When I embrace you again I will have a new text to give you, I promise you every day. Until you arrive and nothing is up to scratch, and the great artist, listen carefully now, the great artist is just a man who always falls short of whatever he loves. He was able to resist anything except the irresistible. He was, deep down, just like all men and all women: he could bear even the unbearable.
That was when she arrived. Quiet little words, small steps, skin as though untouchable. She asked for a coffee and he knew that he was lost. Then she said ‘thanks’ and didn’t even realise that he, within his ‘yes, ma’am’, had already surrendered to her eyes, her shyness, the fatal inevitability of loving her as though there were no other possibility.
He was capable of avoiding love as long as he didn’t love. He was, deep down, just like all men and all women: he loved even the detestable.
That day, he walked with her almost the whole day long. She didn’t know it, but she walked with him to every table he served, with every ‘yes, ma’am’ he said. When he left work, as he took off the jersey from the café where he’d worked for more than twenty years, he saw her face in his mind once again, and her gestures, her voice right in his ear even though she was more than a metre away. He tried to tell what her mouth tasted of, her skin like silk, the moment when their lips met. That was how he fell asleep, kissing her, and woke like this, holding her to protect her from the world.
He was capable of being courageous so long as he didn’t feel fear. He was, deep down, just like all men and all women: he feared even what could make him happy.
It was on the third day but it could have been on any day. She arrived, he filled his chest with courage and said as much as he could about her beauty. He waited, his heart raging, just a few seconds. She said ‘thank you very much’ and asked for the usual coffee in the usual way. She continued, then, reading the newspaper and making notes on a small pad she brought with her every day. He went to fetch the coffee but he had already been dead for a few seconds. He stood still, watching her, to prove to himself that he was able to bear even death. Then she said ‘have a good day, take care’ and headed off towards the exit as she always did, he replied what he always replied, but she added a strange ‘happy reading’ when she was already outside the door.
He was capable of living for ever so long as he was mortal. He was, deep down, just like all men and all women: he lived off even what could kill him.
‘If you’re here tomorrow I guarantee you’ll have to love me for ever’ was what was written on the piece of paper she’d left on the table. That night he slept in the café, under the counter, just in case the alarm clock got up to its old tricks again. And she arrived.
There’s something godlike in the way you love me, mother.
People are not as great as you. People cry, people suffer, people go through life in search of a better way to live. But you love me, mother. You love me like this, unconditionally, and it’s as though when you love me you don’t even exist. You’re just there, seeing me exist, and that’s how you discover and teach me that life consists of watching somebody you love living.
There’s something impossible in the way you love me, mother.
The possible would demand that you stop when it hurts you, that you stop when the world, the bastard world, obliges you to invent new ways to give me everything I need. The possible would tell you that, no, a single person, as small and as big as you, cannot bear the weight of two lives. And yet there you still are, as strong as only you are, as impossible as only you are, smiling when you see me with my exercise book in hand saying I’m the best pupil in the class. Of course it’s good to be a good pupil, but my greatest pride is being the son of the most impossible mother in the world.
There’s something brilliant in the way you love me, mother.
People don’t invent time the way you do, people can’t understand what equation allows you to be always wherever you need to be, people arrive late, people fail to meet their responsibilities, people sometimes forget what they have to do, people can’t make just half of what they need to live on be enough for them to live wanting for nothing. And you manage the miracle of the loaves and the bodies, you’re in exactly the right place where I need you at the exact time when I need you with the exact words I need, talking to me about how important it is to believe that we know everything even if it’s important to believe that we know nothing, and I hear you and I understand that the secret of your existence is knowing that only love can defeat mathematics, and that there’s no number that is a match for when you hug me.
There’s something of all of me in the way you love me, mother.
And when they ask me how old my mother is I’ll just say for ever.
And your smell spread all over the bed.
The socks you wore to go out at night, folded to perfection as though you had discovered in them some complex mathematical theory, the high-heeled shoes lined up by colour, the dresses arranged by size, the floor and the scratches from your heavy steps when you were in a hurry and life was waiting for you.
And the kitchen in disorder, the plates piled up, an unbearable stench of a lack of you all over the house.
I’m the most fragile man in the world when I don’t have you, I wander around these pieces of furniture in search of a reason to talk, I sit on the sofa not knowing where to go, and the truth about life is that your arms don’t exist and I have nowhere to lie down.
How am I supposed to believe in God if even your body is not eternal?
What’s left is the space of memory which is ours alone: when you were angry and still didn’t stop being beautiful, when you cried and still didn’t stop being beautiful, when you said that your whole body hurt all over and still didn’t stop being beautiful, when you died and still didn’t stop being beautiful.
