We need to learn early on how to be in big people’s shoes,
milking the cattle, working the soil, travelling by train, my grandfather was a ticket inspector and he was the best ticket inspector in the world,
Even when I’m urinating I make a point of being the best,
and I didn’t even know what urinating was,
why the hell don’t they teach a five-year-old boy what urinating is?,
his hand on my back, so much life in those fingers, each skin has a thousand books to write,
Take this pen and do with it as you please, even if it’s making money,
and I became a writer just to try out your gift and your words, a Parker pen with smudged ink that I still keep religiously,
And I don’t believe in God but I have faith that He exists,
but I need your harsh voice to calm me down, your coarse way of loving me,
And I don’t need your grandmother at all, except to stay alive,
the most profound declaration of love I’ve ever heard, nothing I read after you comes close to the look in your eye when you were telling the truth, and only the truth,
What stays on the surface makes me sick,
what do you mean sick, grandad, you were probably just born in the wrong century, who knows?, you wanted to go deep into the bones of humanity and they just gave you skin instead,
Humility annoys me, it’s arrogance that changes the world,
and all those mealy mouthed words, the do you reckon it’s possible?, the let’s see if I can, the sorry if I’m going too far, without arrogance nothing can happen in the world but mediocrity,
We need to take a risk, to be the best of all, and of all time, or nothing,
and I’ll keep trying, grandad, I’ll try and I’m so arrogant it actually hurts, you know?, I’m sure nobody does it better than me and I still won’t stop, just to create a greater distance, so it’s impossible that somebody one day, and there’s always somebody one day, isn’t there?, would know how to breathe where I am,
I live to dismantle obstacles,
and there’s me asking you what dismantling is, to teach words is to teach the world, what’s the point of a hug if you don’t even know what it is?,
I see the solution in the unknown, never the problem,
if it already exists it’s not for me, if it exists it doesn’t feel like much, inventing things is the least we can do to give thanks for our existence, are we here to make a difference or to make up the numbers after all?,
They assured me I was going to die of this, and I accepted it after my fashion, but just in case tell your grandmother I love her like a whole field ready for sowing,
and I told her.
You tell me to take the rubbish out with you, and life is so beautiful.
I promised never to like anyone the way I like you and still I don’t feel inconsistent, or maybe I do but the most beautiful thing in the world is actually inconsistency, doing now what you couldn’t have done earlier, all reason is overrated, since if what makes us happy rarely has any reasonable cause then why should we place reason above all things?
We hug good and tight, leaning on the wall next to the bottle bank, and life is so beautiful.
We’ve got the whole world against us when we love like this, before you I believed in the possibility of happiness not existing, it was just a childish fable you get told about from an early age, and writers were these diabolical creatures who had created something that could only make us suffer, and loving for ever only existed in the movies, two people in love running towards each other in the middle of the hot sands of a beach, but then you showed up at my cake shop, it’s not really mine but it’s as if it was because whatever I love is only mine, you smiled fearfully and asked for an orange cupcake, I don’t know how, not least because I’m not one for gags or anything like that, but I said no, it wasn’t a cupcake, still less was it orange because I don’t even like politics, and you, and I still completely melt when I remember it, I swear, you laughed a lot, until you had to cover your mouth with your hand, you were so embarrassed about your laugh, and right there, at that moment, I believed in all the writers in the world, so the bastards had invented what did already exist after all, and probably that’s the main function of art (what do I know about art?, but here goes anyway): inventing what already exists is the greatest kind of creation.
An old man is bringing over his rubbish and walks past us shaking his head, and life is so beautiful.
I like it when your tongue finds mine, that’s what life should be like, whatever licked the most would be the richest, perhaps it already is, perhaps it is and it’s just that nobody’s realised it, perhaps wealth is licking whatever life gives us, a yoghurt top, the tongue of whomever we love, even the tongue of someone we don’t love but who we want out of nothing but passion, I have no idea, I’ve never had any idea about these things, I just know that when you lick my tongue with yours I forget who I am and I know myself to be profoundly me, probably that’s what love is, love can only be this: what makes us not know who we are and what makes us know ourselves to be profoundly ourselves at the same time.
We climbed the stairs together because the lift is too quick for all the desire we have, and life is so beautiful.
