The Day I Found You

by Pedro Chagas Freitas

  No relationship can resist perfection.

  Everything was adding up just right, the words were right, the looks were right, the decisions were right. We never argued about where to spend our holidays, what piece of furniture to buy for the living room, what name to give our children. We came to everything with the naturalness with which we had always approached each other: without a drop of conflict.

  No story can be any good without a good conflict.

  And the truth is, that’s just how it was, without an argument, without a voice raised for one single word, without any criticisms at all, that was how we moved away from each other. You said ‘you’re perfect but I have to go,’ I said ‘you’re perfect but I’m fed up,’ and we exchanged one of our kisses (even our kisses had no conflict in them; and maybe that’s what sustains a relationship: a kiss in conflict, a stolen kiss, a criminal kiss that goes into the mouth of someone who while not wanting it wants it more than anything) and then one of our hugs (as though we were hugging a ghost; we were careful with each other as though we were made of crystal and that was why we started breaking into pieces, inadequacy by inadequacy, surrender by surrender), and we understood in that instant that we were dying at just the right point, changing direction at exactly the right moment. Even in this we were perfect.

  A separation between the couple of protagonists could even be a good ending to a story.

  Now that I look at you, after such a long time, whenever you come to fetch the kids and you smile at me, I understand that we did what had to be done. Your looks are still to die for (your mouth like a landscape of paradise, your body with no trace of the passing years: you’re so handsome that it’s incomprehensible that you don’t thrill me to the depths of my bones), and I continue to be the perfect woman all men want and from whom all men run away. And deep down we never stopped being anything and nor did we start being whatever it was when we separated. And in this way, in just this way, it becomes clear that a love does not really exist: when everything before it and after it remains unchanged.

  We are too perfect to accept something as defective as love.

  Playing with fire is the only thing that can heat you up.

  Everything else is warmth, too slight to keep me alive. I need to know I might get burned for me to feel ready to take the risk. And if living isn’t a risk you might as well be dead.

  If there’s no chance of going wrong, where’s the use in going right?

  The thing that gives me life is knowing that the worst could happen. Knowing that it could hurt, knowing that it could wound. Surviving unscathed is totally arid if I don’t know that it can get me. I want you the way we want a precipice, the way we want to look out over a void, the way we want speed, adrenaline. You are the greatest risk I am prepared to take. And each day I risk a little more. It feels so good having you constantly on the edge of that blade.

  Rather a minute on the edge of the blade than a whole life without a single fault.

  What we are is so human. And that is love, that’s the only thing that can be love: something so human that it can end, so human that it can wound, so human that it can make mistakes. We are made of the weight of mistakes, of the weight of the fallible. It’s from cracks that we build our house, from tears that we build what protects us from water. We know that we lack so much to be perfect and that this is how we feel immaculate: each other’s, and both inadequacies.

  What we are unable to be is what makes us what we are.

  And we try. We try so hard, my love. We try everything, everything. Really everything. We go right up to the end of what hurts if that’s where we need to go to stop it hurting for ever, we go right up to the end of the dream if that’s where we need to go to not stop dreaming. We risk all that we are on each day that we live. And that is the only way we know how to live.

  All life must be called into question every day.

  Everything we have must be in play as long as we’re alive. Everything on the table. All in. Fearless but trembling with fear. All in. All our skin in the game, our whole soul, our whole bodies in everything we exchange, in everything we seek, in everything we decide. The two of us are here, entirely, whenever the two of us are here. All in. And from one moment to the next everything can change, everything can be lost. And until that time, that moment when, one day, we might happen to lose ourselves entirely, until that moment, it will make us greater even with nothing, even starting from zero, even with nothing but the loss to unite us.

  Better to start from zero than to make life a simple number.

  That is what we see around us. Couples and people and lives as though they were within a number. A circus number, an act they think is a theatre act. A depressing balancing number. And everybody is a trapeze artist, and everybody is looking for the naïve equilibrium that is only good for keeping going.

