The Book of All Loves, page 8
In the first epoch of our life in this house – which was a long, long time ago, since to my mind we have passed a great many epochs between these four walls – when you went out onto the mountainside for food, or to defecate between those two rocks that hold the curvature of your buttocks better than even my hands do, or when you were simply going out to look across the perpetual snow, you always glanced at yourself in the mirror by the door. And your face would remain there, flat and still, with no degradation or loss of detail, and I could look at it until evening.
– he says.
Since the Great Blackout, mirrors have held memory. The last and hopeless reserve of light.
– she says.
All bodies open up a gap in the air. All bodies are empty spaces in the air that have flourished, become something. When taking soil samples, geologists extract long cylinders of earth, clay, ice and stones, which, ordered by strata, indicate the terrestrial age of the hole. There are also layers and strata from every epoch inside us – since we are ultimately cylinders of meat, fat and water, but blended and shuffled together in a complex network that we never fully understand. It would seem that the principal node of this bodily network is love. And there is a logic to this. If not, like a block of ice in the sun, we would have melted various aeons ago: extinct layers of neglect and sorrow. (Principal-node love)
I sometimes think that by loving one another so intensely, by this unending thirst to enter and exit all of each other’s cavities, what we are doing is training our souls.
– she says.
For the day the light comes back.
– he says.
Killing someone is sometimes a crime and sometimes an act of heroism. Kill someone in civil society, and you pay for it in jail; kill that same person in a war, and a medal awaits you. This would seem to suggest that killing is not a thing in and of itself, but rather an act which, depending on where it comes from, will be qualified as either unforgivable or worthy of applause. Death at somebody else’s hands is, then, something directional, a veritable vector; one that not only has an intensity, but also a direction and a meaning. This apparent paradox pertains in many different ambits. A black key on a piano always makes the same sound, but anyone who knows about music theory can tell you that this key can be a different note – flat or sharp – depending on the note that precedes it: depending on where the melody comes from, we will have a different musical note – C sharp or D flat, for example – though the same note has been played. Killing oneself is another example: do so on a Formula One racetrack, and you will immediately be elevated to hero status; do it by smoking cigarettes, and you are relegated to social detritus. And all of this speaks to us of the concept of staging. It is the stage – the setting in which an action takes place – that confers meaning on the action, modifying it irrevocably. It is not for nothing that we speak of a ‘theatre of operations’ in war, where killing is licit, but never in relation to terrorism or deaths that occur in peacetime. This indicates that war and theatre, though diametrically different as activities, are structurally identical. We see the same principle at work in love and hate: what distinguishes them is the context, the place either is coming from. Hence we sometimes hear speak of that utter impossibility known as love-hate. (Directional love)
When you arrive in a place for the first time, it’s bad luck if the first piece of writing you see is something somebody else has written. As soon as we arrived in this valley, I saw your name written in the soil. I’d scratched it there with a stick.
– she says.
And it’s still there. No kind of luck exists – good or bad – that can do away with your handwriting.
– he says.
In the film An Unmarried Woman, a woman having supper with her female friends sighs and says she misses the ‘old-fashioned highball orgasm’. When a couple breaks up, this is the nature of the theatre – the simulation of the Final Judgement – on show. (Old-fashioned highball orgasm love)
Sunsets here don’t languish like fish out of water. On the contrary, they light us up more and more as the light fades.
– he says.
We are the silver and ruby that shine in the eyes of the fireflies.
– she says.
