The Day I Found You

by Pedro Chagas Freitas

  and I like my wife so much and now I feel like crying,

  and I’m really afraid a genius is whoever cries best,

  bring me a bit of inconsistency and I’ll prove it right now.

  How stupid it is to live several lives, one is unbearable enough, somebody at a presentation asks me for an autograph and calls me blessed, oh, the magic of ignorance, nobody can imagine what it is to write, and nor can I, and that’s why I write,

  for how many lives must there be sufferings in the world?,

  and I’m so lost this morning, I woke up with my fingers hurting, the index finger discovered the first few words and the rest is what you can see, I don’t know where this is going but it’s already reached my depths,

  what is this water that’s coming out of my eyes?,

  there must be a character being born, and it hurts so much knowing I’m going to kill her,

  my God, so many deaths in a writer’s hand, when I’m big I want to have just one life, to be born, and grow, and die,

  anybody who needs fingers to write is a one-handed writer, it just occurred to me,

  and I could write a whole poem about this but my wife has woken up, there’s always a kiss to calm an artist, fortunately I’m not an artist and I have the right to several of them and a lot of hugs, too,

  see you soon,

  bring me a bit of humour and I’ll prove it right now.

  Obscenity is suffering,

  it’s what can be heard in the back row of the bus, seventy-five seated places, thirty-two standing, more than a hundred people in there and so many empty spaces, one man and another man and a strange conversation in the row in front, it’s not normal finding words like that at eight on a Monday morning, life stops us thinking about it, the great benefit of living is that it prevents us from looking, nobody thinks about the meaning of life when they’re busy fighting to stay alive,

  Either obscenity or death,

  the same man in the same row, the same bus, she can’t see his face but she’s suddenly taken with his hair, how strange life is when you can love someone without knowing what they look like, maybe that’s exactly how it is, maybe that’s how it has to be, loving always happens without knowing what someone looks like, when you love and you know what they look like right away it can be so good but it’s not love, pleasure perhaps, but not love, loving is this, one man talking to another and we only know his hair and we already love him like crazy, you love the words first and only then comes the person, in the beginning was the word, and only afterwards came the slave,

  Hypocrisy is what’s obscene,

  the journey is coming to an end and it cannot come to an end, the man is talking to the other man, what’s obscene is wanting him so much already and not knowing how, it doesn’t matter why when the big question is how, she could find out what he’s called, maybe ask someone who knows him, it’s a big city but someone’s got to know him, right?, then just by chance she could sit down next to him and that man, or opposite, these seats that force people to face each other have to be good for something, and out of nothing, who knows, she could set out her theory about obscenity, it would begin quite simply,

  Obscenity is loving you,

  then she would go red as a tomato, the skin can’t lie, we all know that, he’d look at her and with any luck he’d go red too and a few minutes later they’d already be on the patio of some café, or, God forgive me for the thought, in some bedroom, it would feel so obscene and still the words wouldn’t be lacking,

  Obscenity is not to be fucking,

  it was a punch and a kiss at the same time, and what the hell is the use of something that isn’t a punch and a kiss at the same time?, the journey ended and he finished those words, she woke up, she was still a long way from her usual stop, the store had to be open at ten as usual, what do we do when there’s nothing decisive to influence our decision?, she could lose her job but she mustn’t lose out on the moment, that was what she thought and she made a mental note, she had just conceived her life philosophy, her new life philosophy, I can lose my job but I mustn’t lose out on the moment, she said again, once, twice, him just there in front, just two or three steps ahead, she’s already seen a bit of his profile, an elongated nose, perfect, and the deep, dark look in his eyes, how many looks like that do we need before we go blind once and for all?,

  I can lose my job but I mustn’t lose out on the moment, and this time he heard her, she said it out loud and he heard her, he turned, smiled, approached her, only if you’ve never loved can you claim that time never stops,

  I was afraid you wouldn’t come,

  and neither of them called it a kiss even if their lips did meet and their tongues and all that, they always called it ‘that’, they never explained why, possibly because they never found a better name, or just because the opposite of ‘this’ is ‘that’ and if love isn’t what takes us out of this to that then it’s quite possibly no use at all,

  Obscenity is not to be fucking,

  and they were prudish for at least that whole night long.

