THE PALE TREPONEMA OF OUR SEPARATION

 

I've always been mischievous, skittish and cheerful. Everything has meaning to me, the hours, the days, the dates, the trees, the cats, the sunset, the tea and the conversations and you, Manuel. You signify laughter and dreaming, yesterday and tomorrow. And still today.

The most important conversation I had ever had in my life was there. Still the days were long and full of hope for the future. And that conversation was very succinct and revealing to me. I could sum it up in one sentence: And when you believe that everything ends, everything begins again, in a new light. Even if it is the prism of the consequences taken by others. Or by our own choices. At the time, I would have been twenty-nine years old. And I knew that this was the case, because I had seen the march of the same and different days bring everything new, again, another day and a year and many years. And at that time, you were still coming back to me, like the waves coming back to the great ocean. You were still my savior.

My uncle, at the time of the loss of his mother, did not want to diminish my possibilities or gild them. Life was what it was. And it had been and continued, neither winds nor storms had altered its course. The old chair had been a constant presence in the moods of all in the house, and you too had worshipped it. That you loved to look at the horizon on clear days, that you drank your whiskey, at dusk, in the old angora jacket that I still drag with me everywhere, and drank it in short gulps and lingered your eyes on the horizon lines. Like an old man from Restelo, already with some omens that you never dared to tell me. I leaned back in the old chair that had sheltered so many of us, in difficult and less difficult moments. I indulged in the absorption of the landscape and even the make-believe that I still could at the time. 

One day, on a perfectly normal day, perfectly like all the others, except for the opportunity of the day being clear and auspicious to the world of others, on a day like this, I will see the march shorten,  my arms will not try to kill the weight of my agonies by diverging to other courses, nor will they lead me to new struggles. One day, I'll wake up with disheveled hair, I'll put your old coat on my back, and just like that, in a nightgown, as now, I'll come and sit in this chair, ruminating on the steps and the landscape, alone,  as I am now, without a mug of tea, without worrying about the fate of the flowers, and on that day, I will feel nothing, neither anxiety, nor fear, nor a dream coloring my complexion, I will finally accept defeat, I will beg, perhaps, for nothing new to come, not a cat, not a simple flower, that I do not want to be responsible for anything else and I will surrender to the designs of the Creator,  that will bring me the light I need to rest. I'd like to die here. In this same place, where I am, from where I can see the boats appear on the horizon. On that day, like everyone else, which will become new for the world, I want to let myself go through the hands of the one who sent me, and perhaps, it is just a maybe, that in matters of life, we cannot claim demands, perhaps it will be windy, perhaps the sea will not be quiet for my departure. Maybe ask for the sky to be filled with dense clouds, maybe ask for everything to shake so I can leave. That thunder always brings a sweet relief, which we don't want to separate from the calming of the waters.

No two days are the same. I'm still serving the sentence that brought me here. I believe that whenever we incarnate, we see the fulfillment of a penance or the validation of an injustice. And if I am not mistaken, I have come to fulfill both. But only God knows, no matter how much our heart lets us foresee. And understanding, they say, will come in the final moment. After so many years, it was only in the last few years that I remember losing my laughter. I lost the ability to smile. I've lost so many people, old and young and unborn, I've lost my laughter, Manuel. And that inability was born out of the verdict you would bring into our lives as a choice. There is nothing in this world that makes me smile again. Even to flowers or cats, or storms. Yes, easy laughter was an ally that I lost in this continuation of time that came to confirm to me that, more than my friend, he was a teacher.  Neither death, nor sickness, nor cursed letters took pity on the life I had planned, on the dreams that diminished the problems, whatever they might be. 

