Love is good for many things but never for receiving.
Loving is a happiness – but loving is also a calamity. But what’s the point of the world if there are no calamities?
Today I loved you with everything I had, just as I always love you with everything I have. I gave you all the sex, all the sweat, all the tears, all the veins all throbbing, all the kisses inside all the lips, all my life in seconds, in minutes, all the meaning of life stretched out on a bed. I passed through your body as though passing through eternity – and if there is anything eternal in life it’s only pleasure, the immortal moment of an orgasm, the interminable second of euphoria.
The irony of life is that it lasts just long enough to be eternal.
And there, only there, is where love comes in. Love is the lying bastard who persuades us that something that’s a part of life, even if life is finite, can be infinite. The bastard who persuades us that despite being a part of something that will end and that has to end it will never end in us. Love does not exist – which is why, the only reason why, it’s the realest thing we can have in our lives.
Love is good for many things but never for living.
Love kills. It kills violently. It kills with all its might. It kills every day. And it’s only in these deaths, in these small deaths, that the importance of life is to be found. It’s in these small deaths, and only in these small deaths, that life happens. Today you killed me more than once and I could spend my whole life being murdered like this by you.
Love is a delight – but love is also a disgrace. But what’s the point of the world if there are no disgraces?
Touch my skin and I’ll know that I’m alive, my hands seek your body in search of the salvation of your bones, the continuity of your heat. There is no code of ethics between us, we screw however we can, whenever we can, in whatever way we can, each of us in search of his own absolute pleasure, his own piece of tangible immortality. There is a pitiless battle for orgasm, one person’s body the support for the other’s, the needs and impulses and thrills as owners of all our movements. We don’t think about each other, not even for a moment, when we choose the way we are going to love. We don’t want to know about the other’s pleasure when we are made happy within our own pleasures. We couldn’t care less about the other’s orgasm, and we don’t give a damn what the other wants and desires. We want ourselves, in ourselves, fully whole, giving what we have to ourselves. We are the most selfish lovers in the world, the most deplorable sexual partners on the planet. We fuck ourselves in our own name. And this is how, the only way, we share ourselves absolutely.
There are those who call us self-centred, sons of bitches, selfish. They call us happy.
Love is many things but it is never politically correct.
If you need proof that words lie it’s that ‘stealing’ is such a bad word and yet can be so lovely, like when someone like you comes into my body and takes away my soul, and you know it was stealing, no less than that, and if I could I’d like to be stolen like this by you every day,
One day I’m going to write a dictionary of ugly words you have transformed into poems,
Like ‘kidnap’, for example, an awful thing, everyone knows, except me, since that day you came to fetch me at work and said to me ‘come on I can’t bear it any longer’, and I said ‘I can’t’, and you said ‘you can, you can’, and the truth was I really could, everything is always possible when we want it completely, and off the two of us went, me kidnapped by you, we went into the back of your car parked on a dirty dead-end street in the neighbourhood, and that was where I realised that places are also like words, you never know what they are or what they are worth until you know how you’re going to have them, how you’re going to experience them, and that lost alley in the centre of town, smelly and almost uninhabitable, managed to be, on that afternoon you made the word ‘kidnap’ a work of art, the most beautiful destination in the world, and if you’d asked me to choose one of the most dazzling places on the planet I would have chosen that one, because the most beautiful places in the world, you taught me on that day and on so many other days like it, are just those places in the world that are the happiest,
One day I’m going to write a grammar of glaring mistakes you have transformed into rules,
Like my absence with the long pauses when I write of you, or to you, or about you, I want to breathe more, longer breaths, use full stops, and I can’t do it, and all that comes out are commas, short pauses, like these, just these, a half-breathing, an almost-breathing, maybe because thinking of you takes my breath away and stops me breathing properly, maybe because I don’t want full stops, I’ll allow nothing that means distance between us, and then I want to make transitions some other way than by using ‘and’, and this happens, I want to believe, because there is always me and you, but no word can separate us, only an ‘and’, an ‘and’ that joins, that brings us together even in the words, and maybe this is the right time to end this text, or at least this paragraph, perhaps a full stop really will come at just the right moment, a strong phrase and a full stop and everything will be perfect, nicely rounded, closed off, literarily perfect, and the critic will say, ‘yes, sir, we have a poet here, or a writer’, and my readers would like it but they wouldn’t say, as they do say, that this text is boring, repetitive and unmelodious, but if you want to know I couldn’t care less about the critic or my readers, I’m writing to you and when I write to you I won’t accept that there should be a full stop, not in this text nor in any text that writes us, and that’s why I’m going to leave this one like this, hanging there with an ‘and’ to end it, so everyone will know that this is how all writing of love, of real love, ought to end, without a full stop and with an ‘and’ at the end, I just ask you never to forget that I love you and that if I’m writing it’s to write to you, and if there’s a moment when I have to choose between writing well and writing you well I’ll always prefer to write you well, love you well, hold you tight in paragraphs and punctuation marks, invent stylistic resources that deserve you, love you beyond every letter, and
Eternity is knowing that you exist, opening my eyes while you’re sleeping, or otherwise falling asleep while you watch me, and then living for ever.
