That Desire and Thirst

André, I look for you and I can’t find you. It seems that I’m touching things blindly in a room, and you show up at times to tell me that you’re not there, that you’re somewhere else but I can’t tell where. Sometimes I’m haunted by the idea that it’s all useless—that we’re like the myth of dawn and night, who although in love, will never be able to touch each other, but for an instant.

In the end it’s about touching the center around which everything revolves, of looking at what’s impossible.

i

I looked at the little ball go up and down in the display cabinet of the closed store. At that time in the afternoon the streets were deserted. It was big, the silence. Seven. She twisted her head for an instant trying to look at someone. She only found capriciously disseminated buildings, telephone booths, automatic doors, buttons…items turning themselves on and off in the shop windows. A hollow sound on the other side of the line was the sensation that this country produced. She fixed her scarf and put her hands into her jacket. It was cold. She walked slowly. She exited the shopping area and came towards the fountain and afterwards directly into the station. At the entrance, men and women were getting high. She crossed the long, dark tunnel riddled with signs in a language she couldn’t decipher. Before taking the electric staircase, she stopped to look at the trains. She was sitting on a bench. From time to time someone got on or off a train, and someone came downstairs or upstairs. One could listen to the rails vibrating. She approached the stairs. She took them. Crossing the bridge, she stopped again. Below, the trains were beautiful, the city was beautiful, with its big moistness and emptiness. And the giant dome in that building. She climbed a last flight of stairs and went outside into the street that bent like a semicircle. She came home. He wasn’t there. It was cold. It was big, the silence.

What happens is that I’m fixed with the unheard of idea that man has been created for something else.

ii

Ever since I started living with him it seemed like there was smoke in my hands, disperse particles of an André that I couldn’t find, even if I perceived him sorrowfully. I don’t know why I needed to get to his center and touch it, to find out what was there, to love him…touch him. Then I remembered the old lady who thought about everyone whom she knew who had died, and valued their lives according to the number of children that they had: “They had four children, two boys and two girls; they had six children; they had five children…” And what else—I thought—what else? Since that moment I was looking and looking for something that I couldn’t name, but that I had dreamt, crossing oceans and empty pages, under a blue hemisphere one night in June. When I woke up, I understood clarity. Since she reached delirium, she was in another reality. I had also questioned the solidity of writing—that desire and thirst, and dark night. But twinkling at the light of dawn. Going up and down between abyss and sky, I realized that I no longer lived in that other territory that I had entered unknowingly. It was a result of every step and gesture one could imagine. It wasn’t exiting the supernatural order of this world but penetrating a distinct space. Outside, there was nothing I could hold on to. And now, in obstinate clarity, I tried to decipher the figures that men draw in their pauses and movements. André acted in that other sphere, maybe earthlier, but we both contained the same emptiness. Emptiness, that was it.

iii

So what? I’m asking the thousand-year-old question. So, what else? This walking every day, books and more books, sheets and sheets of paper, don’t hold the answer. I get lost when I climb the day, if I walk the streets, I get lost. If there’s someone who loves me, I get lost. I am lost. André says that he loves me. It’s nine fifteen. Where am I going?

iv

Alone at the bar. The sky turned off. The landscape, five chimneys of a factory all at different heights, the tower of a lonely church, a clock, the cleanest street, a cold spring. Everything jagged in the shadows. The sky turned off. He thinks that I’m only skin, not hand, nor soul, nor voice. Only skin. I look at him exit, enter, flee, move endlessly. Then I leave, I discover the city by myself, I look at the trains. I let time pass. But my heart aches, and I breathe, and I think. My heart aches.

The exclusion of the world and of oneself is the price of abnormality, but abnormality allows one to confuse and unite the real and the imaginary.

v

At midnight, her passion overflows. I want to turn on the light. I think that André is another dream. I think that I write, and when I go out into the street there’s an inside where I am, and an outside, so far away. I remember a remote stoplight or only dashes of light for a long time, then a color, and then a car. I walked, and in the park the trees were barely a different shade from the grey of the afternoon. I think it was raining. Over there, a blurred woman. And ghosts, de-realized streets and streets. Urban murmurs. My reason in splinters. Open consciousness penetrating a naked world that violently tears me apart. I don’t know if she’s entering hell or coming from it. Now she’s suspended amidst the shades. I want to turn on the light.

