The Book of All Loves, page 15
Blue is one of the colours that the brain takes the longest to identify; most four-year-olds have not yet conceptualized it. The reason for this is simply how rarely blue features in nature. The sea, seen as a whole, is blue, but there is nothing blue about a cup of seawater. The same goes for the sky: a portion of air held between our hands is never blue. The fact that when we look down on the Earth from a space station and are able to say that we live on a blue planet and not on a green, grey, pink or brown planet, indicates that, seen on a large scale, the Earth’s enveloping shade – that is, the statistical median of all terrestrial colours, combined with the different atmospheric densities – gives a result that, when looked at on a small scale, becomes invisible, does not exist. This is a genuine ‘apparition’ of a colour as a result of the interaction of sunlight and the Earth’s atmosphere. From which we can say that the branch of mathematics called statistics is the most fantastical and at the same time the most realistic version of reality. We see the same thing happening in love as well. When a large mass of people gather together – a football match, a concert, a political rally, a religious gathering – a union suddenly emerges between each and every one of those present, and certain special attachments that previously did not exist, which we could call ‘statistical love’, a kind of love that disappears when we remove a couple and consider them in isolation, for example in their domestic ambit, the affection and attachment here always being of a different and radical nature. A common error or misunderstanding often arises here on social networks. When Facebook tells us someone is our friend, it is referring to this statistical friendship, this statistical love, which does exist, but will turn out to be illusory if we take ‘friend’ to refer to the bond between two people. The love experienced by a couple, by definition, rejects every attempt to extend it to collective virtues and behaviours. A story: in a few months there is going to be a mass protest on the streets of a certain city, and a married couple, man and woman, are both in agreement with the cause, but the woman, more reserved than the man, does not feel comfortable in big crowds and decides not to go. Out of love for her husband, however, she volunteers to make some signs. She buys large pieces of fabric, and spends a month sewing them and painting the relevant slogans. And she does not know – there is no way for her to know – but when she gives them to her husband so that he and all the other protesters can walk into the city holding them aloft, the love between them as a couple, which has prompted her to stitch and paint and sew day and night, this love for which she has left her eyes and fingernails on every stitch of every placard and every letter of every banner, will in this exact moment be being destroyed by statistical love, the collective love in which her husband finds himself submerged, a human tide that will carry him away and from which – he also does not know – he will never return. (Blue love)
Years ago, when we first came to this house and you would get up in the morning and go out to get water from the spring by the path out the back, I would say to you I was going to sleep for a while longer, but that wasn’t true. In your absence I would look at the wrinkles in the sheets, which still had the outline of your silhouette. When you got back, I’d hear you open the door, and your body would disappear, the wrinkles would go back to being wrinkles and the sheet, a sheet.
– he says.
In the spring by the path, I also saw the water pouring out all kinds of different shapes. Now and only now do I realize that they were also wrinkles, your wrinkles.
– she says.
We are always dealing with this same doubt: what will the characters in movies think of us and our lives? It is the same with dreams: what would happen if somebody could see us from the inside of a dream? And it is the same with utopias, which for this reason are always impossible to realize: in essence, they are the same as cinema and dreams: from inside a utopia nobody can see us, nobody can perceive the lengths we go to as humans to bring utopias about. But neither can we see those who are inside them. If we think about love in these terms, we will see that it is the exact opposite of a utopia. Love either shows itself as reversible or it does not show itself at all, it is a vision of a round trip; naturally the object of love is able to see us from their side to the same extent as we can see them from ours. But – I wonder – what act of love-for-the-global-market, what kind of perfectly resolved utopia, prompts a young man to kill a tourist beside St Mark’s Square in Venice so he can take his phone. (Market utopia love)
A kind of gluttony systematically leads my mouth to your sex.
– he says.
What is radical about the horizon is not that it can never be reached, but that it never stops moving.
– she says.