To say nothing of the classic theme of painter and model. On the scale of planetary history and its transformations – a scale subject to a time so vast that we call it deep time – the fossils studied by palaeobotanists show that plants survive all kinds of catastrophes and animal extinctions; plants survive on a scale so massive that we as humans cannot fully comprehend it. The habitual preoccupation with the way in which humans are affecting the evolution of plant life is thus only a primitive and wrongheaded projection of another, totally different phenomenon, one we are able to see because it belongs to our temporal scale and affects us directly: the gradual extinction of diversity in human cultures due to the globalizing effect of world commerce and advertising, an extinction that – on the other hand – is subject to a short time span, human time, a time infinitesimally small if we compare it with that other, vegetal time. By copying a model of time applicable only to the love we profess for one another, we create a useless sort of deep time. (Anthropocene love)
The city expels its dead. Like an evil accompanying the coming of a flood, it empties them into the fields beyond the final houses, depositing them in a place that cannot even be considered the outskirts.
– he says.
You and I are that place, and we aren’t dead.
– she says.
Love is questioned with the same persistency and hostility with which company logos, folk dances, the burning of books or the destruction of Our Lady of Fátima’s image are questioned. The motive being nothing other than the fact that such destructions would lay bare what lies behind all these things: nothing, or at least nothing of what is generally assumed. (Logo love)
I thought I heard footsteps last night, they came from the track in the valley, they approached the house, they prowled around it.
– he says.
Don’t worry, it was me, it was my predator-body, which had materialized. My love-body was still at your side, watching over you.
– she says.
As for love with non-humans, the key moment, the point of no return, is the creation of emotional ties with objects that will always be separate from us: machines and animals. These are attempts to create love from places we have no access to: from death – the computer – and from non-human life – the animal elevated to pet. If we analyze these two, the first, rhetorically known as Artificial Intelligence, comprises our dream of assembling love from inert parts, of giving life to the conjoined assemblage of inanimate objects; the second is the dream of using simple animal flesh to generate a creature similar to us, a human almost always in the shape of a dog or cat. The key, and what reveals these impossibilities for what they are, is to understand that though computers and pets hear us, they do not listen to us. Nonetheless, there is an alternative to impossible loves such as these, and it requires a complete recasting of the love impulse and the creation of a kind of love of that which is genuinely accessible; this we could call a love of what is sufficient. It would consist in simply accepting and being satisfied with things as they are, satisfied in the etymological sense. Satis, ‘enough’ + facere, ‘to make’. (Sufficient love)
When I pick up pencil and paper, I am unable to draw my hand without it also being yours.
– he says.
And this valley has the same shape as the floor of the ocean that once covered it.
– she says.
The maximum number of days you can go without liquids before dying of dehydration is the same number of days you can go without sleep before irreversibly losing your mind, three. It might therefore be said that sleep and water share a common symbol: the stream. And that would be true were it not for the fact that water descends due to the influence of gravitational acceleration, whereas sleep, unsusceptible to that tug, rises upwards, and goes on rising upwards until a second and more significant difference appears: sleep never stops, there is no ocean that can arrest it nor lake into which it might flow. Where water particles want to descend, to be more water and join together with others of their kind, sleep wants to rise, to be itself and only itself. None of which prevents there being a great proliferation of images of water and sleep when two lovers come together over a divorce contract and discuss the differences between what they would like the new animal called separation to be and what it really is: the continuation of love via the means of conflict. (Divorce love)
When we copulate, it is an animal with a single direction.
– she says.
Hand-in-hand, through the dark streets, after the Great Blackout we tried to find the path of a kind of sex that by then was virtually non-existent, the seismic kind.
– he says.
VENICE (2)
The writer taps away, as we’ve said, there is a nervous energy to her striking of the typewriter’s keys, she has barely slept in days, the snow globe on the desk shakes, making it snow in the miniature version of the city whose canals Lord Byron boasted of having swum in winter, the city that was the birthplace of the butcher who in later centuries would be Charles Manson’s inspiration, whose prisons Giacomo Casanova escaped and in whose waters Richard Wagner drowned, the city where the first bank cheque was signed and capitalism invented, the city at whose Lido Goethe collected hundreds of conches, the city with its Marciana Library, where there is a cache of unpublished lines by Petrarch, the city with which that greatest explorer of the East, Freya Stark, fell in love, the city Galileo Galilei came to detest, and on the writer goes, tapping away, while in this labyrinth of tourists and water and stone the early summer humidity is ushering in a storm, and she counts the number of words she types between lightning flash and thunder crack, and every time there are fewer of them and all and only about the one subject of interest to her, love. Pausing her writing, she turns her mind to her husband, asleep in the next room; he lies prone beside a large sphere made of vinyl which, as though it were a totem, he has placed on an improvised pedestal on the nightstand.
