Love in Lowercase

by Francesc Miralles

  “I’d like both versions,” I said. “Can you order the Barenboim for me, please?”

  “Of course. It should arrive within a few days, and we’ll let you know when we have it. Could you give me your telephone number, please?”

  I gave it to her, ridiculously pleased that she should have it. Although it was only to inform me that the CD had arrived, in my dreams it had become a lovers’ tryst.

  “I’ll see you in a few days,” she said, smiling. Then she disappeared into the storeroom at the back of the shop.

  I was spellbound. “See you.”

  Mono no aware

  It doesn’t matter. There I was, all alone in my apartment, making some coffee and repeating this.

  “That’s precisely the problem,” I informed Mishima, who seemed to be listening attentively. “It doesn’t matter because for her I don’t exist.”

  I flopped on to the couch as the last light of the afternoon disappeared from my living room. With a heavy heart, I looked at the shelves full of books, the hi-fi system, the posters with portraits by Brassaï, the reading lamp that hadn’t been turned on yet . . .

  I wasn’t up to listening to the CD I’d just bought. I was haunted by the Japanese notion of mono no aware—the pathos of things, a term that was beginning to pervade my being, very much against my will.

  I remained there in the gloom for several minutes, until I finally decided to switch on the light, whereupon Mishima gave an approving meow. I picked up Rheingold’s dictionary from the coffee table, longing to wallow in melancholy and knowing full well what I was doing.

  The expression in question didn’t feature in the dictionary itself but in a clipping I’d slipped inside it. It seems that it was used for the first time by the eighteenth-century Japanese poet Motoori Norinaga, who was referring to an extreme sensibility to things and an unfiltered relationship in which the observer merges with what is being observed, like the lover inhabiting the heart of his beloved.

  This profound experience breeds melancholy, a condition that would seem to be inherent to the world’s substratum. It’s all about beauty and sadness. This is the title of a novel by Yasunari Kawabata, Japan’s first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  Maybe everything that is beautiful is sad because it’s so ephemeral, like a butterfly kiss.

  Fed up with myself, I closed the book and went to wash the dishes. I’d been insufferably romantic lately.

  As I was running hot water over a plate, I could see the moon, full and splendid in the sky. I thought it looked very lonely up there. A good reason for going to visit.

  Perhaps Valdemar was right in thinking that our immortality resided there. But who would want to spend eternity on the moon?

  Siddhartha’s Candles

  On Saturday morning I woke up feeling more upbeat. We’re never alone, and the idea that we are is just another human illusion.

  The sight of the moon had provoked some kind of reaction within me during the night, because I was giddy with the euphoria of a man who believes that anything is possible. The scenes of the previous day that had made me sad were now cause for optimism. Was I going mad?

  The sun had woken Mishima, who was doing his early-morning stretching exercises, yawning at the same time.

  I leaped out of bed, fired by the conviction that I was the master of my own fate. I therefore had nothing to fear, not even Mendelssohn. I put on the CD of the Songs and ransacked my pantry to make myself an abundant breakfast.

  To my delight I discovered that the version by András Schiff was the one they’d been playing in the shop. It was just the tonic I needed in order to summon up Gabriela and dream of enchanting scenes. Only magic could take me back to a fleeting childhood love that had lasted only as long as the flutter of an eyelid.

  The first gondolier reminded me of Gabriela’s smile, the constellation of freckles sprinkled over her cheeks, her almond-shaped eyes. The very best of life—the wonders of the world—all brought together in one woman’s face.

  To an outside observer I would have looked like a half-wit daydreaming over a solitary Saturday-morning breakfast. True. Apart from Mishima, I was as alone as ever. But my solitude now seemed to be densely populated.

  I went over the love-in-lowercase succession of events which had unleashed my wild, crazy hopes: saucer of milk > cat > Titus > train track (curve) > Gabriela > terrace > Ravel > Mendelssohn > Gabriela > Titus (tests) > terrace > Valdemar > Mendelssohn (two gondoliers?) > Gabriela . . .

  Where was this chain of cause and effect taking me? What about the moon? What was the moon doing in all of this?

  There seemed to be a direct correlation between my opening up to the outside world—Mishima, Titus, and Valdemar, without forgetting my sister and her husband—and Gabriela’s triple appearance. Would she be my reward for trying to help some strangers who had nothing to do with me?

  Maybe the only people worthy of love are those who love indiscriminately, without denying to some what they give to others.

  This idea took me to something I’d read before going to bed, an aphorism attributed to Siddhartha Gautama. I went to get my little book in order to reread it.

  Gondolier number two had appeared on the scene, and then I found an answer to some of my questions:

  Thousands of candles can be lit by just one candle,

  and the life of that candle will not be shorter because of it.

  Happiness is never diminished by being shared.

  Treatise on Feline Philosophy

  After a Saturday devoted to daydreams and finishing some university work—namely, preparing my classes for the coming week—on Sunday I started to feel some pangs of conscience concerning Francis Amalfi’s book.

