The Day I Found You

by Pedro Chagas Freitas

  It’s necessary to love entirely but only in pieces.

  And scrupulously they would carry out a ritual whose existence they couldn’t see, a routine that only somebody who loves couldn’t see. They had no agreed times or set days. That was what left them rested, in the final stronghold of security. Even if, without ever noticing it, they met religiously every other day, almost always in the same place, at the same time. And they were, though they never knew it, the most tedious of couples. ‘Only tedium can kill us,’ she warned. And she called him over to the tedium of her lap.

  Even what calms you is exciting when you love so excessively.

  How many dreams can a body contain?

  In order to see your skin I need to close my eyes, really close them, feel it the way you feel a moment of God, and wait for life to do the rest. The secret of happiness is understanding that there’s so much to do before you wait for life to do the rest. You need to find everything that can be found and discover even those things that can’t be discovered. And then, only then, wait for the moment when life shows you its worth. How much it’s worth to us.

  How many lives is your embrace worth?

  You showed up as though you wanted nothing, you sat down beside me on the plane (please, miss, would you allow me to say you are beautiful?), and the plane hadn’t yet taken off but I was already on cloud nine.

  How did you discover within seconds that I was yours for ever?

  No journey can be described through what other people see. Travelling is an internal process, however much the body may go from here to there, and however high that plane may have risen it was carrying me deep into my dreams, to the root of which all those who breathe ought to know how to breathe. Breathing is fundamental and also unnecessary.

  Only what isn’t breathed in full is felt fully.

  How long have you been the owner of my heartbeat?

  We married two days later (please allow me, girl, to tell you that you will be my wife; and only then I understood that there never was, there had never been in you, any kind of question; you were informing me what would become of me; no more; and no question could be put to us; if only we existed then nobody would have invented the question mark), and we refused to say that we would be together until death parted us. Who the fuck is death to want to part us anyway?

  When you dream on the scale on which we’ve learned to dream, you must understand that if we’re able to touch it that doesn’t mean it stops being a dream. Our whole life they’ve told us (such a daft idea) to pinch ourselves to check we aren’t dreaming, and it’s exactly the opposite, the complete opposite. It’s only when we’re capable of pinching ourselves that the dream is actually happening.

  Pinch me to check it’s a dream.

  And the priest is asking me, right now, if I want to love you in sickness and in health, in joy and in sorrow, and all I can say is no. No. Proudly no, just like twenty years ago no. I continue not to want to love you in health, not to want to love you in sickness. No. A thousand times no. I want to love you unconditionally. I want to love you: that is all that should be said in a wedding.

  The problem with God is that He has never loved like this.

  And the problem with weddings is that they have too many words.

  My favourite demon:

  I’m writing to you to say I do hope you go fuck yourself.

  Anybody capable of loving in duplicate is not loving anyone. Anybody capable of dividing up his love doesn’t deserve to have me multiply myself in his name.

  Either you love each other totally or it’s all crap.

  You say that it’s necessary to understand love in order to understand what you love. And I don’t understand. What is loved, please note, isn’t to be understood – this, most likely, is the biggest problem between us. You want me to understand what can only be felt and I want you to feel what you can only understand.

  When you love with your head you aren’t loving anything at all.

  There’s another woman in your path, another woman retrieving your arms. You ask me to understand, you ask me to see that it’s necessary to be selfless to be able to love.

  And I do hope you go fuck yourself.

  I don’t know why the word egoism exists if the word love exists already.

  Loving is singular. Singular. Take note: singular. Sole. Just one. Just that one. Just what occupies everything without leaving the tiniest thread out, not the smallest little crumb in sight. I made you singular and you made me plural. That is what separates us. It’s a question of grammar, even mathematics. But even love deserves to have every calculation made. And ultimately the result of me + you is me with nothing else. Me painfully and yet proudly with nothing else.

  Better a solitary woman than a solitary fool.

  I share you with no one. I share myself with no one. When I am I am completely, when I am I am myself completely, in my coming completely. And so many times I’ve said never to you, and then you came back and I came back. I don’t think of myself as weak for still believing that you’ll come back, that you’ll come back one more time, with that look in your eyes that strips me from the world and gives me life. And when you come back you’ll say ‘come, there’s no one but you’. And all I ask, all I’ve ever asked of you, is this: that there is only me. That it be only me. ‘Come, there’s no one but you’, you’d say, and my whole body would open up to let you in, and the embrace would happen and all the suffering would make sense.

  Loving is knowing that even suffering can make sense.

  You haven’t come back. You still haven’t come back. And it does seem like this time that’s it. You’ll be sold to the other arms of the other women who accept you in parts. And here I am, in parts but whole, waiting for you to understand that what binds us is a privilege so great that it must demand exclusivity. If you don’t come back, you mustn’t worry about me. I’ll keep on being that same old woman in love in the same old place, waiting for the same old man. Until someone arrives, slowly, someone who can teach me to deprogramme you from me, to dilute all I have of you within what sustains me. Until that time I will be yours and nobody will even have the right to look at me fully. And that’s my final decision. But after my final decision comes yours. The decision is yours. Always yours.

