Still I Miss You

by Inês Pedrosa

  I could never be that kind of woman. I was always tough as nails. I remember Teresa telling me her first boyfriend had despairingly complained that she wasn’t willing to commit suicide over him. He ended up marrying a girl who attempted suicide three times in his honor. Of course, not even you deserved such treatment from me—I kept talking to you in my silent living room, with every tear, until death decided to come looking for me. But don’t worry: it was just a coincidence, and it took nearly two years of conversations like that, in a silence inebriated with old laughter, for that coincidence to happen. And it wasn’t intentional. If I’d imagined that even in death I’d still be crying over you, I would have gone looking for you in life to kill you.

  I wrote you letters. I never sent you the most honest ones; they weren’t brilliant enough, and I wanted you to think I was brilliant. The others, which were literarily unimpeachable, got no reply. Salvation was my department—you weren’t that arrogant. You loved for pleasure, because only pleasure provides the art-madness that is love. My love for you was tinged with narcissism and will to power. You gave only what I asked of you; it never occurred to you to run, fire extinguisher in hand, to save me from fires that I hadn’t even spotted.

  I wanted to save the world. And yes, I also wanted to be seen saving the world. I had very precise ideas of how to go about it. I knew exactly how to encourage civil servants to give their best, how to do away with the privileges of the wealthy and distribute the world’s excess among the poor, how to bolster young people and lower crime rates. It was all a matter of simple ideas, a massive investment in human ingenuity, which nobody seemed to believe in anymore.

  I also knew exactly how to put an end to my friends’ sadness or loneliness. My house was always bustling. It hurt when someone would tell me, after I’d spent the whole night healing hearts,

  “You’re not capable of living alone”

  in an insidiously paternalistic voice.

  I’d hoist up a smile with an imaginary crane, thinking about my books, the exams I had to grade, the condition I was going to be in for my meeting the next morning. That battered heart was there to do me a favor. To gulp down my whiskey, my free time, the most generous part of my heart, just because I wasn’t capable of living alone.

  I’m certainly not capable of dying alone. Nobody is. But we die better when we don’t hear death tapping on our door, when it bursts into our home like an unexpected guest.

  I always liked it when guests showed up unannounced—we were completely different that way. My whole life, I longed for a surprise party, but nobody ever organized one for me—at a certain point, you and everybody else started telling me it was impossible because I wanted it so badly. “It wouldn’t be a surprise anymore, you know?” No, I didn’t know. Christmas didn’t stop being a surprise just because I knew it was coming. I dreamed that one day all of you would summon me to a beachside restaurant where all my friends and lovers would be waiting, surrounded by white roses and colorful balloons, with a piano and Pascoal’s guitar, greeting me with the glorious sound of “The Shadow of the Clouds on the Sea.”

  God doesn’t have a particular knack for music—while she may have tuned the strings of a few birds, certain types of rain, and ocean waves, she left the sublimity of sound to men. I always had the impression that God was a woman—and her lack of talent for music, judging by a statistical analysis of the great composers’ genders, proves it. Further evidence still is her compassion for how much I miss you—which is also a kind of malice, of course, but no less compassionate for all that. I miss music, wish I could dance by your side in this nolus I’m drifting in. I did have my surprise party in the end—everybody showed up, flowers in hand, beside my coffin. But you’re the only one who sang, pressed against the ice of my blue mouth.

  36

  Maybe paradise is all damp lawns and leafy trees full of squirrels, like Cambridge. We had a lot of fun at that stuffy conference on colonialism. There were a few dickheads who attended to show off not essays or research, but their prison stints, the torture they’d survived, as if these were medals recognizing human superiority. War taught me to be very dubious of guys who brag about things like that—heroes, at least the ones I’ve met, aren’t big talkers (which, by the way, doesn’t bode well for your career in heaven).

