Messiaen and the paradox of your name

 

And there he was, you, on the path of my thoughts, extraterrestrial, greater than an obstacle to which my mind lent prominence, without circumventing. The paradox was having to leave you, loving you. And if you had been in all latitudes, the meanwhile, you had been much earlier and perpetuated yourself beyond what was expected and understandable, remaining in a liquidated aftermath. Where there were no us, this beautiful exercise lived and conjugated in all times and spaces, where he wanted to take root. A globe evidently divided, in the coordinates imposed by the usual Judas and Barabbas. You were the lover in the frame, you were the portrait and the bandage that kept me faithful, guardian and dreamer. Either romantic or loser. Or, being able to use, the prerogative form of crescendo, ascend the natural design, before voluntary offering, loving, delirious perk and now, which was not now in the we, you were by divine grace, because yes, to the mind existing in the loving heart, like a prayer, in fervor, devoted to my higher self, saying "I could not go around the figure", the person, taking possession of its essence, the dizzying passion for the human being that is today the origin of the ailment headache? But no, it is not a malaise, migraine and without rationalizing, that love dispenses with reasons or worries in force, but the express trembling, debauched hungry desire, yes, in prayer, so many times, not knowing so many times, knowing only in me, that remain countless, endless, his moist lips and his warm breath that I sipped up, yes, it was my consolation and more than a memory, prophecy, because time multiplies in wills, when we cross deserts of humanity and look for someone like us, who can reflect dreams and particularities, fearful affinities. I desired it as much as I asked for it. I loved him long before I conceived him, for the growing feeling, before he came to me, in front of my still youth, which even though it does not help me, which still persists and materializes in memory and in its indelible details, which I keep to the millimeter, scraping odors and preserving nostalgia in the same inner pocket where it resides, ad eternum, the beloved. Oh you, who do not exist, who do not speak or write for you, who do not silence what I must!

Then, it was I, and I alone who was to blame for such a figure of the present body, as expressed by Luís, not the architect Luis, but the poet Luís of the present figure, Brito Pedroso, or perhaps, long before him, Cervantes, referring to Quixote, to Sancho Panza, to the mills or, perhaps, to the horse itself that followed him silently, for his internal battles, or else, perhaps, such a purpose and leave came out of the mouth of the character himself, Don Quixote of La Mancha, referring, obviously, to Dulcinea, his sweet Dulcinea, who was never absent in her tortuous forays around the world. In me, there were no attacks of fury, no swords drawn against the wind, nor against the carved rocks, nor did I serene when I saw that, after all, they were all mills and the giant of the story was the usual, this hungry time that happens, whether one lives or chooses the absence of the figure, the mixture of drowsiness, the numbness of sentimental weaving, or the vegetative state of social hermitage.

Oh you, who do not exist more than you should, and you who owe nothing, I silence you, writing of an extinct time. And I only omit what I keep silent, lying in the proportion that goes from a kiss to a snap. Valentim, nicknamed mercenary, the brave one is me, in every woman you know and who I am, a whole person, in short!

If during the day, the tasks were proof of the lassitude of memories, the night purposely sculpted the reveries and faithful contours of hopes, dressed for a great day, a day that would be worth more than a hundred years, if I lived them, a day with more than twenty-four hours, certainly, counted by the effusive chimes of my state of joy, that he would live divinely, as if on that day, I could hear what composed him, what he composed for me, by a real and authentic orchestra, string and wind instruments, percussion and dramaturgy, of no less than ten violins, clarinets, recorders honoring Orff, double basses and, at least two pianos interspersing solos and monologues, of his cues in me, of my logs in the fire that fed on his memory. Turangalîla built Tristan and Isolde, but both had fallen on a deathbed of stone and dust, and not even Messiaen would keep them awake for a thousand more years. Nor of its tragic decadence, of the unbridled frenzy for the accidental opportunity of not conceiving life, beyond the life of others. And I pushed my physical body to wear out all the energy, as if I were the conductor, but also all the musicians in the orchestra, with no breaks, not allowing them to exist while the peak of my longing lasted. And there would come, inevitably, a time of fallow, a disastrous interlude, where the notes offered me a clear look at the landscape, to glimpse forget-me-nots and the round shapes of the boulders and pebbles, to the irregular design of the leaves of the trees that detached in the breeze, I then let them fall with them, intrepid, dissonant chords, of my eyes wandering and, along with them, whole octaves in my mouth and in the thin fingers with which I refused to say goodbye to you, suffering forever, hands of my internal, heart and external clock counting lives more than decades or centenarians! And I saw them, in mine in your hands, in yours in my eyes, solfeggio unfolding like tuning forks with wings, condors, falcons and albatrosses, ascending from the earth to the unreachable angelic murmur, decorated, of your timbre blowing to me the weeping that only Calvary would refine it better than you, from the arteries of the chest, repeated by the mainstay of the eighties, riding the acoustics of the orchestra room, filling the clefs with sunshine, erecting roofs, piercing walls, soling the pains of the deprivation of seeing you, longing for the knight of the sad figure, the sad composure he had lost over the years, the vivacity of having inhabited the house that was me, the bed and the table, all the artifacts necessary for me to still be left between my lungs and pleura, screams, moans, distressed phonemes from the mists of other times, which had been a reference for me in a modus vivendi, which I did not know how to blur from oblivion.