She recalls the journey of a few days before from Montevideo to Venice. She remembers falling asleep in her seat while looking out at the curvature of the plane’s wingtip. With the lights off inside the cabin, the small bulbs marking the emergency exits had seemed like flames burning in a temple, and then at one point she was woken by a movement in the seat next to her, which had been empty before, followed by a noise not made by the plane itself, a noise like when you wake in the night and cannot get back to sleep, and you lie there listening to the breathing of the person asleep beside you, and she remembers having opened her eyes completely and seeing, there beside her, silently staring at the seatback in front of him, the man who looked like an ambassador and in turn reminded her of a Berber who many years before had split into two people and disappeared into the Atlas Mountains. She glanced around at the other seats in the tail section; all empty. To her surprise, the man struck up a conversation with her, ‘Are you travelling alone?’ ‘Yes…’ she paused, ‘my husband is waiting for me in Venice,’ before pausing, again unsure of what to say, ‘we were there together last winter, a fortnight, I had to go back to Montevideo because of family commitments and work; now we’re going to be together again.’ ‘Does your husband not work?’ said the man. Again, she was quiet, for a little longer this time, before answering, ‘Yes, of course he works, he teaches, he’s a Latinist, he’s on a sabbatical year finishing a dictionary of Old Latin.’ ‘But isn’t all Latin old?’ ‘Well, there are different periods,’ and she took it that telling him this much meant she could ask him something, ‘and you, sir, are you travelling alone as well?’ ‘I never travel alone, many go with me,’ he said, still not taking his eyes off the seat back; she, under the white blouse with the pearly black buttons, felt her heart rate increase when the man added, ‘it’s not for nothing that I’m the ambassador,’ at which he immediately pressed the flight attendant call button, before going on, ‘you’re finding that fold in the wing tip troubling, aren’t you? I saw you looking at it when we were taking off. You shouldn’t worry, though, it’s to keep the plane in the air, to stop us from crashing, the sort of thing only aeronautical engineers understand, they dream of building the perfect aeroplanes, perfect as birds, but they can’t, birds always know where to go, even when it’s snowing they know where to go, unlike most of us, spending our whole time drifting this way and that across the planet, would you like a drink? It’s on me, I’m getting something,’ she shook her head, ‘up to you, but if you change your mind, just say, or if you’d like something to eat, I might have something shortly, though plane food is always so awful.’ ‘I know,’ she interjected, ‘food is one of my passions, I like trying the cuisine everywhere I go, even on planes.’ ‘That reflects well on you,’ he said, ‘I consider it a sign of intelligence on your part, the food of a place or the food that a company gives its workers says as much as, if not more than, all the public monuments or the most complete annual accounts.’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but recently, when I go to cook, my hands get stuck, I can’t remember any of what I’ve learned.’ ‘If you practice, everything you’ve learned will come back, you’ll see, I guarantee it, by the way, forgive me for just coming and sitting next to you like this, but I wasn’t feeling at all well, I was in need of some company and there’s nobody else in this part of the plane, I threw up in my seat, I left quite the mess, years I’ve spent travelling the world and my stomach just won’t get used to all the different kinds of food, nor to plane turbulence,’ he again pressed the call button, ‘are they never coming? I need a drink of something, my throat’s so dry,’ and an air hostess then arrived, ‘please, young lady, bring me a mineral water, the purest mineral water you have,’ and the writer felt her breath taken away when the man added: ‘The ideal thing would be water from Mount Toubkal,’ to which the air hostess said, ‘Pardon?’, ‘Nothing, nothing, it doesn’t matter, just bring the best water you have, please, and quite a few bottles, four or five,’ the air hostess went away, and he continued: ‘I like the water from the summit of Mount Toubkal, you won’t find any water in the world that’s as clear, except for in a certain trattoria I know in Venice, where they also have the cheesiest pizza in the whole city, you won’t find the water in any other bar or restaurant anywhere, you have to go to Mount Toubkal itself, but I was saying, I came and sat next to you because when we were taking off you turned around and our eyes met and, truly, the look you gave me