I couldn’t care less about being eternal, I confess, because eternity is a lot of work when you aren’t mortal. It really is good to know that I’m going to die and you will happen. I’m sure that the great advantage of life is the very fact of it ending, being finite, for the time of a breath or an orgasm to be worth it. Wanting to make life eternal is wanting to put an end to life, removing its value, reducing it to just another one of those eternal, uninteresting things the world has in it.
Why should I care if a stone is eternal if it never stops being a stone?
The rarity of life is what delights me about life, the certainty that it’s so small, so fragile, almost nothing, and if someone told me that I was going to die for ever I’d kill myself right now.
Love me as though we were to end: that’s what I ask you, for us to be eternal.
That’s how I immortalise myself in the smallness of life. I fall in love with what fascinates me, I surrender myself to what makes me fall in love, I’m complete in what I surrender myself to. I don’t think about the possibility of for ever, I don’t even yearn for the perfect moment to be stretched out in time, because as luck would have it I’ve learned that the perfect moment, when it’s stretched out, becomes a stretched-out moment and not a perfect moment. The value of valuable things is in their continuity, in their inability to be infinite, and it’s only in that way that they make themselves infinite.
What is immortality if not the moment when something unforgettable ends?
When you hold me tight in the centre of your arms, I’m certain that we are corrupt, there are too many eternities in the moment of our bodies, as though God had offered us extra lives, mistaken lives, and the most interesting thing about life is how we want at all costs to remain alive when the et
ernal is what kills us.
Kill me every day for as long as you live: that’s the request I make of you so that you keep me alive.
I’d like to survive the same way the world seems to survive around me. People tired of living ask their doctor to prolong their lives, people who have never lived still won’t give up on living, as though life could be measured in numbers or hours, as if such a person aged ninety had more life than me. I know I’ve already lived as much as I was supposed to live, and if there were any justice I’d die right now and make way for younger people, for those who might have long dozens of years of life but never live. The most perverse thing about science is the belief that life is scientific, that a few machines and a few medications can define the meaning of anything at all. And then there’s the security, the strange obsession with wanting to know everything when what creates the magic in everything is the not knowing, not even nearly, everything. I like blank spaces, explanations not yet given, phenomena not yet understood.
If I ever discover the reason you make me come like this I bet I’ll never come like this again.
I don’t want you to live for ever and nor do I want our love to be eternal. I want us to end one day and never to happen again.
Now come over here and please fuck me to eternity.
He used to get up whenever he felt like it, normally about ten or eleven o’clock, because of a neighbourhood that, on some days more than others, tended to be quite bustling first thing in the morning. Then, with all the calm in the world, he would get dressed, always those same white clothes he loved wearing whenever he didn’t have to go out, comfortable and able to let him move around freely, he’d have his breakfast, sometimes alone and other times with company, and he’d devote the rest of his morning to dreaming.
So he would sit there staring at a stain on the wall, or out of the window, for a long time – never less than an hour or two. During this time, he would travel the world, and his memories, imagining what he might, one day, do with his life. He had already, as you might expect, made many plans, and he was absolutely certain that he would make them a reality.
