The people I love.
The people I love have wrinkles on their faces even if they’re children, a skin which daily teaches them that we have to keep moving forward before we are left behind, and an unshakeable desire to change the world with every gesture they make. They don’t shirk their responsibilities as human beings, still less do they deny ageing as one of the constants of being alive, they suffer like the soulless because deep down that’s the greatest proof that they have souls. And they insist, impudently, on a road to stable perdition that takes them to meet their unbalanced happinesses.
The people I love.
The people I love are hard to understand, sometimes they talk about strange things, have unattainable desires and worst of all they go off to try and get them satisfied. They don’t waste time speaking ill of people who have done, they don’t waste energy searching for the inadequacies of people who have tried. And they continue, frivolously, developing their own theories of existence, their own manuals in every speciality that the speciality in being alive contains within it.
The people I love.
The people I love spend their lives goofing around, telling anyone whoever requires them to wear a tie on their souls to get lost, who are fans of the repeated pornography of undressing dreams and acting on them, and if anyone asks them for a hand they have no problem giving their whole arm if they can. They don’t turn down pleasures, they don’t say ‘no’ to an orgasm, they don’t believe in a faith that castrates and in all the gods that sell hardship. And they throw themselves, almost always head first, towards a wish for everything for the first time, life for the first time, and day, and night, and all the evenings that never come late.
The people I love.
The people I love aren’t the best people in the world. But they are people.
And that’s enough for me to be able to love them.
The poet sat down, took a deep breath and wrote:
‘An Infinite Sentence for an Infinite Love
One day we spent the day defining what was
surrounding us, we started with what was closest
and saw that happiness, if you think about it,
consists of looking at what doesn’t cause pain, and
that’s how we spent that evening of that day
when we spent the day defining looking at each other, without
a word, because we all know and we all
knew too that all ends begin in
words, said or yet to say, and all we wanted
was for none of that, me looking at you or you at me
for us both to be looking at happiness
after we’d defined it, to end, and the truth is
it didn’t end: I continued to be happy looking at you,
you continued to be happy looking at me, I’d bet
that you told me I was beautiful and I’m sure
I told you you were beautiful, without a word
I also told you that we would need to stretch time
so that the whole of life left to us was a good beginning
for all the minutes I wanted to love you, then
we decided to go in search of new definitions and
the words returned, you said it would be good to define fear, and
before we knew it the two of us were embracing,
saying to each other that fear was the ending of
what we were, and we had to cling tight not to
let it get away, and like that, without realising, we were already defining
an embrace, that thing that, deep down, is no more than the
way in which humans, being so impotent, find to maintain
the illusion that this way they can stop the person they like most
from getting away; and while we embraced we were already
thinking that there was so much more to define, the sea or the
wind, for example, you started saying that the sea
is what when you look at me seems so small and I
said that the only function of the wind was to push your
voice towards me, then I also said that I didn’t believe
in the blue of the sea since I’d seen your eyes and you said
that sometimes you’re afraid of the wind because there are words it
might carry away from you which you so want to hear; that was when I said
I love you and even the wind didn’t stop me, you said love me and
tell me so always even if it’s over the noise of every wind, and suddenly
your hug was tighter once again, and happiness
was once again better defined, and the only definition
left was the greatest one of all; I started, fearful, and
I stated with conviction that love is what suspends
life, you agreed and added that perfect love
is what suspends life throughout a whole life,
and I still wanted to specify that in some contexts
people say that love and life can be perfect
synonyms but I disagreed firmly, because
it’s quite clear that life isn’t nor ever would be
a match for the size of love; it was
at this point that you gave up on the hug and preferred
a whole body, and the only definition we touched upon again
that day and that night was of moaning, which we left,
polite as we are, for all the neighbours who
had the patience to listen to our pleasure
And thus, without any full stop at all as there needs to be, ends the infinite poem’
The poet wrote, before lying down, alone, and spending the night crying as he listened to the pleasure of the neighbours upstairs.
He believed he ought to have two women: one for loving and one for company.
‘There’s no way to combine the two sides of what I want: if on the one hand I want peace, on the other I want war. The woman I love unsettles me; the woman I have for company soothes me,’ he used to say, whenever he was asked the reason for such a strange way of looking at his feelings. ‘I’m a two-girl man only,’ he’d conclude, and smile, as he tenderly kissed the woman he had for company, and then, heatedly and passionately, the woman he loved.