When there was still life and laughter in me, when I still used make-believe, when I still lived among the living, and I worried about coloring the lives of others and my own, I remembered the word games on the board, of setting goals to accomplish tasks, to believe in any tomorrow that others would bring me, from the hot oven with the smell of cinnamon biscuits, freshly made, bringing us beautiful moments to both of us, many smiles of complicity, slow and simple meals, but you see, after leaving, there is no tomorrow in me, tea is already swallowed up like poison,  The cats adopted me so that I wouldn't disgrace myself against the furniture, or fall into the rock in front of me. When you were still here, and I would pour you the bitter coffee you loved so much and watch you chop the wood, as if it were the easiest of tasks, when I could watch your movements and silences, all tomorrows were possible. Twenty-two letters, that's all I have of you, twenty-two letters read and reread in the exhaustion that time has given me. The last one arrived two years ago. There is, perhaps, no day in which your handwriting, or some parts of your words, does not haunt me. And I don't even know if there's life in you yet, or if you already see me from another level, because you see, for me you've died and that's the mourning I do. They never came knocking on my door with telegrams, or bringing another letter, I never heard that you had already left. You chose and I was left with only the result of your choice. I could not impose my presence. I wouldn't mind the smell of the disease, the bandages. You didn't want me to see you like this, sick, you chose solitude for company and I was left with both, yours and mine. And every sixteenth of December I push myself to eighteen, that I swallow the necessary pills that make me sleep all day and night and I wake up always sweaty, on the eighteenth day which is the day to cry for you. And today, that we are still in November, that we can still see and hear young and not so young, when it doesn't rain, looking for mollusks and dating, on the sand down here, I already feel December coming. In a clear anticipation of fever, of fear. I'm so afraid that when I leave, I won't find you. And that, after all, life is the aimlessness, after the goals are accomplished. Tomorrow, which is like saying today, I'm going to write you a letter. Perhaps it will be delivered in hand or perhaps I will no longer find you, a letter where I will tell you what I did not allow myself to tell you before, what your decision has silenced in me, and even if it is silence that opens the letter, let it not be read at all, whether you are still present, or, as I predict, absent from this plane,  you will know that I came into the world because of you. That your strength was my strength, that the way you stitched together your lines was the perfect alignment of my thoughts, that no day of your presence, even when I saw you sadder or more guilty, was grosser and more vile than the long seconds of your absence. Let it not occur to you, if you are still alive, that there was an accusation in my silence. My silence was my inability to tell you that, even though you had been unfaithful, I still loved you, and that more than that, I understood that the distance between us was not easy. Life is not pleased with our afflictions, weaknesses, or ambitions. And I didn't tell you that I accepted everything, your choice, because I didn't have the words or because probably, inside me, I knew I couldn't build the next day where you weren't. And look, you who were interspersed years without me and I without you, and we survived. Because at no time could I foresee your exile, at no time could I predict your illness and, even less, your choice not to want me to accompany the final outcome of your life. The hard part was saying in words that I understood you, it wasn't what I had dreamed for us, infidelity, but I understood it. And I didn't tell you that. If, when we are silent, we consent, forgive me, but my silence had no consent. I had only my cowardice in not telling you that I would take care of you, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, until death did us part. And words are just words. And you said them. Treponema Pallidum. No treatment.  It sounded like a foreigner to me, but I saw it well, by your ease, by the determined profile and the tension of your jaws, that this word would be the reason for the lack of your embrace, your tender kisses and, finally, your decision to seclusion from our lives. My silence was one of helplessness and not knowing what you expected from me, or if you expected anything from me. Expect? Because the attitude was one of acceptance and so much silence born since the last time I saw you. The longing has survived everything, but it would be dishonest of me not to say how angry I am at your protection or contempt for me. And all these letters did nothing to appease me. I've never answered you, except now and you want to know why? I believed that if I didn't answer you, you would come to me and then, yes, then the right words and the right attitudes would be born within me, which if you had come, would convince you and show you that there was no sense in this punishment of yours, you and me, of separation. That your illness would kill me no more than permanent absence. And if you had come, the seventeenth of December would have been an ordinary day, one more like so many others, always new and always different. I never asked you what her or they's called. I'll never know and frankly, I never wanted to know. Within me there was no anger and no jealousy, no revolt and much less complacency. As our uncle used to say, the acceptance of understanding shows us life through different prisms. What still revolted me was your absence. They all left, but their departures, distressing as they were, were cleaned clean. They didn't try to run away, they didn't try to pretend it wasn't pain, that they didn't mind leaving. At some point, we know what's coming next and we prepare. It wasn't like that with you. It was the seventeenth of December, I remember that you were still punishing yourself for having lost another baby in your absence. That you weren't there to hug me. Your sadness was a consequence of mine. I remember your hug the moment I saw you and wanted to jump on my lap. To safeguard yourself, in that scrutinized, measured, contained embrace, which was not the same as the one you returned to me on your arrivals. Or in your matches. Changed. At the time, I couldn't calculate the immensity of the different day that had come for me, that that seventeenth of December would impact me more than any other date. And you already had in your mind, strategically, how you would do it, what you would say, how you would put some clothes, some books and photos in your suitcase and how you would disappear into the curve of the cliff. If I had guessed, Manuel, I would have made it easier for you to leave with my absence. Or I wouldn't have let them fill my suitcase and room with pain, or all my days with a new pain, every day growing, a high tide that never saw the high tide again.

I lean back in my old chair. The rain is warm and light. Nothing as I had anticipated, but today is the day of my total tiredness. Of my giving up the telegram that will never come, to tell me about you, that you have died or that, by a miracle, you have convalesced and given a new direction to your life. I drank the tea with the lozenges that will make me sleep more peacefully in this armchair. I left instructions for my ashes to be scattered in this sea, where life was fruitful on beautiful days and others less so. Cats continue to wander on the windowslid and flowers are bent by the rain. I suspect that my letter will never reach you. And my goodbyes are on the beach of my life, here, in this place where you sit at dusk. And I climb into your lap, dressed in your old coat and surrender to the liberating, wet sleep. The human isolation that has kept me company in recent years no longer reassures me. And being happy was always a fat and beautiful word when I still had you inside. Manuel, come and pick me up today, don't delay, I beg you, call mom, dad, Adosinda and Tiago, if it is not your will to receive me or if you haven't even left yet, but I ask you to take me. This time, I don't want to go through the seventeenth of December. Say that you will come and pick me up to sleep in that armchair and you will go through the before and after with me.