The Book of All Loves, page 3
Look at that billboard. From the time when women’s flesh was sold for men’s enjoyment.
– he says.
A show I refuse to repeat.
– she says.
The one thing that remains unchanged from childhood into old age is a person’s gaze, which becomes, thereby, a true identity. The way we use our eyes to look and to express ourselves never changes. Hands are also recognizable throughout a person’s life. But there is something else about eyes and hands: they are the parts of the body we move most often; even in sleep, our eyes twitch and our fingers quiver, as though in competition with the unstoppable machinery of our internal organs. Eyes, hands: sentinels which in their constant pumping-out of identity recall a kind of external heart. (Epidermal love)
Today, when I went out hunting, I saw a dog – or a mongrel, rather, a wolf-dog sort of thing. It bared its teeth; I showed it my hands. We stayed like that for quite a while, snow statues. Each of us saw our own death in the other’s eyes, I think. We feigned battle, then both withdrew.
– she says.
You have such power, you could hang your clothes on that moonbeam coming in through the window over there.
– he says.
It is a known fact that in every language the number of words in people’s lexicons oscillates between 400 and 5,000, which is the same as saying that there is one group of people that makes use of 400 concepts on a daily basis, and another that makes use of 5,000. Nobody knows why, but it is also a fact that at either end of this spectrum, most words have to do with ‘love’, which would act upon these two poles of the populace like an elementary, agglutinative mass, a glue for every word spoken. And for everything unspoken too. But, above all, for everything that will never be spoken. (Poles-apart love)
Everything – and I mean everything, the tap, wheel, glasses, tobacco, cups, satellites, music, writing, anything you might wish to name – was tested out in war before being put to civilian use. Every object is the material hangover of some bloody conflict.
– she says.
I wonder which conflict led to the hangover that is the love invented by our bodies.
– he says.
In the Spanish language, the word ‘omnipresent’ – the faculty by which a being or thing is everywhere at once – has no antonym. The dictionary does not specify anything as its opposite. ‘Omniabsent’ – which we could define as the quality of being nowhere – does not exist. Nor is it a word in any other known language, which relegates the concept from the human sphere entirely. The relationship between omnipresent and omniabsent is therefore different in nature to that between other well-known dualities, such as light/shade, where the one guarantees the existence of the other – shade exists because it is the absence of light – or the duality of good and evil – evil exists because it is the absence of good – and neither can it be compared to the dyad of love/hate – hate being the absence of love. This could lead us to the conclusion that absolute love, if it truly existed, would not necessarily require an opposite; would be an omnipresence that does not admit omniabsence. This object, sought by every civilization as a Holy Grail or as the all-originating primordial ocean, has still not been found. (Omnipresence love)
I still haven’t reached the extremity of your body.
– she says.
He says nothing, takes off his clothes and folds them up as though packing for the final journey to the far reaches of the known world, gets into bed and that night dreams of naming the first bird to come and land on the windowsill after the Great Blackout.
