The Book of All Loves, page 13
He falls quiet; his breakfast plate untouched on the table. She has just finished hers and, not knowing what to say, she looks over at the windows in the back room; lightning flickers on the horizon, a storm is approaching, the first of the early summer storms. Turning to her husband again, she says: ‘How about we take your sphere apart and listen to those vinyls?’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘a lifetime wouldn’t be enough to listen to them all, the man in the shop was very clear about that.’ ‘That makes no sense,’ she says. ‘Yes, it does,’ he says, ‘it makes all the sense in the world,’ and he immediately gets up and goes back to bed, lies down, closes his eyes but does not sleep, feels the heat of the sphere and feels the movements of his wife, who has gone into the next room, a study in which she has just for the first time taken a portable typewriter out of a metal case. After a few minutes he will hear her starting to type, a sound that will go on throughout the morning and into the afternoon and evening, and all night, and through the succeeding mornings, afternoons, evenings and nights too, to constant thunder and lightning, and several days pass with the writer typing non-stop, many broken nails, and the storm has settled over the city, a relentless battery, and the small snowglobe of Venice, placed on the desk by her, has bobbed this way and that to the striking of the keys and is now at the edge, about to fall to the parquet floor, one more letter would be enough to make the snow rise up again and a minuscule snowflake fall on St Mark’s Square and all of Venice go tumbling down, but no, it will not be a keystrike that gives the final push but rather the sound of the doorbell, which rings, it rings this very instant, a doorbell so loud that it makes the writer start, and the same with her husband in bed, a doorbell so seismic that the globe teeters and, now, indeed, begins its vertical, clean, unimpeded dive, and smashes on the floor, buildings and canals in pieces, imitation snow everywhere, glass ceiling shattered, and she in the study and he in the bedroom, both still paralyzed by the doorbell, at a loss, it is the first time this doorbell has rung, they can’t bring themselves to react, each of them in their separate places can’t bring themselves to react but they know that were they together, their paralysis would be just the same. After a few minutes they get up, go towards the door, somebody has slipped a piece of paper under it, she crouches down, there is some handwriting, she reads it out:
‘Good morning. I’m your upstairs neighbour. I only wanted to introduce myself and say hello, I’ll stop by another time. The ambassador.’
IV.
Why are we afraid of the dark if it is an absence. (Subtraction love)
Your life and mine are infinite, they cover entire millennia. The rest of humanity does not understand this timescale.
– she says.
Our mission is to ascertain the epochs of terrestrial love.
– he says.
Love, like rocks, can be igneous, metamorphic or sedimentary, and because of this the processes that cause our feelings to mutate correspond to these three rock formations: crystallization, metamorphism and sedimentation. Beyond these geological limits, all love is imaginary. (Rock love)
Life assigns us all a task that is beyond us, something that even over the course of various lifetimes we would not be able to achieve.
– he says.
I often remember the street cleaners, the way they used to bring the streets back to life.
– she says.
The family is, by definition, a secret society. And as if this were not enough, it sometimes in turn hides a secret, an ancient episode latent in the darkness of generational time, and then this secret society becomes doubly secret. The concentric ring of secretiveness triples when the crime still exists. The secret is then handled like an ember of uranium passed from one hand to the next until the fingerprints of every family member are erased, making them all equal in their love of this thing that may never be named without its corresponding judgement and sentence; it then manifests when the person who has named it is expelled from the tribe. (Concentric love)
Love is a fantasy.
– she says.
But one of precision.
– he says.
Technology, in all its forms but especially since the appearance of electronics and later of social networks, has grown exponentially. Our perception of our environment, however, does not grow exponentially but always at the same rate, a linear rate. These two phenomena being so out of step indicates, in the first place, that for many years now technological advances have been moving beyond our apprehension of our environment – increasingly less immediate and more vast – and secondly that a day will come when technology’s exponential growth will be an almost vertical line, and at this point we won’t even be able to detect what is around us. By then there will be no human perception capable of attending to such a change; the technological milieu will simply escape us. But this also indicates that love – something that appears suddenly and instantly in the human, and which therefore does grow exponentially – will be the only thing capable of accompanying technology in its flight to infinity. Love will then be the solitary witness, the only thing to see what is happening. It is not the ‘Internet of Things’ that will save us from individual solitude, but the love of things. It could even be that, through the elementary laws of viral contagion, love will become technology and, vice versa, technology will acquire a halo of the love drive, only possible until now in the spines covering the thighs of fairies and in the solitary eyes of the cyclopes. (Exponential love)
