They’ve met every day, at the same time, on the park bench. The third on the left as you come into the park from the south side. They’ve never spoken but they know everything about each other. He knows she’s called Isabel, she’s forty-five and has been divorced for about a year, since she, on the phone on the park bench, instructed her lawyer, with tears in her eyes, to go ahead with the proceedings whatever the cost. She knows he’s called André, that he’s forty-seven and that he’s married to a woman he hasn’t loved in more than twenty years, as he has written almost daily in his diary which she, not meaning to but not accidentally, managed to read out of the corner of her eye while he, on that bench, wrote with a frequency that was almost religious. Today, strangely, she has not yet arrived. He looks at his watch and confirms the delay, more than half an hour. Night is threatening to fall and still nothing. She doesn’t appear. He looks, countless times, to the hands of the watch. Nothing. Then he looks around, as though seeking the cure for death. Nothing. Lost, desperate, he decides to go looking for her. He knows her full name, he knows which neighbourhood she lives in. It won’t be hard to find her, he thinks, as he walks quickly through the streets of the city. The sweat pours down his face, a perfect photograph of the state of nerves that drive his steps. The minutes feel like days on that road that never ends. But lo and behold, he arrives. It’s a peaceful street in a peaceful neighbourhood. The ideal place for a peaceful person, he says to himself, while at the same time looking around, in search of her face, of her legs, of her body, of her smile. How lovely her smile is, he recalls, and without his realising it’s no longer sweat running down his face. He doesn’t see her. But he doesn’t give up. He goes house to house, trying to work out which is the house that deserves her. He had never needed any kind of question, any kind of word, to know everything about her. And nor would it be necessary now. He goes by one, two, three, four, five, six small but pleasant dwellings. And he reaches the seventh. The flowers, the garden, the tree, the dog barking at the gate, the swing where he imagines her in search of a possible heaven, even if just for a few seconds. She could only be here. He advances, without hesitating, only after having wiped away everything that insisted on running down his skin. He’s less than a metre from the door, in brown wood, and he expects to be less than a metre from meeting her. He straightens his shirt one last time, centring it on his shoulders, and does what he needs to do. One second. Two seconds. Three seconds. Footsteps on the far side. He smiles, recognises the heels of her walk, and he knows he’s in the right place. She opens the door and that smile. Next she embraces him, kisses him, takes him to the bedroom and loves him while he loves her with exactly the same intensity. Neither more nor less. They love each other in exactly the same way, and perhaps that’s the only way to prove the existence of a love, that’s what he realised, later, when without a single word just as it had always been without a single word, they say goodbye. Until the following day, when, at the agreed time, they meet on the park bench. The third on the left as you come into the park from the south side. By this point everything will be as it has always been, despite his having instructed his lawyer to begin, as quickly as possible, the divorce proceedings.
Life was over and yet there was still so much to live.
The story of a bearable end had been left by the wayside. I knew that I didn’t love the man I’d chosen, and perhaps that’s exactly why I’d chosen him: to show that there was a possibility of deciding my destiny beyond what destiny had decided for me. I wanted to play God when I chose him. And I prayed to Him for help.
But even God cannot silence a love. We lived in a state of all-out war for twenty years. Twenty years to figure out who was in command of whom. And the love, sickly and irrational like all loves, always in command of us inside. Everything we did was for love, to conquer love. That was how, each day, we would make ourselves be defeated. There were, of course, the usual escapes. A son, for starters. To hide the silences, to not have to put up with each other, to oblige ourselves, in front of him, to keep our mouths shut. And we started keeping our mouths shut. With us, it was love that fell silent too, like a wild animal that, bit by bit, with the triumph of age, starts allowing itself to be defeated, without realising that it’s only when it’s in motion that it can hunt.
There is always one child too many when a couple who don’t love each other has a child.
We insisted. We insisted to each other. Forever at war but now in silence, stealthily, each with their own cool combat strategy. He stopped being my love – despite, as I now know cynically, still addressing me as the usual small and insignificant ‘hon’ – and started being just the target of all my internal movements. When is it that someone stops being our life and starts being what prevents us from living? Only stubbornness kept us together, such a great mule-headedness that held us close to absolutely nothing over more than two decades. Two decades. Fuck it. Twenty times three hundred and sixty-five days of my life lost like that, see who’s the most resilient, see who didn’t give way just for the pleasure of watching the other give way. I bet he dreamed, like I dreamed, about the day of liberation, about the day when he would arrive home and I’d say ‘I’m fed up, let’s just end this shit’. But the day never came. And the whole damn mess just grew. And our son increasingly realising that he was living with two different people in two different spheres and never with a couple. There were three houses in our house: mine, yours, and ours with him. And he, as smart as he’s ever been, knew exactly how to act with one or the other of us. He did everything to make us find points of agreement, to end with a hug, however forced (or committed) they may be. I would have been capable, I swear, of putting up with it till the final days of my life. What bastard idiot prefers to surrender their whole life rather than surrendering once in their life?