made me feel like I could trust you, there’s something trustworthy in your eyes, something stable, something fossil-like, in the best sense of the word, and in my travels around the world it’s become clear to me that every person, and all animals and objects as well, have what I call a fossil dimension, what I mean by that is a mineral quality that everything in the world hides deep within it, and that will become manifest when least you expect it. Have you never cut a cabbage in half, the whole thing, with a single slice? Have you not seen the thousands of leaves, compressed like stones, the way they enclose one another in those curving, coiling shapes, like an unseen landscape? And didn’t it then seem that the cabbage before you was a very ancient cabbage, a prehistoric cabbage, a cabbage fossil? It’s as though, in that very moment, physical matter is making itself visible, like it’s been preparing its outward appearance in anticipation of the moment it’s found by future humans, after all, something very similar happens with people, we all have a deep but distant fossil dimension that will suddenly become manifest one day, I know this for certain, I know because I’ve experienced it, I’m not talking theoretically here, everything is pure experience, see, quite a few years ago now, when I was a young man, I broke my left femur, the exact details don’t matter now, but, in short, I fell out of a boat into the Grand Canal as I was passing the Rialto Bridge, not far from my house – sorry, I haven’t said so yet, but my main residence is in Venice, though I don’t get back there much because of my work – and so I fell out of a boat onto one of those old sets of stone steps you get along the canals, the ones for accessing the boats, the steps go down into the water, water that’s so dirty nowadays you can’t see how deep they go, but there was a time when the water was cleaner, more see-through, the stone steps even go down to these trap doors at the bottom of the Grand Canal, trapdoors that look like gigantic manhole covers, immense flagstones that nobody’s ever dared touch – people claim that if the trapdoors were opened, all the water in the canals would drain away – it isn’t clear what’s beneath those flagstones, I shouldn’t think it’s anything but silt and sludge and the remains of the forest that grew down there thousands of years ago – but none of that matters now, the point is, I fell from the boat, I cracked my femur against those stone steps, and when it came to convalescing from the surgery, it took far longer and was far more tedious than expected, particularly because I got a sudden and unexplained infection in the head of the femur which meant I had to go back to the surgeon for a second time, I’m not entirely sure what they did to me then because, although I was young, my globetrotting had already begun, from one continent to the next, and the only thing on my mind was my next diplomatic mission, so the doctors told me things and I deliberately translated them into a language incomprehensible to me, but what I do know is that they covered the infected femoral head with a resin full of antibiotics, and they told me that the bone would reabsorb the dressing within a few weeks, which never actually happened, instead the infection came back, and I had to be operated on quite a few more times and to this day nobody knows what the infection was, a mystery, somehow every night my body stung from all the pieces of bone they’d taken out of me and from all the chemicals they’d pumped in, and then it happened that shortly after this litany of operations, when I was more or less able to walk without crutches, on a visit to my grandmother, who was still in our family home at that time, we were looking at some old photos and I saw one of me as a baby in the baptismal font, the baptismal font in St Mark’s Basilica, no less, and I was in my mother’s arms – may she rest in peace – and the water was being poured over my head, and then my grandmother put the photo album to one side and told me a story, a story I’d never heard before and that has to do with me and that photograph: a few days after my baptism the police had burst into the basilica wanting to investigate the holy water, after allegations had been made about it causing infections, allegedly bringing babies’ heads out in a rash and causing puffy eyes and a loss of vision, and then, my grandmother said, the police told her that the team in charge of the investigation had spent the morning gathering samples of the holy water, running cotton buds around the insides of the church fonts, doing all the other things they do – the police are veritable archaeologists of the unknown, it’s a fascinating, totally misunderstood job – and after asking the priest for a list of all the recently