I love you so much that I can’t forgive you.
Out there, a bird teaches me happiness. It beats its wings and everything around it makes sense.
The sky only exists so that flying might be possible.
In here, beyond the silence, is the shout I want to give, the freedom that not even the throat can speak. And beneath the sheets J. is suffering, she is still suffering – the sound of her tears showing me that no aspect of what is eternal is painless. ‘Whenever I remember your lips I forget what keeps me from you,’ and it would be so easy to let myself go, that embrace once again, that faith once again, all those religions of life once again on the altar of two bodies. ‘Cure me of not having you or kill me once and for all,’ she says to me, all my muscles already in that embrace of hers even though it’s still only my eyes that touch her.
It’s through our eyes that all forgiveness happens.
There are no grounds for letting you in after the devastation you have left in your wake. All surveys refuse you, all inquests abhor you, all formulae declare that you are impossible. I know that if you return then all this pain might return some day. But I know if you do not return then all this pain will return every day.
I have no reasons for letting you inside but please do come in.
And all the ‘Ah’s are spoken now, all the ‘I love you’s are heard without a single word that can tell, me and our ghosts speaking the language of the incapable, walking through the sin of feeling as though we have no legs and this is the only way we can walk. ‘Talk quietly so the world doesn’t know that it is no match for us,’ and we fall asleep like this, murmurings hidden within the sheets, waiting for nobody to know that we have gone back to being incomprehensible.
Nobody knows what it was that united us but it’s our still being together that is inexplicable.
The most important thing in the world is vertigo.
And for there to be vertigo, we need there to be a precipice. I need to be there, next to the place where the fall happens, to be able to remain on my feet. All lives need vertigo. And it’s in your hands that I find the thing that makes me fall and still I stay on my feet.
Every day I get up to the transgression of your precipice.
And I walk along the stones of the pavement just millimetres from the moment when there is a downfall awaiting me. Either I’m millimetres from the downfall or I don’t think it tastes of anything. I need to feel that it can end, that it’s always just about to end, that’s what makes us people, what sustains us, the destitute of the skin, and if there weren’t the danger of your pleasure I might as well die.
The most important thing in the world is knowing that one day you’ll end.
And that is how I cling to the weight of the minutes without needing a set of scales, legs startled at each moment without you, waiting for you perhaps to be the final one, and while there’s your life there’s hope. One day you go and all this ends: you are all I need to get up for when the morning asks me to surrender. At the instant when I love you (the wrinkles of your hands, the sexual aggressiveness of your beard on me, the dialogue of two bodies in search for impossible words), every abyss knows how to open up. I know that I will die of you but I also know that without you there’s nothing but dying left for me.
Every day I learn to be illiterate in you.
And I write only the silence, or the lines fill with something that has no order, and if there’s chaos let it be that of our spilled sweat. Then you teach me, patiently and methodically, that I need to know a lot before I can be in a position to be oblivious to what binds us, and that all our embraces are an apprenticeship. Death follows immediately when there are no more embraces to learn, no more disordered lines to fill. I require your hands on me as though in hell, awaiting the final call of a consensual rage. I order you to keep me disordered for ever. And insist that the only command should be the one that obliges us to sin.
The most important thing in the world is what can, even if forbidden, be done.
How many knives are there in your no?
Like some fucking desperate woman here I still am, waiting for you to come over, waiting for you to say ‘I love you’, waiting for you to say ‘I love you and I’ve always loved you and I’ll love you for ever’. But the only thing that is for ever is what ends. It’s over and it’s for ever. For ever without the taste of your kiss again, for ever without the ‘I’m coming’ of your touch again. What never ends is loving you like this.
How many men will it take for me to forget your embrace?
I’m a desirable woman. I know it. I know that men look at me as they walk by, and I walk by and they look, and that my body will never be left alone, without the presence of other bodies to meet. But no other body cancels out yours, no smell keeps me from the memory of yours, no arms hold me with the strength of your embrace. The hardest thing for me is knowing you existed. And knowing that after wanting you like this all that’s left to me is to be wanted.
All that’s left for me is finding the someone who loves me most after I have lost the person I love.
Even your death would be good for me. Forgive my selfishness but sometimes I dream that you’ll die and free me from the hoping. As long as you’re alive I’ll keep believing. However much I don’t believe it, however much I may know that what I hoped existed does not exist. However much you don’t want me I’ll dream about you, in the most hidden nook of what I am, the most fetid corner of what I feel. Needing you like this makes me sick. Needing you like this makes me ashamed. And all it takes is a ‘go on…’ from you for all places to make sense.
I can let others make use of me but I am your inalienable property.
