Use me completely so that you can love me everywhere.
That was her desperate request. They were in the most expensive hotel in the city, nothing could be heard now but the disquiet and the hurried breathing, and outside there was all life and nothing that mattered. He didn’t answer right away, he looked at her, he thought he could tell her just how much he liked her, the profound inability to imagine himself beyond her; he thought, too, that he could tell her that he was lost, that his whole life had been squandered from the moment he’d met her, and that the only ability he retained was to love her; then he thought he would never be able to give her what she needed, the cars, the houses, let alone the travel, because if he was ruined because of her then he couldn’t because of her go back to what he used to be; finally he thought about the irony of the whole thing, how perfect and how stupid his life without her would be. He didn’t know if he hated her but he knew he loved her. He was perfectly hers. Perfectly hers, in so far as a crazy wretch of a man can be perfect. He could have said so many things to her, everything that occurred to him, everything that made him think he was minutes away from losing her for ever if he told her that he loved her for ever. He could also have told her so many important things, so many definite things, but it was enough for her to take hold of him and pull him into her for him to understand that only the silence was urgent.
They made use of two bodies to make use of life.
It was their best man who wrote and read, his hands already tremulous with age, everybody dressed in black to say goodbye to two old folks who had given up on everything in life except orgasm. The photo on the tombstone didn’t show the face of one or the other of them, just the sweaty bed sheets and the two of them, as always, her naked and all the cells of her skin rising up with the passing of his tongue.
If she had boarded that train, on a cold March day and the station packed with people, perhaps her life would have been different. Perhaps he would have been waiting for her, in the last row in the last seat in the last carriage as always, his eyes open in search of a risk he did not yet know. Later, certainly, she would have made her way down the aisle as though making her way down a road to her destination, with him getting closer with each step. And then the look, the train pulling out and an unhurried look, him looking at her as though undressing her completely, her looking at him as though there were nothing left to be done.
There’d be nothing left to do and that was why they wouldn’t waste any time doing it. The train would be full, so many people and so many lives and not one would get between them, about three hours’ journey and the whole counting of time for them would restart with the rest of the time they had left for themselves. They would talk about everything, him serious and excited, her shy and excited, but in reality they would only ever talk about love. About theirs, of course, born without anybody realising it, just like all loves are born without anybody, least of all those who love, realising it. They would come to know a lot about each other, she would learn what he created, words that were meaningless when he was in her gaze (not a single vein was still, all wanting the moment of the skin); he would learn her fears (he wanted to protect her, with all his bones, from what hurt, to ask her to come into his arms and breathe), even a bit about her past and what she had left behind.
They would certainly understand that all defeats have a meaning and that everything they’d lost had brought them there. It would be the shortest journey in both their lives and they would never travel so far again. There wouldn’t be, not until near the end, any daring advances, nor any attempts beyond eyes giving pleasure. Until, and later he wouldn’t be able to explain how, she wouldn’t be able to explain how, the hand happened. He would love her with his hand inside her tall boot, to this day he can define her touch precisely, the moment when he discovered a piece of her skin and believed he had discovered the secret of the existence of faith. She would blush a bit but she’d let him continue, she’d understand then and there how love really can consist of blushing a bit but allowing to continue. The hand would remain, it would keep remaining, the final stop and two people focused, their whole minds, on the few centimetres in which the hand of one was inside the tall boot of the other.
Nobody would notice it, the train rolling along as though everything were just as normal, but the world itself would be changing there, irremediably, without any God able to prevent it. Because the moment of the kiss would arrive, you do always arrive at the first moment of the kiss. It was nothing like in the movies, there would be no racing about, there would be no huge embraces, still less any well-rehearsed movements, just him with the courage deep down to take the risk of a kiss on the threshold of everything, and her not knowing how to refuse what she didn’t believe was refusable. Absolute love really can be a shy kiss in the last seat of the last carriage of a train that unwittingly changes the meaning of the world.
Then the journey would end and by now there was nothing that could prevent them from beginning the fateful journey. There would, of course, be bed and orgasm, but none of that would be complete without what long after – by which time she believed, sceptically, that all great adventures could only go wrong in the end (reality can only punish perfection severely, and that might actually be logical, poetic justice to rebalance the world) – they would both euphemistically call love for want of a more befitting word with which, twenty-four hours a day (really twenty-four, because twenty-two or twenty-three would be an inexplicable waste of something so ludicrous that it couldn’t possibly exist), they would have to live.
If she had boarded that train, perhaps she would be, today, by his side, on a bed where one day, for the first time, reading a text exactly like this one, which he had written seconds before kissing her on the shoulder, running his hand over her lips and telling her that if he could go back he would do everything exactly the same, her, him and the train where the world changed, and the inadequate I love you, at last.
‘I love you.’
‘Just this morning I made two new girlfriends.’