  He eats a crust of hard bread, and he’s happy,

  the kid on the street, and he cares for nothing,

  in happy people there’s a condescending morality, a kind of satisfied detachment,

  the small, thin hands, the smiling look in the eyes, he walks as though jumping, or even as though flying, it makes you want to hug him and run away at the same time, how many bad things can an angel do?,

  he’s very cold, and he’s happy,

  my bones hurt, one day I’ll snap on the inside, I swear it, the damn boy has a thin jersey on and he doesn’t stop smiling, his eyes looking all around him, wide open, every second there’s a new discovery, when did I lose my capacity for discovering, for fuck’s sake?,

  and I’m still so addicted to completely crazy things,

  one mad idea is to take the boy with me, give him everything he’s lacking, a school too, why not?, but then I look at him more carefully and I understand that it’s on the street that he feels at home, how many people can a free person run from?,

  he’s so alone, and he’s happy,

  he stops in front of a grown-up in a suit and tie and holds out his hand,

  an unfortunate wretch isn’t someone who doesn’t find,

  an unfortunate wretch is someone who has nothing to look for,

  he tells him about his poor family, about his poor life, his poor destiny, immediately strikes a wretched pose, I’d almost swear he really was crying,

  the ghetto is where theatre was born, I’m sure of it,

  the face with black smudges, not long ago I saw him dirtying it on purpose, and within a few seconds he has one or two coins in his hand, he doesn’t even say goodbye and races off, how many coins are enough to make you a millionaire?,

  he’s such a liar, and he’s happy,

  no idea where he’s going, still less where he came from,

  what has happened to his life?,

  and me here following him, a morning devoted to learning who he might be,

  I’d like to understand what makes me go but as long as I don’t understand I’ll just keep going,

  and I see now that he knows I’m following him, how could he not have noticed if I’m sure he even knows the meaning of life, the little brat?, he looks sidelong at me regularly and I can almost make out his mischievous smile, hidden on some filthy corner or other, when because of some oil on the road I fall flat on my face and smash my nose against the tarmac, somebody helps me, I struggle to my feet,

  whenever we need to get up we finally see we’re just these bloody old people, I learn,

  and there in the distance, at the top of the avenue, there he is, looking at me and smiling at me, a little victor toasting the big man he’s defeated, and then running really far away, my inadequacy preventing me from going with him, how many falls does a hero need?,

  he’s so cruel, and he’s happy,

  it’s hard for me to get home, it’s hard
on my legs of course, it’s hard on my back, it’s even hard on my feet, but what’s hardest is not knowing about him,

  I’ve an insatiable appetite for intolerable stories,

  I sit in the rocking chair and write these words, write this column to try and find him, might he read after all?, I imagine him under his favourite bridge, newspaper in hand, my photo at the top of the page,

  look at the old guy I humiliated the other day,

  and finally he lies down with his little head on the page,

  you’re going to be my pillow today, old man,

  and I don’t understand these tears I cry for him, if I’m the old man with just a house, how many homeless people exist in the city’s buildings?,

  and I envy him so much, and I’m happy.

  We is,

  a mistake in verb agreement, spoken by a northerner with a Matosinhos accent,

  can you love an accent?,

  a singular combined with a plural, a construction that’s impossible and yet perfect, her hands on my face, then her big eyes, the inside of her veins and I melt completely,

  what’s the point of all that grammar crap if getting it wrong feels so good?,

  we is,

  she doesn’t believe in bad people, she doesn’t believe in forgiving, she believes in going all the way with what you attempt,

  happiness exists or death, she tells me countless times,

  yesterday she showed up here dressed as a mermaid, would you believe it, she could hardly walk and she was laughing so hard, she’s crazy and I can only stay sane with her, I don’t know what to write to show her how things ought to be, one day I’ll invent the theatre of the insane, or the play of the true, or a novel of people who’re nuts, something to pay tribute to her, whatever, in the meantime I’ll devote myself to loving her and I really fear I might never get past this stage,

  people are strange, did you know?,

  she asks me, she’s already covering me with kisses, she’s already taken off my trousers and she’s already looking for the beginning of the orgasm, but not even this prevents her from explaining the rationality of her choices, even philosophy can give you pleasure, at least mine can,

  I’m only prepared to cherish a person I love, you see,

  and I say yes, she laughs out loud, she touches me gently with her tongue on my skin, she finds another virgin centimetre and I shiver, there’s an immensity of shivers and only one life, for the years we live we have too much body to explore, dammit,

  I’m only prepared to respect a person I love, you see,

  living is simple after all, I’ve spent my days looking for complex supports and life is so simple after all, people complicate things and they are strange, that’s what I think for a second or two, no more than that, there’s a kind of electric current feeding my brain, I swear I wouldn’t know where she’s touched me but I’m alive, thinking is such a big drought when you could be doing,

  people love without looking at themselves, you see,

  it makes sense, when her mouth takes hold of mine I find nothing that doesn’t make sense, to tell the truth, but it makes sense, I was saying, that way I’m able to complete my reasoning, I’ll try, it makes sense because people are strange and when they love they don’t love themselves, I’d so like to write a whole thesis on the need to not be completely in somebody else’s hands but she’s on top of me and I don’t have time,

  we is,

  and in spite of it all I’m the one who’s in charge of myself, who does she think is?, I’m the one who dictates things for myself, let me make that absolutely clear, I know it’s me and I’m always going to do whatever I want and only what I want,

  so long as it’s what she wants too.

