The Book of All Loves, page 6
Until a day came when they heard the volume go up in the usually quiet street outside, neighbours speaking across their balconies, and gondoliers and skippers of motorboats seemingly communicating in shouts. The couple had made coffee and while they ate a breakfast of sweet Venetian pastries, they turned on the television; it was being reported on a local channel that not only was St Mark’s Square itself cordoned off now, but the security perimeter had been extended by 100 metres all around it after that pocket of total soundlessness had been found to be causing not only strong headaches but also blindness, in certain cases irreversibly. But as well as the absence of sounds and the blindness, there was now no smell there either; a thing so extraordinary that no human could be said to be prepared to experience it. They turned off the television, spread the map out on the table and came up with a way of getting to the Biennale complex – the only significant tourist destination they still had not been able to visit – that would avoid the cordoned-off areas but nonetheless be as direct as possible; the route they sketched out would entail an unlikely combination of sections on foot and others by gondola and motorboat. They set off, again passing the house with the statue on its façade whose eyes had been taken out – the male writer dropped his gaze, again struck by the incomprehensibility of such vandalism. After half an hour, as they passed the food market, they witnessed an accident. A taxi boat and a boat with an outboard motor crashed into one another, seemingly for no reason; moments later a third vessel, coming up from behind, then crashed into the first two, before bursting into flames. Boats and gondolas swarmed around, everyone trying to help, several individuals even taking out what appeared to be business cards and handing them to the people involved in the crash; maybe, he said, they were lawyers offering their services on a commission basis. Between the noise of the swell and all the shouting, they heard somebody say that the people involved were blind, all blind. The couple decided to go back to the palazzo. They walked in complete silence. The sun went behind a cloud; she did up the top pearly black button on her blouse to cover her neck. A few hours later, while she, sitting in the living room, looked out across the domes of St Mark’s Basilica, he broke the silence to say: ‘There is a way to avoid crashing, a very simple one: if you suddenly find yourself about to crash, and you intentionally turn the steering wheel in the direction of the collision, you’ll go towards the collision, and when you reach the point it’s taking place, the cars involved won’t be there any more, they will already be somewhere different in the road. A rule that actually applies to lots of things, conflicts between nations included, and between couples, too.’ She looked pensive for a moment: ‘But this idea of needing to turn towards the collision to save yourself,’ she said, ‘are you trying to tell me something with that?’ ‘Yes, I’m trying to tell you that we should go and jump over the police cordon and go out into the middle of St Mark’s Square. We should go towards the place where everything is being erased. It’s the only way to save ourselves.’
But they didn’t go, they didn’t so much as approach St Mark’s Square that day because the following one marked end of their holiday. They were due to leave very early, and packed their bags and got ready after supper so they could be sure to catch the first vaporetto to the airport. She was woken at dawn by him shouting in the living room. Throwing back the sheets, she rushed through; still in his pyjamas, her husband was pointing at a collection of large boxes in a pile. ‘I was coming to make coffee when I saw them,’ he said. They were both dumbstruck. He went over to the boxes, she begged him not to touch them, but, bending down, he opened one; it was empty. She recoiled – he then opened another box, which was empty too, and another and another, until it became clear that none of them had anything in them. She went back to the bedroom, threw on her clothes, not even brushing her hair, checked the clock, dragged the suitcases through to the living room, where he, still in his pyjamas, stood staring at the empty boxes in silence. ‘What are you doing just standing there? Get dressed, come on.’ He seemed not to hear her until, coming out of his reverie, he said: ‘I’m going to stay, I’m going to stay, a dream can become reality, I finally see, and this dream’s trying to tell me something, the men in the dream weren’t here to bring us something, quite the opposite, they came to ask for something, and what they are asking is that I complete their dream, that I be the one to bring the rest of it to life, that I myself fill up their empty boxes, I think they even want me to help bring them to life, to turn them into flesh and bone, I see clearly that this is what I need to do, I don’t know how but I have to, however long it takes, this is my mission in Venice, you can go to Montevideo, see to the house, I’ll be here, come back whenever you want.’
II.
The best place to hide something is in the fire. (Fire love)
The clotheslines out on the patio have become tangled in the wind. The tangle has created a knot; it’s the same shape as your sex.
– she says.
I’ve seen it. This valley we’ve been walking also has the same shape as the floor of the ocean that once covered it.
– he says.
Another way of understanding things is to say that we come from a darkness and are moving towards another darkness. Between the two there is only a brief candle, a match pointlessly struck, although everyone’s soul gets its corporate branding in the end. (Match love)
It’s as though the world has become a skin that’s been turned inside out and, having never previously seen the light, is still fresh and steaming, bloody even, laid open for all to see.
– he says.
A language we must invent where there’s nothing. The intangible business of survival.
– she says.
The infinity of ad breaks on television only dawns on you when, watching a movie à la carte, the ads come on and you skip through them in time-lapse, and it seems like the slowest time-lapse in the world; the promotional images you once enjoyed watching now seem to you if not dead then dying. When a couple splits up, each of them goes back through the experience, also in time-lapse, and the exact opposite happens: the advert of their coexistence, so to speak, appears. Moments of boredom in their daily routine, moments that at the time manifested as pointless addenda or bound-to-be-forgotten detritus, but that now, in the succession of images coming back to you, reveal themselves to be as muscular as a grasshopper’s hind legs, as beautiful as a rhizome’s impossible root, infinite like the balance of the credit cards in dreams; detritus, all of it, in which – precisely, right there in the detritus – you feel that a cell, however small, could have existed of the thing we call ‘union’. (Advert love)
Every night, while you sleep, your eyelids are the sluice gates of a river that stop me from swimming back up your body, from entering you. Outside, meanwhile, the valley awaits the sun in darkness, and I spend the time thinking of its perpetual snow and of the nameless birds who in that moment will be cutting through the air above it. At times, this sort of mineral silence gives rise to a noise that excavates the darkness, leaving it not only shorn of its silence but riddled, hollow.