Whoever wants me needs to know it. Whoever wants me must be ready to lose me as I’m ready to win you. I’ll belong to whoever wants me most right up until the moment when you want me, even if you only want me the tiniest little bit. Nothing is more unfair than loving like this. And yet nothing is more beautiful than loving like this. We would be perfect if you loved me just a third as much as I love you, if you desired me a fifth as much as I desire you. As it is we’re just a couple-to-be, and me the stupid woman who offers herself to instability in the hope of the vision of what never ends.
How many times will I have to die to kill you from inside me?
If I hadn’t been yours that night I would never have known what it is to be unhappy like this; but I also would never have known what it is to be happy to the tips of one’s bones. You gave me, on that night when I bowed down in the face of happiness, the best night of my life and all the worst nights in my life that would come after you. I only regret not having loved you later, much later, right at the final submission. So that the ending would be like this. For ever like this. Me and you and the final night.
How many lives is such a night worth?
I do not write today,
there’s so much to do and here I am shut away,
what is this life after all?,
on TV a man who says he’s prime minister talks and how very weak it is, a few others applaud, they exchange praise as though exchanging packages,
so I give you this, you give me that,
one hand dirties the other, not even proverbs can withstand filth, that’s for sure,
that must have been why God gave us the capacity for disgust, that’s what I believe,
then there’s some football match, I love this small life for ninety minutes, it has in it a whole kind of dramatic comic quality, an excitement that if it doesn’t make you laugh will make you cry, you can’t get past excitement like this unscathed,
if you don’t love or hate the defeat or the victory then you’re dead, that’s what I’d say to my patients if I were a doctor after setting them to watch a game live for a few minutes,
what we do when faced with what doesn’t matter to us in the least is what defines us, surviving means being ready to give everything for what doesn’t matter in the least,
I would kill for a kiss from
you, for example,
and exaggerations do exist but this isn’t one of them, I really would kill,
you know that act by which someone prevents another person from being alive?,
the truth is that I could even say I’d die for a kiss from you but that would be lying,
how could I benefit from a kiss from you if I were dead?,
that’s the only reason I wouldn’t die to go back to the inside of your lips,
last time I was so happy when I found your tongue,
and I go to the supermarket to look at the people,
there’s an incredible resemblance between a supermarket and a book, inexplicable though that may seem,
all I need to write a novel is there, but I do not write today, let that be quite clear once again,
in the bread section there’s a woman every poet would like to meet, whatever that may be,
when will I learn not to look at life in verse?,
maybe that’s what a poet is,
or rather a poor wretch, depending on what fiction each of us is living,
and I’m even able to be normal when I want to be, a kilo of potatoes, a bag of pre-chopped salad,
you have to give people work seeing as you can’t give them love, that’s how you explain the existence of an economic system,
all that’s left for me to do is waste a few moments talking to the neighbours, telling them about my life,
a writer isn’t much into chit-chat only because he doesn’t have much to tell, this occurs to me now and it’s the truth,
it would be good to know about Senhor Gouveia’s toothache, only yesterday I heard him complaining as he was coming up the stairs,
the bad thing about a toothache is that it makes us rethink our whole lives,
if there were no pain there would be no poets, nor me,
it’s already getting dark and I’ve done nothing, I’ve only lived and that doesn’t feel like much, that’s the great failure of whoever invented humans, anyway,
living is all that’s left us and we’re never satisfied, does that make any sense?,
sometime soon I’ll lie down and that’s it, I’ve produced nothing and probably that prime minister would have preferred if I’d never existed,
where have you ever seen a citizen who produces nothing more than being alive?,
if I were to write today it would be about your voice when you say I’m here and you really are, immediately I hug you with all the years we’ve already lived together, I ask you to speak to me of silence and we both go quiet, and that’s how we end the day without insisting on any great happiness or any special commotion, simply content with the prospect of waking tomorrow and carrying on here, and maybe that’s sad, it probably is, but it’s also love,
or just poetry,
perhaps I love you, I have to tell you,
you’re worth my whole life and you don’t even help with the balance of trade or the deficit,
and the prime minister’s just going to have to learn to deal with that.
Which was born first: life or you?
I ask myself daily how it is possible that we have reached this point, in the bed that’s dishevelled by us, at the re-begun moment of all orgasms. I love you up to the limit of my body, and even then I still never tire of loving you desperately, as though your skin were a religion and there were no prayer with any other purpose than to ask for you.
I beseech you to devour me or else to abandon me.
When you feel there’s something missing you will be sure that everything’s missing, because I can never be filled by half a glass, because not even a nearly full glass can do away with how I need you. The only routine we share is our going all the way to the folly of what we have never experienced, inventing innocences that we have not yet lost, stages of evolution that no Man knows exist, and if some superior being does exist it will get depressed when it meets us.
How can anyone have created euphoria without knowing that you exist?