One day, one of them, the woman he loved, died suddenly. In distress, after a few minutes he quit the company of her relatives and their unbearable weeping and, unable to shake his desperation, he sought solace from the woman he had for company. He arrived at the house, said the usual ‘honey, I’m home’ but didn’t hear the usual ‘I’m in here, love’. He searched the house countless times. Then he searched the city countless times, and the hospitals, the homes of their friends. He phoned everywhere. Until at last he went to the police. He gave her name and then finally someone said they knew exactly where she was, without volunteering any further details. Barely breathing, he wrote down the place and went on there, anxious for a hug that might give at least one of his sides some peace. Until he arrived, onto the threshold of total distress.
‘Thank goodness you came back,’ cried the distraught mother of the woman he loved, dressed in black and tears, when she saw him approaching from a distance. ‘We didn’t know where you’d gone, you left without telling anyone,’ she added. And she rested her head on his defeated lap.
He seemed like a normal man but he was a man without love. Though he doesn’t seem like it, a man without love is no man at all.
‘Do you dance?’
The woman, who he had never seen before, was looking him straight in the eye, staring fixedly at every movement of his mouth as though expecting to hear the secret to eternal life.
‘Sorry, I just haven’t got a knack for dancing.’
His expected answer, whenever there was the possibility of something that might hurt him. ‘If you can’t conquer it, get yourself involved in it’ was his maxim when it came to fear. But that woman was fearless. Or if not, she didn’t give a damn about him.
‘Not
having a knack for something is, for me, the best possible reason to carry out that something, countless times. It’s only then that doing something gives you that real rush: when we don’t know much, or really anything, about how we’re supposed to do it. And we just test it out, experimenting, running risks and inventing new paths. Doing something you haven’t the vaguest idea how to do, that’s probably the most exciting thing in the world. After love, of course.’
All this without a smile, without the slightest sense that she was joking: that woman didn’t joke when on duty. And her duty was well defined.
‘Do you dance?’
In silence, feeling as though he were being observed in an ultrasound of emotions, the man tried to run away. The man always tried to run away. (Man always tries to run away.)
‘I really haven’t got the knack, like I said. And besides, I don’t like it. At all. I really don’t like it at all.’
Plan B is under way. The strangest thing about fear is the way it forces us, in order to avoid doing something we’re scared to do, to do something we’re even more scared to do. Running away is an act of disguised courage. But if you’re going to be afraid, let it be a sensual fear, a sexual fear. A fear with an orgasm inside it.
‘Not liking something is the second strongest reason for doing that something. When we don’t like something, the problem isn’t with the something; the problem’s with us, that we can’t extract from the something in question whatever it has to offer us. We need to turn that something around, look at it from every possible angle. And then we always find reasons to do, and enjoy doing, that something. Sometimes we have to do it first and only afterwards understand why we’ve done it.’
The woman insisted. The woman was one of those unusual people who don’t give up until she’s won. That, deep down, is the only possible argument for giving up on winning.
‘Do you dance?’
Finally he danced. Around them people didn’t even register him or her. They were just another couple, just another love winning the battle. Just the world winning the battle. It’s courage, perhaps more than dreams (dreams imagine; courage is), that make the world leap and move forward.
‘Do you dance, miss?’
He asked strangely, on the most special day of his life, in the middle of another of the times when the two of them went out dancing. And she understood that, this time, it was an invitation to stop. She stopped. And said yes.
Till death would them part.
‘I’d like to forget the name of the sheets when I have you, the space unoccupied on the bed when you aren’t with me, but time passes and it may be too late.’
These were the first words she wrote to make him come back. But they didn’t last long. She looked at them, felt they were too poetic to tell the truth, which was so primitive, about what she felt. She deleted them. And started again.
‘I’ve got a stomach ache from not having you. There’s a hole that doesn’t get better in the centre of what I feel. Come back to my lap or I don’t even know why I want this body at all.’
That was her second attempt. It seemed much better, she thought, the right words in the right place. But then she read it again. She saw that it was perhaps too visceral, that it was perhaps too physical. She wanted something more balanced – and yet still able to show him the imbalance of not having him. She needed something that connected the physical lack to the total lack. Without beautiful words, without exaggerated metaphors, without surrendering to the temptation of the clichés you can read in any cheap paperback. She needed to be unique. And she tried again.
‘You are the best way of living. I could say to you I want you for everything that you are. But I’d be lying. I want you because of everything that I am with you. I want you because of what I am. Because I feel I am, in you, the person I want to be. You are my best way of living. I want you out of egotism. That’s it. I want you out of egotism. I hope you want me for the same reason.’
Now that was it. She read it through. She adored it. That was it, that was exactly what she wanted to say: honesty needed, at this point, to be the right approach. There was no use for complex ideas, poems that were beautiful but empty. Only sincerity, the purest sincerity, might be able to make him come back. Before sending the text to print, on a dry white page, she read it once again. She liked it even more. She had achieved the perfect text for such an imperfect moment as this. She had her finger on the ‘print’ button, ready to press it, when she understood that, after all, she still hadn’t found what she wanted. He had just arrived, he looked at her and opened his arms to her. She looked back at him and didn’t even need to speak.