Then we made a date, you said you’d arrive at six and it was five thirty and you were never going to arrive, me drenched with rain, there was still half an hour to go but I couldn’t run the risk of not arriving in time, it was four in the afternoon and I was already as happy as though it was six, but in any case it was five thirty and I was in the rain and when you arrived you asked me why I didn’t have an umbrella and I asked you what for?, you laughed (I’d exchange my whole life for a second’s laugh from you) and you didn’t understand that I wasn’t even joking, I was standing there drenched and I hadn’t even remembered my fucking umbrella because I was just waiting for you to come and I’d been happy since the morning (or before that, I can’t guarantee it wasn’t earlier still), then you asked why I hadn’t taken shelter by the door to the café or the shop, and I asked you again what for?, and this time you laughed less, and when you laugh less the world stops and I need to do something to correct it (isn’t that what love is, us doing everything we can to correct a laugh that’s less than a laugh from someone we love?), I then grabbed you in my arms, God only knows how I was able to do that but I did it, and there the two of us went, without an umbrella (you dropped yours on the ground and left it there, hopefully someone who wasn’t in love found a use for it), going down the road to the restaurant in the certainty that we were going down the road to for ever.
You tickle me when we get home and I twist myself around completely until I’ve stretched out like a madman on the cold floor, and life is so beautiful.
I was so suspicious of writers and now I’m writing to you as though I was one myself, I hope you aren’t thinking about grammar and things like that when you read this, just think that there must be someone who won’t believe me when they read me, but then there will be some cake shop or other, and another you for that someone, and then all literature will start to make sense.
You fall asleep on my shoulders and I cry as I look at you, and life is so beautiful.
‘Love me as though you’d only just now discovered me.’
On the last night of the year what I fancy is what I’ve fancied every night of the year: your body with mine, there may not even be an orgasm but I’m happy all the same, and life, really slowly, passing by with your skin on mine.
‘Teach me to grow old happy.’
I’m a woman of simple tastes, I wouldn’t say I insist on the best, I merely say that I either have the best or I have nothing.
‘Promise you’ll completely forget about time when you touch me.’
And he promised. It was nearly midnight, the world of that country was trembling with anticipation, there were fireworks almost exploding in the air, a new year is always a good reason to celebrate, and the touch hap
pened.
‘Everything happens for a reason, my foot! Everything that really happens is what has no reason at all.’
They weren’t, they aren’t, perhaps they never will be, a couple like any other, they don’t believe in living together, they don’t believe in marriage, they don’t even believe in children or family. They probably aren’t even a couple, if we’re going to be strict about it. They believe in the moment of love, as they decided to call it. They love each other as though they were loving life, they consume each other desperately, invent new parts of the skin to taste. Then, each goes back to their house and they devote themselves to loving each other without their bodies having anything to do with it at all.
‘I don’t know what I love more, your skin or the memory of it.’
They believed above all in a maxim they’d created between them, according to which they mustn’t leave any kind of happiness untried. That was why, despite neither of them ever having done it before, they each allowed the other to be free to do whatever they wished to do with whomever they wished to do it.
‘We’ve got to try whatever we fancy.’
That night, as the passing of another day was being celebrated, they returned to the usual ritual. She held him tight, asked him never to let go of her again, he held her and asked her never to let go of him again, they remained like that a few minutes, changing position as they held each other, until she asked him never to let her go again and she let him go, and then he asked her never to let him go again and he let her go. They walked silently out on to the street, where each of them continued on their way and where, once parted, they felt that theirs was the true connection, which allowed them to retain just the best memory of what was loved, just the best moment. They felt, then, fully consummated.
‘Please love me with defects.’
Or not. Or it was nothing like that at all. Or she understood that what they loved was one species of love, and she didn’t like species of anything at all.
‘Either I beget a species or I’m a species of person.’
And he received her in his apartment to which she’d never been before because they’d decided always to meet on neutral territory (why would we bring to a space that’s already occupied something we’re going to occupy entirely?), and she said, ‘I want you even if you’re weak, even if you have problems, even if sometimes you annoy me or hurt me, even if we have to suffer like dogs to stay together,’ and he opened his arms to her, he said to her, ‘I never expected you to love me the way I love you, I’ve been missing you ever since I’ve had you, the memories are so good but to tell the truth I prefer the original to the copy.’
‘Today I feel like living with you for ever.’
The biggest decisions are those we make without thinking, and today I feel like having you as mine without anybody else touching you, today I feel like being your wife and not allowing you even the least temptation, call me selfish if you want but what you can’t accuse me of is leaving happiness untried.
‘How many years do you need to know that it’s for ever?’
He wasn’t sad at being just one woman’s all of a sudden, since he’d always been so even when there had been no need, they embraced and this time they decided not even to celebrate the new year any more, there were decisions to be made, a house to choose, all the things that every couple has to do to begin a life together.
‘I never thought being normal would be so extraordinary.’
They married and were themselves ever after: all children’s stories should end like that. Theirs, however, is a story of adults. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t childish.
They married and were themselves ever after.
The only thing they could be sure about was that they loved each other, and yet they believed they had everything.
They were young and they didn’t know what they were doing, they didn’t study what they were supposed to and they didn’t learn what they could have; then they became grown-ups and they continued not to know what they were doing and as old people it was exactly the same, maybe it really was just inherent in humans to do what they didn’t know how to do, and perhaps that’s what they call apprenticeship, I dunno. They believed that love was enough to make life happen, but they forgot there was a living to earn. All of which is to say that she absolutely loved reading but they had no money to buy books; and he didn’t love reading – maybe because he didn’t even know how to read.