  Kill me right now if the only thing you have for me is a continuing.

  Continuing can go jump in a lake. Continuing can go fuck itself. I demand beginning. Beginning always. The first time. Every day beginning something. New game, all in. New game, all in. If one day I’m a trapeze artist it will only be in order to learn to fall better. To learn to suffer better, to learn to slip better, to learn to fail better. If one day I’m a trapeze artist it’s also so as to love you better. Because loving you is being up on a trapeze or it is nothing.

  Love me now at least: that is the only request I always make of you.

  Conquer me at this moment, entrance me in this instant, promise that when you are here you’re really here, that when you kiss you’re in that kiss, that when you embrace you are that embrace, that when you hold me you hold me entirely. At least for now love me completely in the same way that at least for now I love you completely: this is the most ambitious declaration that anybody who loves can make.

  A second of you is enough to love life for ever.

  Today I write the poem of the common, the obscenity

  ode, the bastard serenade. Today I send

  the more or less to hell, and the politically

  correct, even the relatively worthwhile. Today

  I either smash the dishes or hope no one will hear my wishes.

  And

  praying this way is what makes me yell today:

  ‘Neither eight nor eighty’ can frankly just go

  fuck itself. ‘Either eight or eighty’, yes,

  that’s it. Either the most excessive all or the most

  inconsequential nothing. Pity whoever needs

  eyes to see. And loving you is so ill-advised

  that I just want you in me everywhere.

  Whoever doesn’t take a risk on a step longer

  than their leg is paralysed.

  No body defines what it means to be

  in movement. And there’s no happiness at all

  that doesn’t begin with ‘yes, I want to’ or

  alternatively a simple ‘go fuck yourself

  and come over here now.’ And there will be some who criticise

  my vocabulary, who call me vulgar, who

  accuse me of being bad – but there’s nothing stopping me from

  the word that must be said, telling them to clear off,

  give me a break, I’d rather have the filthy madness of the desperate.

  If you aren’t just a bit ill-bred

  you might as well be dead.

  And if danger exists for us to be alive, and

  if being capable of shocking exists so we can

  speak. Because life is obscene, because

  to love is to try the unacceptable, because the

  euphoria is what’s left behind after the reasonable. And

  I abhor what’s impeccable, and I throw what’s healthy

  into the river, and I go in search of what’s indescribable, of

  the dementia of someone who wants only

  to discover, of the extravagance of someone

  who has never learned not to dream.

  If I have to
die let it be by falling, and

  let me be the proof that it is possible to fly.

  What could be more pretentious than believing in love?

  Loving demands vanity, self-confidence and a decent dose of dementia. To rephrase that: loving requires an insane dose of dementia. Everything else will be added along the way – or subtracted. Anybody who believes in love believes that poetry exists and that there is a poem in each kiss given, in each embrace shared, in each body discovered à deux. Anybody who loves is Pessoa, Camões, Sophia, Neruda. Anybody who loves is either a poet or else they don’t love at all.

  Anybody who is not pretentious when they love, it’s because they don’t love, not really.

  And being like this is so good. Writing with the bone of your fingers, going in search of the words beyond logic, into the insides of grammar. Nothing is badly written when it’s written with love. Either it has absolute love or it’s not poetry. Writing must be done without the obstacle of the why if the writing is to be love. We must refuse those poor souls who don’t know it and who analyse a text of love just like they analyse any other text. But a text of love is not just any other text – for the simple and absolutely obvious reason that a text of love is not even a text: it is love. That alone. Whoever writes a text of love doesn’t give a damn about literature.

  What is literature when you love like this?

  Anyone who writes a text of love puts himself so entirely in the letters that he can’t imagine how they came out of him like that – but they could only have come out like that. And only someone who loves is obsessed with the idea of being a poet, the sweetest of obsessions, the most delicious of delusions. And he brings the verses together as though bringing bodies together, and kisses the words as though kissing mouths. Only someone who loves ends up looking ridiculous making poetry – because only someone who loves ends up looking ridiculous being poetry.