That text stayed where it was, still, the excitable cursor watching them love.
The neighbour opposite always insists on vacuuming her house when I’m loving you, I hear each speck being sucked up as my desire for you breathes me in, and if there’s something coming through the light it’s your eyes and your kiss.
There’s so much fear in the room when you leave, I lie down, all wrapped up, waiting for you to come, the windows bringing me life that just keeps on going, as though it were possible to keep on going without you, people looking at me, lying down and all wrapped up, and they feel sorry for the old man who’s just waiting for somebody to take him away to nevermore.
The neighbour opposite does her vacuuming, I don’t know how long I’ve been seeing her like this, every day, the usual time, not too early in the morning nor too late, or maybe it’s just not too early in the morning nor too late within me, and whenever it is that she vacuums I’m loving you.
Like now, as I look into the cracks in the ceiling, I’ll deal with them one day, I promise, for something that I don’t know quite what it is, maybe a deeper hole, or a different-coloured stain, all around there’s a darkness I can’t bear, your smell visible each time I try to open my eyes.
I need your smell more than I need life, and I never told you, coward that I am, that there’s a courage within me that depends on you, because there’s something telling me that you’re the justification for everything, and that even killing for you wouldn’t be a sin. And that damned vacuum cleaner, when are you coming back?, it doesn’t stop and doesn’t let me stop, probably there isn’t even a vacuum cleaner or a neighbour, it’s just me in search of you, and you already know, have I told you this?, that whenever the neighbour does her vacuuming I’m loving you.
Yesterday I saw you doing the washing-up and I thought about God, or about some other thing that’s just as big, I thought there’s a declaration of love whenever I look at you, and that we’ve discovered that life doesn’t pass by when we convince ourselves of its end. Then I stopped thinking and went over to you, ran my hand down your back, your smile as I discovered you, and you helped me to love you while I helped you to put the dishes in the machine. What kind of god would let something like this end, would allow there to be something as small as our two bodies sustaining things as large as our desires for ever?
The neighbour vacuums and we love each other, and if there’s something coming through the flesh it’s your eyes and your kisses, and whenever the neighbour vacuums, have I told you this?, I’m loving you.
The day puts me to sleep beneath its eyes, and your hands are the skin that God has chosen for touching the world; there is no place more divine than your kiss, and when I want to fly I lie down at your feet.
I ask you not to go, to stay just so I can stay, to remain on your side of the bed, and me on mine, both of us feeling time running on, and you can even fall asleep, you can read the women’s magazine with the red carpets and those men with abs that nobody has, or just look at the ceiling and think about you; I’ll stay here, looking at you so I know that I exist, thinking about how much I love you and how much I have your body within mine. Knowing that there is the curve of your back for finding the curve of life, my eyes watching your sweat running down, understanding the possibility of eternity.
Immortality is an orgasm with you.
Yo
u moan until the world is ending inside my ears, my whole body comes when you’re about to, and the truth of the universe is the cramped physics of the space between us. You hold me tight for ever until the ends of my bones, until flesh is impossible and there surely must be something more to explain our existence.
All I know is that I’m more than a body when you come to me to hold me tight.
When I embrace you even the poem bends, too small in its poetry for the intangible that unites us, people don’t believe something like this happens and that’s what saves us from excommunication. Then you go, you ask to leave, as life also exists and the bills need paying, and I finally understand that the problem with all this is that nobody understands what’s important in life.
The cleaning woman arrives and finds me pen in hand, writing you these words and some others, stretched out on my side of the bed, waiting for you once again, and in silence she goes on cleaning whatever there is to clean, she already knows not to clean the marks from your feet on the kitchen floor (your feet all over the house are so beautiful), still less the already smoked cigarettes you’ve left in the ashtray, and I keep writing I don’t know what, which I’m only writing to free myself from you for a few moments, I don’t know where the words go but I suspect they don’t know much about me either, and many minutes or hours later, with so many words already between us, the door opens, the cleaning woman is no longer here, there’s no evidence in the kitchen that when I was writing to you I fed my body to stay alive, because it’s only alive that I can love you, and your smile. All these words, a day’s work, and your smile. Why write when your smile exists at the end of the day? I feel like tearing everything up, all the sheets of paper and all the hours I spent without you, and search for the perfect verse inside of which I can see you when at the end of the day there’s the door and you and your smile. The only reason there are still people who read me is because there are still people who don’t know you. I’m so small for the scale of you, my love.
The Day I Found You Page 18