The Write Thing

…et la fin.

France: – The long walks along the Seine in chilly autumn nights, crossing the Pont des Arts to the Cour du Louvre, starting small in the esthetically harmonious lights that wet the walker’s appetite, only to enter the Grand Cour and lose my senses in synesthetic ecstasy before the pyramidal shape and the tones of light and shadow it casts on the quiet pool.

- The 67 bus to Pigalle, a metaphor to classical Paris, a place that would be so distant and so close to me as a student, walking down rue Lepic to her place, where a funny picture of a Michael Jackson-like friend or relative would preside over the table across which she would supervise the words to my thesis, as I got irreversibly lost in her perfume and stood only half an inch away from drowning in the nape of her neck.

- The day we knew it was meant to be, shortly after I pleaded to her to discontinue the use of French between us and caress my ears with her Sicilian accent, orgasmic in its essence and fugitive in its state, with her destined to be so far away from me, and love sentenced not to be. Est-ce que je t’ai gênée? I let her hand touch mine in simple complicity, knowing I had been the one to kiss her the night before.

- A picnic in spring, a good, cheap Côte du Rhône from Franprix to counterbalance the chilly breeze, a mix of pungent, hard and soft fromages of the best possible cru for the standard student pocket, and the hope that the moon would continue to shed its light on us, inexperienced souls convinced that Paris was a woman. Great futures awaiting and, behind the sharp angle of L’Ile Saint Louis, the distant foreboding of goodbye.

- The ride in Line 13 to Saint-Denis, the courses on Austen and the Brontes, Woolf and I, alone, as I returned to the small room at the Maison de l’INA, warmed dinner and plunged into other readings, battling against Orlando Furioso from an unkempt English translation, burying my nose in the secrets of Knole, and letting Sackville speak from her poems and her letters of her complicity with the genius at Tavistock Square.

It was early 1981, and I was just around the corner of 10 years old. As a child with relaxed, lenient parents, I was allowed to watch TV more than the average infant. I would watch adult soap operas (OK, adult in those days meant cryptic, not explicit), and refrain from asking my mom embarrassing questions (a Virgo child tends to be discreet) that would force her to advance uncomfortable explanations that she would simply blush around years later. One night, out of the black and white small screen that presided our living-room, came the music and the verse of a song that captured my interest. It was called Annabel Lee. Only years later would I discover the words belonged to a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, and they had been translated ad lib to a romantic musical tune sung by an unknown Argentine singer with a rich mezzo voice. The opening theme to Marco Denevi’s Ceremonia Secreta was on, and the story began to unfold only minutes later. I would love to see that recreation of the short novel again, just to find out what impact it would have on me today. I know that, at the time, I was probably in a position to understand a fraction of the implications embedded in the plot, but I loved the performance of the leading actresses. Who decided to put Poe to music in Denevi’s work? Whoever it was, I liked it at the time, even though I was not sure what it all meant. I recently re-read the book, and relived some of the claustrophobic feelings I had as I was watching the show as they came back to me from the pages of Denevi’s closed and mechanically-calculated prose.

The other message, however, had arrived to me years in between childhood and now, when I was a student of the language that today imprisons me. In a secluded corner of the Lincoln library in Buenos Aires, as I was leafing through a collection of Poe’s works, some of that magic returned, sending me back to the childhood memory, albeit in a different background.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we –
Of many far wiser than we –
And neither the angels in heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful ANNABEL LEE