  After agreeing to do the job for Titus, I’d barely managed to produce ten pages: the fragment from The Sorrows of Young Werther, a few aphorisms from Buddha, the section on love in lowercase—and that was about it. A Short Course in Everyday Magic needed a breakthrough moment in order to convince me I was capable of finishing it.

  I glanced at Mishima. He was on the couch looking bored, like a typical human being. Before I succumbed to my customary Sunday-afternoon depression, I went up to Titus’s apartment with him in order to grapple with the chapter on “Feline Philosophy.”

  I turned on Titus’s laptop and started collecting material. There were quite a few manuals on cats in Titus’s library, and one of them was tailor-made for me. It was called Ten Spiritual Lessons You Can Learn from Your Cat. The author, Joanna Sandsmark, said in her introduction that her two cats had taught her to land on her feet and to purr when happy.

  That wasn’t a bad start, but I needed to look for something else.

  I’ve always associated cats with having nine lives, so I decided that this would be a good starting point. Keeping Mishima in sight, I started to write, spurred on by a sudden burst of inspiration.

  I. SPIRITUAL LIFE

  Cats are great meditators besides being masters in the art of yoga. This member of the feline species can remain immobile for hours, traveling toward its own center, and then, in an instant, make the leap into the external world, focusing all its senses on what is happening there. Its vitality comes from this state of repose since the cat consumes no energy in intermediate states. It’s either in action or at rest. When it acts, it does so as if its life depended on it. When it rests, it’s as if it never had to get up again. It doesn’t waste time dithering.

  II. EMOTIONAL LIFE

  Cats are said to be selfish, but in reality they’re just smart. They won’t come to you if they can make you go to them. Their power resides in their apparent indifference. They prefer to let you love them than to put their feelings at risk by revealing them. Like the good Taoists that they are, they do without doing and rule without ruling. They limit themselves to keeping their dignity and acting according to their whims. They don’t go looking for lo
ve and therefore obtain it without asking. Dogs have a master. Cats have servants.

  III. A LIFE OF THE SENSES

  A cat in your home is a reminder that you must always pay attention. We frequently miss opportunities because we are not aware of them. Cats refine their senses, monitor their surroundings, and are alert to the smallest change. Theirs is a serene alertness, full of active patience. While resting they are attuned to the people around them, ready to act when necessary. Thanks to this watchfulness, events tend to turn out in their favor.

  I stopped there, impressed by what I had written.

  Mishima was thumping the rug with his tail, urging me to get back to work. I mulled over other themes I could develop: a cat’s hygiene, its ability to disappear before a disagreeable turn of events, its almost supernatural intuition . . .

  The lesson was clear. I, too, had to be attentive from now on. I looked forward to the week ahead and realized that anything could happen. The secret lay in keeping my eyes wide open and leaping fearlessly when the time was right.

  Breaking the Egg

  The dance students’ exams had started, which meant that the German literature seminar had been moved to the first lesson on Monday morning. This one was about Hermann Hesse and, in particular, his novel Demian, which he originally signed using the name of its main character, Emil Sinclair.

  I entered my classroom to face my few, half-asleep students.

  I got straight to the point. After a brief account of the main features of Hesse’s biography, I handed out the themes from Demian I’d chosen to discuss and then focused on one part of the novel that seemed particularly significant.

  Emil Sinclair has lost contact with his friend Max Demian, who’d revealed to him some of the more sinister aspects of the society in which he lived. One night Sinclair dreams that Demian is holding a coat of arms featuring a heraldic bird. The bird comes to life and starts to devour Demian’s entrails.

  Still affected by the dream, Sinclair decides to paint the bird as he dreamed it and sends it to his friend’s old address. His reply arrives in a mysterious fashion, in the form of a folded piece of paper tucked into one of his school books. Demian’s reading of the dream has taken the form of a revelation:

  The bird is fighting its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wishes to be born must destroy a world. The bird is flying toward God.

  At this point, the class know-it-all—wearing round glasses, just like Hesse—put up her hand.

  “Hesse nicked that idea from Goethe.”

  “Did he, indeed?” I didn’t like her tone.

  “That’s what it says here,” she said, pointing at a German study guide with a yellow cover. “Goethe had previously mentioned breaking an egg in the diaries he wrote during his time in Italy.”

  “Well, I’ve also broken an egg or two to make myself an omelet, but you don’t have to read Goethe or Hesse to do that.”

  I regretted my words as soon as they left my mouth. The student kept her composure and started to read aloud—with a perfect German accent—what Goethe had felt as he traveled around Italy. I rendered one of the sentences into Catalan for a slightly obtuse boy who always required simultaneous translation.

  “He believed he was shedding a new shell every day and that he had been transformed down to the very marrow of his bones.”

  “You’re right,” I conceded. “They’re both talking about the same thing. I suppose everyone has to break the egg sooner or later. What does this image mean to you?”

  This resulted in the usual silence that followed my saying or asking something out of the ordinary. I turned to one timid boy who rarely opened his mouth. His response to my invitation to speak was a shrug.

