The problem of loving two women is the danger that one day, owing to an awkward coincidence, they will meet. Which is what has just happened. He was with the tranquil woman, apron on and food nearly ready in the oven, when the hard-on woman showed up. She didn’t ask for permission and she asked (‘you either fuck me now or you could lose me for ever’), then and there, for total pleasure. That was what happened. The other woman, poor thing, disappeared instantly, in the time it took for an apron to be taken off and dropped on the floor. The advantage of loving two women is the danger that one day, owing to a delightful coincidence, they will meet in just one.
‘The crazy thing about life is the body, you know?’
In front of him a woman with tears wired into place, a forced smile, feeling as though at any moment he might leave, the usual man, the usual life, and now if she could she’d want to have all the arguments over again, and once again that way he had of sometimes not giving her his full attention, anything to get him out of that bed which like all the beds in the hospital smells of something very close to the smell of death. What does it smell like, the thing we smell when we’re beside someone we’re going to watch die?
‘Promise me you’ll be happy with the first man to make you happy?’
There might even be tears, and now there are, she can’t bear it and she really cries, but there’s also the certainty of a future, he asks her to continue after him, because love can be, often, understanding that the other side can survive beyond ours.
‘Why don’t you get up and come play with me, daddy?’
The child arrived, she wasn’t meant to have arrived but she did, she doesn’t yet know what’s happening there but she knows that her father is there not moving, as if he were just some lazy guy who just didn’t want to get up, and what is death or closeness to death if not a laziness that never passes?
‘Daddy can’t just now.’
No father should have to say that he can’t, ‘can’t’ is impossible for a father, ‘can’t’ is impossible for a mother, all fathers and all mothers should know that they contain superpowers, and that if there’s one thing they can’t do it’s say that they can’t do whatever it is. The proof of this will follow shortly.
‘You see, daddy, you can!’
He can after all, it took a few minutes but it happened, the father, impelled by his whole life and all the strength in his arms, one arm on the woman he married and the other on the woman he saw being born, he raised himself up, he’s standing, the tubes coming out of his body don’t even seem to exist, it’s just him and those he loves, and he’s standing, and the women’s eyes as usual, in love with what he is, complete love appearing completely, never will a few simple tubes prevent a complete love, there’s a man who loves two women and two women who love a man, that’s all, only this, all around everything is perfect when inside us there is a space that’s occupied, totally occupied, by those we love within us.
‘Go on, let’s take a walk, daddy!’
If we wanted to look at what’s happening from a negative viewpoint we might say this is the last walk in this man’s life, supported by two people, one on either side, one small and one big, and the tubes go with him, a trolley with saline too, and they’re small steps, on squalid, thin legs that hurt, making each centimetre a victory, making each advance a hero, but there’s to be none of that, no last walk, just three people who love one another taking a walk, three people no body could separate, he might walk more slowly but it’s still him, he might be thin and wasted but it’s still him, and when you love each other no body puts an end to love, what do incapable legs matter alongside someone who loves like that?
‘Look over there, daddy, it’s our house.’
And there the three of them go, eyes in the window, and way out there in the distance, lost amid so many houses, is a house where the three of them arrive now, they imagine themselves there again, the girl playing and jumping in the garden, the woman and her husband watching her from the doorway, they smile and hug, it was worth it, one of them would say, I love you, and I love her, the other would say, then he will teach them the rules of some game or other, the three of them playing in a garden where all their memories would remain, and there they would remain, whatever happened, within the space reserved for those people who can’t imagine themselves unless they’re imagining themselves beside other such people.
‘I’ll be back tomorrow so you can take me for another walk, OK, daddy?’
Yes, she’ll be back tomorrow, she’ll always be back, even if one day the bed is empty and daddy’s had to take a walk somewhere else, somewhere she won’t be able to see him, tomorrow the child will be back and one day when she’s a grown-up she won’t stop coming back, to the house where she took her father, the house where her father took her, to show him that nothing you touch with your skin stays on your skin, and what is being alive if not being capable of bringing feelings to others?
‘Whenever you come back I’ll be here.’
And he is.
When I get up I like to lie back down beside you, and wait for the moment when sleep returns, understand the unstoppable scale of the absurdity of being alive, and fall asleep back to you.
I love you emotionally, and with total reason.
