I’ve seen how the flesh gets scared of me, only at the thought of me. I’ve witnessed it in one of my invented memories. I touched this man’s hand, and I could feel the flesh, the warmth, and the hand withdrew, quickly, like a snake, like the body of a snail does, hiding slowly under its protective shell. I got scared myself because in that indeterminate movement I’ve seen myself through the eyes of that man, and I appeared monstrous and alone, like a child who fears being abandoned. I’ve seen that frightening look that for a second made me seem invisible or made me want to think that I’m invisible or that I should be invisible just for that pair of eyes. I am the child and the child-molester, the victim and the perpetrator. How could I not be when every time I touch you I can feel the flesh that has grown into something that only your mind could fathom? Is it the same flesh, that of the child, that has grown dark, day by day, and thought by thought? Aren’t you still that little boy you were years ago that still smells of breast milk? It is the same skin, the same glorious architecture.
The mind has made you furiously dark, laid one by one the brushstrokes of dementia, adulthood, over the scribbled smiling face of your innocence.
The mind grows too fast. The body has to keep up.
I try to understand where this guilty pleasure of yours comes from, derive its driving principles, and in the process understand myself, your lover. To find the spot where the mind refused the spectral image of an angel replacing it with that of an androgynous figure, relaxed and seemingly superficial, yet full of sexual frenzy.
There is no change, no crossing point, that’s why there is no turning back.
I can’t find your number, it seems to have disappeared and for a second I panic thinking that you might have been indeed a figment of my imagination. I finally find it under the letter M. It’s that other name that I have given you this week. Hey, I can hear your voice at the other end of the line, trembling, filled with expectation. I’m just going to get my luggage and I’ll be there in about 15 minutes. You know how these things work, I tell him, but I only do that to fill the air that is suddenly too much for my lungs. I have taken my best shirt, even my best boxer shorts, my best socks, you know, just to make a first good impression on you. We’ll see about the other impressions. The first one is the most important at this point. I’ll be waiting, he says, and as he said that I suddenly felt that 15 minutes is going to take forever. I tell myself that patience is the key aspect now. I’ve been waiting for this for so many months.
I’m still waiting for it.
I finally take the luggage and I put my sunglasses on. I have a terrible headache, I tell him through the phone. We’ll take care of that he says, you’re on the other side of the wall. I could actually hear him.
Was it a flicker? A second there has just passed, consumed itself.
The doors open automatically. I could hear the mechanism working inside.
I step outside. The connection seems lost and I can’t hear you anymore. I stop and look for your number again. There is no letter M in the alphabet. I look through the rest of my contact list, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandparents, unknown people. There is no letter M in the alphabet. One pearl is missing from the string. But I’ve just seen it.
There is no alphabet.
You’re probably waiting at the car.
There is a young man waiting next to a colorless car. I have never told you the color of my car. Once I told you I had dreamed of you, or rather forced myself to dream of you and you were voiceless. Back then I didn’t know the sound of your voice. Now I’ve become so familiar with it.
You’re not under the letter M.
I wonder what name I have given you today.
Under the letter G there is the word ghost. For a second you looked like a ghost. That ghost which comes at night, intent, and full of meaning, full of lust. We kill the lust that grows between your bodies. We strangle it with our bare hands until it breathes no more. The lust that comes to life when our bodies occupy the same space, at the same time, a slight distance required to make things work, the distance and the time that at one point will seem to extend towards infinity.
You are under the letter L, for lust, blocked into a category, my category.
There is the unnamable celestial body, of unknown descent living in a completely white inodorous land, no houses except words. There is the center of consciousness, diverse, totally different color. The body is stained, recorded in black and white, saturated. The body becomes a hypodermic syringe, youth itself, in the flesh. The body is the prerecorded obsession, the sound, no sound of any kind. There’s no specificity there. There is the completely inodorous white land. There are hundreds of inhabitants led by a man who fell in love in the mirror, made love in the mirror until he was trapped inside. They all turned purple and then orange due to the light reflected by the mirror. The skin turned hard, like a crust, perfectly stretched, flawlessly attached.
The body is an open wound, a cut in the air made with a word.
The flesh is the presence of lust.
