THE ESSENTIAL IS INVISIBLE TO THE EYE

 

When I looked at my parents' house, I wondered if, when I was gone, our children would look at my bedroom window, or any room where I had stayed longer, if they would look at my memory as an unknown in their lives, or a liquid longing that would creep into their eyes and make them uneasy. You stood there for hours, with your head in your hands, the music kept playing, the compositions became part of the atmosphere. The music never ended, one would say that there were composers there who dedicated their breath to this composition that had become eternal, when associated with the memories I carry of you. Your head bobbed, not to the rhythm of that music, but to the internal rhythm of the pains you carried and I never gave them a name. Nice names, I mean. I knew they had begun to inhabit you long ago, when you had returned from a journey through the woods and woods in the north of the country. You never opened up completely, you said it wasn't anything serious, you didn't deny pain, but you took away their importance and gravity, because they were yours, that didn't have the weight that I attributed to them, but I felt you and your ghosts that were, at one point, almost real. Today I know that they were more real, heavier, uglier, more concrete than our life together. 

When you left, the geraniums died, and I left, but the ivy kept framing the house, the windows, until they went up the walls and reached the highest point before the roof. And among the ivy, there was your window, where you had spent the last few years, among books and cats, between an old piano and the old fireplace. And nothing was touched in that space. 

It's been months since I've seen you disappear, into the earth, like everyone else, falling into that dark pit with no return. Yesterday I entered your room. Yesterday. Something was pulling me there, perhaps to tear me out of the torpor in which I was left with his departure. Today, I'm not sure I should have done it. Or if the torpor of your grief has led me. Or even if it was you who came to pick me up and lead me to your room. Yesterday I opened the windows that creaked, yesterday the curtains, the same curtains still swayed in the east wind. Yesterday, I went upstairs, opened the door to your room, and had to muster up the courage to go in. Your smell was still there, the scent of your aftershave cologne, the soot from the fireplace inside, the smell of your cigarillos, as if it had only been a day since you had finished. Yesterday, unintentionally, I took the bed out of place, pushed the pouch that was at the foot of the bed, pushed myself to the limit of despair. Yesterday. I was alone. There was no one to wait for lunch, there was no one to say, I'm sorry, I'm coming, or the leftovers from lunch are in the fridge or I'm glad you came; Today I will finally accept that you have left. Today I'm going to go and maybe I'll fall and restructure myself. And perhaps when we beat ourselves up, when we tear up a storm, we can finally see the peace we deserve coming. And I found you, under the cupboard where you kept your records, where you kept your liqueurs and cream cigarillos, one of your diaries. I left the furniture, anxious to hear you in your intimate registers, and sat down in the old armchair by the window, where I had so often seen your figure, with your head in your hands, moving to the rhythm of the pains and the music of your favorite composers. And I discovered that the ghosts had names, addresses, that some of them were known to me, that life was not beautiful for those who kept so many ghosts in their basements. And I asked myself why I didn't know how to identify those pains that kept you away from us, from me, from the kids. Yesterday, I had a pain with an emptiness, based on a fictitious reality and today I could already name all the clouds, all the moments of silence that had pulsed within us. Today, I already knew how to understand your loneliness and your abstinence from people, I could already understand the distance you kept from the world. Today. Yesterday. Verb tenses that collided in the now of my consciousness. It could be said that I had accepted your pain, that I had respected your silence, that I had argued with myself that each being has its moments, its particular life, without concrete misfortunes, as if they were notes that are removed from dreams and that remain in an unsolid state because they are part of several timelines. And that the reality was that of getting in the car, going to teach, meeting this and that, sitting down for a coffee, getting up and proceeding mechanically, inside the car, inside your thoughts, but always with a steering wheel in your hands, and then entering the house and standing with your head in your hands, swinging the chords between your fingers and your mind.  between the occult and personal senses. Yesterday, your pains had no name, and sometimes they even had an angelic glow, because there are angels among us who dance and take us in their arms, with smiles and tears, who congratulate themselves on our successes, even if they are small, how small are all the successes of everyday life, in the face of the pains that today,  Only today can I realize that they inhabited you. 