It’s as if I’m no longer stepping on earth but fluttering in a space of darkness, not of air. If light penetrated this darkness, I would fall and break.

vi

It was nothingness. Pure atmosphere. Where nothing fits which hasn’t been created. If I attempted to narrate that night it would become hesitant, undulating between several meanings, until it reached its essence perhaps. The inside that Strindberg describes is intemporal, it captures and fixes the entity of a place, an event. It’s why it can conform a real universe. But existence ends up lacking reality that way.

Beware of she who dreams and doesn’t accomplish her dreams! Haunted by nightmares, she ends up succumbing to the insomnia of a reality which is not hers.

vii

She’d spent many hours looking at the river, the rain of artificial stars, the hanging train. She’d looked at the hallucination of hundreds of cathedral towers elevated towards the sky, the square where they placed the market stalls, the stores, the sumptuous bank palace. She’d looked and dreamt as a ship passed by. With the rare sun of night, she now looked at herself become undone. Next to a barrel organ a woman sang sweetly in French. Is it just a twist of my thought—she said to herself—an illusion? If only she could wake up… If only somewhere there was a tangible being. André—she screamed—where are you?!

Because the imaginary boosts the common temporal experience, giving place to an exploration of the possible that is exempt from the constricts of the historical (subject, of course, to its own constricts).

viii

Through the window it seems like it’s raining. There’s a leak and he went outside. He put up his wall and that’s it, as easy as that. Again I’m trying to alleviate loneliness, thinking that maybe distance can’t be spared, and that André will stop being important. Now madness is advancing towards me, madness of the heart which became also the head, liver, and womb, and vagina, and crawling nails. Anyway, life’s in shreds. The leak in the window is rain. It’s rain, and he touches my breasts and caresses me, kisses me, and his hand between my thighs. I would like to tell him right now that I feel lost amidst a city of the future, that I can no longer take it, and that he should grab me before I’m elevated towards the non-real. —Kill me on earth, please, touch my soul so I can feel your hand between my thighs, so that way you can tell me that I’m woman and not angel. Stop me, or I’ll go.

What double thirst is this? What incomplete being is this which produces by itself this thirst that is only alleviated by writing? Only by writing? No, only through writing, because that which haunts the writer, is it the written or is it that which is achieved through the written?

ix

A long time later, thinking, she would see that in her lonely dialogues, André was always somewhere else. She always had walking—to look less and less for the logic in his actions, and to let herself lose in the haze of what she wrote. To accept the mistake that moment meant.

Everything which is visible—Novalis explains—rests on an invisible floor. That which can be heard, on a floor that can’t be heard. That which is tangible, on an impalpable floor.

x

That cold rainy night in the street. Signposts with their yellow lights, lined up, like in dreams. An impeccable bridge. Not a single tree out of place, not a leaf, nothing. The river is deep and dark. This cold night I’m alone. Like a dog.

Everyone here—me with everyone—we live the slow and despairing agony of our dreams.

xi

May passes by as the flowing of water over walls. Only loneliness and May blow that night, washing dishes in the restaurant of an unknown city. Cold, a strange language, strange people, and those plates to be washed, and that night in which it rained unstoppably. In the glass, the drops of May flashed by, the city a mirage in the air, caught on the rain, under that sky.

We live in a world swarmed with signs.

xii

I know that he’s him and his life, his cock, his money. I know that he’s superficial and I need it, that his landscape… What a trip his landscape! the opaque sun, the streets amidst haze, buildings and towers…the city under a bell glass. His landscape, him, that other side.

