to know that this exists.’
‘And watching you breathe. I spend hours fighting back sleep in order to watch you breathe. I feel each movement of your chest as though I were feeling the space that life occupies within me. Your chest rises and I go with it, it falls and I go with it. And that’s how I fall asleep, with the certainty of your breathing. With the certainty that I can sleep restfully.’
(tears on her cheeks, her head lost in his lap)
‘We always wake up hand in hand. Had you noticed that?’
‘It’s as though even in our dreams we need to be together. I fall asleep and I take you with me, hand in hand, so that there is no path I take, even if it happens within my unconscious, that I take without you.’
‘The other day I dreamed I was the happiest woman in the world. Then, when I woke up and saw you beside me, that was when I understood that after all I’d dreamed that I was the second happiest woman in the world.’
‘If I could have chosen what I wanted to feel it would be less than what I actually feel.’
(the clothes are undressed; first his, then hers)
‘And everything we say comes out of our souls. I speak to you and what I say comes from within, from the deepest part of me. If I had to lie to you I would have to tell you the truth.’
‘We’ve never had one sole conversation. Everything we say stretches out. We speak the same conversation, however different the subject. When we speak, the subject is us. It could be biology, science or politics. When we speak, the subject is always us.’
(eyes on eyes, sweat, exchanged looks, excited hands)
‘Love me as though we were endless.’
‘There’s no other choice: either you love as though it were the last time, and that’s no kind of love at all, it’s just covering fear up with pleasure, anxiety with moaning, the sound of silence with the sound of moaning; or you love as though it were endless time, and that’s how love pacifies without ever stopping unsettling, like a strong current, swift but never hurried, never ceasing to unsettle.’
‘Or desperate to just the right degree. Excessive to just the right degree.’
‘It’s necessary to feel too much without overdoing it.’
(the moment of one in the other)
‘Love me as though you were talking to me with your body.’
(and the final moment)
‘If I could choose, I would have been born in your arms.’
I don’t know what I am but I know I’m your woman.
I don’t believe in loves that do harm, despite being certain that all loves do harm. To love is to be certain that two birds in flight are better than one in the hand. Proverbs never know what love is.
I would change a life of orgasms for the orgasm of a lifetime.
There’s an almost-happiness in each moment without you, and even the pleasure can happen without my coming with it. Cerebral people ask me for containment, they ask me for cancellation. But it’s impossible to contain what makes us love. It’s impossible to contain what makes us live. And if life exists it’s so that it is like this for you, so that somebody, one day, can be like this for someone.
Only someone who never stops being completely her own can manage to be completely someone else’s.
In you I am what I could never stop being, the woman who fled from what skin gives her, who never surrendered to the I don’t care. If I do I do completely, if I want I surrender completely, if I need I bend completely. If I’m here to live a life I’m also here to yield. To know that I am no less just because I’m not a queen, and so that all kingdoms are governed from the inside.
Only someone who is able to be in shards can be herself entirely.
Only those who are pitiful stop halfway. I refuse to find myself in nothing. If I want to get there I’ll cross to the other side, without pride but proud, trembling but without fear, and when they tell me I’ve been weak I’ll reply with the contempt of someone who only accepts ecstasy when ecstasy is possible.
Strength consists in refusing sufficient satisfaction when there’s a chance of having total satisfaction.
I don’t know about the woman I am but I know about the woman I’m not. I’m not the woman who hides amid the cooking pots, the woman who is silent when it’s time, who surrenders to the sham of security, to the supportive fraud of watching time pass. No. I’m not. I’m not a woman of fados and wailing, of fads and railing, of dreams that drag themselves round corners. No. I’m not. I’m not a woman of smiles when there’s such a thing as laughter, of villages when there’s the world. I’m not one millimetre less than I can be, and if one day I fall it’s because I tried to jump and not because I chose instead to accept.
Better to be a Titanic that has sunk than a ship that never travels anywhere at all.
