All love letters
are ridiculous
Diego Maenza
Translated by Gastón Jofre Torres
www.traduzionelibri.it
www.diegomaenza.com
© Diego Maenza, 2020
© Tektime, 2020
© Gastón Jofre Torres, translation, 2020
www.traduzionelibri.it
www.diegomaenza.com
All love letters
are ridiculous
Diego Maenza
Translated by Gastón Jofre Torres
INDEX
FOREWORD
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
EXALTATION
EPILOGUE
FOREWORD
Abelard looks up at the sky. Smiling, satisfied, as he hasn't been for days, as he hasn't been for weeks. The clouds crowd in a hazy gray, foreboding. His nervous and excited legs lead him down the sidewalk, but his mind is imagining the imminent encounter with Eloisa, the love of his life. Under his right armpit he has the manuscript, squeezing it as if protecting it in advance from the coming storm. He feels the breeze brush his face, ruffle his thick hair, caress his cheekbones. Abelard looks down at the ground. Look at the trash that vibrates with the wind. His feet go down to the road, carefree, like his dreamy instinct, like his restless eyes that go astray again in the shapes of the cloudscape. That is why he does not notice the car that crosses the avenue quickly, that is why he does not listen to the last and useless moment the desperate horn of the imprudent driver. The metal of the vehicle impacts Abelard's body. Her skin rustles, her flesh lacerates, its bones are destroyed, its beaten anatomy is ejected several meters in the same direction that the breeze carries. Certain splashes of his blood are confused, mixed, integrated, with the vermilion hood of the car. The boy's head hits the pavement and causes trauma. The rain begins to fall, very delicately. The most carefree pedestrian, whose inquisitive nature of the human being will be more focused on verifying the circumstantial details than on directing his attention to the center of the incident (perhaps with the intention of materially taking advantage of the tragic situation), will be the only person who will notice the four words that head the manuscript that has ended up near a sewer, those four words that are already beginning to dissolve throughout the page due to the insipient drizzle, and that constitute the title of the work that yearns to publish the badly wounded young Abelard: Theory of affects.
CHAPTER ONE
To talk about her (I have always said and maintain it) is to talk about the least common creature. What could I say about her that does not sound like something hackneyed or an easy phrase, a hackneyed topic? The problem does not lie in the lack of anecdotes on which to speak. The complication turns out to be the opposite, because in fact there are too many things that I could comment on his life. The issue is that I will not do it because he will start telling this story. And I must take it easy. Detailing his life will be an interesting process, but it could be an inexcusable slip on my part to err for a moment. Perhaps some other more talkative interlocutor is the appropriate person to capture his essence with accuracy and objectivity; However, my claim is much more ambitious: I need, in this process, to reveal what she has meant to me. Where can I find the most crystalline source of truth if I can not find it in her? For her lips the lie is forbidden and this empowers her to do with me what she wants. Her struggle to be a woman has forged the most utopian animal that carries a desperate idolatry towards life. She likes loving... She likes loving me. To enter into details of her being would be to desecrate her. Have believers tried to describe their gods? But I must take the risk, even at the cost of not escaping the attempt unscathed. Her raw and stately character, the haughty breasts that draw curves in the air, the voice of sticky and sweet melody, the mischievous gaze pinching me in indelible caresses, her practical intelligence and generous spirit, the invisible claw of her hips hitting the wind in her peculiar way of walking, her sense of humor, the skillful smile designing her picaresque profile. This is her. The prototype of the perfect woman. A fictional being transmuted into reality. Her name is Eloisa.
My name was Eloisa and I am no longer young. Not after everything that happened. Even over the years and despite the youth of my cells, I found myself eaten away by a spiritual old age that I have preserved until today and that never left my veins. The body is sometimes the reflection of the soul and other times its torture. Because we were born in a time and in a space where beauty is synonymous with misery, although they insist on saying the opposite.
I was slim and beautiful, graceful and fragile like the gazelle that shows its slenderness without realizing that hungry hyenas and starving wolves lurk from the shadows.
Today, telling you this, young friend, I may even know what each of them thought at the time of the incident. The first, the fat one had looked at my thin, brown legs that were appealing for their voracious prey. The second one, the strongest looked at my nascent breasts, small buttons that protruded from my blouse and prompted the man to bite them throughout the work. And the third one, the young man was awakened by the luminous showiness of my turned and firm buttocks based on aerobics and contemporary dances. They were all pigs.
LETTER ONE
I draw you, as if outlining in the soft thicket of the rain an imaginary and perfect face whose precise dimples balance in parallel with the cheeks. I make you smile, making your pains and your customary obligations sleep. They handle your face like puppeteers of your destiny. I make you live a dreamed longing implanted in the depths of you.
Starting a love letter is as difficult as starting a story that does not contain some deficient element that could reveal the writer's full satisfaction with his work. Complacency that, in my opinion, will never be filled, in the same way that it will not be in this love letter.
Transcribing feelings sometimes becomes an almost insurmountable difficulty. Protect the task of the sculptor who must make the fine nose of the model and its beautiful testicles sprout from the hard marble. Heroic is the task of the painter who, mixing his varnishes, achieves on the canvas the perfection of an ideal jaw, striking small breasts that contrast with the splendor of a vulva made up of hair. No less arduous and complex, if not impossible, is the work of the poet who, perched on his platform of lucidity, must bring to the ungraspable what is palpably comfortable, and in a paradoxically analogous case, return the thanks that without his intervention would be inaccessible.