It would have stayed just the same if you hadn’t happened. I say happen because that’s really what defines the moment when I saw you. You happened to me. And me happened. That’s probably the best way to describe what you did to me: you made me happen. You made me understand once again that there was still space to try. From the beginning. Everything once again. You didn’t need to say much. You said, ‘Carlos, a pleasure,’ and I heard ‘Carlos, for ever’. And that’s how it was, my love.
Until today.
The sun was shining and the wind was blowing and the world
continued as beautiful as only it could be, but
you weren’t there and none of it mattered.
The worst thing in the world is a half-life, the cruel limbo
where the overwhelming majority of people
come to rest, sitting on a bed of things that are
reasonable. A reasonable job exists, a reasonable house,
reasonable feelings, even reasonable happiness, and it’s only
later that you exist beyond all reasonableness.
The moon was full and the beach had sand
brighter than had ever existed before, but you
weren’t there and none of it mattered.
A half-life consists of avoiding suffering as though
death itself were in it, giving up on going
in search of what might hurt and in doing so
giving up on going in search of what might delight. A
possible euphoria does exist, possible pleasure, possible days, and
it’s only later that you exist beyond all possibilities.
The birds flew high and free, poems
continued to be the most blessed creations
of mankind, but you weren’t there and none of it mattered.
I believed that being alive was no more than that, everything
I ever wanted in a moderate dose, in an adequate dose, life
served out in small portions. I smiled because smiling
was all I could manage, I was satisfied embracing whatever
crossed my path, I was convinced that this was
how my whole journey would go, and it’s only later
I understood that you exist beyond all satisfactions.
The restaurant was wretched, the food an absolute
scandal, the weather out there was horrible, your
waiting-staff uniform was an attack on
good taste, but you were there and nothing else mattered.
The taste of your kiss was strange, as vast
as it was gloomy, and only then, after the first
touch of your lips on mine, did I understand that
there was a goodbye in the meeting of our mouths. It was
the whole construction of my half-life that was giving way
when faced with your overkissing. From us and from our
mouths there was a whole existence that seemed to be
performable, and we performed it all night long.
The bed was uncomfortable, the springs made
unbearable noises, your moans
were so piercing that they did away with my
ears, but you were still there and nothing else mattered.
‘Half of me is you and the other half is sin.’
‘How do you understand sin? How do you separate good sin from bad sin?’
‘The pain. The pain separates the waters. The pain separates all waters.’
‘What’s painful is bad?’
‘What’s painful, yes. The rest isn’t and nor is it. One must always choose what might be painful. Only what could perhaps hurt has a chance of perhaps making you love.’
‘If it doesn’t hurt it isn’t love?’
‘It if isn’t capable of hurting it isn’t love. Maybe it won’t actually hurt. Maybe it’ll never hurt. But it has that capacity, you know it has that capacity. Because it is down in your deepest layer, in your most profound dimension. Deep in your guts.’
‘You love me all the way to your guts.’
‘I love you until I find myself. You are my losing and my finding. I need you to lose myself and I need you to find myself. If I look around you and don’t find you I’m lost, even if I’m somewhere familiar. If you’re not around me it’s because I’m not there.’
‘Do you want to sin with me?’
‘Every day. You are all the sin there is for the living. The good and the bad. But ultimately there’s only one kind of sin: the kind that keeps us alive. Anyone who lives without sinning and dies without sinning has never really lived. He’s just wandered through. Anyone who has never sinned is not a saint; he’s a dead man. He was born dead. It’s sin that creates changeability, irregularity. Life, despite being a regular cycle, must show some irregularities. They are the bends that give the road its charm. Always going in a straight line makes me sleepy.’
‘If you’re not transgressing, you’re depressing.’
‘If you’re not transgressing, you’re bad at tasting. I’m no good at rhyme. I’m no good at anything, really. I try hard to be good at loving you. That’s the only talent I seek to have: loving you competently.’