The window, from a construction point of view, is a source of light: the removal of filters. The window, from the point of view of the person inhabiting the house, is a way of looking out: the insertion of filters. Architecture is, in part, the attempt to solve this contradiction. There is a third function, not contemplated either by building techniques or by the inhabitant of the house: the gaze of the person who comes and, from the garden, uses the window to spy: the voyeur, the lover, the gossip, the removal of every filter in existence. This is a kind of love-violence. And it is here that architecture falls short in providing building solutions, where the inhabitant of the house, lacking any language to shelter in, expresses themselves like a newborn. (Architectureless love)
From the deepest part of the valley, the part we’ve never been to because it’s the source of the river, and you and I hate everything that springs from the earth and neither asks for anything in exchange nor has any clear objective, there are vibrations with such a short wavelength that only I can feel them. They beat in my chest under my white blouse, like a second heart.
– she says.
It’s the song, synchronized, of all those who have left us.
– he says.
In the same way that there are identity-less spaces – airports, motorways, shopping centres – that have been given the tag ‘non-places’ by sociology and urbanism, we can think about the existence of ‘non-objects’. But unlike non-places, non-objects would not be identity-less, nor things so lacking in personality that they appear to not want to exist; on the contrary, we can imagine non-objects as objects that ‘exist too much’, as being so charged with meaning, so manifold in their adornments, forms and content, that all their meanings collide with one another in such a way that they are annulled, creating an object that is not only unique but also absolutely empty. Empty by excess, not by defect. Love is – par excellence – the supreme non-object. (Non-object love)
There is much talk about the lines on people’s hands, about our destinies being delineated in them, but never about the lines on the soles of people’s feet, which are the true makers of the path.
– he says.
A cap of mist has come and settled on the top of the mountain, you can’t distinguish it from the snow. A nameless bird has made its way through this mist and this snow. I just saw it from the window; it looks like the first bird that came and landed on our windowsill after the Great Blackout. I think it’s time to give this bird a name.
– she says.
From the Newtonian myth of action at a distance, to the no less mythological image of the butterfly fluttering its wings in India and unleashing a storm in New York, thus is our ancestral faith in magic. Or thinking that someone who died naturally has been murdered. Or a couple falling out of love, which is the murder of a third figure that is around us but we never see. (Distance love)
There is a movement towards the bone that is missing from my ribs, towards birds that have lost their way, towards a desert of lies with walls erected around them.
– he says.
In the Beginning there was also the darkness of a womb, and then a cry and tears at the contact with light. For this reason, tears and light are sisters.
– she says.
VENICE (4)
We left the couple holding a sheet of paper –
‘Good morning. I’m your upstairs neighbour. I only wanted to introduce myself and say hello, I’ll stop by another time. The ambassador.’
– a handwritten note that she has just read out. He says: ‘Let’s go up and introduce ourselves,’ an idea that she, in her unease, roundly rejects. He questions this, and, again, she simply says no. They hear footsteps in the apartment above; someone walking to the kitchen, turning around and going back along the hall towards the front door. The couple go through into the living room. They look out at the city through the high windows, which are wide enough to give a view of the horizon, where further storms are moving in. There is almost nobody in the streets, a darkness like lichen or granite has spread over the buildings, very different to the white limestone from which Venice was built. They comment on the shape of the canals, some of which appear slightly bent towards the east, others slightly shallower. They watch an ocean liner leaving the port, ‘It’ll probably be the last to do so,’ he says. She quickly asks: ‘How do you say “ocean liner” in Latin?’ ‘You can’t. When Latin was invented, ocean liners hadn’t been invented.’ ‘Now,’ she says, ‘a word will have to be invented for their absence.’