  Either you come now or I renounce you for ever.

  PS I do hope you go fuck yourself.

  And I love you.

  I hope that your salvation comes from you: that is the first commandment of what keeps me alive.

  They call it masochism but I call it survivalism. I live you to keep myself alive. Nothing recommends you, nothing advises you, and it’s with the absolute certainty that you don’t deserve me that I do everything to deserve you.

  I’m so idiotic and so happy in your arms.

  I liked knowing with my body what I know with my head, refusing with my skin what I refuse with my reason. But then comes our touch and even the masochism is worth it. Even the minutes of you in me are enough for all the hours of pain without you in me.

  I’m so foolish and so yours when you kiss me.

  And inside I’m comforted by being yours even if you will never be mine. I lie down into your arms, I awake into the heat of your pleasure, and knowing you aren’t here but you could be here is enough to fill all of me there is to fill.

  One day I will kill you within me but until that day I will die for you.

  I’m really dying. I’m dying of desire, of will, of dreaming. Dreaming about a house of ours, with children of ours, with the world of ours, with the bedroom of ours. I’m dying for my whole life beside you like the whole life I have with you now even if you aren’t here. All that’s missing is your body for everything to be the way it is for ever. Better a masochist than a con artist. Anyone who doesn’t accept he’s needed will end up worn down. And then they enter that internal war of erasing what no time can erase. Nothing but you to erase you in me. I need you in order to stop needing you. You are too much in me for me to be able to ex
pel you. You are so in me that when I kiss you I feel kissed.

  I’m so ridiculous and so whole when you embrace me.

  And now I go on, unafraid of being absurd (the absurd is the only thing that makes sense, nothing can explain life but the unexplainable), savouring each part of your absence. And that is how I have you, so distant and so inside of me, like a landscape you need only to look at to make it ours. You look at a river and it’s yours, just yours, at that exact moment. You absorb all that it is, all that it gives you. You are all that it can be in you. Why can’t love be touched like a landscape? Why isn’t just looking at you enough to make you mine alone? I am only real when I dream you where I am. Reality is what binds us when you do not exist in me. All I need is me in order to have you completely. We are experiencing a unilateral love, a two-person relationship in which just one wanting is enough for both to be here. I love you without needing permission. I love you beyond you. I love you without needing you. I love you by illegal imposition. Whether you like it or not you are the man of my life. How many lives do you need to know that you are mine?

  Only your orgasm can make me come.

  Come.

  Come now.

  How many women do you need to know that it’s me?

  All love begins in secret.

  She knew that she was wrong to go, just like that, not knowing why and fed up of knowing why, to meet him. They had never seen each other and already they loved each other. He didn’t believe in love and all the same there he was, on that train where two souls were learning that there was a love for ever. When she got on she just kept walking. At least inside of him. He closed his laptop (it was still open but who was interested in it?), switched off his cell phone (it remained on but who was interested in it?), and devoted himself to watching her talk. That’s just how it was: seeing her talk. Watching her be.

  All love comes in through the eyes.

  They spent the journey – the three most beautiful hours that any train has ever offered anyone – talking about absolutely nothing. They spent the journey loving each other without anyone being able to tell. There was no touch (just a hand of his, stealthy, trying to find out what her tall boots were hiding), but the two bodies felt more clinging and tangled and crushed and giddy than ever. Love needs to happen through the skin too.

  All love needs skin.

  She was afraid of staying for ever, there, inside his eyes; she was afraid that returning would be an impossibility. How could she return to the simple life after having learned to live? He just looked at all of her (her fringe, her large eyes, her irresistible shyness), and knew that the most that was left to him, now, was to surrender himself, although he had already surrendered long ago. It was the most immortal journey that any means of transport had ever known but the damned journey would never end again. There were two bodies in search of more.

  All love is found in search of more.

  They arrived. They arrived right away. Of course there was a car in the meantime, too, perhaps some hand or other touching some other hand. But only what was to come would occupy their memory. The whole universe awaited them in the simple room of a simple (and so small) apartment. And all the clothes were too many.

  All love refuses clothes.

  They loved each other for ever on the scale of that night. They went deep into the bones of pleasure, no sweat wasted. They don’t know if it was hours or if it was only minutes; they know that from that moment onwards they would never understand life the same way again. They fell asleep, tired and hugging tight (their bodies slotted together as though they had been born to it: one to receive the other beneath the sheets; could the size of one body be defined as a function of the size of another?), and when they awoke they understood that they were waking for the first time.

  All love wakes us for the first time.