Loving is the person you love never stopping being beautiful, you told me, I don’t know if it was one or two hours before letting yourself go, and I came home with your death and dedicated the following days to loving you. I visited your cell phone, your emails, the loose sheets of paper you’d written here and there, the messages we’d exchanged to keep us together. I didn’t find a single character flaw in you, a single inconsistency. You were the healthiest woman in the world and perhaps that was why you’d died. So that life can continue to be unbalanced, so that the world can be made up of people who fail the way you’d never been capable of failing.
You’re too perfect to deserve anything as fallible as a body. No body was a match for you and it was necessary to put an end to you before your perfection put an end to whatever it is that keeps the world in balance.
Your large photo on the living-room dresser, the way you smiled whenever you didn’t know what to do. You’re so beautiful, my love.
And now there’s too much time left for a life without you. The days don’t pass, the words don’t come. They are sad people who think a writer lives off his pain. If I’d lived off my pain I would have written more than these poor lines since you left. If I’d lived off my pain I’d be alive for ever.
Your toothbrush beside mine. What could be more of a bastard than needing you like this?
The worst thing about life is needing to sleep. Eyes close and there you are, eyes open and there you are. There are pills that force me to stop. But then there’s the dreaming and everything in it that you make me and everything that you are. What kind of cruelty is it making me wake up somewhere where you are not? The worst thing about life is needing to wake up.
People feel sorry for me, they look at me as though looking at a dead man, and in those moments I envy you; you’re dead and no one can see you, and I still need to walk, need to eat, need to say ‘good morning’ to somebody who brings me nothing – because they don’t bring me you. Next time promise that when you go you’ll take me with you. It doesn’t even need to be anything romantic, anything dramatic. You just need to do what you’ve always done: go and take me, that’s all.
And your smell spre
ad all over the bed. Maybe that’s why I stay alive. Or in whatever state this is that I’m in.
I write to you every day to try to remember you again. So the words reconstruct you, so the poem gives you life. I write every day to try to remember you again. And they all end with a final shout, which all the neighbours know now and ignore. This one too.
He’d decided it wouldn’t go on beyond that night. Life was hurting too much to go on and he had to put an end to it as soon as possible.
On the table were the various possibilities for a happy end: the pills that, he’d read on the internet, in just a few minutes, if taken in excessive quantities, would fulfil their task without too much pain; the revolver belonging to his late father, God preserve him, already loaded and ready to do its duty, just point it at the right place, something he’d already studied in some detail in an old school textbook; a dish full of his favourite food, which was no more than a dish filled with deadly poison, a mixture he’d learned years back during a strange conversation with a doctor friend, which included rat poison and even a bit of balsamic vinegar; and finally a generously proportioned pillow, which he had bought one day for reading in bed but which might, now, be perfect for saying his goodbyes to the world in silence. Besides all these possibilities, there were a few others too, which weren’t on the table but were still on the table: the window was open, and a leap from the fourteenth floor certainly would not result in anything less than death; and the bathtub was full, so a drowning couldn’t be completely out of the question.
All he had to do now was choose. And, of course, write the farewell note that, as he’d seen in the movies, it would be good to write. In it he wouldn’t blame anyone concretely – just this life, that bitch of a life that had taken from him his job, his wife and, with her, his children who he hadn’t seen for months. He’d write that he wasn’t even going to bear a grudge about anything, against anyone, but he just felt he’d reached the point when he should find a different path and try new things. Death, then, seemed to him the right experience for this stage of his life.
As he wrote, he thought about who would be the first person to read those words. Maybe the ambulance man, Senhor Gouveia, such a sweet man, who’d been so tireless at the time of his mother’s passing away. Even knowing that there was nothing to be done, he’d still rushed her to the local hospital, putting her so carefully on to the stretcher and treating her, in the final minutes of her life, like a real princess. Yes, it would probably be Senhor Gouveia. And he’d probably look at the dead body and think it was a waste, that life is so big and so beautiful and that nobody should be able to put an end to it without just cause. And the only just cause for dying, he’d say as he said so often, is not being able to stay alive.
Then, he thought as he kept on writing, Senhor Gouveia would call Carla. She’d come over with that sleepy look on her face, that skin that was still baby-soft, and she would read, the tears unfairly making her more beautiful, what he had written. She would understand his words perfectly, and his reasons, and then she would hug Senhor Gouveia, who would just repeat countless times: let it go, child, you’re not to blame.
The children’s turn would come next. António, the eldest, would be so disappointed. Doubtless he’d think it was a lie, how could his superdad, who was never afraid of anything, do a thing like this? Joana, the little one, wouldn’t even really understand what was going on. She’d ask why daddy’s lying so still, or she wouldn’t ask anything at all because no one would let her see him again. She would never see him again and she’d end up forgetting him for good. Her mother, all the same, would speak as well as she could about him, since in this regard Carla (who is, oh fuck it, so, so beautiful) was exemplary: she would never stop sticking to the story that their father, their coward father who’d given up on living, was the greatest hero in the world.