‘Competently. Such an ugly word for such a beautiful thing that binds us.’
‘I don’t like beautiful words. I believe we all have a limit to the amount of beauty we can spend over the course of our lives. I prefer to spend it on acts and not on words. Anyone who speaks beauty will later be left with nothing to make beauty. I prefer to be the poem, the novel, the literature. I don’t want you to be my inspiration, I want you to be my titillation.’
‘Another expression that’s far from beautiful.’
‘And yet effective.’
‘You’re right.’
‘Come.’
‘I’m coming.’
They discovered as they danced that the body of one didn’t fit perfectly into the body of the other. That was enough for them, right then, to separate. He was fanatical about mathematical perfection and quite clear about what made him go far away: the dimensions between us are wrong. She heard him, understood that there wasn’t much to be done when something was as impossible as that, and just said: there are some bodies that mathematics cannot measure. But she let him go, with no reaction, with no attempt to fight back. She believed that love was made of such moments, where you had to learn to lose, calmly, what it was no longer possible to win.
Yes, I do, he answered the priest. He had at last found the sought-after fit, after a ceaseless search, which included journeys to three different continents and a few seconds’ dancing with thousands of women of every possible kind. But he was within reach of his great objective. That woman, who is now kissing him on the mouth as a celebration of a matrimony consummated, is mathematically perfect in her dimensions. Never before had any dance been so untouchably perfect. Their bodies as though composing, together, a second symphony to the strains of the first. Bodies like musical notes, he would conclude many times while dancing with her, understanding with some emotion that all the sacrifice had been worth it. You are the proof that mathematics is the complete science: it can even measure love, he told her, moments before they surrendered for the first time to the incomparable pleasure of the flesh.
It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense, he said over and over again, inconsolable, as he looked into his wife’s eyes. You’re the same size lying down and standing up, and I’m the same size lying down and standing up, and yet we seem to be lacking in closeness, there’s too much space between us. I have your whole body on mine and you feel far away. It’s as though bodies change size when they lie down. It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense, he went back, with the day already beginning and light coming in through the bedroom window, to repeating. And with a calculator in his hand, he got up from the bed.
The maths worked out just fine in the daylight. That was his first conclusion when he threw the thick, dense manuals into the living-room fireplace, the books he had used to guide him his whole life. Until today. Until the moment when, after loving the woman who one day the dance had shown could not be perfect for him, he understood that there was an irreparable defect to science, a glaring inadequacy as regards the capacity for measuring what is loved. Mathematics doesn’t understand the difference between a love lying down and a love standing up; it’s as though it measured only what bodies show and didn’t consider that, in some cases, what measures two bodies is not the actual size of the two bodies but the distance that they allow to be created between them; it’s in scarcity that you measure love: the less space there is separating them, the greater size the bodies attain, he now wrote, aware that he was just a few moments from starting a historic revolution, a new current of thought, who knows maybe even a new discipline that henceforth would be studied in schools and universities across the world. But, strangely, he gave up on all this right away. The woman he loved was still there, watching him, over on that side. She was asking him, desperately, for one more embrace. And he went.
Love me until you stop knowing yourself.
That was how you started to enter me. Suddenly, without our ever having seen each other, your words like bullets in the middle of the local library: fuck me until you stop knowing who you are. And me silent on the inside, even if on the outside I couldn’t prevent a smile and a few opportune words made up on the spot (how the hell is one supposed to know what the opportune words are for an opportunity that has never existed before?): I like the way you kid around, I said. But you weren’t kidding around. Ten minutes later you were on top of me with your clothes already torn off you and myself already torn off me. We had confirmation: I no longer knew who I was and I was completely unprepared for this.
If you abandon me I’ll run away.
That was your threat when, fed up with your eccentricities (one day I arrived home and you were showing the peculiarities of the colour of your left nipple to my best friend, another day you decided to cut my finger with a kitchen knife to find out what my blood tasted like, another day you threw yourself out of the living-room window to be sure that your wings were only on the inside), I was standing at the door with my bags in my hand. And you insisted: if you w
alk out of that door you can count on it that you’ll never see me again. I didn’t believe you. And I thought I was right when, less than a month later, I was already back home, our home, aching with longing for your love that prevented me from knowing who I was. But you were correct and you were right once again: the person with me now was no longer you. You, more than me, had run away that day. And it had been my fault.
The Day I Found You Page 14