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.
The other revealing morning, in which I suffered your epiphany, was when you gave me that innocent kiss. When I came home I fell down in the hammock and while the short wind touched my happy face, the memory of your touch evoked my almost epileptic feelings, in internal shocks like insects flitting my chest or candy worms poking my bowels.
Mornings... Maybe they are foreboding, or something like signs. The mornings at the institute were not pleasant if I did not find your presence at recess, even if it had only been for the occasional babble that emerged from your mouth, because I had to (as I once told you) take out your words with a scoop. Adequate metaphor to define your reality at that time when you were a pale boy and very quiet. The important thing was to perceive our figures sitting on the sidewalk, with my legs together and my hands on my lap, and capture the lifting of my hairs interacting with the rhythm of your movements, as two magnetos strangers, who wanting to attract, only rub each other in a sway of tension. Those days I began to fall in love with you, with your long pauses of silence, with your gaze projected to the horizon in search of ideas and that encouraged me to explore the enigma of your prudence.
It was one morning when you waited for me in the pouring rain. You insisted on going to the meeting, without realizing that it was better to escape the flood and postpone our meeting until the rainbow exit. It was the morning which gathered us in the park of the village, in the corner christened with a fancy name and we'd use as a key on subsequent occasions, having always kept in mind that each couple has dubbed it with a name according to their relationship. It was one morning when you brushed my breasts with the impudence of your hormones. It was one morning (I want to dream it like this) when you caressed my buttocks over the fabric of my hateful denim pants.
It was one morning the first time we made love, although our love had already been made long before. Perhaps because at that time we only had those spaces in the early hours of the day, when the dawn was breaking and we woke up eager for the moment of meeting again. And then the afternoons would come, which may not be so premonitory, but very special. When noon was approaching and I was jubilantly getting ready for meetings in the city.
Our love was maturing, and we matured together with it, these sad lives and remorseful for the distance, but happy because despite everything we felt close.
I remember the time when we did not have a phone and we sent messages thanks to a notebook and a momentary accomplice. And after all this happy remembrance, our contemporary situations come to my mind, these ones which we are building and destroying. A Russian man says that even the great reformers of the society have been criminals, because when they enacted new laws, they abolished the old ones preserved as sacred. For this I say that to keep on building, we demolish some things, exorcising our shortcomings, practicing a debugging in our relation to not let her die.
Maybe I can't fully understand you, it's most likely. But here I am, trying to tell you that I want to interpret the codes of your brokenness and take a path holding our hands. Perhaps not a radical, immediate solution, but one that serves to adjust the balance of this relationship that is teetering like a castle of cards on the seat of a full-fledged locomotive.
This letter is a symbol of my engagement. I feel bewildered because I warn that I have demanded too much to you and in your circumstances you have not been able to satisfy my whims, not because you did not want it but because the nature of your sadness has absorbed you and I have not been able to warn you until now when the day is breaking, after this dawn of anguish.
Maybe the mornings are foreboding. Because just now the image of a hypothetical future arrives, with your warm body resting next to mine in a morning hug, in an awakening that is very dreamy, when the dew has distilled the sweat on the nearby herbs and the first twilight of the day bring out the warmth of the sun that is not from the sun but from our awakening.
Yours today, tomorrow and forever.
CHAPTER THREE
Our story started in high school. An exalted girl with her thunderous voice who complained to the rector. It was the graceful Eloisa. Thin, with her waist made of porcelain and her angelic face, his bow at rear and her charisma embroidered by the youthful energy. When we met, little by little, a closeness disguised of friendship brought us together. The most important moment of the breaks was being able to see her and greet her with my glance. The mornings insisted on turning me next to her. Gradually my illusions flickered; sometimes, exalted, it did not fit me, because she chose me to talk at break; other times I was sad, because she spent her minutes in the hubbub of her group of friends.