  You got me into a right old mess during that conference. One night you came and banged on my door, claiming to be scared of a family of cockroaches or something like that. You knocked right as I was deepening my knowledge of Australian colonialism via the cutting-edge method of participatory research, between the sheets, with a highly skilled anthropologist. As soon as she heard your voice, the young woman pulled on her dress and leaped out the window—fortunately, my room was on the ground floor. Unfortunately, in the days that followed, I wasn’t able to convince her you were just my best friend.

  You didn’t notice a thing, of course. Other people’s indulgences tended to whiz right by you. Plus, though I never intended to hide my interest in the Australian from you, I didn’t tell you anything about her. I found your obliviousness amusing. And to be honest, I was also afraid of your matchmaking efforts, which tended to bear a striking resemblance to a runaway train. Ultimately, I adopted the attitude of La Fontaine’s fox, deciding that if those grapes weren’t going to end up in my mouth, they must be sour.

  I can’t say I much enjoyed sleeping with my arms around you that night. But I think I faked it pretty well: I was the supportive friend you needed. We told each other stories, I tickled you, and I stroked your hair till you fell asleep. I slept very little that night, but good friends have to make these little sacrifices. Besides, sacrifice is a word created to describe the sadness of nonbelievers like me. Whereas you believed so very much.

  37

  We returned to Cambridge together on a future time curve. No conference-goers or English cocktails now—we were there to collaborate in writing our Alternative History of the World, a history in which original sin would be swapped out for the intelligence of love, and the Greek gods who inspired Dr. Freud would die once and for all, choked with guilt, after killing their fathers and sleeping with their mothers. A history in which the joy of discovery would fill the space occupied by destructive wars in the histories we’d heretofore been given.

  We laughed so hard in that session on history and colonialism, remember? One of the panelists was a Bulgarian woman who’d been drinking the dregs from everybody’s wineglasses and scarfing down leftovers after lunch. Then she started feeling sick. By the time she started reading her paper, her guts were on fire. As it happened, you were sitting next to her at the table. Flushed, she asked you to read the rest of the paper while she shoved her chair back and put her head between her knees. And so, in shaky English, you read her text, an inane treatise on the historical repression of women, dressed up in academic jargon. I bit my lip hard to keep from laughing, and you didn’t dare even look over at me.

  Other conference-goers wore prison sentences and censorship like medals—generally those whose experiences of imprisonment and humiliation were least significant. They often rounded out their presentations with bombastic readings of their unknown literary works—a poem, a poetic meditation, a story project in which the image “free as a bird” inevitably appeared as a sort of refrain.

  I remember this French girl raising her hand to ask one of the ornithologists why he insisted on using such a tired metaphor. He responded gravely, “When you’re in prison, you don’t think in metaphors. The only thing I could see through my cell bars was a bird perched on a branch. I wanted to be as free as a bird.” At that point, the two of us exchanged glances and fled—like birds ourselves—to go out riding bikes, punting on the autumnal Cam that flows behind the colleges, treasure hunting in the used bookstores.

  I remember that night we shared a bed, stifling our laughter under the blankets so as not to draw attention to ourselves. I’d been reading in my peaceful bedroom when I saw a fat, hairy-legged spider walking across
the bedsheet straight toward my nose. I killed it with the book, but, concerned about the whereabouts of Madam Spider’s family abode, I went downstairs and knocked on your door. I crossed paths with a respectable Japanese professor in the hallway, and the next morning, the whispers had started up. We were twelve years old, or a hundred, and all we wanted was to talk nonsense, unfurling the static night of childhood over time until time disappeared.

  37

  Why is it that, whenever I leave the city, you feel farther away? They say the dead still echo in that derelict cavern known as the heart. That you can hear them in the silence, in the quietude of deserted places, in places like this, where it’s possible to hear the involuntary muscle beating. But you were always a crowd. Your walled arrogance was always forgiven because a crowd swirled on the other side of those walls. Clinking wineglasses, piano music, muffled words, cigarette smoke. And books, books you devoured as eagerly as a lioness. “You read so much you end up not learning anything,” I used to tell you. That was the kind of statement that cut you deepest. You didn’t respond, afraid it might be true.