As in art, as in the perception of all images which say much more than they are.

xiii

How useless everything else! These roles that we incessantly play. This absurd of steps, plots, discourses, and wardrobes. It’s not the scarecrow at center stage, it’s not the trunk of shades that opens at night, it’s not the fallacious world which fades, it’s not the overused, greasy script. It’s the dark reasons. It’s one day and another one without André, the chimera of finding each other, it’s not seeing André’s soul. It’s being surrounded by nothing, the candle that I lit close to a heart that cried pieces of nothing. It’s his dark reasons.

xiv

Later? After the swallows fly, a pinwheel moves softly with the soft wind, it’s yellow and orange and pink with two types of pink, and blue… The swallows form circles, come and go, the sky blue blue, blue sky, the pinwheel twirls and twirls, and stops, and twirls again. They fly!

xv

It was a hallucinating brightness. The gothic cathedral, its sparkles, the night that parted. A rising sun, and the moon still, with its enchanted halo, moved to a city in space. With its towers…innumerable, so high and elongated, trespassing the clouds painted in the air. Taaang, taaang, taaang…bells toll. A flock of crows falls upon the square. Their shouts extended in the silence, and I saw that they were hundreds, and the sky turned black. The cathedral crumbled. It was a sign, an omen of darkness. And I ran, through the streets, towards the river I ran…there was a crow floating face down. I woke up in the early morning. And I ran. André stopped me.

Does this mean that I’m a psychic, that I hallucinate?

xvi

That black bird with the yellow peak sings but sometimes screams! Then she became obsessed. She analyzed her surroundings. She observed nature. She searched for pigeons in the square. They ate peacefully, some bathed in the fountain. She walked towards the park looking in the flower meadows, a hundred and thirty-three red roses against a green background. Red filling almost all the space. She looked at the clouds, the moving flight of a seagull, the dance of the other birds. She scrutinized the horizon. The different skies, pink, golden, red, dark, orange. She was afraid. She started looking for signs in dreams.

Reality and imagination seem to confuse me. I see myself wandering like a sleepwalker. I don’t know if imagination is the author of my work or if it’s been the author of my life.

xvii

André, I don’t know what’s happening to me. I feel like life makes no sense. If I write, I know that it will only help me find incomprehension, stupid people, hunters with their net. If I know a fried, I know he won’t be my friend. If someone is with me, come the time, would you see how alone I am! That’s why every time that I’m doing something, I ask myself, what for? I don’t know if you understand. And it’s not that now I can’t touch you, walk with you over a starry bridge, us not being together, if I think that not even while making love we were together. Before, I used to read the papers, go to the university, listen to the others talk about ideals and: everything was determined—I thought—manipulated. With you I dreamt of creating a space that was full of reality. And you saw that it wasn’t. I would like to go back to that morning in my childhood when I fished axolotl in a bright lake. That’s where life started. If I knew when I lost my faith, in what place, or if little by little I renounced it. How to go back, where, to find it? I don’t know why I lie down, and get up, and go out, and walk, and work. And hold you. What do I love you for, if you’re in the center of the room in a coffin and it’s nighttime. André, I don’t know how to explain this to you. It’s as if that winter, when one day and another day went by with no sun… Without us looking at the sun, and I couldn’t stand it… It was like being dead with you. But I’m alive.

xviii

I’m afraid. I want to be alone, I want all of this to end, the world to start over. I have a dream tattered in my dream, I dream my tattered dream. I die. You don’t realize, Man Sitting Next to Me. I would like for you to feel bad for me, for you to care, to console me, to cover my body with your body, I’m so cold! and for us to die together, but not at the same time. Separate, but together, a single death. —Save me! —Piss off, sweetheart, you don’t exist. —God, you don’t exist. —You, you don’t exist. I’ll go out flying through that same door and there’ll be a cold night out there, there’ll be fog, no one in the streets, the signposts will be lit and the haze…and there’ll be no one. The world will end. Now go away, you don’t exist. I am no more, I’m not, I also don’t exist. I die the death of the living. So what? I can still write. But André will get dry and lonely, lonelier than me. I don’t care. I have no love, no pain, nothing.

xix

“Passes by, life passes by / And you haven’t noticed / That you’ve lived when / life passes…” It’s as if it rained, a constant thudding, water falling and bumping into something. It’s only a nightfall with the nine o’clock sun ablaze. It’s only a picture, a he and a you far away, others. Your nonsense. André crossing the universe in a pod. His blue eyes looking at you from the other side of the portrait. The sky already black, the picture dark, his look of many eyes when the lights go on. You would start everything again for a piece of sky, blue, filled with clouds, and blue, of quietness, of silence. “Passes, glory passes / Arrogance comes / but one day…life passes.”

xx

I walked to his house. Crossing the bridge to get there, I felt pain because of what wasn’t there, what leaves and doesn’t come back.

xxi

Sometimes I don’t understand what happens. There’s too much silence and shade that stop me from looking outside. I don’t realize that reality is independent from the gaze, from things that just are. But to me, a tree waving its leaves in the wind next to a terrace could be, for instance, the noise of voices mixed with the singing of birds. Then I know that a different time intervenes, and reality turns itself towards my reality, twisting me.