The profile was already blurred with the time that fell on my shoulders, without weighing me down, as I remembered his soft and clumsy curls, framing his face, his warm white skin, on his face, around his mouth, pierced by dark dots of a well-trimmed beard, a hooked nose that tapered as he measured his eyes, the space between them, without stopping at her gaze, in the windows of translucent prisms, next to her temples and earlobes, guessed behind her natural hair. Big hands that played on all the pianos, after him, after him there was never any other piano that was played except by his fingers, where shoulders and chest rhythmically obeyed the impulses of the compositions, almost always improvised, as later, by the carpets of any synthesizer, making bed to the expressive and painful solo of some sadness that inspired his soul and back. I got used to seeing him, drawn on the side of my dreams, as a present and eternal figure, as having arms and legs on his body and smiling with his whole mouth at the joy of beautiful compositions that only I could hear, or amazingly, with the metaphor, comparing his modus operandi with the walk of a unique and generous god, contemplative and tireless who taught how to finger the laziest or most unfit fingers. Its aura would have to be translated into a new color of sky, into a new rhythm of marking time, without delimiting it, but supplementing it, like those harps that grow in orchestras, that when one waits for the roll of a drum, announcing three more minutes of apotheosis, deludes chronos and, from there, the crystalline sound of a flock of birds and nightjars emerges, of canaries and emperors, to be solified in the temporal interstice that grounds it, that of postponing the end of the unforeseen composition, of a distracted maestro in the country of childhood. It would be forbidden and overwhelming to limit one's joy in this country.

And when no other routine could postpone my sleep, at the end of all the obligatory tasks and the others invented to space out the time of the armistices, my tired body collided with the mattress, wrapping itself in the blankets that promised to be protective and keep stagnant, all painful memories, back there, where they belonged and no more than figures of style, of a rhetorical and anachronistic permissiveness and lack of limits to human suffering. There had to be a limit to pain. An adult does not live in a childhood country for more than two-thirds of his life. There are compasses and rituals to be fulfilled. And my body needed to feel bloodless and obedient to the anesthetic of exhaustion.

On that night, which would be a normal night, if it could have been, which would be so for all bodies that rest before they become animated by the alarm clock and by the commitments in force of days, weeks, months and years obeying calendars, more or less in the same way, more or less in the same intensity, depending on dreams and merits. That night, when my face quickly grew tired of the twilight shadows that entered and wandered through the openings of the half-open shutters, that night when the wind was the main music and when physical exhaustion promoted easy sleep. That night, animated by an external force, with my eyes closed, I peeked at myself lying down, at that very twenty-sixth hour, In this pillow that made me sink my neck in tune with the synapses, my sleeping and relaxed body had the shape of any other body, external to me, and I saw myself as something unscalable, despite the fact that all bodies obey certain dimensions, which must be dimensioned, or this act of attributing dimension to objects, and geometry attributed the most beautiful and exact contours, with the mathematical rigor of the universe, and this body that would still be mine, was translucent bronze, rounded and, rigorously, without any concreteness, that there was light between all angles and a face with a mouth that spoke without words, with eyes that saw without reservation, that promised me, to me, a body absent in other latitudes, that the end of the barriers that my mind had invented, to have fun in the daily life of gray days, of endless and bitter nights was coming soon. That that body abandoned between blankets and constant nightmares was also this one, made of bronze, vaporous, immaterial, and that the darkness that clouded my vision was nothing more than the blindness to which it forced me, not to want to see the divine absolute in me. That I was free, and that this decision of what was to come, covered more than a thousand blankets, my safety and the protection of loved ones, that my beloved of eternal figure present was similar to me, in the extendable bronze of other planes, and that all the symphonies, which were and would be written, were composed and contemplated before, on a plane where the human merged with the divine, where desires did not collide with obstacles and where suffering and all the barriers invented by illusion were nothing more than the ignition of overcoming and liquefying them, of translating them into an extensive score, written in the mathematics of eighth notes and spindles, pauses and telepathy between parallel universes. And that love, which frightened millions, millions who could not feel it and millions who deprived themselves of feeling it in its higher octave, was all that deserved to be experienced, and was nothing more than the fuel, the vein and the apparatus where life was drawn, the guiding thread that conducted, in the hands of the conductor the baton, the alteration between moments and regencies, the solidification of art, the only translation of the evolution of the universe through that liquid, which one day petrified the heart, and the next the next became fire and sap, must and water, the love that communicated between worlds and galaxies, the continuation of the desire to play, just like music, producing states of happiness, giving foundation to the creation of universes. Biology, the practical sciences, politics, mathematics, philosophy, humanity itself, depended on the engine called love, which without it, everything was nothing, not even dust.

Dressed in various implications, more than those I can tell you, out of ignorance, laziness and ignorance, I invented names for the moon, uttered lurid jargon, contaminated the galaxy of treaties of Tordesillas, trying to manage my emotions, exposed ultimatums like the feudal lords, gave them halter, stuffed them in the harvest basket of Bacchus, walked through forgotten deities, on my knees, Always in prayer, in a petty haste, I burned all the calendars, agendas and journeys before you. I dressed in black and waving my arms, I shouted fear, creed, mourning, strength, conduct, god and the devil. And I was left with your name written in the sand, I waited for the high tide, to see you drown, to erase the stuffing of what you are still whole, whole, floor, ground, concrete and absolute, thatch and vacant iron, sailboat on the high seas, and after being everything, of being winter and Shrovetide, from being river and banks, after being a speaker, wise and poet, now mute, silent, blind and deaf, I gesture to the winds, to the tidal waves, to the tsunamis and volcanoes, which will be present, that will take me to myself, that they erase my name which is your epithet, finally, so that I can rest, finally, from all the longing, of the memories, the hopes that I keep, stubborn, between my restless chest, in the crown and the litany, of the scabbard of your sword, in the waterline of the bow, of your deck, faith and children's toy, which rises like the tides and magnifies yourself when you place your hand in mine, your eternal embrace, the shooting star, in the girl's diary. You only exist in me and that's where you persist the most!