After all, a seemingly balanced, seemingly normal man, seemingly living day to day, may have died a long time ago after all. And you died so long ago. And now that I understand you, you are alive, with me, here, in your room, watching me invade your notebooks. Yesterday I did not know it, nor could I identify such a reality associated with you. Today, my pretense of knowledge was there, between the bed out of its usual place, the pouch, the vinyl cabinet, today even my mind suffered from the gale caused. The curtains undulate and I know that eventually I'll have to come out of my torpor, I'll have to go eat, feed the chickens, the cat, eventually the postman will come on the bike and play, as if today were a normal day, Another day to add to all the others, that mourning forces us to simplify things, even if they do not descend from the glottis, they park for years in the glottis, that things need space and soul disposition to return, as I did, to the usual places, to the usual days, to the usual thoughts of the sameness of all mourning. Yesterday, just yesterday, in the intermediary yesterdays, only yesterday you were here. Only yesterday I was able to stroke your rare strands of hair, only yesterday I could look at you and retort from your apparent absence, only yesterday I could bring you the cheese in thin slices with bread and your body of milk, only yesterday I felt awake and today, that I understand you, that I know how to give a name and a late solution to your dilemmas,  You're not here. And I think that maybe today, right now, maybe right now, you're more present than in all the days that I was able to come to see you. In which I tried to hug you and because of your reluctance, I was postponing the moment to do so. Without imagining that yesterday could have made a difference if only I had entered your room while you were leaving to teach your classes and robbed you of the privacy of your pain and shaken off all the ghosts you kept here, in the vinyl and liquor and cigarillos cabinet. I lit a cigarillo to celebrate my stupidity, my ignorance in looking at you and noticing you in yesterday's retrospective. In today's magnifying glass. Now that I am here, I feel that you too have come from afar, that you have sat on the edge of the bed, facing the armchair where I am now. Yesterday, I thought we were lost, I didn't know about you, even with you here physically, yesterday I didn't even know about me, because the hours dragged on successively and I named the time that belonged to God, as the days of the week are called and it was there that I walked, in the sameness of routines. Yesterday I was lost in you and I didn't know it. But today, look, today that you are not here, your body is not present, mine was also absent, when I took your records and gained the courage to read you. And if yesterday I had lost myself and felt lost, today I have found myself and forgiven you. I don't know if I'll ever be able to do that to myself. Forgive me for not violating your privacy before. While I could rescue you, or tell you let me help. Let me hug you or else, hug me, because your pain is mine too. Of not having shared your isolated pains, pains that without a name, populated our moments. I realize that today is an important day, that it is the day when I caused a gale in your rooms and that I come to regain some peace, some tranquility that, since you left, I did not believe I could have. Yes, we push the days along with the chores, along with the shopping, with the letters, the books, and the casual meals. 

It took me seventeen years not to realize that when I lost you, it was me who didn't know. Who spent his time slurring at you in soliloquies, for not knowing how to translate your grief, your absence, the guilt I attributed to you for not sharing yourself with me. The kids also resented it, but I think now that maybe they understood you more and better than I did. There were several years in which I lost count of the times when, in order to be able to turn my back, questions were born inside me and bitterness grew against you. Because you didn't tell me that your pain had nothing to do with me, that your pain had other names that I didn't know. And there was a time, it wasn't yesterday or today, not before you left, But in that time when you were still smiling, when you still shared meals with me, when you still forced yourself to the normality of life to happen, in that distant past, I will vociferate on the walls of the bedroom, the living room, the kitchen, the chicken coop, under the old oak tree, where I added up your faults, in order to dispel my doubts, I who did not know how to understand you and who never occurred to me to invade your privacy,  Maybe because I couldn't stand it if you did it to me, or maybe because I didn't know that your privacy could bring me answers. To end with the immense and tiring monologues in which I spent myself, to understand the distance you imposed, to which you pushed us. Forgive me. Today, I know very well that it is late, so late, that the vegetables have burned in the garden, that the cat has fallen asleep forever, that the beans have burned on the stove, that the soup has spoiled in the fridge, I know that it is so late that the day I met you was the day I could not forgive myself. Forgive me and help me to untangle all these guarded woes. How do you do it, you tell me, how do you tidy up your house after a windstorm? How things are arranged under the shelves, in alphabetical order, by theme, by intensity, tell me. How do you stay alive after you die? 