The body is a curve between two points, the longest way between one point and the other, the longest way between A and B. The ultimate measure of the body is loss. The earth plates are on the move and we’re caught in between, innocent as we come, by nature. Time runs slower in this center of consciousness.
I wouldn’t want to wake up because waking up means facing the inodorous white desert. I can’t find you in that desert. There’s a land of lines put together, laws attached and meanings, and you stop being human, there is only what you’ve become, an entity. There are the repetitive words said every morning, cut obliquely they are empty of meaning though desired to be full of meaning. Good morning, how are you, did you have a good night. The answer is always yes, though by saying yes, I intend to say so much more. Yes means yes and no. The people living in this inodorous white land will understand you, they know.
Human waste, with every touch we go to waste. One step taken towards love is one step taken towards becoming human waste.
We stood hand in hand, our feet into the sand, watching fascinated how the waves came and went. My father knows, he says, he knows that we’re together. Did you tell him? Yes, I told him, and it’s not the first time I did that, he seems to forget a lot.
I’m not afraid of that, I’m not afraid of your father, he’ll eventually understand, what I’m afraid of though is what will come out of that understanding. Next time we’ll meet and we’ll have to shake hands and he’ll have to look into my eyes. I don’t know how I’m going to do that.
We’ll just have to avoid that, he says, be silent, pretend, shake hands like normal people do, wear the armor of common courtesy. In that world we’ll be invincible, in this world we’ll tend to our fragile souls in need of each other.
I try to imagine what his father is thinking about this, I’m the guy who’s fucking his son, three years older than him, taller, with long sideburns. Some may say I’m taking advantage of the situation I’m in. I fear the mercy that he might feel for me; I wouldn’t want to have that.
Your skin, the sun has given it this dark hue, the sun is telling me to look somewhere else. His father told me to look somewhere else, told me his son is not for me that I don’t deserve to have him. His mother smiled and said nothing. I looked down and told them I’m in love with their son. They said nothing, so I said it again. His father laughed but said nothing and I wanted to hold him, right there, hold him in my arms. The world was telling me to look somewhere else. There was this lump in my throat, I felt like throwing up.
I took him by the hand when we went out of the house. I looked back and the house was completely white, painful white. The windows were completely white, the trees framing the house were completely white, the sidewalk was white, everything was of a perfect white as if the house, his parents, time itself were mere drawings on a white sheet of paper. His eyes were completely white, perfectly white, inodorous white, tasteless white, a desert of whiteness at my feet. And in that whiteness I felt so alone and I felt like running away as fast as I could. Something held me, with a strong hand, something held me close.
At one point you come to terms with yourself, with who you are, or at least try to. I did the same, or at least tried to do the same. The whiteness was on to obliterate us, both of us, reduce us to mere drawings on a white sheet of paper.
You were wearing this dark blue sweater and that pair of jeans you always said they were your favorite though at times I disliked them deeply. And you had had your new haircut which seemed desperate the first time I saw it, but I was in love with you so it was the most beautiful haircut in the whole wide world. And there was a smile on your face, like that of a child that for a moment has forgotten about everything. We were in the backyard of your father’s house and you had found this rubber ball, and you were playing with it trying to imitate famous footballers. There was also that friend of yours, I don’t remember her name, something with K, I guess. Look under the letter K, there might be something there. But there isn’t of course, there is no letter K in the alphabet.
You were laughing and I fell in love with you again.
It was autumn. And the trees were not yet white, inodorous white, devoid of color. Back then the whiteness was yet lurking behind us never having the courage to attack us. It was the joy in your eyes that kept the whiteness away.
