The Day I Found You Read online

  Your solitude is visible from my table, you have lunch with yourself and I go along too, the corner table whenever you can, a salad or the catch of the day, I don’t know if I’ve told you this already but you seriously don’t need to diet, if I could only draw your body I’d be a complete man, all day long watching you, but I’m no artist and I just love you, the corner table far from the window, you’re probably scared of people or you’re hurt by nobody, and so am I, you should know, I ask for what you ask for and follow you along in no hurry and I can see no greater intimacy than our having lunch à deux, each of us in the secret of their corner.

  Your freedom is visible from my bicycle, you run in the late afternoon in the most dangerous park in the city and I protect you in order to protect myself from your ending, I keep an eye on you at a safe distance, the river all the way down there, those low lifes look at you and I tremble, one day this will go badly, I cycle past them and act like I’m a really bad guy, me who’s never hit anybody and who was the laughing stock at school, for you I could become a hero and if necessary I really am, today you stopped earlier than usual and you’re bent double, I don’t know what’s going on and I’m alarmed, you’re not the kind of woman to stop in the middle of whatever’s hurting you, now you’ve sat down and closed your eyes suddenly, your body switched off and I can’t take it any more, I stop my bicycle and grab on to you hard, fortunately it’s just a faint and you wake, me with you in my arms and your eyes opening, and I can see no greater intimacy than you opening your eyes and meeting mine.

  Your hand is visible from my side of the bed, it’s resting on my chest and life may be no more than this, you sleeping with your hand resting on my bare chest, my breathing and your hand rising with it, yesterday you smoked your cigarette on this side, I told you about how I smoked with you, I showed you the angle I loved you from, but the day is happening and the light is coming and there’s work, you thank me, you apologise for having been weak and you leave, you mention the possibility that you might call again, you say you don’t know what it is that connects us but that you’re going to try to find out, I let you go and I smoke a cigarette at the window, the whole city in a search for who knows what, and I can see no greater intimacy than the chance to be here smoking the happiest cigarette in the world.

  ‘I promise to fail.’

  It was the only promise he ever made, a whole philosophy in four words, he didn’t believe in the possibility of perfection, he didn’t even do whatever he could to try and reach it, since if it doesn’t exist why go looking for it?, and he let himself go on living for what he had ahead of him, all the options, all the doors, there was always an ideal time for happiness and it was always now, love only exists when one gives up on being perfect.

  ‘I want it so much, but never mind.’

  The abominable fear that people have, the abominable capacity for being satisfied with half of something that could be whole, she was afraid, so afraid, afraid of getting it wrong, of not getting it done, afraid of not taking the right step in the right direction, still less at the right time, and when the embrace happened it was two bodies that combined, yes, but much more than that they were two different worlds that didn’t know how to connect, love only exists when two different worlds unite without the faintest idea of how they should be uniting.

  ‘The one mistake people make is seeking what doesn’t exist.’

  And he insisted, he hugged her after sex and explained what life contains, the urgency of skin, forgetting the possibility of a perfect couple so as to savour the perfection of a possible couple, him and her, imperfect like themselves alone, him with wrinkles all over his face, age spread all over the design of his body, her tired of struggling, tired of fearing, her children, her life, an indelible story behind her, him and her with everything to get wrong and it was only this that separated them, just a wish but for different journeys, love only exists when two people meet in the middle of two different journeys.

  ‘I promise to fail.’

  I promise to love you to the limit, to kiss you to the final frontier, to run when walking would have been enough, to jump when running would have been enough, to fly when jumping would have been enough. I promise to embrace you with the inside of my bones, to run all over your flesh with total hunger, and go in search of an orgasm every day, at every moment, to find happiness in the sweet absurdity that we knew we were destined for. I promise to fail. With no hesitations. I promise to be human, to be incoherent from time to time, to say the wrong word from time to time, the wrong phrase, even the wrong text altogether, act from time to time without thinking, what the hell is the point of thinking if I love you this senselessly? I promise to understand, I promise to want, I promise to believe. I promise to insist, I promise to fight, to discover, learn, teach. Which is all to say that I promise to fail. And God help you if you don’t promise me the same.

  ‘You were the most beautiful way for me to make mistakes.’

  And she felt her breathing falter, she hesitated as she had never hesitated before, she wanted to think about it all, lay each of the possibilities on the dishes of the scales, but when she realised, she did not say ‘I want it so much, but never mind’, when she realised she was thinking about how come she’d stopped thinking, one or two seconds of herself, love only exists when it offers at least one or two seconds of ourselves.

  ‘If you fail again I promise to love you for ever.’

  And she failed.