I prefer the early hours because they are what wake me for you while you sleep, and when I touch you and you open up to me I don’t know whether there will be life enough for us to love each other entirely.
I’d need to explain the beginning of the world to explain the beginning of us.
Today you are far away and the sound of the cars isn’t the same, the empty window without your body in silhouette in the middle of the outside light, my father’s words without your look, and your ears seem like a sign that nothing exists but what passes through you.
I don’t need you until death, I need you until life.
Night falls and my missing you rises still further, I left you a few hours ago and I lost years of my life, I’ve already forgotten what existed before you, and if you want to know the truth even my hands hurt from old age as I write you these words.
I only fear silence when I don’t have you unspeaking beside me.
It’s so incomprehensible how much I love you, as though the only things that happen are those that happen to you, the people beside you, the lights, the TV turned on, so many people I love but who are not my place in the world.
Tell your parents please that they invented God.
Through these words I’m trying to get closer to your skin, probably all pieces of work are borne of this violent desire to curtail distances, to bring bodies closer together through words, and when they tell me I’m a genius, they will know they’re talking about you.
The secret of literature is abdicating language.
Nobody loves while thinking about words, words are used for loving and not the other way around, and I luv you are always the most correct words in the world – because nothing, least of all some insignificant spelling code, can make a luv like this wrong.
Only if you’re getting love wrong are you getting writing wrong.
‘What are you drawing?’
‘God.’
‘But nobody knows what God looks like?’
‘Then wait a few moments and you’ll find out.’
That was how I met Zambé, the kid I’m going to be telling you about today. A mischievous kid, beautiful head, his whole life in his eyes when he looked at me, in that schoolroom, and when he made me believe that the only things that didn’t exist were those that couldn’t be imagined. From Zambé I learned to be a child and I reckon there can be no more valuable learning than that.
‘What do you want to be when you’re big?’
‘Small again.’
And he was. He really was. Just a few months ago, when I ran into him again, there he was, the same look in his eye, the same desire to discover everything for the first time, he was carrying a child and I understood he’d only become a father so as to have
an excuse not to grow up.
‘So what are you up to?’
‘Inventing.’
‘What have you invented today?’
‘A new way of hugging.’
He taught me that hug immediately, with the whole street stopping dead to laugh at us, some expressions of derision, Zambé and me leaping up and down in a kind of hug that nobody understood but which feels damn good. After all, what we take away from life is what nobody understands but which feels damn good.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Teaching my son to read.’
‘But he’s two.’
‘Yes, but there’s still time.’
‘And does he know his alphabet already?’
‘Who needs their alphabet to know how to read?’
And there he was, that illogical smile like you can only find on people in books, a two-year-old child in his arms in the middle of the park where everyone is thinking about bills, about crises, about insignificant things like survival, having forgotten that the most important thing was happening and it was called life, and now the sun is shining brightly high in the sky. After all, what we take away from life is it happening and the sun shining brightly high in the sky.
‘What are you giving him for Christmas?’
‘I was thinking of giving him a kiss.’
With all the seriousness in the world, Zambé was playing, maybe that’s the secret of children’s happiness, can there be anything more serious for a child than playing?
‘I’d like to attend my funeral.’
‘Why?’
‘It would prove I was still alive.’
Zambé was, if you’ll excuse the pleonasm, a philosophical child.
‘You’re afraid of dying.’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘When it comes I know it won’t take me alive.’
And it didn’t.
It’s unbearable wanting you this much but it’s impossible not to want you this much.
And it consumes everything when my need is so urgent, when it becomes clear that all struggles are possible except the one that goes against my liking you. All dreams don’t seem like much when I don’t dream you within them.
What is happiness if not what happens to us when we are together?
I want an embrace as much as I want to not want an embrace.
And I embrace you. With all the desperation of a woman needed, a mere addict to staying with you, and it’s as sad to need to be so yours as it is overwhelming to be deep in the marrow of your arms.
We lack for so much, and yet an embrace is enough for us to have everything.
All power is undone in kisses.
‘I want to fall asleep in the immortality of your lips,’ I say to you, and your smile tells me that you don’t give a damn about the words, and your open mouth seeking to ruin me tells me you only want me for what I give you.
But what is love if not being addicted to what our beloved gives us?
Only those who need the unadvisable deserve to live.