baptized, of which there were a great many, these being the baby-boom years in Venice, they were going around the respective homes enquiring about the health of these babies, and my grandmother told me that they came to our house dressed in blue jumpsuits, they were an early version of what we nowadays call the forensics police, and they had cardboard boxes with them for any evidence they found in the different homes, boxes that were still empty at this point, since they were yet to find anything at all, and she told them that I was in perfect health, there was nothing to worry about, but the superintendent wanted to see me with his own eyes, so that, in the presence of my mother and grandmother, one of the officers picked me up and held me while another one of them examined my head and shone a light in my eyes, and although I, obviously, was too small to have any memory of the episode, I know that it did lodge itself somewhere deep in my brain because it comes back to me sometimes, jumbled up, in a recurring dream – the following dream: to begin with, and this was many years ago, it was simply about some men in the family home lifting me up and looking at me, but, over time, as well as repeating, new details started to be added to the dream, details from the scene as it had actually happened, my grandmother at the far end of the living room, my mother, still young and keeping a close eye on everything the police officers were doing to me, their empty boxes in the corner of the living room, and then, in still later years, other astonishingly precise details were also incorporated, the Persian rug with its perfect patterns, the frescoes on the wall, down to the details of its brushstrokes, the oval dining table with the veins in it that look like an ocean, the sounds of the house – all these things started appearing in the dream, even the smells, yes, the dream introduced the sounds and smells of the family home, I know it’s highly unusual for a dream to have sounds and smells, but it did, and so the thing is that my dream actually became a real memory, such a detailed one that I’ve finally come to the conclusion that it’s become reality, exactly that, I fear that the dream has now taken on a life as pure physical matter and is circulating around the world, and I realize that everything I’m telling you will seem completely crazy, but no, it isn’t, people think dreams are just gobbledygook, the product of the sleeping brain, only there to produce these absurd little cosmoses, but in fact it’s the exact opposite, dreams are looking for something very concrete, and what they are looking for is none other than the real world, this is the true task of dreams, to make the shift into the physical world, to become its equal, like when two lovers try to make the perfection of platonic love fit seamlessly into the carnal union of their bodies, try to make fantasy and flesh one and the same, this is the way that dreams progress, they grow like this until the moment when the dream becomes identical to memory, at which point the dream’s task is complete and we stop having that dream, it will never appear to us again, it’s no longer a recurring dream, its life cycle is over, and yet, and yet, that doesn’t always mean the dream being extinguished, because, as I’ve said, when it attains a maximum precision, an unprecedentedly detailed precision, it then makes the leap to the world of physical matter, taking on a life of its own, endlessly roaming around among humankind, hence my fear that exactly this has happened to my dream, such was the detail it came to me in, and it’s out there circulating among people – but I’m sorry, forgive me, I’ve lost my thread, this water they’ve brought me is awful, the flavour of it made me lose concentration, it wasn’t dreams I was wanting to tell you about, but, as I was saying, over the years I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on that infection to my femur, which was a result of falling against those stone steps on the canal but had repercussions in my adult life, an infection so unexpected and persistent that, as I’ve also already said, it defies medical explanation to this day, and what I want to say is that I’ve finally concluded that my illness was a consequence of the contaminated water I was baptized with, water that spent years after the baptism waiting to come out of me, because the virtue of the fossil is patience, patience is all the fossil needs to exist, and this is what I was referring to before when I said that things have a fossil level, a dimension that, mineralized, waits as long as necessary and then suddenly, bam!, one day it hits you, just like that it appears, and do you know what was really in that contaminated water? Do you know what was really contaminating that holy water?’