Next, when his dreaming was interrupted by his stomach, and often by the ceaseless noise that his neighbours kept making, it was time for lunch. He ate well, he liked to savour what he was given, and he believed that happiness was also in this ability always to savour, in the best possible way, what he was given.
In the afternoon, he liked playing outside, in the large green garden he was lucky enough to have – and so great was his enjoyment that he didn’t even remember to have his afternoon snack. Sometimes he pretended to be a soldier and imagined himself conquering new lands with his powerful army, other times he pretended to be a football ace who with his incomparable dribbling and personal technique managed to dupe any defence. Whatever the game he played, he always ended the afternoon, as night was beginning to take over the sky, feeling tired – but above all, always lucky and always a winner.
It was then time, now more hungrily because playing works up more of an appetite than dreaming, to eat again. He would devour whatever there was to devour, exchange any possible words with whomever, and off he went, happier and more reassured than ever, off to his bedroom, where every night, without exception, he would receive a call at around eleven p.m.
It was his brother, who worked locked away in an office, from eight in the morning till noon and from one to seven or eight or nine or more, six days a week and sometimes also on Sundays, and who had had him committed there, more than ten years ago now, believing that he was the crazy one in the family.
She stretched out on the bed, shut her eyes, and focused on crying. There was so much to cry for. The loss of her eldest son, the unbearable noise of the metal crushed against the wall; the redundancy, after forty years devoted to the local shoe store; the immense sadness of not loving the man life had chosen for her to marry. So much to cry for and only a bed for company. She turned over again, her eyes still closed, and with her head on the pillow she tried to cry even more, even more deeply. She felt all her flesh contracting within her, the feeling of a world drawing to an end, the end turning a corner. And she slept.
She arrived home earlier than usual, perhaps because she felt there was some reason or other for arriving home earlier than usual. Along the way, as usual, she cried behind her dark glasses, the memory of her eldest son always falling into her arms. How do you survive the loss of a child?, she has asked herself every day, with no answer, since the day he left. Sometimes she thought she had to bear it, that life had to go on, and that if it had happened then it had to have a lesson to teach; other times, however, she just wanted to give up on that bus she entered daily so that the noise would prevent her memories, and on that life that seemed to have nothing but suffering in store for her. But on that day she arrived home earlier than usual. She walked past the sofa, where there was nobody, past the bedroom of her eldest son, which had been untouched since he left, the word Ricardo stuck to the wall in the poster she’d given him for his tenth birthday, past the empty kitchen, and finally to her bedroom, where she could hear a strange silence.
Being alone had its advantages, he thought, sitting in the usual café, as he leafed through the usual newspaper at the usual table. It allowed him to choose the time he wanted to do the things he wanted, to fill the blank spaces with whatever he fancied, find the best solutions to the problems that arose. Being alone is the best way of being at peace, he concluded, and got up, said his usual greeting to Senhor Gouveia, the final see-you-tomorrow and the habitual goodbye. He already didn’t believe in life very much and he suspected the feeling would be mutual. To tell the truth, it had already stolen from him everything he loved and left him there, a surplus bit of trash waiting to be collected up by time. Right up until her eyes.
Life is the moment when people. Just that. Not another word. Life is the moment when people, he said to her, wrapped in her arms, his old body as if new. There is always a person for each miracle, she replied, her hand on his unexpectedly excited member. There is always an extra body for each life, she added, her old body as if new. They loved each other, there, he doesn’t even completely remember how he ended up there, as if there were no past, as if there were no future. They loved each other there at that exact moment of life. She was called Carla and had loved him for ever. He was called Luís but lately he didn’t call himself anything – he just yelled and wept. They met in a café which hadn’t been made for people to meet each other, a café made for solitude to have some space. They were both just a few years from ending, death getting ever closer. They decided, in the middle of the bed where their bodies were young again, to love each other until the end and not weep for the other’s death. When I die I want you to live for ever, to find more people to keep you alive, he asked her. She nodded, an embrace with no distance, her skin bristling as though it were not old. Then mouths came together, lips seeking out eternity. And they found it.
The Day I Found You Page 21