I find myself with this wall at this moment, not as a painter, sculptor or poet, that I do not have so many faculties. I collide with this wall not as an artist but as a human being. My soul (I name this way the set of my few qualities, do not think beyond that) is proud to belong to the side that praises the condition of being human above all artifice of the world, no matter how sublime it may be. First of all we are human beings and as a human I express myself.
Sometimes I ask myself why I waste time writing. The answer cannot be simple. To report the ills that concern society? No, definitely. To dismiss personal problems by turning literature into a great psychological masturbation? Neither. To achieve fame and wealth, or to rejuvenate the way we use language (not the organ but the verbal communication system)? No. And I explain: My role model in his attitude is the Shadow Writer. I only think about writing and the rest doesn't matter.
Perhaps the answers are less pragmatic than is generally believed. I try to answer: I write to understand better my surroundings. Perhaps the answer is the same one that I give myself every time I question why I am used to reading: To become more human.
Do I become more human by writing love letters to you? Does love grow because I write a letter? Can love grow as babies or toads or rivers grow? Or could it be that when I write a letter to you little by little I am detaching (as if it were an infinite fractal) the pieces that constitute whole love and in this way little by little you are running out of my love? Does love diminish as an old man or as roast meat or as rotten fruit? Perhaps the only valid answer is this: Writing raises questions, irresolutions, in the same sense that trying to describe the marked smell of your hair makes me so confused, opaque compared to what my head spits on me. Or in the same way that your face becomes at this moment the word that escapes me, or like the praise towards your eyes that slips down my throat with the perplexity of someone who is ecstatic and no longer has pleasure for stories or poems.
No, it´s not that either. I do not know. I'm not sure.
Yours, Abelard.
AFFECT
Affect arises from the pancreas and is diluted by our bloodstream until it returns to the hypothalamus. It is amber in color that symbolizes happiness and the search for well-being. It is manifested in infrasound and with a floral smell. In the universal symbology it is represented by the Moon. In the Tarot cards I identify it with The Strength, which provides control and security. In the western zodiac I personify it with the sign Virgo, attached to spirituality, order and intelligence. In the Chinese zodiac I find it in The Rabbit, full of prudence, tenderness and harmony. Affect is Liquid and it goes to the North riding a Unicorn because it is virginal.
CHAPTER TWO
As it usually happend in the mating process of the human race, our lives were brought together by an arbitrary fate. She is fifteen years old and in the splendor of menstruation; I am fourteen and in the delusions of masturbation. It sufficed as a pretext an occasional encounter, a fair of the village and five of the most scandalous friends to start our relationship.
She was the most beautiful girl of the school and I was an aspiring suitor who began to stop studying because of the new philosophy of love.
For me, the beginning of our relationship was sweet. For her, not so much. The motivation of her approach was encouraged in an effort to maintain a romance not with me but with a relative. The irony (and why not say it, romantic) is that in the process she ended up falling in love with me. I conquered her or we conquered each other.
Perhaps she intends to explain the facts by resorting to complicated abstractions, which a fool would venture to specify in a couple of words. But I point this out, my goal keeps ambition.
Her overflowing joy against my constant battle with melancholy; her charisma and intelligence reflected in the contours of her brooding and vivacious eyes every time an idea addressed her or every occasion fumbling evasions by the depths of the imagination to excuse herself in front of her parents for our furtive dates, in front of my philosophical pretensions; her mania for dancing and my mania for writing. Everything was unjustifiable and yet, dear reader, beloved reader, you will understand that for us has been the most intense relationship that have sustained people in the world and I hope to communicate that impression properly.
Night fell with surprise at the end of the summer. I left the dance class that a young and beautiful European instructor had begun to deliver in the village and took place in evening hours on the premises of the institute where I studied. I remember that that day we had rehearsed a Turkish dance that I would never dance after the event. The mother of one of my mates offered to take me home in her car. I refused. I wanted to walk and clarify certain ideas of youth.
I took the longest alley that borders the teak trees and wraps the road in darkness. The stars protruded without timidity and a large moon made the stones shine like magic static fireflies.
Fate wanted the three birds of prey to emerge from the gloom. The big man approached me with the mask of an archangel. He did not say words and he woud never do so during that anguish night, but stood in the middle of the road and opened his horizontal arms to stop me and I realized he was the head of the group. The other two silhouettes appeared. A young, thin man and not so tall, with an adolescent complexion, wore a skull mask. He said You can't pass, and the sound of his voice confirmed his youth. The tall individual was covered by the mask of a goat. His voice was thick as his stomach and he also chided me by ordering me not to scream.
My body felt the paleness of fear. My thoughts as well as my body were paralyzed. My hair stood on end when feeling the forced contact with those three beasts. As if that fat goat had been a witch and his threat had been a spell, no matter how hard I tried I couldn't scream.
LETTER TWO
The morning I woke up with that kind of revelation that told me that I was really in love with you, I found myself startled. Perhaps I do not have the precise image and I am unable to describe the exact sensation, but the memory emerges almost clear, like a déjà vu waiting to be captured. At that moment she was just a friend to you, a circumstantial mate who you visited in your free time as the more adequate distraction to any teenager.