The note was, at last, written. It was time to decide where to put it, and this could only be decided if another decision were taken first. Deciding how and where you’re going to die is a privilege, it is, he thought; but he also thought he’d never imagined it could be so complicated. He should have just come up with one possibility and followed it through, he concluded, while remembering the many times he’d accompanied Carla (who is, oh fuck it, so beautiful; she’s really so beautiful) on a shopping trip and, after three or four hours, come out of the shop empty-handed because she, liking everything, couldn’t buy anything. Dying – he concluded now while simultaneously stroking the pistol, the pillow, the plate full of food – was a complication.
The food. It was decided. He sat down calmly, tucked a napkin into his collar, like a bib, as he’d learned from his father (any man who is a real man doesn’t get his suit dirty, son), and, with knife and fork in hand, began to die. I’m going to have a well-seasoned death, he even had time to make an ironic aside to himself, before putting the first piece of food in his mouth and being interrupted by the ping of his cell phone. They won’t even let you die in peace, he joked, but still he couldn’t resist his curiosity and got up to go to fetch the little device he’d put on the kitchen counter. Curiosity, sarcastically, is one of the few things stronger than death, he theorised, as though wanting, in his last minutes of life, to leave some kind of philosophical thesis to those remaining behind. He picked up his cell phone and read, a smile on his lips, the name of the sender. Carla. It was a simple message: ‘Guess what! It’s nearly morning!’
Nobody believes in the words of the skin, there are
fears, steps running away, the impossible
shame, and the only certain words are those of the body.
On the nights of our sheets, the silence
was overvalued, I understood the word
through your eyes, and you understood that everything
there was to be said had to be touched.
Loving is easier than speaking, watching the
grammatical movements of pleasure, hearing the
absurd and irresistible discourse of orgasm.
We loved each other through words without needing
to speak, because when you moved an arm
all linguistics moved with you,
all syntax was in motion, the lexicon
changed within our bliss, and
however much silence we heard, never
was our life so far from keeping quiet.
It was at the moment when we needed to speak
that the unwelcome silence arrived. I started
telling you of your beauty, of the unstoppable scale
of our moments, you replied that only
poetry would speak what we were doing, but the
problem with words is their being finite, there are always
more people than adjectives, more people
than adverbs, and being dependent on a sound
means accepting right away that one day silence will be for ever.
Whose idea was it to invent verses
when we already had pleasure?
Now we’re alone with the words, you
where my eyes don’t see and me isolated
in my need to write to be able to feel you
beneath the letters. All love exists
but it keeps quiet so long as we unlearn
the moment of silence. Perhaps one day I will be able
to find you again in the gloom of the empty night,
in the harmonious construction of a noisy
absence. Until then I’ll keep looking at you in the
small photograph you left on the living-room table, in this so happy
silence. It’s the only way I have of hearing you.
Whose idea was it to invent text
when we already had love?
Fuck it, but I love you so much. I want you so much, need you so much. Fuck it, but it’s so good to love you like this, as though I were short of breath when I’m lacking in you and even shorter of breath when I’ve got you.
Today I want to forget all the beautiful
words, gentle words, and be savage and tough and strong the way my feelings for you are savage and tough and strong. Today I don’t want poetry – apart from the poetry of wanting you like a madman, desiring you like life. Today I love you in big words, in bad words: fuck it, I do love you so much, my love.
And your body, your bastard body, your damnable body. I seek it out like an insatiable addict, as though there were no world beyond your skin. And the truth, the bastard truth, is that there isn’t. There’s the curve of your shoulders, the empty space of your lap when I’m not in you, the gluttonous mouth of your smile. And your legs opening to me as though all needs were concentrated in the need for you, as though pleasure owned the world. And it does.
I want everything else to go to hell if you’re in my arms. It’s the cruellest of sentences, may other people forgive me, may even God forgive me and His sin too, may the politically correct forgive me and those poor little things left behind along the way. May all people forgive me but all I want is the certainty of your body and the truth of your soul. That’s enough for me to have the certainty and truth of myself, of this me that only you have brought, of this me that only exists with you. This me that wants only life, the purest of lives: to love until the end of the day, to love every day, to love until night comes and to love until morning returns. To love you so that I lack for nothing. The end of the world appeals to me with you. And you’re enough for me to lack for nothing. It’s enough that you come over, with that princess-like demon-like step, that look in your eye that says ‘protect me with affection but never stop fucking me hard’, and you tell me to give you tenderness without drawing out your sweat, to give you complicity without drawing out your moans, to give you communion without being afraid of devouring you, down to the very last drop, on the floor. It’s enough for me that you come and that you come, that you want me and need me. It’s enough for me that you should be this sort of everything, this sort of absolute mistress of what I am and feel, of what I feel and think. It’s enough for me that you are.
The Day I Found You Page 19