They go out that afternoon; it is the first time he has left the apartment in several weeks. They do not see a single gondola at any of the moorings, nor any vessels in the canals, which are empty of everything but water. The occasional passers-by feel their way along the walls, their memories of the streets to guide them. An elegantly dressed woman, walking with a stick bearing the words I Love Venice along the side, doubtless taken from an abandoned shop, walks along tapping the ground, making S shapes with the tip. He says: ‘There’s no difference now between these people and their shadows, which are also blind. They are one and the same.’ Feeling suddenly frightened at these shadows, which in the couple’s imagination become the actual living doubles of the bodies, they soon turn back. Come the night, over a supper of the few remaining provisions in the freezer, they try to arrive at an explanation for this sudden, unfounded fear of human shadows. After much consideration, they come to the idea that, in every moment, every aspect of our bodies is being passed between body and shadow, as though the two were interconnected vessels; if somebody loses a hand, the hand does not disappear, but instead gets passed to the person’s shadow; if somebody has their gallbladder removed, it isn’t lost, but instead gets passed to their shadow; if somebody is blinded, it is also the shadow that then receives the functioning eyes, and so it can always see. They find this improbable explanation sufficient to calm them for the rest of the night. She sits down to rest while he, on an impulse, feels a desire to go and have a look around her studio, something he never usually does. On the writing desk, to the right of the typewriter, he sees a pile of typewritten sheets of paper, and skims through them; hundreds of short paragraphs concerning one single theme, love, pass before his eyes. Before leaving the room, he is still standing staring at the miniature version of Venice – which is lying on the floor in pieces that neither of them has bothered to sweep up – when the doorbell rings. They both jump. Each stands stock-still. After a minute, they go to the front door and find a note has been slipped through the gap; she picks it up, reads it out:
‘Good evening. It’s your upstairs neighbour again. I only wanted to introduce myself and say hello, I’ll stop by another time. The ambassador.’
He again suggests they immediately go and see the man, knock and introduce themselves. She again refuses, and is even more set on this than before.
The next day, she says she wants to go to the old Biennale complex, to see what he told her about the pavilions of the world’s leading nations being taken over by people of every class and country. He has no objections, though he does point out that, with no means of travelling by water, it will be a long walk, plus they will have to avoid the areas occupied by the vacuum-bubbles of smell and sound, which have grown to immense proportions. They make a plan to set out at dawn the next day, enough time to be back at the palazzo before nightfall. Provisioned with a couple of water bottles and energy snacks – dried fruits, dates and chocolate – they set out at 6 a.m. The day is cold; they set off walking separately, but soon find themselves holding hands. Without stopping, they see the whole of the sunrise, the warmth it provides barely seeming to touch their dawn-damp jackets. The only shadows are their own and those cast by the buildings they pass. The water, abnormally high in areas not usually liable to flooding, has partially covered many of the streets, which the couple are forced to skirt; only the churches are untouched, always being built, as is well-known, a few steps higher than street level. Before long they begin to hear rumbling noises inside the churches they pass, amplified by apses and domes. Finally, after a number of hours, they arrive at a street that ends in a canal, backtrack, take various diversions but find them all blocked by the soundless, smell-less bubbles, zones that announce themselves in intense bodily sensations as the couple approach. At the far end of an alleyway, they spot a gondola, moored to a building by a metal ring on the wall, water lapping at its sides. They go over. ‘Even without any boats, these currents are never-ending,’ he murmurs while she briskly unties the vessel; she has never operated a gondola before, but quickly works out how. They row along a series of connecting canals before arriving at a jetty, very near to the Biennale grounds, and she ties up the gondola, using several knots just in case; if it comes loose, she’s aware they probably won’t be able to get back. They walk no more than 100 metres before arriving at the gardens that mark the start of the grounds, and before they have gone very far along the tree-lined paths, are presented with a vista of the different buildings and the spaces that, having been nestled in gardens for over a century, have now been occupied by an extensive platform made up of pallets, wooden boards and pieces of rubbish. A multitude