  I don’t ask much of life, I never have, my body in a fit state to seek you out and anything else is extra. We might also have the possibility of a weekend à deux, just the occasional one, me and you without the world bothering us, someplace that could really be just some place. Next we’d spend the days pretending that there existed something beyond the need for us. I could even get a job, work from nine to five, smile at my colleagues when they told a joke, mutter insults at my boss between my teeth because he didn’t appreciate all my abilities, just to be able to get home, with night falling by now, and say to you, ‘I love you and I’ve already forgotten everything I’ve lived through today’ and then you could say, ‘How was the day, my love?’ and I’d answer like every other head of a family that it hadn’t been easy but things are moving along, until having said two or three things of no consequence whatsoever it would be time for the hug and then the kiss and then the body and then the pleasure and then we’d stretch out on some surface where there was room for what we wanted. There would be more moaning than in the past, the neighbours would lodge a complaint with the doorman, the doorman would call up, he’d say, not quite knowing how, that we were bothering people with our noise, I’d say no doorman was going to stop me from loving, and we’d go back to the moaning just to show that when you love someone not even the decibels can be measured.

  ‘Only what exceeds all limits can change the world, did you know that?’ you’d ask, cigarette in your mouth, your body naked, the window open and the neighbours opposite, as always, in love with the perfect arithmetic of your body, and me responding as best I could, telling you I hadn’t believed there were limits since I’d found the inside of your lips, you’d say at once, in that way you have, innocent little girl and at the same time untameable little slut, that you loved the way I used letters to open your legs, and without my noticing I was inside you once again, your wet thighs on my hips and all the orgasms possible once again.

  ‘Everybody knows the size of an orgasm,’ you’d say, without my understanding why or what for, and you’d continue your lecture on the idea that in reality pleasure only exists so that mankind can exist, and that pleasure comes before life, for the simple and elemental reason that it’s only this and what results from it that makes birth exist; I’d still be stretched out on the bed, watching your silhouette in the window and under the light coming in through the glass, imagining what the world would be if it weren’t for the impotence of not loving you like this, of not needing you like this, I’d also think that none of this would have a
future, that we would have no future, we were two lunatics playing bodies, two children playing orgasms, such irresponsibility, such inability to create a future, while you had no idea what I was thinking or imagining and just wanted to convey an idea, which you thought unchangeable and unassailable, according to which love consists in the possibility of finding all the passions in just one body, concentrating all the sexes in just one sex, and you’d conclude that no, you couldn’t do it, that you were sorry but there was no way you could love only one body just like you couldn’t love only one life, and that this was why you invented people in you, you were girl and adult, rebel and conformist, you were everything you could be, this and its opposite, so that you could resist, not that you were a traitor or an infidel, not because you didn’t like me to the depth of your skin and the start of your bones, but just because you had this strange obsession with insisting on being happy.

  Then you stubbed out your cigarette, the light of the moon when you turned made me believe that if God existed He would be something like what I saw in you, you gave me a goodbye kiss, you said it was impossible to give me what I deserved, and when you were getting ready to slam the door and leave I simply said that if you couldn’t give me what I deserved then I had every right to demand that you give me what I didn’t deserve.

  I don’t ask much of life, I may have said this to you before, just my body in a fit state to love you and your body even if it’s old beneath a moon that is only ours.

  We were so small and already we were loving a love that was so great.

  When we began to love, I would wait for you outside the school, I’d stop my Yamaha next to the pavement, rev the engine two or three times and everybody would stop to look at me, I can’t pretend I didn’t enjoy it, I did, but what I wanted was for you to hear me, for you to see me and perhaps come running into my arms, and if it was worth having a bike, I alone knew what I’d had to do to buy it, and it was just to make you look at me.

  We were so young and already we were loving a love that was so ancient.

  At first you didn’t notice, I’d be there ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, until it stopped being cool just standing in front of a secondary school, till everyone stopped seeing me as a threatening kind of guy and started seeing me as just some fool who came to a school gate to rev the engine of his bike, and then I’d have to leave, many times, without seeing your eyes on mine or on my bike, without seeing your smile, without the day being worth it. On those days I’d take other routes and wait for you to come out, I’d see you with your girlfriends, they all knew they were friends with the most beautiful girl (you do know that’s you, right?) the world has ever known, and I’d think that one day it would be me, me and you, arm in arm, without needing bikes or revs, what a waste it would be to have my hands occupied by a set of handlebars when there was such a thing as your skin to touch before time passed, me and you and the absence of a bike, that’s what the perfect world would be like however much just watching you smile may already have been good enough.

  We were so naïve and already we knew everything.