What nobody believes exists is what makes our existence worthwhile, and the reality is a succession of tediums until you find what takes off your shoes and makes you comfortable. When they ask me to define life I’ll say ‘fools’, and you and I both know that only folly can prove that happiness exists.
Two fools in flight are better than one on the ground.
All around there are regular loves, loves that stabilise, loves that turn solid with each day of conceding. But between us there is no conceding. Between us there is an unfettered battle that does, very often, involve frontal collisions. And more often than not, these happen without any clothes to cover our body.
The good part of being at war with you is knowing that even when I lose we end up winning.
Because the two of us are in different trenches but we’re still on the same side. You want to love me in your way, I want to love you in mine. But we both want this love to continue.
And what is life if not fighting every day for love to continue?
They’re so stupid, people who aren’t stupid.
And they don’t understand that even routine can be exciting, that every day exists for the unpredictable to happen, for something to leave us with our heart in our hands. And they sustain. They keep their desires for later, their fantasies for another time, their rebellions for never. And that’s how they keep putting off waiting for the day of prearranged happiness, the moment of scheduled liberation. But happiness can be anything except it can’t be pre-planned. If happiness is pre-planned, it’s going to be bland, it ought to be canned. Because only what takes our breath away swells our breast, and coming up with new ways to love you is my daily tribute to you.
Naïveté is why I get up every morning. And ninety percent of happiness is naïveté and the other ten is ignorance.
Better to have innocence every day than to feel guilty for ever.
The day I left you, it was you who didn’t want to stay.
All things considered the world is simple, at least the world that matters:
there is your smile and life, and right here we can easily understand what a pleonasm is, and most of all how much wastage of words there is around.
The perfect dictionary would have your photograph on the cover and all the pages inside blank, and then the language would be born again, your face alone would just occupy the beginning of the tongue, all the historians would talk about the revolution of your body, and by the final page I would have torn out all the others already so that nobody would discover that it’s with forced words that I’ve been winning you over.
The day I left you, I wanted you to stay to see me coming back, did you know that’s how poets love?, I imagined you’d be waiting for me in the lingerie from our first night, the cheeky smile of your half-open legs, lips painted just to have a serious impact on me, I would play hard to get, you know how it is, a serious look here, a sharp word there, maybe even a tear I’d practised in front of the domestic appliances store before coming back, you’d ask me please to forgive you for something, I swear, at this point I have no idea what it could be, I just wanted the bed sheets pulled over us and your cold body on mine for us to invent the perfect heat.
When I returned to forgive you, you hadn’t yet forgiven me, the house standing empty with everything in it, the place where I would forgive you only had the blanket and the dead sofa where I was sure you would have to forgive me for I don’t know what it was you’d done (what the hell had you done to make you ask my forgiveness?), I looked for you everywhere to forgive you, and gradually I realised you’d gone because I left you in order to be able to love you more strongly, go figure these poets and their little obsessions.
All things considered, poetry is simple, at least the poetry that matters:
there is your love and the poem, and right here we can easily understand what a pleonasm is, and most of all how much wastage of words there is around.
I wanted to pull the string to stop you from bursting, to understand that you still loved me beyond pride, to make you feel insecure so as to feel secure myself, and when I lay down you weren’t there and it was me and the poem, all the lies that literature created just shattered right there, but what is all this crap about the artist being solitary when I spend my days trying to write a work of art and only end up writing to you?
The day I left you, it was you who didn’t want to stay, and now (I swear I’m ready to come back and you’re forgiven):
do you? do you want to now?
They assured me I’d never be able to walk again, and I accepted it after my fashion,
so my grandfather once told me as he ran alongside me in the park, me as a boy and him pulling me along,
They assured me that I’d never again be able to have children, and I accepted it after my fashion,
and a year later my father would be born, and then I started to understand that accepting doesn’t mean giving up, you have to keep going after t
he acceptance,
It offends me that they should want to choose for me, that’s all,
a hero after all is merely a man who’s more wilful than others, more short-tempered than others, more unbearable than others, if there’s such a thing as bearable heroes then in fact heroes don’t exist at all,
You’re only a person when you know how to get away with it without saying a word,
that was how I learned to write, with him beside me and his words, a man from the countryside teaching me the importance of language, a phrase here, another there, earlier he’d lent me his grown-up boots and I became a person around the farm, it wasn’t big but it could hold my entire dream, and the livestock, and me and my grown-up boots,
The Day I Found You Page 25