In a boundless flight, years empty. They un-pass, delete themselves, re-filling calendars, returning moons…

xxii

I don’t go out anymore. I don’t have a job. I write. At night I get obsessed. In the mornings I sleep, I go out to walk sometimes. If I see someone I know, I avoid him. Sometimes it’s too much isolation. I think as if in a nebula. I almost don’t realize anything, not even if that evening I sit at a coffeeshop and look out the window, and I slowly come to realize that I’m in a different city, that I’ve been in a different reality for three months now. And it’s as if a year had passed, but also a day, because the stupor that loneliness produces only lets me live something as static as a sort of sub-reality, lets me look around but doesn’t let me go inside. Yet writing is like a world that gives sense to that world.

Having emptied yourself completely of yourself, not only because you’ve released what you knew but also what you suspected and supposed, as well as your shudders, your ghosts, your unconscious life… Having done it with sustained fatigue and tremor, with caution and tension, with discoveries and failures… Having done it in a way that all of life was focused on that point, and noticing that it’s nothing if it’s not embraced and ignited by a human sign, a word, a presence. Dying of cold, talking in the desert, being alone day and night—like a dead man.

xxiii

She was in Mexico at a bar. The guitar player was young. In all his gestures and movements, there was a passion for life. They knew each other. That night, looking at him playing, she tried to remember something about André. His laughter, his hands, his voice. She couldn’t! So far away everything seemed, so unreal. She felt the same pain that caused her to hear the end of a movie as if it’s a life or a part that’s ended. She wanted the guitar player, and she pictured herself loving him. It was nothing but a scene of desperate love, not profound. She’d lost the last thing that she had. If only this was a story that she made up. If André was like a bad dream, and the one who’d been dead in Europe for a while was her. Maybe the only thing that existed was that city made of rain.

If belief is an essential element of happiness, by not having it, one removes the possibility of having a full experience. The spirit of Proust’s character can no longer find the longed-for exterior essence of things. His return to the woods of Bologna, reminding him of the happy times of his youth, presents him with a spectacle that lacks the belief in giving unity and consistency to existence. The woods are devoid of their former content. Then one realizes that known places don’t exist but in memories, because he was the one who’d put a soul into this city.

xxiv

André’s death was like a gale flying her papers around. Papers and objects going up and down with the wind, grasping the calm she had left. Now all things were superficial and useless. Because life ends. That’s also what gives things the value of an unrepeatable setting, a unique instant, a volcano that will no longer be.

xxv

I’m still hungry for real things. What I dreamt of one day, what I looked for, was a human being surrounded by clarity, which was maybe unreal. I saw him before in that shining lake of my childhood. It’s what I think that I saw in the infinite blue of André’s eyes. I wonder if I’m real, if I exist. That crowd which comes and goes, comes and goes as if transported by a conveyor belt. It exists because it has the others. It upholds itself completely. It doesn’t require clarity, nor does it know the abyss. I live in the invented world of what I write. There, everything seems more real. But not all of reality is in thoughts. Perception, that zone of the unspeakable one needs to reveal with words, is what’s closest to reality. That’s why that time I’d been moving through dark alleyways. Reality, which is ungraspable like the universe, can only be found in instants.

I wonder sometimes if superior forms of aesthetic emotion don’t consist simply of a supreme understanding of that which has been created. One day, men will discover an alphabet in the eyes of chalcedony, in the brown velvet of phalaena. Then they will know astonishingly that every spotted snail had always been a poem.

xxvi

I wanted to write a story that was like the ocean, and like a drop, and like rain falling on the sea, and like breeze and salt. Like the singing of waves between pages. Like seashells.

xxvii

Loneliness is transparency. She keeps it in her heart. (Swinging between light and darkness, those hours writing.) In another time and place, another continuum perhaps, there was a region plagued by real presences. There, they had a clarity created by the word. The word was something she often wondered about.

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