– she says.
Hollow space filled with fears and solitude, hollow space for all the surplus, the overspill, the remainders. Noise is only music we don’t yet understand.
– he says.
The speeches of politicians and orators, and their associated powers of persuasion, have nothing to do with the words they use, but rather with the music inherent in those words. Hitler is a succession of fortississimos, Churchill an alternation of fortissimo/piano. Fidel Castro oscillates between pianissimo and mezzo forte – an oscillation with no discernible pattern – while JFK is a continuous mezzo piano with the occasional subito piano thrown in, and so on. What becomes clear, therefore, is this one truth: leaders do not relate to the masses through the semantics of their words but via the secret musical score within which these words are inscribed and modulated. This is also demonstrated by the tweets exchanged by leading government officials, in which it is not the words but rather the intensity, intonation, rhythm and imagined prosody that are the thing. Inversely, these other things we commonly call ‘songs’, and which play on radios and stereos, have nothing to do with music, they are words and musical notes that end up metamorphosing into the leaders’ voices, into the true texts of power; the music used at rallies and at ‘free’ raves and that you hear being piped in at large department stores are also clear examples of this. But the love between two people, which as such has to be modulated by an original tune that is theirs and theirs alone, comes about when it is impossible to conceive of a device – analogue, manual or electronic – capable of recording and registering the music that comes from the lovers’ mouths. Love is the loss of one’s own voice with no possibility of it being reinvented as something called power. (Unrecordable love)
The moon is up already.
– he says, at breakfast.
Stepping on her, demeaning her to the point of subjugation, made no difference to her ancestral instinct for supplanting the sun. Nor to our union.
– she says.
Up to a certain age, at some point between 40 and 50, the thing we call ‘pain’ is the product of impetuous excitement, of being daring and of a certain kind of passion. This pain is then substituted by another, very different kind, which comes from degradation, illness and solitude. By this we do not mean a cosmic solitude but rather a political solitude, because your relationship with the cosmos is always inevitably a good one – death and its natural processes attest to the harmony of this pact – unlike that with the ruling class, which, as you grow older, reveals its predictability and can only generate in any human a sensation of abandonment and, finally, a desire to break with every administrative tie. This, pain’s trajectory, is the same as love’s trajectory, only that it goes in reverse; as though its intention were to neutralize it. Leading in the end to a zero sum. (Neutralization love)
When I enter and exit the groove between your buttocks, my skin comes from another world.
– he says.
To love has nothing to do with looking up at the heavens and feeling stupefied by the gods’ demands. To love means looking down and using the tip of your tongue to write in the orifice of desire.
– she says.
At certain times, in places where photography is prohibited for whatever reason, there is no option but to look up and take photographs of the sky. Climate-dependent, blue or light grey rectangles will appear, or also the white of clouds or a nocturnal black; empty spaces, all. Trying to spot previously seen figures in empty spaces is a recurrent theme. Mediums do it with the Bélmez Faces, radiologists do it with X-rays, and experts and enthusiasts alike do it when contemplating abstract oil paintings. Extreme cases are grouped under the term ‘apophenia’: ‘the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things’. But the world is one huge copyright now, everything protected and actionable, leaving the normal citizen with no option but to look up and take photos of the sky. It happens in theme parks and in museums too – where the ceilings are the only thing you are allowed to point a camera at – and it is beginning to happen in city streets as well. A day will come when all we have of our urban spaces will be images of the skies above them, and, like somebody divining the past in the viscera of a freshly killed bison, we will be left to remember the city via the cloud that presided over it or the name of the bird traversing its airspace. Love is precisely this, the definitive apophenia, noise+interpretation, a mark that appears out of nothing and upon which we confer, with unshakeable certainty, a comprehensible shape – a shape also about to fade into another that is not only unknown to us but that we will never succeed in knowing. (Apophenia love)
On the night of the Great Blackout, you were untouched by the flames not because you aren’t made of flesh and bone – you are, I can attest to that – but because you live on the very outer shore of time.
– she says.
It takes skill to stay one step ahead of sundials. The sun is a star which burns everyone.
– he says.
It is normal that, in trying to make a better life for ourselves, we guess at the future, something that ultimately comes down to simple cause and effect, which we use every day and which can be described as understanding past and present allows us to predict what will happen tomorrow. But it is no less true that without the risk inherent in all that is present – in things happening at this very moment, live and direct – there is no vibration to move our lives or our vital powers, and so we could also test out this other formula that does not look to the future but rather, precisely, to the present: we try to understand past and future in an attempt to predict today. Or in other words, to imagine a future in combination with what we know about the past in order to act in the here and now. Or, more clearly still: instead of anticipating futures that will never arrive and that have a mortgaging effect on the present moment, to see that the present resides not only in what we have left behind but also in what is ahead of us. The vegetal image applies perfectly here: the tree now producing fruit – real fruit, fruit you can chew in your mouth and consume – does so because of the flower it once gave forth and because that fruit will eventually become something inedible, something rotten. This and only this is why we are able to experience and touch with our hands the one thing we will never completely know, the here and now. Love – that which is radically alive – is this here and now, but projected spherically, in all directions. (Present love)