  So many people in a bad way with a steering wheel in their hands, dear God,

  there’s a kind of obscene sharing that happens when you stop at a red light, the whole city in half a dozen cars, the inside of people’s eyes, the taxi driver who tells me the story of his mother, poor woman, may she rest in peace, next to a middle-aged woman, or maybe younger but she looks middle-aged or even older than that,

  faces are strange things, aren’t they?,

  every face is born with the faculty to lie prodigiously, that’s enough to tell us what we’re here for, why we were born, if we weren’t meant to lie we’d be simply incapable of doing so, like flying, for example,

  the worst people are those who fly the least, I’m quite sure of that,

  the taxi driver is still telling me about his mother, the middle-aged woman looks out into infinity, occasionally scratches her blonde hair, turns the radio up, I’d like to hear what she can hear so as to know more about what she’s feeling, I need to know about people, guess them, have an integrated sense of their states of mind,

  who was it who invented sadness, does anyone know?,

  on the other side a boy, ten or eleven years old, he’s drawing on the glass with his fingers, he’s misted it up with his own breath and now he’s writing letters beneath his drawings,

  childhood is the start of happiness, and the end too,

  when I was small I used to hide away to watch the world, now I just need some traffic lights, a few moments a day and I’m ready to write, all the characters in my book are people who exist even if I invent them,

  a writer’s a guy who manages to invent what already exists, that’s just how it is,

  the taxi driver’s mother is a good person, she wanted him to study,

  I want you to be a doctor, my son,

  but people are evasive and they make unexpected choices, and then there’s love, of course, some woman or other changed this man’s life, it’s not clear whether it was for the better,

  who knows what might have been but I could never love like this, that’s for sure,

  he loves her so much and my sadness, the kid keeps on drawing and writing, he doesn’t even notice I’m watching him, naïveté is too lovely to survive long, the middle-aged woman can no longer stand it and she cries, she doesn’t know I can see her and she lets herself go, she must have a husband at home, children, a kitchen that needs tidying,

  there’s a difficult relationship between a kitchen that needs tidying and the dreams of a lifetime, who can say why,

  I could have been a doctor but I’m happy, the taxi driver’s words are the most brilliant life philosophy I’ve ever heard,

  I could have been a doctor but I’m happy,

  and I give him a banknote and tell him to keep the change, I look at the kid for a second or two, and at the woman, I say goodbye, I race out of the taxi and go in search of you, you’re a bad influence and you’re going to stop me writing,

  but to hell with it,

  how it’s taken me this long to realise I have no idea, but I’m still in time, let’s hope you understand, the most important thing is that I love you and I’ve already complied,

  I could be a writer but you make me happy,

  how does that sound to you?

  ‘Fuck me like a dog but never like a poet.’

  and I look at you inside those words, I could spend my whole life writing about the way your body mingles with your words, and maybe that’s actually what I’m doing,

  loving gently is insulting, even obscene, a kind of pretence, perhaps,

  ‘Poetry is cool but I’ve never come in verse, I have to admit.’

  your hands and the diabolical extension of my sex,

  it was animals who discovered pleasure, the beginning of humanity happened at the beginning of pleasure, only an evolved being can understand an orgasm, let alone how to reach one,

  a house without orgasms is a third-world house, or fourth-,

  ‘Go on, come, screw me, it’s not poetry but it could well be art.’

  and I obey you as best I can, and I can do everything, literature that’s finished in the way I hold you tight,

  the rough blood is the whole poem, the blind mystery of all salvation,

  it’s through your veins, no
t through your nose or mouth, that your body breathes,

  ‘Take my breath away at once to show me the miracle of all inspiration.’

  loving you is an epiphany, a second of happiness that never passes, there are some extraordinary words and ‘I’m yours’ is one of them, even if it’s two,

  your mouth with those words to explain the existence of God, and mostly of my own,

  ‘No book has ever given me an orgasm like that, go and tell that to the Nobel people and tell them I sent you, OK?’

  for a few moments I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry,

  is the best book the one that turns you on the most?, a couple of seconds would have been enough to answer but she was one or two seconds away from coming,

  and I with her,

  being a poet is also being smarter, and coming better than men, choosing who you kiss,

  and I chose, I did,

  ‘In a second or two you condense the entire meaning of life in me: so take that, Sun Tzu, and tell Confucius he can take it too.’

  or ‘yes!’,

  ‘I’ve said. But mainly I’ve come.’

  if you weren’t tragic you’d be comic,

  and I laugh all the same.