The truth is that love strangely united a woman addicted to reading and a man who didn’t know how to read or write, and if that isn’t a bad start to any novel then there’s no such thing as a bad start to a novel.
And so he picked up work wherever he could, he was pretty skilled with his hands, and she worked as a cook in a restaurant, what she brought home at the end of the month was enough to eat but never to read. Of course there were libraries and things like that, but the closest (they lived in isolation and far from their parents: his had emigrated and hers had forced her to choose between them and the illiterate man she loved, and it’s plain to see what choice she made) was many kilometres away and getting the bus there meant leaving work early, which she never, or almost never, managed to do. She worked every day, even Sundays, and only on holidays, when she was able to take holidays, could she feed her addiction and read four or five big classics in a week and be all set to survive the rest of the year.
But there was love, and if there’s one thing love doesn’t do it’s make you give up.
So what happened then was the following: he, without her knowledge, stopped being illiterate, nobody can quite understand how, they say a client of his had lent him some books of his youngest son’s who was in the fourth grade, and that he, without her noticing or something like that, managed to understand of his own accord how you connect one letter to another and another to another, and then came the words and finally came the pieces of writing. It was, undoubtedly, a laudable effort for him to have made in the name of love, most probably he was doing it so as to be able to read with her, or simply to be able to share with her those few things she did manage to read, since love is sharing and also friendship; or alternatively he just wanted her to love him even more, to want him even more, that way they’d be able to talk about what they’d managed to read, since what makes love secure is, all things considered, the ability to keep chatting about things.
So we have a man who learned to read and write for love, and that alone would already make a great love story.
But there was more, the man didn’t love just any old love and nor was he just any old man, he knew exactly what he wanted when he learned to read and write, which was why nothing could be left undone, and when somebody loves they can even tolerate their own unhappiness but never the unhappiness of the person they love. There was an immense pain inside the woman because she didn’t have books to read and she needed books to read (people who saw it happen say she used to read the restaurant menu countless times the moment she arrived just to see if she might find, somewhere in it, any piece of literature that might nourish her), and there was a man who now knew how to write ready to fix it, and so if he already knew how to write then why shouldn’t it be him who gives his wife what she so needs?
All great books are written for love, and the first thing he wrote was very far from being a great book but if it wasn’t a great book at least that wasn’t the reason.
The phrases were constructed basically, the words he used were very rudimentary, the binding was done by hand with thin string and pieces of cardboard he cut out of milk cartons, it was of doubtful taste to say the least, but the truth was that when she received that book (here, read it, it’s yours, I hope you like it) from his hands, she needed only to read a line, not even that, to be sure that she was starting to read the most impressive piece of work in all of the world’s literature.
When she finished reading, she looked at him with gratitude and wanted to kiss him down to the depths of his bones, but he would only accept one quick k
iss and a tough review, and that was what she gave him mercilessly.
There was no time to lose, he jotted down all her criticisms and set to work, all his free time was devoted to this, to his book, and without realising it (and you never realise it when it’s the real thing, when it’s from the soul) he had become no longer just some odd-job man, some handyman, he was now, yes, a writer, because someone who spends his life writing is a writer and that is all.
The second book was done, it was already quite different, it had the same ugly jacket and the same coarse binding, but what makes a book is the way it talks not the way it’s dressed, in that regard books are like people, that’s just the way it goes.
By the end of the last line she was crying, he wanted to know why, but she couldn’t speak, she just gave him a kiss with her whole life in it and asked him for a bit of time to breathe.
‘I’ve read the best book of my life’ was what she said a few minutes later, and he smiled, thinking she was patronising him, and asked her for the tough review he needed. This time she chose to say nothing, he was sad at first but eventually accepted it, and he kept writing, of course, that’s the way, keeping on writing, it’s what a writer knows how to do, that’s just the way it goes.
There was once a couple with everything to suggest they would go wrong, but there was love and all things considered that’s all it takes to go right.
So she understood it was her turn to play dumb, for there are some secrets in love that are proofs of love, and she handed the book (the best one of my life, definitely the best one of my life, and I’ve read so many and such good ones, it’s the best one of my life and I’m not just saying that because it’s by the man of my life) to the owner of the restaurant where she worked, the restaurant owner read it and wept and loved it, and gave it to a friend who was a friend of a friend of an important publisher and when, more than three years later, someone knocked on the door of the poor house of the poor couple, the sound you could hear was not the boom-boom on the door, it was the boom-boom of two hearts that, without realising it, had managed to survive entirely on an entire love, can there be any greater sustenance than that?
The Day I Found You Page 26