One morning, after leaving the institute and after having participated in some games of a fair that had been installed in the town, I walked through an alley not so common in my tours with the intention of heading home. I heard shouts behind me. In the distance, a gang of girls in scruffy uniforms were beckoning me to approach them. A park smudged with sand offered us its ground as the only seat. The comments full of puerilities (of which I was oblivious) of those nymphets prevented me from participating in the chat. I shone in my silence and they directed their glances at me. Tell her, a freckled girl told me, looking at Eloisa. Nerves took over my skin. I remembered that a week ago I had awakened with the clairvoyance of being in love. I pretended to repeat a lovely speech that I had prepared some days ago, but the words flew to a dimension impossible to cross. I laughed demurely. It was when I heard the expression: Talk to her now. Eloisas closest friend had said it and this stimulated me to speak. I looked at her. She sat cross-legged on the position of a lotus.
I did not have to spend more than a minute for a short kiss (short in terms of body but substancious within us) to be present under the expectant eyes of the girls. The youth crying of the companions who had been suspended in front of my declaration of love rumbled rhythmically, mysteriously unanimous, as prepared with priority, unvealing the consummation of the ritual when touching her mouth with mine and extinguish finally the lip virginity of her dear friend.
I was once a virgin. I always thought that he would be the first man I would give my purity. That tingling sensation came to me every time I finished reading his love letters, smart, passionate and ridiculous, as all love letters should be. After all weve had a relation for few years.
But I have strayed from the subject, dear friend, and since you insist on knowing my story I will proceed to try to finish it.
If there's anything it does not erase from my memory, rather than the visual record, it is the smell of his body. If someday they asked me to identify any of them for the nature of their build, I am sure that I would be wrong in my exploration than if I did because of their smells.
The silent man, who with the passage of time I preferred to give the name of dumb, had a particular smell of machine oil, as if his work had been to lubricate all day gears of complicated mechanisms. The rotund reeked of stale onions, a stench emanated from his armpits and intensified as drops of sweat fall from his forehead over my face. The young smelled of cinnamon, but at times marked in the environment a nauseating fragrance of marinated seafood.
The silent man, who with the passage of time I preferred to give the name of dumb, had a particular smell of machine oil, as if his work had been to lubricate all day gears of complicated mechanisms. The rotund reeked of stale onions, a stench emanated from his armpits and intensified as drops of sweat fall from his forehead over my face. The young smelled of cinnamon, but at times marked in the environment a nauseating fragrance of marinated seafood.
The onslaught of the fat vermin was the most egregious. Supporting the weight of his gross and repulsive corpulence was the least compared to feeling it in my guts.
LETTER THREE
Does it suffer more who waits for the caress of its love, or that sadness that does not have anyone to wait for?
The poet
A Frenchman claimed that love letters are written starting without knowing what is going to be said and ending without knowing what has been said.
Whenever I write to you, I try to do it with a fixed idea that I am gradually developing. This is not something I invented, but I've extrapolated from a theory of the story, according to which the first three lines have almost the same importance that the last three. I have understood this formula as the definition of writing, in any field.
But let's get into the matter. An African philosopher has delved into the theme of love, and in her work which is entitled Depth of the amatory arts she draws us showing the passive side of the desire which reaches its climax when it is satisfied and the diligent character of love as source activity. She condensed it into one powerful phrase:Love is infinite dissatisfaction. There is no more irrefutable truth.
This is the thesis that she develops throughout her work, sometimes a little hyperbolic, it is true, but never without charm. The interesting part is that phrase. Desire, according to her, culminates when it is satisfied. We wish something and when we get it, it is the end of the story.
But when the desire is linked to love, it is difeent: It is possible that the desire can route to love; the beloved, irrefutably we wish it, adds the philosopher.
Today I want you to feel that through my words I can caress you, and not with the prosaic friction that the delights of modesty pay us, but, but with these indelible caresses.
As the bards immortalize their loved ones, this humble practitioner would wish to glorify yourself with songs that refresh your youthful thirst and with poems that lull your afternoon. Say how much I am in love with you, virginal goddess, almighty, the owner of my love, the slave of my love, as the slave women of the Old Testament, with a candor of cosmos as Proserpina, infernal queen, or some pagan goddess. You are the Musa of poetry. You: a thousand women in one. A thousand goddesses in one. My Pandora, my Eva, my Mary Magdalena so purified for the kisses of Jesus.