If we made the breasts smaller on any Greek statue with a woman’s name – such as the Venus de Milo – it would look like a man, such as Apollo. And, vice versa, almost every Hellenic masculine representation would become a woman’s body with a little inflation of the chest area. This pseudo-androgynous characteristic of Greek sculptures reappears in Christianity, but joined together in a single figure, that of the angel. Indeed, physically undefined Christian angels can assume different sexes according to their respective missions. The Angel Gabriel we see at the Annunciation is represented as feminine; the same character is present at the Final Judgement, but in a masculine guise. There is a logic to this: all angels are the same angel, an emissary of God’s will, and in God everything is Unity, one that, depending on the case, undergoes different metamorphoses. But there is no such thing as God – or at least not yet – meaning that we have been going along creating substitutes for Him. The different religions, whether monotheist or not, for all their declarations to the contrary, are clear examples of doctrines that neither see nor have ever seen any God, and therefore do not work with information that can be retrospectively verified; rather they speak of a non-existent, fictional past, relating events they claim to be true, or invoke a future like somebody who in the middle of a drought repeats the word ‘rain’ over and over in the hope it will induce the heavens to burst. And then, faced with this lack of real divinities, what happens is that we humans raise ourselves up as Creators. As the following example shows: in the present day, Artificial Intelligence produces entities that are supposedly female or male, symbolically sexed machines that, in the manner of ancient Greek statues, are christened according to purported genitalia – take the case of the domestic robot Alexa. But it wasn’t always so; when AI began, in the mid-20th century, it produced machines with no fixed body, assemblages of metal and cables with no predefined symbology, their sex capable of heading in any direction – or none – depending on the use to which the machines were put. We could therefore say that, as far as their bodies went, those machines were angels, the angels of AI. The history of AI is therefore that of a trajectory that inverts the history of bodily representation, having moved from genderless beginnings to the rigid current-day heterosexuality, or, in other words, to the hetero-patriarchalism of the machine. (Angel of AI love)
I’ve discovered a new stream at the top of the valley, it’s just beyond the mountain of perpetual snow – I think there are tadpoles, we could go and look at them.
– he says.
I already saw them a few times, when I was out walking in the early days after the Great Blackout, they were moving about in the little dead hollows of the channels. They wiggled their iridescent tails, restless. Love is blind; from the first to the very last time humans copulate, love is a virus that’s forever changing colour, only we never imagine it like this.
– she says.
Unlike other predators, we humans do not have the kind of teeth that can express an intention to attack. This is why when a stranger approaches, we focus our attention on their hands, on the promise of love or hate contained in these advancing hands, our mandible substitutes. (Mandible love)
There’s a story that’s stuck inside my head, something I heard when I was small and which has been with me ever since: it’s about two people of different sexes who converse day and night, for months and years they talk non-stop, and they talk so much and share such a quantity of knowledge, facts and opinions, that they end up swapping sexes without knowing how.
– she says.
No wonder. I once heard somebody say that the particles which make up the world are all one and the same particle. It takes only a slight twist to turn protons into neutrons, and vice versa.
– he says.
In geology, ‘deep time’ is a concept used to refer to chronologies so ancient that it would be unworkable to talk about them in terms of years, and so timescales get subdivided into units like aeons, eras, periods, epochs and ages. Deep time advances so slowly that from the point of view of human scale it could be said to have stopped, to be a kind of time crystallized in physical matter. When someone goes out of your life and, years later, you have the experience of finding things in your home that can be qualified neither as objects – they were never bought – nor as raw material because they are mixtures of many other materials – we call this love crystallized in matter. Legitimate vectors of memory, such as a hair. (Crystallized love)
Today, coming back from our walk by the river, I trod on a dead grasshopper and said to myself that I couldn’t call it a grasshopper any more. In the place where animals go when they die, they lose their names, passing them on to other creatures. As if in this, the body’s new home, the dead will christen the living.
– she says.
I can imagine no greater pleasure than to die in order to give a name to things. I sometimes think that the first bird that landed on our windowsill after the Great Blackout gave us its name so that it could lose it.
– he says.
The dictionary defines ‘immemorial’ as ‘something so ancient that there is no memory of when it began’. The ‘once upon a time’ of tales and fables derives from this – a time so distant that all chronology is lost in it, that cannot be dated. This is why time in tales and fables is not properly time; it is outside of measured time. But we can also think of ‘immemorial’ as something exactly contrary, that which is so near to us, so present and real that it passes from one memory to another without pause, without finding a stopping place or end, and because of that does not stay in anyone’s head. In this case ‘immemorial’ would be that which in its rapid circulation leaves no trace, which in its continual flow and carrying out of certain objectives is so swift that it will not be completely used up by any memory, and may never be remembered. Love, distant like a children’s story but accelerated like the ghost of capitalism, is immemorial in both senses. (Immemorial love)
When your body and mine light up in the night like fireflies, the moon darkens. More and more with every passing day.
– he says.
The sun already did the same. As did artificial light, even earlier on – it gave up on the world of the living with no explanation.