of people, adults and children alike, are out bathing in the faint sunshine as it filters between the deep, dark clouds of an incipient storm. The couple go on, leaving all this behind, and are soon afforded the sight of numerous pieces of art, previously housed inside the pavilions, which have been brought out and piled up to form what appears to be a play space for the children of the improvised commune. Other pieces of sculpture have been fitted out as makeshift huts, in which adults can be seen cooking on portable gas stoves. A brief walk takes them past the minimalist pavilion of the Nordic countries, which has been overlaid with bricks; only a small gap affords a glimpse inside, where a whole battalion of men and women of every ethnicity and colour are roasting what appears to be a deer. The neoclassical columns at the entrance to the oversized German pavilion have been painted different colours and used to fashion a frame for a low-doored wooden structure; they move closer and, before a woman’s face comes out to meet them, see people standing around small fires, smoke escaping through an open chimney where the roof once was. Japan’s see-through pavilion, Brazil’s brutalist pavilion, Spain’s fortified brick pavilion, Poland’s ecclesiastical one, the United States’ rationalist one, and on through the rest of the pavilions, nearly 30 in number; all – to greater or lesser degrees – have been transformed. Intending now to leave, they are making their way down the slight slope that leads to the exit, when a man stops them. With a curt nod, he asks what they are doing here, they don’t know how to answer except with something that, although true, suddenly seems like a poor excuse: ‘Pure curiosity.’ The man tells them that everybody living here comes from countries that, when not locked in never-ending fratricidal wars, are starving, and that it would be best if the two of them left, that nothing in this camp could possibly be their concern, that they should go because, he says, ‘The Great Blackout is coming and you need to be ready,’ at which he returns to the people in his group, not giving the couple a chance to ask what he means by the Great Blackout, nor where such a thing might be due to take place. Going around the edge of the former central garden, they stop outside the Austria pavilion, the only one still with nobody inside it. A little further down, on the east side, the row of delivery bicycles he saw months before are now a mound of metal pieces and wheels piled up at the water’s edge. They are about to leave the Biennale grounds when, in the middle of the central platform, standing on some boxes that serve as a pulpit, they see an elderly man, slim and silver-haired and wearing a blue double-breasted jacket with golden buttons and with a burgundy tie, using a megaphone to direct people as they transport works of art out of various pavilions. A crowd of men and women are depositing a multitude of sculptures, canvasses, video screens and photographs – photographs in particular – on the esplanade of the former gardens, which the large group then stands around admiring, but not for long. The man in the blue jacket with the golden buttons produces several canisters containing some kind of fuel derived from fossils, takes them over to the men and women but without giving any orders, without making any particular statement – perhaps in the knowledge that true power, the kind worthy of a monarch or a god, lies in making it known that one possesses the power and yet simply chooses not to exercise it, deferring it indefinitely, leaving it to exist only as a possibility or dream. Next, the men and women empty the canisters over the pile of objects, which become a flaming pyramid when someone from outside the circle enters in and hands a lit match to one of the children, who throws it on. Before stepping into the gondola again, the couple take a backwards glance. Hundreds of people stand in silence around a blaze that rivals the brightness of the sun. And even, fleetingly, blocks it out.
After midnight, back at the palazzo once more and feeling unnerved by everything they have seen, he goes into the bedroom; lying down in the wet heat of the vinyl sphere, he closes his eyes and falls asleep. She goes into her studio, she wants only to sit at her desk, to rest, to think about everything they have seen. She has barely been back in this room since the snow globe broke – it remains in pieces on the floor. She goes over to it, looks down. The glass dome in smithereens, some of the shards so tiny they can barely be seen. The buildings, squares and canals, shattered and unrecognizable, look to her like the skeleton of an animal frozen beneath a patch of snow. She sits down at the desk, inserts a sheet of paper into the typewriter carriage, does not move her fingers but observes the amphitheatre of the typewriter keys, moments pass, she wants to type, but without knowing what else to write on the only subject of interest to her, love, she is unable to press a single key, the moments turn into minutes, so many that she falls asleep.