You, who knows how to dominate my spirit, are my owner. And you are at every moment. Because your affable memory cures me of my melancholy: your words whispered in the wind and your face illuminating the space that could be empty unless you love this crazy man who lives only for you.
Your being is more hypnotic than a fantastic tale, as shrouded in mystery as a thriller, but at the same time so real and deep as a novel of realistic rawness. And there is no contradiction because sometimes you seem to me to be accurate and paradoxical.
With a vision that goes beyond the everyday, I try to reach you and delve into the depths of your love. And I get to see through your eyes (which are infinite receptacles of clairvoyance, as a crystal ball would be for an old woman versed in crystalomancy, but as delicate and pure as the Delphic oracle) that depth of mature woman, that indomitable strength that you carry deep, and makes me think of the strength of a god. Sometimes you seem to be too divine to proceed from earthly transcendence. Your ancestors can only be the same as those of Ariadne, divine caste of goddesses.
And meanwhile, I only have a dark minotaur that spins and spins in a circular maze of my brain, hoping that Theseus (divine love that professes me) breaks with his thread this brutal loneliness.
That is why I ask, along with the poet: Does it suffer more who expects the caress of its love, or that sadness that does not have anyone to wait for? Although the answer is obvious, the pain, when it is the product of waiting for love, is not bitter, and my promise appears that even having you close I will never stop writing love letters to you. Because you love me and because I love you, because I wait for you, and because you wait for me too, but mostly because our love will always be an infinite dissatisfaction.
Yours, wherever.
GRATITUDE
Gratitude comes from hands and goes through our arms toward the spinal nerve. It is violet that personifies temperance and reflection. It is offered with a sweet taste and a woody perfume. Its symbolic effigy is Wood and it will always be carved in this material. In the Tarot cards I mold it with The Hung Man, who hangs on a tree branch and exemplifies dedication and sacrifice. In the western zodiac imagine I associate it with Capricorn, parent of all generosity. In the Chinese zodiac I reveal it in The Boar, who never keeps resentment and it has an altruistic spirit. Gratitude is Condensed and it goes to the west behind a Wolf that feeds on the old and praises the new.
CHAPTER FOUR
They marched during nine days so that my humanity entered the limpid portal of her house in the fifteen years party. I arrived early, with my bloody innocent gift (at that time my mother worked as a dressmaker and the present I brought her was a cut from a cheap cloth) and with a smile that camouflaged nervousness. Half an hour later I was sitting in the main room orchestrating the way not to go dancing. At the bottom, in the anteroom, angry voices of experts talks were intensified in the same proportion which increased the force of music. Surely there were their parents, relatives and close people, people of Saturday dinners, all enjoying the pleasures of the coexistence of the moment (or at least that's how I imagined it, because I was not approached by the curiosity of observing who they were and I venture to say that even if I had, it is likely that I would not have recognized any of them). Most of my high school classmates surrounded me. My ineptitude to interact flourished at every moment and I did not know how to respond to the moment: the cave animal was facing for the first time the jungle world of the wild beasts.
It was time for the dance. My legs stuttered and implored me to rest and not because they were tired but because they were ashamed of their crudeness. She was the expert and she took my hands as if she wanted to teach me the dances that I might not learn in a lifetime. I don't remember if I danced with someone else. The most possible thing is that I did not. I left with the anticipation imposed by my watch and when I left the party she said goodbye with a kiss on my cheek. Dessert, unattained by my urgency, appeared a couple of hours later on my porch. Her delicate arms extending the disposable plate constituted one more step towards falling in love.
Although the fat man was the roughest, the dumb was the strongest. They squeezed me outside and inside while they silenced my despair by covering my mouth that moaned with dismay and helplessness, and my tears hit the pavement.
The young man was the most impetuous and contrary to what you might think. He never showed indecision and lashed out at me with the same predisposition as his elders.