  ‘Man, have you thought how fucking lucky we are to have tomorrow? You can see how it goes? We’re here, today, the two of us. And tomorrow can exist. Tomorrow really can exist. Being here, just today, just for now, just for this moment and for all these moments of today, man, that’s already some amazing shit. But having tomorrow, even having the possibility of a tomorrow, that’s truly unbelievable. Unbelievable. Isn’t it? Imagine you just landed here on earth without knowing anything. And you start living. And you start feeling everything there is to feel (and there’s so much to feel, isn’t there? The smell of the trees, the flash of birds flying, how do they do that, I mean how? And then, oh man, the people; the people are something, truly something…it’s like they’re impossible. People seem impossible. So complex and so unique. There isn’t one who’s like another, not even a bit alike. All different. And their touch, and their eyes. Truly something. Their eyes are just inexplicable, right?)… So then you show up here, like I was saying, and imagine, really just imagine, try to imagine, you don’t know anything till you get here. You arrive here as an adult, you land here as an adult and you’ve come from somewhere, you don’t know where, and you were you don’t know what, but you definitely weren’t human, you didn’t live all that as a human, and you arrive here and you see all this and you start to feel all this. And it all starts coming into your veins, flowing in your blood. And it makes you want to cry. Don’t fuck with me, man. Don’t fuck with me, there’s no other possibility; if you landed here amid all this and started feeling all this at once coming into you for the first time, man, you’d really have to cry. It’s too big. It’s too intense. It’s too impossible, you know what I mean? It’s like this shit didn’t exist. Living the way we do, with all these possibilities (you can run, jump, shout, touch, taste, smell, hear…and love, man. Loving is the bomb, seriously. Loving really is impossible. Imagine you arrive here and immediately realise that you love, that you have this unbelievable capacity to love. What must that whole love thing be like to someone who arrives here all of a sudden? Oh man, it’d be to die for. It’d be something that’d make you want to stick around, feeling that. There are so many possibilities, so many things available to you just by being. You need only be. And these things are there, these sensations are there)… And I think I’ve got myself lost again, haven’t I? Oh yes! I was telling you that with all these possibilities to experience it’s like none of it really exists. It’s like we’re in some imaginary space. And that’s the magic of all this. The magic is exactly that: hell, nothing exists. None of this exists if you don’t exist. At least for you. This is all yours. This only is because you are. If you aren’t then this thing doesn’t exist, it disappears, kaput, finito, game over, get it? But I think I’m already talking too much and maybe you haven’t yet understood what I’ve been trying to say from the start. Let me start at the beginning. So…the basic thing I’m trying to tell you is this: tomorrow there’ll be a new day. Do you understand the greatness of that? This shit is so big and so overwhelming even for only one day, even if only for a few minutes. If you were here, dropped down here from out of nowhere, for only two or three minutes, you’d already leave saying it was the best experience you’d ever had, the most son-of-a-bitch amazing experience you’ve ever had. Man, one minute would be enough. And that would be that: you’d be vanquished, overwhelmed. A minute would be enough and you’d be happy for ever. But man, no. Hell, no. You’ll have, and with any luck you’ll have many times over, a tomorrow. Tomorrow you’ll wake up (and even sleeping is awesome, even sleeping is an extreme experience, a little kid’s death, entering a different zone, living different lives to yours; fuck it, it’s just too good! Too good. But I’m not even going there because otherwise I’ll never leave)… Tomorrow you’ll wake up and you’ll have the possibility of everything all over again. You can feel the same and you will feel the same, and you can even feel more. Even more, do you see? More new things. More things for the first time. You can kiss like never before, eat what you’ve never eaten before, see what you’ve never seen, say and hear what you’ve never before said or heard, do what you’ve never done. Man, it’s incredible. It’s a miracle. It’s a fucking miracle. Inconceivable. Tomorrow you can wake up and change everything or keep everything the same. You wake up with all this within your grasp. The whole world, this whole vastness, over again. Seems impossible, doesn’t it? And you still have the fucking nerve to cry so much, to complain so much, to beat yourself up so much. Better to see sense. And don’t try my patience. Get away from here, go on, try being impossible. Just one more time. And then another. Go on. Be impossible. Until it really is impossible for you to do it.’