  It’s either mediocre literature or it’s mediocre love.

  And mediocre love can still be terrific – but it’s not love. And that’s why I write to you like this, my all, with the certainty that when the critics (those wretches, they don’t know what they write) read me they’ll see me as you see a writer, and not as the lucky devil who loves you and who limits himself to doing anything (even writing) so as to love you even more, to be able to show you the scale of what he feels for you, the size of what suffocates him. Pay no attention to them, my love. Pay no attention to those who when they see words see only a text.

  I love you even beyond what is ridiculous.

  I love you with mistakes in verb agreements, with words that don’t even exist (how can something exist to describe us when we don’t even exist yet?), with preposterous grammatical constructions; I love you with verbs in place of nouns, with adjectives in place of adverbs, with singulars in place of plurals. And that is why I can say heavenyou or foreveryou, or even youeternally. Because I really don’t care about something that isn’t knowing what this is, just this, which can tell you when you are in me.

  When somebody starts telling you I write literature when I’m writing to you, leave me. I will have stopped loving you long before.

  What are words made of

  if not of the substance of which I love you?

  Skins project the linguistics

  of love, pronouns of pleasure in

  the temptation of the verses, and when you lie

  on me it’s all the philosophy of life

  that rises up, applauding, to hear

  the absolute explanation of the orgasm.

  What is it that makes up syntax

  if not the study of the moment

  when our two bodies

  fit together?

  Academics don’t teach what

  joins us, students don’t learn

  what the life in you makes me, and even

  the lexicologist wouldn’t know where to place us

  in the dictionary nor would the dictionary know

  if it had the space to define us. As I look at you

  I invent the only language that

  I understand, and when I hear your

  ‘Ah’ that’s when I know that the alphabet

  worth knowing is about to start.

  What are phonetics made of

  if not the analysis, scientific

  and with the skin, of the untenable

  noise of your sighs?

  A tongue only exists so that

  your kiss exists, because I deny

  the need to speak when

  I find such usefulness in

  the existence of mouths, and more

  dialogues always happen with the

  size of silences than with

  the dimensions of words. When

  God comes to earth one day

  He will see that you already exist, and

  all religions will be useless.

  What is faith made of

  if not the unshakeable belief

  that there is a superior being

  located beneath you?

  He arrived late for the most important moment of his life. That’s something that can change a life. A minute earlier and everything would have been different. She would still have been there, impatient, her eyes on her watch, her hair, the sky – looking for some reason, any one would do, any reason to wait a little longer, to be able to say rationally that it would be worth the wait. The sun would have been shining, high up, implying, falsely, that it would never leave. And then he would arrive (sorry I’m late but the traffic), she’d start off by acting annoyed (I was actually just about to leave, you’d better not do this to me again), but then, bit by bit, with his words that are always light and cheerful (being fed up is pretty hard work, anyone truly lazy is always laughing because that’s the only way to avoid getting involved with things that are hard to resolve), she’d end up as well as ever, in truth, she’d stop being (you’re such a handsome bastard, you’re so handsome that all I want to say is that I love you like a madwoman, that I just want to grab that neck of yours and pull you completely over to me, kiss all your skin, and you seem to have so much to give me, until there are no more lips to kiss. Even my lips burn from kissing you; you’re so handsome that I cannot not forgive you for everything you do to me), they’d go to the usual café, to the pastry shop on the same old street, him just dying to tell her that he loved her as never before and had done for ever, her just dying to tell him that she still only believes in life because she still believes that he exists, but neither of them would say a word about what was going on inside them, they would continue with their trivial chit-chat (the government this, some club that, this film the other) until one of them, it makes no difference which because deep down it will be both, at the exact same moment and with the exact same intensity, doing it, would grab hold of the other with all the courage in the world, embracing them as though shrinking with pain, and they would suffocate deliciously in that pastry shop on the old street that once again was watching them loving each other like they have always loved each other except this time with their bodies doing what their souls have already been doing for a long time. And then would come the time with the sheets, perhaps in her bed (though you know every day since I met you I’ve prepared the sheets for us, every day I’ve woken up thinking that today would be the day and I’ve chosen my favourite sheets, ones I don’t know if you’ll like but which I’m sure you’ll like, the sheets that smell of us even if you’ve never been here), the moment of heads lost, of stolen moans, of everything to which those who love each other have the right. They would end the night the next morning, tired and ready for more nights like this, at the most delicious breakfast that life has to offer. Some months later the moment would come for combining houses, this time at his (when I chose this house I was thinking of you, I thought it would be too big for me but perfect for us, and I chose the remote possibility of an us from the painful certainty of an I), and there they began their story. They would have children, a lad ca
lled Pedro like his father, a girl called Bárbara like her mother, and then they’d stick around, in the house where they would learn happiness and where every day they would teach their children, until the death of one (her first, because even in this he was a gentleman) parted them for one, two months – till the time when the other (him, who to her, for a change, was even late when it came to dying) went too. The children, those two, would cry at the loss, just as all such great losses are cried at, but they would be capable and have all the tools they need to walk on through life. One of them, one day, would fall in love with the most beautiful woman he’d ever had the good fortune to see. They would become friends and he would promise, before they lay down, that on the next day he would tell her how much he loved her. That’s how it would be, were it not for the traffic. He arrived late for the most important moment of his life.