I don’t know what I am but I know I’m yours.
When they asked me to show them my veins I held up a picture of you.
And everyone laughed and I didn’t understand.
There’s no science that can comprehend love.
Rip you out of me or slit my wrists?
And what’s death but the moment when you realise that a vein has been amputated from your soul? Even if the body persists (bodies do sometimes persist, stubbornly, when all the souls have gone, when all the spaces are empty and all that’s left is to close up the last lock; there are bodies that are stubborn, that don’t understand that declaring someone dead doesn’t depend on them, it never depends on them), even if there is the usual inspiring and the usual expiring, the seconds passing, one by one, slowly. I could even do without dreams if I had you beside me to make me dream.
All falling is useful if you can help me back up.
Just to feel that you exist for me, that you are there for me, and that there’s no truth (I hear around the place that I can’t depend on you like that, that no love can stand being loved like that) big enough to interfere in this invincible lie.
When I can’t love you like this it’s because I no longer love you.
When I don’t feel the ground stop moving when you aren’t there, when I don’t feel my whole being embracing you when I look at you, when there’s any imperfect moment to be yours.
Either it feels like everything or it’s worthless.
Yesterday we went to the park together, old adolescents on swings, on merry-go-rounds, in the little toy cars where we learned to be children. And when I gave you my hand and looked at you among all those people I even wanted death to come more quickly. So that we could have a happy ending. So that we could end in the way that immortal things should end. Us and the smile (it’s been so many years, your smiling at my efforts to make you laugh; and the unending tears as I told you it was for ever and you didn’t believe it) that brought us together.
So death and that final marriage: let them come. And on our tombstone let them write two simple lines:
They died. And they lived happily ever after.
Any pen can start a war, and that’s also what brings me peace,
when we went fishing you were happy, a fish bit the hook, you hugged me proudly, you said I love you in the middle of a kiss, then you looked it in the eye and obviously asked to throw it back in the water,
and I don’t know why I’m wasting time writing what I remember about you, but probably it’s just the best way of crying,
it’s tears that save people,
it’s not doctors or pills, and that’s why I write, I’m looking for the word that takes me out of you, that’s all it is and it seems so much,
only the condemned tell the truth,
others fear that something will end, that something will be lost, only someone who has lost their love is in a position to tell the truth, as I do on this page where I bring you back, how can we have been eternal if we’re already over?,
a rope is the perfect representation of you, perfect for killing as well as
saving,
my next aim is to divide up the silence, and incidentally also the yearning, you ought to know, trying to reject the intimacy of the void, to manage at least a few minutes of absolutely nothing, breathing has been a scarce commodity since you went away,
from the day I met you I had already loved you for ever,
we know how useless time is at such moments, twenty-four unending hours in my head, and the night comes and it’s so big, I liked to find some noise that works for me, do you see?,
we need to deepen the escape, that’s the thing,
to build better walls, hide the tears, call friends over to help you dig better, what costs the most is the memory of that skin, I could make an identikit sketch of your body with more detail than a photo of you, I assure you, I just need to shut my eyes and think of you, as I’m doing now,
if you want a failure, please teach me how to go wrong,
Who is it?,
Nothing is as coarse as your name,
Bárbara,
and I open the door to corruption,
Guilty, Your Honour,
but happy.
There’s the urgency of courage in tears like those.
J. asks my forgiveness and says it will never happen again. She rolls herself up in the blanket, wipes her tears with the back of the sheet and spends the afternoon suffering. I say nothing, I do nothing – I just watch the time pass and the pain scatter.
No one knows what love is.
And things with no forgiveness, they’re what kill. Someone who is beloved has no right to do what is unforgivable. Loving is too big to bear something so petty. ‘Forget that you hate me and love me till the very end,’ I hear, my chest wet on the inside, a whole hand squeezing my entrails.
The Day I Found You Page 10