  I no longer recall who it was who once called you a coin-operated chatterbox. You kept quiet the rest of the night, your eyes wet. If somebody called you selfish, nosy, vain, befuddled, you’d snap back with exquisite, triumphant wit. But we couldn’t touch the small black keys of your grand piano. The music was gone.

  Where has my music gone? I open the window, letting the noise of the night city rush in, and put on your music. The music of that slovenly vagrant whose death you grieved so keenly, the music of Paris that we both loved so much and so independently. I light a cigar and sit waiting for you, waiting for a sign from that other clochard who took you away from me without giving me time to discover who you were.

  38

  Messing up your books. I’d like to have the force of a gust of air so I could at least knock the one at the top of the pile out of place. Everything was always in order, even in the weekend home we ended up sharing. I was obsessed with internal organization—alphabetical, topical—while you were more concerned with external harmony: the spines had to proceed in a chromatic sequence, chaos presenting the appearance of serenity.

  Our weekend home: white with blue trim. With an overgrown garden that you tamed by force—the grass refused to take hold, the palm tree to grow. Inside the windows, stone benches where a person could spend days staring out at the sea. You hated the damp, the musty smell in your clothing, the gray blotches on the walls, the mold on your shoes. I liked wearing clothing that was mildewed and stale—it made me feel at peace. Remote from the urban world that was, that still is, my drug.

  Cities feel feverish, like teenagers, dancing on the trails of their own light, consumed by a diffuse unease, cruel, free, impure, lovers of newness, with all their inaugural filth. Places of waiting and construction, levity and levitation, where events unfold in a chained sequence and the tiny truth of each truly exists, altering the chemical composition of the whole at every turn. You sometimes used to say that cities are exhausting in their soullessness. Darling, smog is composed of the bluish ballast of souls, ancient and future souls struggling to infiltrate the flesh of the present, to turn memory into a house under construction. Souls frayed by what they have been unable to achieve—cities give us the measure of the unattainable, which is why we can’t manage to rid ourselves of them.

  There’s always a glimmer of death on any corner of the cities we love, the footsteps of someone who no longer exists but still walks before us, the sound of their steps mingling with the steps of those who are yet to be born. There’s a lack of silence, of resignation to death, in cities—I refuse to resign myself; I can’t sleep in peace, can’t give up this urban whirlwind marked by my wheezing breath.

  Red carnations are bleeding against the white of your walls. You always preferred roses, or else camellias. You used to make fun of my carnation obsession, and now there you are, surrounded by them, in that teal tank top I gave you that you never wore because you thought it was garish. You’re wearing the teal tank top, lying on the pale wooden planks of your unruffled house. The books all around you, murmuring armies in formation. The carnations, the green, the Gainsbourg song (“How can you be so fond of a man who bathes so little and shaves so sloppily?” you used to ask)—it seems that I had to die to be able to enter your house.

  38

  I hang on to too many dead from the past. Stupid dead, their guts hanging out, eyes wide, lost on their way to the other world. War dead, kids who died screaming for their mothers or for girlfriends whose scent they’d barely gotten to know. Dead who make my sleep and my dreams founder. For years they’ve been floating inside my body; for years I’ve been removing them with an eyedropper and transferring them to my memory so they don’t get contaminated with my life.

  We rejected the rituals of death because they interfered with the supposed asceticism of mourning. And we stayed like that, awash in bodies stinking in the caverns of our hearts. We can’t cleanse our hearts like they do in your Russian classics: remorse and guilt, which scrubbed our souls as efficiently as bleach for so many centuries, are out of fashion. As are cries of pain, impassioned confessions, the incomplete fury of human suffering.