And it’s when I remember your embrace that I measure how much a soul weighs. All souls are the subtraction of what we touch from what we feel. And the less the subtraction, the greater the addition. That’s what I am: addicted to you and all the sums that our bodies never tire of calculating.
Since when does one plus one equal everything?
And what is the soul if not the formula that defeats all mathematics, the eternal equation that no science can comprehend? What is the soul but the thing with no body and yet which still causes movement? You sleep, the sheets tangled by all the adventures that just hours ago we had no idea were possible, the window closed so that no world understands that it’s too small to compare to our life, and when you wake up I know that even the tears are coming to celebrate with us.
Only things that can make you cry make sense.
It will soon be time to go. I’ll go to my house, you’ll go to yours. That was the way we found to make ourselves uncommon, human treasures who spend their day wanting to live. We don’t make promises, we don’t make constant demands, we don’t find a word or several that can define us, we don’t believe in the capacity for fair justice for what no law could possibly contain, enclose. We want each other when one of us decides, we love each other when one of us needs to love. We know it isn’t much for somebody with such desire. But what feels like so little is the only thing that keeps us alive.
Which dies first: not loving or loving too much?
The only illness is
having no passion.
There are people who find in this world a mere
place for passing through, who don’t feel what
they see, don’t touch what they find; there are people
who don’t understand that whatever exists was created
for falling in love, for falling in love absolutely.
If there is no passion
why should there be life?
There are people
and then there is you.
You and the madness of wanting to devour what
surrounds you, you and this uncontrollable drive
for every second to be the last, for every moment
of life to need desperately to be worth the whole life.
If there isn’t what you are
why should there be love?
And then I exist. The woman in love you taught
to fall in love. Before you there was no turn-on, there was
perhaps a slight thrill when something very
great happened to me. Before you I didn’t know about
the beauty of fear, the unparalleled feeling of a heart in
someone’s hands. Before you I didn’t know that a heart is
either in someone’s hands or dragging along the ground.
Before you
there was no you: you are enough to explain everything
that explains me.
If there were no possibility of embracing you
what is the point of arms?
My loving comes from your laugh, and from the pimples
on your skin, the way you gnaw on your nails, your
distractedness when you brazenly stick your finger
in your nose; my loving comes from how you wake me every day
in the middle of the night or the day to fill me with
pleasure or simply to say that you love me,
my falling in love comes from your being so fallible in all you do
and this, more than all the rest, shows me
that we are infallible in the love that we are.
I get up to life to fall in love and be in love:
that is what everybody, in the morning, ought to be obliged
to say and to feel. I get up to life to fall in love and be in love.
And even this getting up is my falling in love.
If there were no possibility of causing love in somebody
what would be the point of having skin?
Explaining what joins us is e
nough
to explain the meaning of life.
The only illness is
having no passion.
‘You’re the worst person in the world and I love you for ever.’
All declarations of love are incoherent. All loves are incoherent. There’s a tacit agreement between the lover and the beloved: when you see this thing that we are starting to make any sense, shoot me in the head. A love needs to be thunderous – even if only because a bullet ends it.
Love makes so so many things but it never never makes sense.
Her words on that damn corner of the bed: ‘I have every reason not to stay and that’s why I’m staying.’ He was incapable of loving. Which was why he limited himself to being a lover, to loving her for those possible minutes, to loving every moment of her body. Then, when the time came to love, he left. He didn’t need to speak many words. Just a simple ‘I love you until death but I will never love you for ever.’ She knew none of it made sense, that what bound them defied all the laws of physics. How can something so fragile bear everything?
Love is so fragile that it can bear everything.
They would meet in the most varied places, always on an urgent mission. ‘I need you before the sadness comes,’ one of them would say. And all the places were such a short distance from somebody they needed so close. Each didn’t know what the other did, or how old they were, or their favourite colour, or even what the hell they were called. He was her him, she was his her. ‘In you I have all the pleasures of the world.’ And all names would do within what they called each other. In all places they were happy. All places felt like so little – so that they might, one day, return to discover the rest, to try the rest.
Happiness is always leaving something behind to discover, something to try.
Consuming everything is a consummation. Consuming everything kills. ‘You are my life and you will never be a part of my life,’ she used to say, firmly, whenever the weakness of wanting more than that small everything appeared. ‘We must be the extraworld, the extralife, that which is a part of nothing and therefore fills us everywhere.’ That is how love is made eternal: placed to one side so as to be in the middle of everything, right on the fringes of what soothes, located pornographically right at the entrance to total contentment, ‘If one day I want to love you every day it’s because one day I’ve stopped loving you,’ he explained, not knowing whether he believed what he was saying but certain that he had to believe what he was saying.
The Day I Found You Page 11