  From out there, through the window, came the sea that they hadn’t even noticed was there, so close, so alert. They didn’t know if they would love each other again like this but they knew that they would never stop loving each other. Life insisted, stubbornly, that they part just a few hours later. She returned, sad and happy, to the train where happiness had made history. He returned, sad and happy, to the bedroom where he had discovered he was alive. There was no certainty, nothing was certain. But the two of them shared the greatest of secrets, the most perpetual of life’s mysteries. Only the two of them knew the taste of the sea.

  All love holds the secret of life.

  What’s a brain for if not for suffering?

  Grey days strewn around the house. The cats mew, hungry, and teach me that the only thing that matters is a plate full of food. And then living. There is a vast lesson to be learned each time a cat mews – but there’s an even vaster lesson each time a cat lies down, totally unconcerned, and spends hours asleep, resting on a full stomach in the happiness of being sated. When will I be like that, sated in plenitude? When will I be capable of shutting my eyes, unconcerned, and simply sleeping with the incomparable happiness of a full stomach?

  It would be the salvation of humanity to ask for lessons from those who don’t think about the future and instead savour everything the present has to offer. No Man deserves to know that the future exists. It’s knowing the future exists that prevents us from being, fully, in the place we are, in the time we are.

  Either you are happy or you are unhappy.

  We must understand that everything we are is fiction.

  More and more people ask me for advice. They believe that what I write makes me someone special, capable of understanding what they do, what they feel, even what they write. I feel lost, with no idea what to do, with no idea what to say. And that is why I write. To write is to be lost and seek, with every line, a path. Or a simple sign that there might be a path, that there might be a hope. To write is to seek hope, every day, in what does not exist, in what is written to find out if it exists. I am not a writer, I’ve never been a writer, I don’t want to be a writer. I’m just the guy who writes because he needs to write, because the days demand that he writes, because some urgency or other obliges him to write. I write like a biological necessity, and sometimes needing to write can cost you so much. It doesn’t hurt but it costs you, it’s a pain from the outside in, as if the letters were coming out through my skin, from inside my bones. And literature. What the hell is literature? I couldn’t care less about literature. I don’t want to write literature, I don’t want the intellectuals on my side. When I’ve got a critic on my side it’s because I’ve arrived nowhere. Everybody wants to revere the untouchable, to appreciate what is easy to appreciate, what everybody appreciates, read what everybody is reading because someone has defined what ought to be read. Either you invent everything all over again or all books will be the same. Anybody who is, wants to continue being: that’s how you put an end to a dream. I don’t want to do what the classics do, I don’t want to replicate what so many have done already. I want to start from myself and end at myself. Just that: start from myself and end at myself, as far as possible in myself. I want to do what I fancy with the words that I fancy, face up to the critics and stab them in the chops that I’m writing and that I must keep on writing for ever. Even if it’s garbage, even if it’s a succession of pieces of shit that they, poor things, don’t want to be literature. God save me from one day being a writer and saying that I’ve got a gift in me. The fuck I’ve got a gift. My sole gift is living, tirelessly, and making this life a race to who knows where. A race to who knows where: suddenly I see that this is what life is to me. I’m meant to die running, with the finishing line in sight, the wretched thing, always within sight and always so far away. And the artists. Better a thief than an artist. And is there any greater thief than an artist? What scum artists are. That festering race to whom God offered heaven and hell so that they might create something that messes with other people. I’ll never be an artist. I’ll never believe that there’s anything in me greater than fear. I’m afraid of staying still, afraid of not
moving whoever loves me, afraid of not questioning whatever concerns me, afraid of not laughing in the face of death. I’m so afraid of dying and that’s why I live. Writing is the same: being afraid of dying. I write to avoid death and writing’s also what kills me. I’m a poor little thing who doesn’t have a place to drop dead but who insists desperately on finding places to keep moving about alive.

  What matters is life, never letters.

  ‘If you want to see me happy, give me chaos or nothing.’

  There was within us, right from the start, a certainty that we lacked for nothing, that everything was ready to receive us, right the way up to complete happiness. But no happiness is predictable – and if there’s something truly joyful in happiness it’s that constant unpredictability, that sensation of a door to be opened with no idea of what lies behind it.

  Life is almost worth it just for the opening of doors that hide we don’t know what.

  Everybody knew we had everything we needed to be happy and that was why we could only be unhappy. We had the perfect house, the perfect staff, the perfect cars, the perfect beauties, the perfect families. And later even the perfect children and the perfect educations that we gave them in such an exemplary fashion. We had everything and yet there was always something missing. And there’s nothing more deadly than habit. Nothing is more damnable than the exemplary. Nothing is more destructive than the predictable. Knowing today what we’re going to do tomorrow, knowing tomorrow what we’re going to do the day after, knowing at all times what’s going to happen at all times. We used to know, we always knew, what we were, who we were, and where we wanted to go. And that was why we ended up going no place.