  Standing at the button, heart racing and skin sweaty, L. was trembling. That button. She only had to press. Just once. It was enough to press down just once and everything would be set in motion. A simple touch and that was that. Whatever God wanted. But the problem with humans is that, almost always, they don’t trust what God wants. They prefer to grab with both hands everything they can get hold of, trying to limit the damage, minimising it as much as possible. Humans created a God in whom they don’t believe, in whom they believe only in despair, she thought, her finger resting on the button, her sweat getting ever thicker, her whole body unable to stop. She thought some more. She thought that her whole life she’d fought to have what she had never truly wanted. She had fought to have the house opposite the sea that she’d read in magazines and in books it was good to have, she’d fought to have the convertible car that films had taught her to value, she’d fought to find the job of other people’s dreams and the career that now prevented her from dreaming. She had fought for the dreams of other people. Her parents’ dreams, her friends’, the dreams of all those around her. And she’d forgotten who she was, what she was, what she had aspired to. She’d forgotten the night when she’d fallen asleep, once when she was very small, hugging her teddy bear, and thought that all she aspired to in life was this: time, space and life to lie down in an embrace with whoever would protect her like that simple bear. That’s another problem with humans, she thought now, her trembling finger on the button, they spend their lives not understanding what they’re for, they spend their lives wanting to fill their lives, to occupy them with things to do, with intentions to fulfil. Humans spend their lives wallowing in futilities. Perhaps that’s the best way not to feel the emptiness, she concluded later, her finger almost almost pressing down hard on the button. It’s like a house filled with furniture. However much furniture an empty house has in it it’s still empty, and the emptier the house is, the more furniture people try to put in it. To wipe out the emptiness, to bridge the nothing. To put an end to the silence. That’s it, she said to herself, as though she had just described the secret to eternal happiness. People use things in order to muffle the silence. And there she remained, in silence, with her finger, now it’s the index finger of her right hand, resting on the button that makes her tremble, on the button that will decide whether she’s just another person, with no courage, no strength, with nothing but things for erasing the blank space of her days. I need to decide, she convinced herself. Now or never, she declared. But first she thought about the morbid perversity of comfort. That, comfort, is what kills humans the most. Wanting to be always well. Not great, not euphoric, merely well. And with a terrible fear of being unwell, of hurting. It’s the constant flight from what hurts that harms humans the most, that removes them most from life, she thought. For the second time in her life after that night when she’d fallen asleep with the teddy bear, she came close to herself. And she pressed down, with no further hesitation, on the button. She only hoped, now, that he would hear the telephone ring.