Today, even today, and so many have passed today, converted into the past, even today, I told you, the lilies smiled at me from outside the window, even today I looked in the mirror and ran away. Even today, I reread everything and there is always a dash, a word that has escaped, as I run away from facing myself, there is always more that your texts tell me and that I have been deciphering them so late. Tell me that you forgive me, tell me, even if in dreams, that I could not understand you, tell me that everything will be remedied, call me girl again, call me by name so that I may awaken, so that I may find the plumb line, so that I may come and visit you and bring you lilies, which are so beautiful, so that I may decide to live again. Come and tell me you'll forgive me, please. Not because I have read you, I don't need that forgiveness. It's from the other side, from when I saw you with your head in your hands, swinging the woes, without me really hearing them, when the music climbed the walls and I was jealous of the music, I was angry at what it gave you and I didn't. 

The boys became men. They have put their lives in order and come back to visit us, they leave with a concern in their eyes that, somehow, I try to mitigate, telling them that you are with me, that I am not alone, that life happens, and that even if there are answers, we have the right to live them as we see fit. I think they think I'm crazy. Maybe it's crazy isolation. Perhaps. But I find in silence what I have lacked during our lives. The understanding that, like love, the infinite things, the things that are not revealed, unspoken, kept, are those that remain faithful to us, that remain with us until the last end, until someone comes after us to stir up windstorms, to break through the supposed calm that lies in the chambers and to find traces of understanding, finding basements that we keep and that give us identity, privacy, that bring light to the understanding of our choices. To undo the limits and myths of who we have been and to find, perhaps, the unknown of us that does not reveal itself, that does not ask for shelter or shelter, that accepts itself as the boundary between others and us, that we privatize our whole life, until the streams of loneliness are broken and this human condition has to become visible. 

I decided to call the testamentary. Rectify areas and, still with some discernment, regulate the future of the kids, yes because they will continue. I have written there that your and my diaries should be read in their own spaces, like your rooms that now, only today, I have made my own. I reminded them in that still unopened letter that I want you to wear that yellow dress, with geraniums printed on it, what you gave me for my birthday. It was on that very day that it seemed to me that you were going to reveal yourself. That same day, when, without telling us, they gave us the news of the accident. That same day, when we came back sweaty from dancing and couldn't say anything else. It was also on that day that you decided to change your residence and came to live in the motherhouse, alone. 

Today, I sealed the will. Today, I felt anointed. And inspired to tell you, even today that I have forgiven myself. That I have forgiven us and that I feel your forgiveness. Today, my notebook is written, next to yours that remains the basis of my life's thesis, of what I have left, of what ends in us, when I am finished. 

Today, the postman will arrive and ring two, three, four times, until he understands that silence has taken over everything. He will leave, and he will come back tomorrow and he will realize that no one has gone to open the box, that no one has moved around the house, that abandonment speaks louder than I do. Today, perhaps at the end of the day, they will be able to grant me the freedom to finally fly, drop the old carcass and fly. Today I will smoke the last cream cigarillo. Today I'll put on Haydn, today I'll turn on the fireplace, even if the summer tells me it's hot, because it's so cold inside me today. 

Today, I have in me that living can only be light and pleasurable, when we stop storing feelings on shelves or inside boxes, or behind cupboards, that the weight of things makes life difficult and that authenticity disappears to a basement, and will inhabit our fears. And the occult needs space to reveal itself, without judgments or blame, fears or trivialities. Only today did I realize that my identity needs to die, and for that, I need to count on someone who comes after me, after you, to go up to the rooms and violate all the boxes we keep, thus excusing us from life. Just as it is. 

Haydn guesses my thoughts and directs me to you. Finally, I will be with you and you will be able to show me the basement of your pains and forgive me for not knowing how to look for you, when there was still a breath of life inside you. Today, only today.