No one knows his name but everybody knows his words, the grown-ups are afraid of him just like they’re afraid of anything strange, the children adore him and say he’s got a ‘tired head’, and there’s nothing more fascinating than the sensitivity of children, no one but they can understand, in just a moment without even thinking about it, that that head has already done what it needs to do and is now in rest mode, lost so as not to have to meet what it has left behind.
‘One day I’ll change the whole world with just a few words.’
And in the streets of Cascais, the bay stretching as far as the eye can see, there he goes, from here to there and there to here, nobody knowing whether to laugh or cry and those steps and those words of the madman who just has, so say the kids, a tired head. What could madness be but the precise moment when a head gets too tired?
‘You’re such a beautiful girl I can’t tell you.’
The girl laughs, she really is beautiful, aged maybe thirty, no more than that, she smiles and keeps walking, she doesn’t look at him, she doesn’t have the nerve to look at him, he keeps looking at her but he doesn’t follow her, he’s already made two girlfriends today and he doesn’t seem terribly bothered about making another, whatever happens happens, he’s got to take another walk around the town, for more people (so many tourists and the magic of a madman at every tourist spot just to liven up the crowd) to hide from him, mad men frighten people more than bad ones, the sun starting to set way off in the distance, at the end of the sea, and the tired head is not discouraged, he keeps tiring out his body so as to balance things out at his centre.
‘The whole world depends on just a couple of words from me.’
A man standing beside him, probably English from his pronounced accent, looks at him and wants to give him a banknote, he refuses it without needing to refuse, he doesn’t need charity, only words, he continues on his way among the people, the daylight fading, the height of winter and the cold, a tired head
returning home, a day won, one more, before returning to the cardboard box round the back of the barbecue place in the centre of town, a warm goodnight to his neighbours, a quick stop by the trash can, just so he doesn’t starve to death, and the restful sleep of a warrior who has tired of fighting.
‘You still exist.’
She woke him as she has woken him so many times before, in the house hundreds of kilometres away which one day he abandoned, nobody ever knew why, she ran her hand over his face, she didn’t say a word, he opened his eyes, never had a cardboard bed seemed so cosy to him, he didn’t want to believe what he was seeing, he rubbed his eyes again, and again, and understood that, yes, it was her, he squeezed her in his arms, her white clean skin in his dirty black T-shirt, and he said again, much quieter now, maybe nobody heard it but her, that one day he was going to change the world with just a few words.
‘I love you.’
And he did.
She had waited her whole life for the love of her life and it took someone dying for him to appear. He was dressed in black, the way all deaths are dressed, and it wasn’t till four or five months later that she saw him smile. He was a man who had lost his wife, the cemetery was full, and there she was, not knowing what to do with what she felt about someone she had never seen but already loved.
‘The stupidest thing about love is being so stupid that you don’t even need to get to know the person you love,’ she wrote that night on some page or other of some notebook or other. She felt like an adolescent and all she wanted was to deal in an adult way with what was coursing through her veins. But how do you become adult when faced with love? How do you make a person in love into an adult if love consists, largely, in taking us back to childhood, to that moment when everything is for the first time again? These were two of the questions that she didn’t write but she might have written, were it not for the strange fact of, rather than being afraid of what was happening, having begun to be afraid of what was not happening.
‘Nobody waits their whole life for something that’s not worth a whole life,’ she wrote later, and what followed this was very simple: a phone call here, a phone call there, and within a few minutes she was more peaceful despite (or maybe even because of) being much more unquiet. Knowing where he lived was, at that moment, the perfect victory, the possible victory, there was the pain of him and the impossibility of someone who had just lost the person they love starting to love again on the same scale. Anybody who has waited a whole life can wait two, she thought, though this is pure speculation because she wrote nothing. All we know is that she lay down, with a smile on her lips and a piece of paper with some letters and an address in her right hand, and fell asleep, as though she were in love already.
‘When you fall asleep as though you’re in love already, that’s when love really begins’, and the morning arrived, he was still at the address she had, she was still lost with desire for it to be right now. It wasn’t. She would have to wait for that first moment, but still there could be intermediary moments: ‘moments of aloneness à deux’, as she would later call them. She would love him without his knowledge, is there any more infallible love than this? She would follow him, calmly, wherever she needed to follow him, get to know him so as to love him better. She would love him in silence, is there any less noisy love than this?
‘If one day you look at me, I promise I’ll look back at you,’ that was the declaration of love that she still had left and to which she’d promised to be faithful: she wouldn’t enter his life if he, however or for whatever reason, didn’t enter hers. There was even a moment when all the promises stopped counting. She followed him on to the bridge in the centre of the city, she didn’t understand what could be taking him there, stepping weakly with doubtless a few tears falling on the ground, and she watched him looking down there, all of life or all of death just one step away. That was when she realised that the thing she insisted on watching was about to happen, she didn’t ask permission and she looked. He looked at her, he looked at her deeply, and she surely would have been the last image he saw in his life.