– she says.
It is animals, not us, who live in the prison-house of language, because they are not able to leave and stand outside it and think about it. This is only because it is impossible for them to access the ideas that surround words. A dog never crosses a road, because it does not know what a road is. This, among other things, is why dogs get run over. It isn’t that the dog fails to look both ways before crossing, it’s that it does not possess the idea of a road. Its gaze is another gaze, its crossing is another crossing. Hence the fact that an animal cannot give or receive love either. It’s not that it doesn’t love, it’s that its love is other. (Language love)
In all these years I have found infinite happiness in your cavities. As if they too were infinite.
– he says.
They’re finite, though they have an end. If not, everything we pour into them would be lost, you and I would have no memory of each other.
– she says.
A test tube, a common feature of research laboratories and clinical-trial settings, is, if we stop to think about it, incorrectly named. To be a ‘tube’ it would need to have openings at both ends; really it should be a ‘test receptacle’. Moreover, the word ‘test’ does not entirely match what it does; the test tube serves to try out hypotheses, but also to demonstrate them, so this part of the name isn’t entirely satisfactory either. If we now consider its shape, we will see that its length and diameter conform to certain strict measurements, shared by test tubes the world over; every single test tube could be said to be the same test tube. For example, though it is well known that everything in the United States is larger than in Europe, all objects there being larger by a scale factor of approximately 1.1, or that the opposite is true in Japan, things there being smaller than in Europe by a scale factor of 0.9 – despite this – test tubes are the same in Europe, the United States, Japan, Africa and Oceania. Just as they will be even on Mars if the red planet should ever be colonized. But the shape of the test tube has more to tell us still: we know that all cultures have come up with their own ideal norms when it comes to the human body, something founded as much in mathematical ideas as in symbolic images. The ancient Egyptians took the fist as their corporeal reference point; the ideal human body for them was 18 fists tall. The ancient Greek norm took as its reference the 7 heads proposed by Polykleitos, which Michelangelo increased to 7½ and Leonardo to 8. The Christo-Roman imaginary put forward a very different norm, symbolically related to evolving representations of Christ’s body, which never matched the rule imposed by the Greeks, meaning that in those centuries Christ always appeared slightly deformed or misshapen. Nor did the norms in the ancient cultures of India, New Guinea or what today is Mexico – all of them fundamentally symbolic – bear any relation with our own. In the 20th century, the most well-known scale of proportions in the West was proposed by Le Corbusier, which he called Modulor, and which is used in the design of living spaces and domestic furniture. Be that as it may, what interests us here, the real discovery, comes when we pause to note that the proportions of a test tube’s height and diameter are the same as those of our arms and legs; the relationship between the height/diameter of the average human leg is the same as the relationship between the height/diameter of a test tube. And the relationship between the height/diameter of the average human arm is also the same as that between the height/diameter of a test tube. The test tube is not only identical in every laboratory and culture on the planet but in its proportionality is identical to the proportionality seen in every human body, which makes it the overlooked and perhaps secret norm of the contemporary human. As a corollary, it is clear that the body, our body – and this includes all the affection and love that our flesh gives off – has its natural extension today in the praxis of the laboratory. (Test-tube love)
I also don’t know what gets in our way when we pass by the ruins of the houses that stayed standing after the Great Blackout. I suspect it’s the souls of the people who inhabited them, who perished in the doorways as they tried to flee in terror.
– he says.
Until we have loved one another inside all these dwellings, our love will be incomplete. The death of the human race is a puzzle we must solve with our bodies.
– she says.