  Of course we grew up, you grew up and stopped being the most beautiful girl the world has ever known only to become the most beautiful woman the world has ever known, I grew up and stopped having a bike and started to have a car, but deep down we remained the same people, we didn’t change even a bit, you kept on studying and I kept on working like a dog just to be able to watch you coming out of school and then university, and I had to, oh didn’t I just have to, work up the courage to tell you one day that I loved you like a car needs an engine, like a bike needs an exhaust, like wheels need the road, whatever, some metaphor (that’s what you say, right?) or other, forgive me, all I can remember are things from the garage, I just want you to understand, right away, that if I didn’t embrace you and tell you I loved you it was only because saying a whole life is still really hard, but I was sure that one day, yes, one day I’d be able to, you just had to wait a little, just a little, OK?

  We were so ignorant and already we understood the meaning of life.

  You bring me all the wisdom of the world, that should be quite clear, it happened that day I saw you with that guy you probably met at university, and if I’d been asked on that day to explain what jealousy was I’d have replied ‘the thing that kills’, and if death does exist it mustn’t hurt as much as this, you on his shoulders, your smile and giving up for a moment, but he who loves never gives up, I read that once in a book, one of the books I started reading as soon as I realised that if I wanted to win you I’d have to say the right words and not the wrong ones, deep down the difference between being happy and not being happy is the choice of words, the happiest man, I learned in an instant, is always the one who says things better.

  We were so incomplete and already we lacked for nothing.

  When you hugged me for the first time, you didn’t see this but it’s true, I dropped the piece of paper I had in my hand and which I’d prepared with such care to give you, I’m no longer sure what I’d written there but it was some way of telling you I loved you in a poetic way, I think it even rhymed, would you believe it, but when you hugged me for the first time, we were alone in the middle of a street full of people, I dropped the bit of paper and told you I loved you, I didn’t use poems or verses or rhyme, I said ‘I love you’ and your eyes opened and closed, then you looked up at the sky, I don’t know if you said thank you but I did, and you hugged me again and in my ear I heard somebody say ‘me too’ and I wanted to believe, as I still want to believe, that it was you, because if it wasn’t then that explains that love compensates for blindness by an excess of hearing, and now I’m even trying to make jokes, see what you’ve done to me, a man practises to be a poet and the best he can manage is to be ridiculous, and maybe they’re exactly the same thing now I think about it.

  We were so transient and nothing could part us.

  Life’s a bitch, you know?, it forces us to do what we don’t want to, to say what we don’t want to, and there are the bills, the jobs, the duties, the weight of days marking time, age which never stops, and when we encounter something that isn’t as perfect as us we can’t take the pressure, I took the easy way out and was proud, you took the easy way out and were proud, and by the time we realised what was what we were just another more-or-less couple in a more-or-less house with a more-or-less life, and nothing that we were deserved something so insignificant. That was when I decided to leave, I took my dreams and off I went, you stayed, I know you cried as I did, I know you believed that however much it hurt it was the right thing to do, and how the hell do we learn even to allow for the possibility of something that hurts so badly happening to be the right thing? What hurts is never the right thing, that’s the only certain truth, and the years passed and there were men and women between us, even wrinkles and children, and when I thought about the value of life I tried just to assess you in full, to understand where you were and what you were doing, until I was bald from it all and old from it all and I took my ancient Yamaha and went to the school gate where everybody looked at me and said I was cool, an old guy who still looked good and kind of cool, but what I wanted was for you to appear again, I thought you wouldn’t come, but when I heard one of the girls, she was definitely the hottest, saying ‘here comes the teacher’ I realised that you were approaching and you were wearing the same clothes (how did you manage to keep yourself so elegant?) and the same certainty that you were, you still are, the most beautiful girl in the world who then became the most beautiful woman who then became the most beautiful old lady in the world, and when you got on to my bike and I did a couple of really big revs so that everybody would notice us leave I realised (did you realise this, too?) that we had never stopped being what we loved.

  We were so old and we still had our whole lives ahead of us.

  You are all good,

  I tell you, nice and loud, people around us laugh, and you definitely don’t like it,

  who would like a constructi
on worker standing on top of some scaffolding with words like that?,

  but the truth is that I love you and what I said to you is so complete it hurts, you’re all good because nothing in you could do me harm, I’m not even talking about your body, I’m not all that into bodies however I might seem, what I like are people and to feel like I exist when I look at someone, and as I said everything about you would do me good, everything in you is good,

  you don’t need some intellectual to define what love is, you know?,

  You are all good,

  I’ve known you since childhood, the smartest kid in the class and me too, and then life happens, and my father, I love you so much, God keep you, a stupid accident,

  as though there could be any death that wasn’t stupid, right?,

  but like I was saying, life happened to me and to you, too, I learned that you studied journalism, then I started seeing you on TV, I felt like the victor in your victory, would you believe it, I still feel it today when I see you on, I chose this company so I could have you every day, it’s the only having-you that’s possible, the only having-you that exists, I’m only a construction worker but I love you so much,

  you don’t need some intellectual to define what love is, you know?,

  You are all good,