  Luckily for him, Miss Know-It-All entered the fray once again with an idea she had found in the introduction.

  “Hesse talks of shedding old skins. So, in a sense, he was anticipating the egg.”

  “Bravo. What skins was he talking about?”

  I could glimpse a flash of pride and sensitivity behind the girl’s glasses.

  “The skins of the soul.”

  The Album of Life

  I didn’t have any more classes till midafternoon, so I weighed my options: continue the work of Francis Amalfi, prepare my classes, or visit Titus.

  I decided to go for an entirely different option, a new one. I’d go and visit my sister. She was usually at home in the mornings. She’d left her job recently, after being afflicted by a mysterious illness that no one had yet been able to identify.

  Having decided to stick with the course of action I had adopted on the day of our Epiphany lunch, I started to repeat my mantra—the opposite is best—and hailed a taxi.

  As I gave the driver the address, I noticed his broad back and gray hair pulled into a ponytail. I also saw that his eyes were staring at me from the rearview mirror. There was no doubt about it. This was the man who’d told me about the mislaid sack of letters.

  —

  The doorman told me that Rita had gone out but that she’d be back soon.

  I decided to wait for her inside the apartment. As soon as I opened the door with the key she’d given me in case of emergency, I was greeted by the same old smell of patchouli permeating the whole place. When I had lived there with my father and sister I’d never noticed it, but now I could easily recognize the smell of an unhappy childhood.

  My first thought was to turn on the television, which is what Andreu does the moment he walks through the door. However, the bovine image of my brother-in-law made me change my mind, so I wandered around the apartment, an intruder making the most of being alone.

  The living room and bedroom were constantly being redecorated, so there was nothing of interest there. Neither was there anything remarkable about the kitchen, where I found only some organic fruit juice and one bottle of vile-tasting beer from Malta.

  My inspection of the apartment took me to the storage room, a long, narrow space full of bits of furniture shrouded with ghostly-looking sheets. I tried to turn on the light, but the bulb had blown, which suggested that no one had been in there for a while.

  When my eyes got used to the feeble light filtering in from outside, I gingerly made my way to the back of the room. There I found a chest of drawers full of mementos from my childhood: school certificates, old comics, toys, and useless knickknacks. I groped around and found a big iron lamp which, surprisingly, lit up when I switched it on.

  This discovery shed light—literally and metaphorically speaking—on other things that brought back memories and past suffering: handwriting exercise books, a compass, a game of Chutes and Ladders, the bracelets my sister used to make out of strands of plastic . . .

  In the bottom drawer I found some music magazines and an old photo album I didn’t recall having seen before. I opened it and shone the light onto the first page, where a large portrait of my father almost made me put the album right back where I’d found it.

  After hesitating for a few moments, I opened it again with the morbid curiosity of an archaeologist digging into his own past. It began with a series of portraits of my father in different situations: at his university graduation ceremony, on a trip to London, or with my newborn sister in his arms.

  The images stirred up bitter feelings in me. Sitting on the storage-room floor like I used to as a small boy, I remembered how I had neglected my father when he was dying. I was about twenty then and still felt the scars of a childhood full of impenetrable silences.

  After my mother died, he disengaged completely from our lives, apart from the financial support he gave us. He thought he was doing his duty. My sister reacted by indulging in outrageous, extravagant behavior, while I plunged into a silence that answered his. Resentment piled up in a stony carapace around my heart until I was as unfeeling as he was.

  After my father died, I started to forgive him. I realized that he’d do
ne all that he was capable of doing for us. I had no right to demand more than he could give.

  It’s so easy to make peace with the dead. I kept turning the pages of the album.

  I came across myself at the age of three, dressed up as a football player. The next page had a black-and-white photo of my sister in her ballet class. She must have been about eight, and her raised leg was resting on the barre next to a large mirror. Behind her, a row of little girls, their heads held high, did their best to hold the position.

  Then I saw her.

  I could hardly breathe. Another ghost from the past. I saw Gabriela at the back of the room. Like all the other little girls, her leg was on the barre and her arm raised to form an arc. Unlike the others, however, her gaze wasn’t lost in the effort to keep her balance. She was looking straight at the camera.

  I carefully detached the photo. This was the little girl I’d met under the stairs. Like an adolescent worshipping an idol, I gently kissed the photo and put it in my pocket.

  Platform World

  I rushed to the bar as fast as I could. I needed to speak with somebody about what was happening, and Valdemar seemed to be the right person to talk to. But I soon realized that my mission was futile.

  “You see that man in black sitting inside?” He asked me this in an enigmatic tone, pointing with his foot.

  I glanced sideways. The man in question was a young redhead wearing a black jacket and trousers. He had just taken a sip of his beer.

  “Yes. Who is he?”

  “I don’t know, but I’d like to find out.”

  I briefly suspected that Valdemar was attracted to the redhead, but he soon shot down that theory.

  “That man is a great mystery,” he added.

  “What’s so mysterious about him? He’s just a guy having a beer in a bar.”