VENICE (1)
Month of June, first floor of a palazzo whose foundations stand below the waterline of Venice’s Misericordia Canal. There is a room, and a high window with views across the domes of St Mark’s Basilica and across a sea that will shift in colour throughout the day. There is also a woman – a writer – who, were she to look up, would be able to see all of this, but keeps her eyes down instead, tapping at the keys of a typewriter. Her typing produces slight movements in a small snow globe containing a miniature version of Venice to her right on the desk, raising a layer of snow up inside the globe, where it swirls before falling across the plastic city, and the writer goes on typing, and on, while outside, in the real Venice, the Venice of tourists and water and stone, the June humidity ushers in an early summer storm. Now, as the sequence she is working on grows in intensity, the table turns quivering fingerboard and the snow rises in the globe, and again it rises, once more hitting the tiny glass vault and falling on empty palazzos and waterless canals. The books and papers strewn across the desk, all of them on one single subject – love – receive these blows without so much as a flinch. Inside the globe, a snowflake has just landed on St Mark’s Square, filling it completely; at the same time, outside, in the city of tourists and water and stone, a flash of June lightning illuminates the skyline of palazzo silhouettes. And now she feels the ache in her fingers – these old typewriters so unforgiving – a couple of broken fingernails she’s forever thinking of cutting and forever failing to. She stops, as does the vibrating of the desk. Nothing moves in the sky of the globe, its streets have become white sheets, the glass dome inviolate, and the thought that comes to her is, When it snows, where do birds go?
When it snows, where do birds go? the writer again says to herself. Her husband is asleep in the next room, he’s been sleeping for days now, and she gets up, moves away from the desk, looks down at the street below through the high, first-floor window of this palazzo, a holiday let they managed to rent for next to nothing and where they have spent the last six months; the estate agency has had no problem extending their stay for as long as the couple wish. We say the couple have spent the last six months in the palazzo, but this is not entirely accurate. We find ourselves in June and, though they did arrive in January from their home in Montevideo, after the initially planned fortnight of tourism in La Serenissima, and for reasons never entirely explained, the husband announced that he was going to stay on, that he had no intention of leaving Venice, meaning she had to return to Uruguay alone. Now, six months on, she has come back for him, has come back because she does not understand what he could possibly be doing in Venice all on his own, and they have spoken – or, rather, they have not, silent meetings that say more than an entire alphabet. And so she has sat down and begun to type, possibly to impose some order on the silence that like armour plating has descended between them; imposing order on a typewriter’s jumbled alphabet. Through the wall she hears her husband shifting in the bed. The mattress and sheets rustle, only to abruptly fall quiet again.
A flash of lighting, still far away in the distance, splits the study in half; she stops typing. Back at the window again, she stands and watches as a gondola disappears around a bend, observing how little the gondolier must move his body to swing the vessel completely about, and she remembers being in Montevideo airport at 2.30 a.m. just a few days ago, about to take the flight that would bring her back to Venice to be reunited with her husband. She remembers the deserted building and sees herself moving forward through Arrivals, alone and completely untethered. Not many people know that there is a first instant to every airport, a number of seconds, sometimes as long as a few minutes, in which not a single passenger is present and the airport installations as a whole cease to carry out their stated function, become something else. After clearing security, she went and bought a bottle of water from a vending machine before exploring Zone C, stopping and looking in at the shuttered shops and the window displays of souvenirs, and thinking how these plastic and metal miniatures summarized not only a country but an entire state of mind. We are all souvenirs of an idea, of a perversion, of a nation, of a person, of whatever it might be; we do not possess souvenirs, they possess us. And although it was beyond her to understand why a souvenir of an Italian city was being sold in Montevideo International Airport, in the only open shop she bought a snowglobe containing the city of Venice; suddenly the idea of giving it to her husband appealed. She said as much to the man working in the shop, who, carefully wrapping up the globe for her, said, ‘There’s a reason the airport’s called the International – you can find everything here. And anyway, is there anything in the world nowadays that isn’t international?’ The writer remembers wandering the airport those few days before, and now, in the Venetian palazzo, goes back to her desk and starts typing again, about the only subject of interest to her, love. A sudden flash from the east, from the older part of the city, again splits the study in two. The summer storm is growing nearer. By the time the sound of the thunder reaches her, she will already have written a further 200 words, more, the snowglobe will have bobbed up and down on the desk and snow will have fallen a corresponding number of times on the miniature St Mark’s Square.
