There is no distance, no far, only illusions

 

Yesterday, I went to see my silent lover.

I needed to hear him roar, speak, realize that he was still alive, no matter how far and distant he was (remembering Fernão Capelo Gaivota and the aftermath of Richard Bach, who is neither far nor far, and this was 1979).

Whole, brave, solitary, indomitable. And on his back, a thousand seagulls breathed in the sea air and perfected their flight. In him, in the stormy sea, I discover the reason for reincarnation. The secret that is no secret. There are no secrets. What keeps knowledge hidden is only the lack of preparation to know it. For everything, there is a divine time. That is the whole secret. And the exercise of wanting to know more.

The territory is organized after him. The sea takes its place. How life is arranged in the interdependencies between our plans and what happens, while we try to bring them to a good end, paraphrasing John Lennon. I arrived and there he was, waiting for all those who love him, willful and temperamental. The sandbank remained the same as I remember it from five years ago. The only thing missing was the large beach with the largest terrace I can remember, ever. The lush and well-organized walkways led the holidaymakers along the line between the dunes and civilization.

I let my feet tread the fine sand, little by little, taking the opportunity to feel and see my toes sink in and come back to the surface. A couple of lovers, sitting on one of the many benches on the walkways, fed their passion with the corn that is typical of love, kissing each other passionately, laughing and whispering complicity, and I heard a soundtrack so beautiful that I believed they could hear it directly from me. Everyone has soundtracks inside, personal and untransferable, different from my choices. I looked around. The beach welcomed me in the way I had learned to love it. With few members of the human species. Half a dozen, if that, in that small paradise hidden from traffic a few meters above, on the roads.

I chose my deserted spot. I spread out the towel, always looking at the sea, took off my shirt and skirt, folded them and used them as a headboard. I organized my sandals, put down my backpack and went, impetuously, to feel the roar of the sea, to feel it through my nostrils and eyes. I am from the sea. And it kissed my feet, my ankles, blew droplets of its freshness onto my body and, before I knew it, I was looking for kisses and seaweed on its lap. I returned to the towel, perhaps twenty minutes later. Another couple, younger in age and more daring in their freedoms, roared a "Setgo" to a brown and white dog, throwing a stick and he ran, satisfied and returning the object, while both, he and she, did gymnastic exercises and the Setgo snuggled, waiting for his time and space, while the adoptive couple's tangles of intimacy grew, from her calves and feet, to her thighs, while her hands gave small strokes on her partner's belly, he smiling, got up and ran his hand over her face, straightening her hair, while the wind ruffled it, again.

The sea creates complicity and transmits joy to the simplest gestures. I found myself smiling at the advances of both, at Setgo's instinctive intelligence and at my own distraction. Joy is contagious. An optimist accepts the joy of others and makes it his own. I settled into the towel, still with wet legs and arms, with a dripping nose and hands full of shells and seashells, of kisses that landed on my lap, as I climbed into the bed of my thousand-year-old lover.

I was reading half a dozen pages of Martha Freud and the correspondence between her and "Sigi". Teolinda Gersão kept me company, there too. Reading allows other versions of reality, other versions constructed by the passing of time and by the inherent assembly of concepts and prejudices that we adopt, views of this or that character, juggling acts that the scopist lens of another view reaches us. Freud was on a level of unlikely immortal monsters, but he never achieved clarity regarding the foundations of his countless studies of the human psyche. There were particularities in him that were revealed now, in this now, in other nows, as long as the reading lasted, which, without destroying his curiosity and studies, disguised them with a clearer causality, despite their many opacities. The insecurity, the fear, that strange episode, which had been added to a personality weakened by insecurities and injuries to self-esteem, revealed peculiarities that, translated by Teolinda, who herself interpreted the correspondence, achieved a new perspective and frequency, explaining more clearly what had become, for me, the complex strangeness of the psychiatrist professor's personality, without dismantling it, without adulterating it. A thin layer of pollen or truth serum, like a transparent and light curtain, with cornucopias at its end (a mere whim of the author) revealed, exposing the source of its thirst, allowing us to glimpse the gap that, simultaneously, hid the true self, and showed the exuberance or arrogance of humanity. Just like the sea, when one has patience, which comes in seven waves at a time, to release energies, seven at a time, for a birth of identity, seven at a time, for the retreat of a ship, seven at a time, the beginning of a new era, also there, in that pink book, unpretentious, but containing within itself the keys to the opening to a new dimension, they found me, devoid of blockages or prejudices, and I was able to see that, just like Sigi, we hide weaknesses that, in the eyes of others, weaken or enable us (we believe that it weakens us, this thing of being human, all too human), and we build "sand castles" on top of pseudo-truths that, perhaps, lives ahead, someone will dismantle, as if it were the seventh wave that will come to knock down the castle built a ream of years ago. And time in these operations can be everything or nothing. That the only thing that is always real in existence is the already and the now, which function like the sea, moving, without pauses or contemplation, like the sunset contaminating the horizon, like those lighthouse heads, like those Petrogal antennas, of which I count twenty-four, until the fog that rises from the distance over the thin layer of the blind spot, imposed by human vision, cannot be discerned.

I found myself thinking about you, you who were always my "Sigi", who were always the towering lighthouse, and the lighthouse keeper himself, the one with the all-encompassing visions, the reason why Uranus is disruptive, who would read about our identity, through the letters we exchanged when you were in Morocco, under the guise of who we are, the suffrage of not being just you and me, but perhaps, parts or remnants of the greater and entire nature of being free. But of course here I remember another author, Daniel Sampaio, of being free in a prison, and obviously, my soul that appreciates flight more than reaching the other shore, is attached to the details of Pablo Neruda, in those great ships anchored in the port but that never reach you, to Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea, to Mota Cardoso's monsters and demigods, to Richard Bach, from Fernão Capelo Gaivota, from There is no far or distance, passing by the Bridge to Eternity, I go to Ilusões, as the last choice of this time pass called now and you "my Sigi", no matter how many details and plots, no matter how many nomenclatures literature discusses, there will always be in you, the correct formula for the sea to expand through the "Uranian hands" and offer me a perspective of coitus on the seabed that I chose as the main character, where I say sea, but it is only you who fills me, where I say high tide and you overcome me with generosity and abundance and I say high seas and there is, always, nearby, a new moon or a full moon with your face in profile and your wide smile and, if I wait, with that patience, which is the poisonous syrup, I see you descend through the torn cotton clouds, after the plane circles what I imagine to be the port of Leixões and returns bustling and relaxed, leaving a tear of its sudden appearance, separating the sky and the bed of this immense ocean where I find you, every time I want to get lost.