The Write Thing

After a long time without visiting this site, I got my mojo back and here I am, re-inaugurating myself with a new entry…hopefully with something worth saying.

It is a time of reflection, almost silence. It is a time of living frugally, surrounded by bare essentials, saving energy and material comfort for a time when, perhaps, it will finally be shared. It is an uncertain time, an uncertain world, an uncertain life. But wasn’t it always like that? The problem with aging is that one begins to worry about actual uncertainty, so it becomes less of an adventure and more of a concern.

In moments like that, my attention turns more to literature, and that radar that sends me out on bookstore excursions activates itself suddenly, as if it had a purpose. The first finding was this novel by an author I totally ignored called Brady Udall. The title of the book caught me by surprise…The Lonely Polygamist. I read the blurb (which American books do very well with, unlike French books such as Amelie Nothomb’s Le Voyage d’Hiver, which has no indication whatsoever of what it could be about…but does Nothomb have to prove herself before I grab one of her books? No, she does not). Udall’s book is about an anti-hero, Golden Richards, father of 28 children and husband to four wives living somewhere in rural America. The story is about Golden falling for a woman outside the church, outside the Principle, and getting caught in the trap of actually choosing love, instead of letting it be imposed on him. The story is about the impossibility of sharing wifely duties without feeling less worthy than the others, less valued, less loved. The story is about being a lost child in a numerous family that  is stranded in limbo, no longer recognizing itself and its members. Well, I would argue that one does not need to have 28 kids to get lost in limbo and lose track of oneself…it so often happens in the typical four-member family.

It is amazing how a good author can make you feel you are inside the story, even when the environment is totally foreign to the reader. Udall does an excellent job, particularly at entering the mind of a pre-pubescent boy who is an outcast in that world, who is aware of how unfair and deterministic that limbo is, and who will pay the price for wanting to subvert the dysfunctional order set out by others. I related so viscerally to Rusty, that lost child sitting on the window sill and looking out; I understood the inevitable failure of trying to be like the others when you are simply different, beautifully so although you don’t know.

It was a hard novel, a difficult read, perhaps because it was familiar in an odd and undesired way, a reflection of the polyamorous loneliness that I wish I could escape. I can’t, and I am still sitting here, like the viewer of a movie that I know will end badly but I can’t help continuing to watch. Who knows? Perhaps at some point relief will come for me as it did for my favorite character in that book, and my own Trish will know what to do.

My birthday passed like the month that hosts it. It takes place at the end of August and I love the feeling of completion that a celebration at the end of the month can bring. I guess one could say the same about opening a month, but I’ll just imagine myself privileged for the sake of my self-esteem. She invited me to Seattle, and we were there sharing the sights, the sounds, the beauty, and the love that synthesizes perceptions. There was dinner at a French restaurant, which was funny because the escargots were nothing like those you’d have in France, although the poulet roti in a way compensated an evening in which you were edgy after two days in a row of living with an inverted daytime, in the cruel shifts society imposes on your profession.

Then came another distance, a couple of weeks in Houston for me before my conference in Rio and then playtime in Buenos Aires, where you joined me and where we confirmed — as if there was a need to do that — the foundations of whatever it is that we are building. We can name it love and that would be all right. I loved having you meet another friend of mine there, someone whose loyalty and trust have given me hope and made me believe that sometimes there is no vested interest bringing people together. It is funny how some of us do perceive the truth about this cruel exercise of life, in which we are born and die alone, so the only form of happiness is finding the sidekick to seal that unspoken pact with us, be it as a friend, family or lover, to know that it is OK to trust, because what is out there is what there is and if we are loved, we must be loved for what we are.

There were Freddo ice-creams, asados, alfajores, my mother’s home cooking bringing you an arroz con leche that gave you back some of that lost childhood. There was your friend sharing with us, being a funny accomplice to the game of teasing you, like two people who love you in different ways. And I loved your shyness around me, the way in which your body tentatively sought mine when we were walking or standing near. I loved the stealth kisses and your happiness, your wholesomeness, the real you that emerged in an atmosphere of simplicity and cool spring chaos.

Now I’m back to Houston, with a book by C.E. Feiling that my uncle gave me without knowing that he perhaps owned a collector’s item. I’ll be reading that, and I’ll get back to the life of office work and odd interruptions from you in those days when you work late or not at all. I’ll get back to the waiting time that has now become a staple in our dynamics, the longing for you that feels like a pang in my stomach for a few more days until I see you again at the airport and I give you the inevitable kiss. Then I will lead you to my car, to my place, to us and everything will be all right for a treasured moment, for now.

There are moments in life when silence is all that is possible. In an odd, untimely way, I believe I had a severe case of this almost for the last two months. Lots of things are changing in my life right now. New doors are opening while others have closed apparently in a much more certain way than I would have imagined, or even liked. Oddly enough, it is in those times when writing becomes the obvious channel. However, I have not written — except for work reasons — for exactly 59 days.

I cannot possibly expect anyone who ever read this blog to even become aware of my return. Those generous souls who would now and then glance at the website for a peek into whatever oddity I would decide to indulge my keyboard into by now have probably given up all hope. Yes, lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate. You would do the right thing by refraining from trusting an erratic author. Life is much more beautiful when you do not have to be surprised by other people’s changing moods.

If I were a good writer, I would be able to summarize in a concise text my whereabouts since I decided to put this blog in the freezer. Oh, well…I don’t think I can do that. Therefore, I will speak about the future, about new horizons, about uncertainty itself. Houston beckons, this time for a more permanent contract. What this means is a lot and nothing. It means I still have a job, and new challenges, but it does not bind anyone to anything — including myself. A few years ago, Houston had also seemed to be the place where I would be residing on a longer term basis. However, neither life nor I were ready for the jump, so the whole fantasy only materialized in a short story I wrote at the time and which I named “Letters from Houston”. It was written in Spanish…and I’ll never know why. Houston was on hold, and in a very particular fashion, I was coming out of my own personal limbo of indecision and non-living. Many things changed in the two years that passed since a first door to the US was closed, partially by H1-B quotas and partially by myself. I plunged into my own abyss, emerged half-victorious and wounded, and created my own re-birth, as Sylvia Plath would say beautifully at the end of that prodigious scene of The Bell Jar. I played around the limits of desire and succumbed to the demons of dysfunctional relationships, I naively believed it was possible to set free a repressed love and not pay the high cost of its loss, but I also learned to let go. I learned that letting go is the only way of healing, and the hardest.

Yes, I miss her sometimes…her laughter, her friendship, her beautiful eyes, and I secretly know there will be no letters from Houston, and no Copacabana Palace. We are no more anything, and it scares me to think that I always knew…because I wrote the end of my own story throughout the summers of her absence and my pain and I was right, even before she severed the bond to escape a friendship that now she feared.

Oh, but this posting was supposed to be about my future. Well, nothing is really about the future unless it comes from our own past. So I will raise a symbolic glass of champagne and toast to us, to the land of no regrets, to the bitter taste that time will turn into sweet vignettes of a youthful Paris…the world we knew before, dont je ne regrette rien