‘It was when you made me come down off that bridge, that was when I realised I was being born once again,’ he would write, one day, on a post-it that he would stick on the fridge of the house they shared, a two-bedroom that was small but so big that neither of them needed more than a little bedroom and sofa to have everything they wanted.
‘I waited my whole life for a death like this,’ she didn’t write, and nor did he. They said it, without anyone else hearing, in each other’s ear, and all the moans gave up on waiting.
Love.
Brushing your teeth next to whomever you love.
Fondling their ass brazenly.
Eating chocolates until you’re bored of them.
Spending the night talking nonsense.
Always kissing with your tongue.
Spending the day talking nonsense.
Telling your boss to go to hell.
Spending your life talking nonsense.
Leaving declarations of love around the house.
Making your father happy.
Lazing around regularly.
Making your mother happy.
Throwing the alarm clock against the wall occasionally.
Making whoever you can happy.
Sleeping fifteen or twenty hours in a row.
Sticking your hand out of the car window.
Painting your hair blue or yellow.
Sticking your head out of the car window.
Singing in the bath for the whole building to hear.
Licking yoghurt tops.
Running on the beach like a lunatic.
Failing like an idiot just because you tried.
Practising oral sex frequently.
Trying like an idiot just because you want to.
Changing the décor in the whole house in a single day.
Dancing when you’re happy.
Spending hours just taking care of yourself.
Dancing when you’re sad.
Saying nice things about a person you love.
Sticking your finger in your nose in secret.
Saying nice things about a person you don’t love.
Dancing while you’re alive.
Keeping unconfessable secrets.
Trying unlikely sexual positions.
Telling unconfessable secrets.
Masturbating without shame.
Having unconfessable secrets.
Seeing how fast your car will go.
Saying what can’t be said.
Crapping assiduously on social conventions.
Dreaming about what can’t happen.
Orgasming whenever you can.
Scratching backs and having your own back scratched.
Moaning whenever you can.
Spending several hours telling jokes.
Falling asleep all twisted up on the sofa.
Spending several hours listening to jokes.
Laughing madly.
Getting an outlandish hairdo just because you fancy a change.
Laughing at everything and nothing.
Crying indiscriminately, left and right.
Rolling around in the sand when you’re all wet.
Crying because that’s also your right.
Cuddling your cat or your dog.
Telling austerity to go fuck itself.
Kissing tirelessly.
Not taking yourself remotely seriously.
Getting rid of whoever annoys you.
Playing some instrument or other.
Forgiving anybody human.
Giving up on what doesn’t work for you.
Fighting for the right to silliness.
Writing a book.
Prioritising pleasure.
Reading a book.
Never giving up on whomever you love.
Learning wildly.
Spooning whomever you love.
Teaching wildly.
Getting out of b
reath at least once a day.
Being born at least one time more than you die.
Living wildly.
Yourself.
He was a good man but he loved two women.
One was his tranquil woman, his peace woman, his sharing woman, his complicity woman. Whenever he needed a shoulder, there she was, arms open with a whole embrace for him to rest whatever was hurting him. She wasn’t particularly sensual, she wasn’t particularly attractive, but she had a beauty he found beneath her face that was tired from the everyday, the family, the house, two children and a whole life on her shoulders. He loved her in total peace, in sweet tranquillity, without any shivers, it’s true, but also without any bit of violent hurt. She was the perfect woman for living with – and he knew that he couldn’t survive without her, he wouldn’t be able to bear what so often assailed him. She was the insurmountable barrier, the last redoubt of what he was able to bear. It was in her that he learned survival, it was in her that he learned not to give up. He loved her because it was the best way of loving himself as a person, someone as good as her could only love somebody equally lovable, which he didn’t always feel. He loved her out of selfishness, it’s true, but he did whatever he could to make her happy, he was romantic and affectionate, he surprised her with gifts and if there was anything she wanted he went gladly to the ends of the earth to be able to give it to her. She was the woman of his life even if there was another woman in his life.
The other woman was his hard-on woman, his volcano woman, his adrenaline woman, his pleasure woman. Just one look from her was enough for the whole world to tremble, for every hair to stand on end, for all his skin to come alive as it brushed past her skin. She wasn’t level-headed or prudent or well trained or tame. She was a wild animal whom he loved as a wild animal, and if she were ever to calm down he could certainly stop loving her. There was no possible peace, by her side, no feasible quiet: it was orgasm or nothing. She didn’t believe in the existence of grey and saw the possibility of pleasure as the only true proof of the existence of God. ‘You either fuck me now or you could lose me for ever,’ she’d say to him fearlessly whenever she sensed any kind of hesitation when it was time to go in search of the greatest moaning in the world. She was profoundly superficial, maybe that was the best way to describe her; she had an unshakeable faith that there was nothing more profound than the right to a perfect now, and if she ever discovered that there was nothing new left to feel she’d probably kill herself in frustration. She was addicted to first times and that was why whenever they met they had to start out as total strangers who come to know each other slowly. She was the woman of his life even if there was another woman in his life.
The Day I Found You Page 24