  The dead these days autopsy themselves, cut themselves open and sew themselves up again, eulogize themselves, mourn themselves, bury themselves. Wakes are therapy sessions, and the only therapeutic modality is forgetting. If the deceased’s mother or father or son wants to talk all night about the light of that dead smile, then a phalanx of friends descends to propose an endless series of distractions, hushing the bereaved and urging them away from the body that—in extremely poor taste—they’re trying to kiss and hug and warm with the scalding liquid of their tears. The dead have become mannequins—things to be dressed and undressed, assembled and disassembled, fodder for erotic theories, for audiences and statistics, the regressive refuge of loners who make of necrology a transdisciplinary art form. The dead are photographed en masse when they die en masse, rather than in the individual modesty of power and money. Or they are produced in life, at the hands of a platoon of makeup artists, following the instructions of visual artists seeking to say the unsayable. We tinker with the dead more and more all the time.

  When Alexandre’s wife died, he sat with her body for two days and two nights, kissing her, bathing her with tears, taking photos of her. He photographed her in bed and in her coffin, bald and gaunt as a Holocaust victim. Everybody whispered about how tacky it was. They tried to dissuade him with their litany of distractions, but he shook off the comfort vultures, even the priests, in one fell swoop: “If you all want to eat dinner, sleep, or get some rest, please go do it on your own—leave me the fuck alone!”

  I wish I’d cursed like that at your coffin. So much whispering about your pregnancy, so much putrid prying into the father of that deadly child, so much Mexican soap opera sullying the air of that room redolent with your body’s last presence. Leave me the fuck alone, damn it, I thought with such intensity that I saw a smile flicker across your pallid face. You winked at me and said, “Let them entertain themselves with their mental fuckery. They don’t have the imagination for any other kind, poor things.” Death may have made you merciful, but it didn’t crush your wit.

  I wish I’d had the courage to affront good manners. To keep a photo of you looking like that, white and caustic. Truly dead, in oldfangled silence. I needed that photograph so I could imagine you growing old serenely, free myself of the weight of the dreams you never fulfilled. But you replaced the practical sense of dreams with the prophetic state of ideas a long time ago. That pursuit of the impossible made your life run faster. Yes, you were killing yourself in life too. Absolutely. You knew everything there is to know. You experienced the full range of passions, marvels, and disappointments. You were older than me by the time you died. I envy you the swiftness and unpredictability of your death—can you arrange one like that for me too, or does everybody die at the pace they lived
? Because if that’s the case, Tink, I’m screwed. Unless I can learn to be quick and efficient. But first I have to figure out how the sun can be shining down so yellowly brazen on a world that no longer has you in it.

  39

  Don’t let me die. Give me an eternal space in your mortal body. I don’t want you to come to me; the dead never meet—maybe they all wander around here, in the black pits of time, watching over the living who never were able to love, even at the end. Maybe only love has no end—their love wounded, red and black; tattered, miserable, human love. Whenever I tried to love humanity, I ended up alone and angry, loving only myself—or feeling sorry for myself, which is basically the same thing. Pain is part of love, bolsters it over time. Like a red carnation, withered and forgotten. Every wilted carnation contains the concentrated past and future of all carnations.

  I liked wrinkles so much—ironic, isn’t it?—and I never ended up getting them. So many women lie in hospital beds, anesthetized, to awaken bandaged and numb, giving over days of their short lives to pain in order to free themselves from the marks of aging—and I, who loved the way time marks bodies, who dreamed of my lovers’ future furrows, their bodies’ fatigue, their souls’ open wounds visible in their eyes, here I am, nowhere at all.

  I can see the earth far below the clouds, but I’m not experiencing that blue tranquility I used to feel on airplanes. The houses would shrink beneath the wings carrying me, the cars like ants and human ambitions suddenly irrelevant. Now I am the wing, a feather’s very essence—and only with you, my self-assured sexagenarian, am I able to rest.