Or that time in the shopping mall when I could only think of you while watching all those men unpacking merchandise moving swiftly along the aisles as if there was something waiting for them when they got home. Is there anyone for them, at home, waiting for them to come back? A girlfriend, a boyfriend, a wife thinking of them, and I could see them doing things so that they could forget the absence. I went to the cashier and put the things I intended to buy on the conveyor and the woman looked at me and said something about a loyalty card and I said no. But everything happened just like that, without me actually acknowledging it. My replies were already there, prepared, ready to be delivered. And I was still thinking of you and nothing could distract me from doing that. We were in the car speeding on a highway leading nowhere the whiteness surrounding us like it was winter though it wasn’t winter, it was summer, it was supposed to be summer, and there was a white sun ahead of us neither smiling nor frowning at us, just like that, one of those emotionless suns, nothing special. But we weren’t running away from the whiteness, by that time we were accustomed with that, it had become our daily routine to live submerged into this sea of whiteness. We were going to that place called home, though in fact it wasn’t a home; it was the only place left in the world where the whiteness hadn’t reached yet, the place where we weren’t afraid to be ourselves. We were in the car speeding on a highway leading nowhere and you said you have to tell me something. Should I stop then, I asked you, and you said yes, I should stop, and I pulled over. It wasn’t the place or the time to say it, you said while other cars went by us and the sound was at times too strong to bear. And you said you love me and I took your hand in my hands and kissed it passionately and I saw you smiling, and I said I love you too.
There is no whiteness here because the room is too dark and the house is hidden away from view. Nobody can see us here, not even ourselves.
For miles there is no house in sight, just the occasional illusions that lure us into believing we are not alone in this white desert. There are no lights, and the weeds have outgrown the path, outgrown those who might venture around the house. The house resembles a fortress, painted in scarlet, painful to the eye, and to those who look at it from the outside it will appear deformed. Not to us, those who live inside have seldom fallen in love with the asymmetrical walls, windows turned away from the sun, doors too small to enter, some of the locked from the outside. Actually, all of them are locked from the outside except one which is in the attic so that if somebody wants to get out he or she will have to commit suicide, every time, several times during one’s lifetime. So we are very reluctant about going out. One morning I woke up with the feeling that we were the last two human beings on earth. No one yet ventured in these parts; the weeds have outgrown the adventurer.
The body is a matter of conviction, a cluster of immovable organs. The organ is the idea. The eye is a matter of seeing. Your hand signifies holding hands. The lips mean kissing, oh, the heart means carnage. There is no way out of this vicious circle. Our love must be ritual. We move around each other showing signs, symptoms. My lungs moving up and down mean to tell you that you take my breath away. When they no longer move in that way I need to say it. Language is no longer referential. We need to tell each other somehow that our bodies long for each other. You need to get ready before I kiss you with the intention of carrying on. I need to make it clear by saying it and making that language referential. I want more than kissing and holding hands, I’d say it, and you’d say all right, just give me a minute. Our love must be ritual. We need to convince ourselves that it must be ritual. We envy their easiness but we make love anyway. Otherwise we would vanish. What am I to do without you?
You live a sort of life, or this thing you call life. Others expect you to call it life. I believe that is why we have a word for it. Words become words out of necessity. The necessity of a human being. A writer’s necessity. You live a life in which you are never quite sure if you are going up or down until the very last moment, until your very last breath is spent on recovering all those moments from the past you call memories. While you do that you realize that every recovered memory is inherently an apology first to yourself, then to all those who have touched you, and then, finally, to all those who have seen you at one point. Yes, even to those. Until you become yourself a walking apology. Have you ever thought of how an apology looks like? Behold the very flesh and bones of a walking apology. The books that you write are themselves apologies. You apologize and ask for forgiveness to your characters, for giving birth to them and then leaving them to linger in a sort of fictitious limbo until you sort your things out. Problems with your girlfriend or boyfriend, your computer has a nervous breakdown, your neighbor’s kid will not shut up. All of these happen while your characters are waiting there, anxious for something to happen, anything. They are just characters, you think at one point, masks; they are supposed to do that. Yet, what if they are not supposed to do that after all? What if we are characters ourselves waiting for our author to figure things out? Then you apologize to yourself and to your own past. We all know that in books the past comes out distorted, changed, and broken. One memory comes out eyeless, faceless, earless, and with all limbs broken. Apologize to that, your sincerity shall be appreciated if you will ever be forgiven, that is. Then you apologize to everybody else because their story too came out in your book, in between the lines. Keep in mind though that you will never be forgiven. That character, still waiting in that airport for the love of his life, will never forgive you. Could you not give him what he wants? Just a few words, a few sentences and he would live happily ever after. Yet your stubbornness and the fact that you yourself lived a life tell you that this is how the story goes, and that his happiness needs to be sacrificed. How could he forgive you for that? For denying him that ending. Ultimately, it is just a matter of words is it not? How could you sacrifice that happiness for the sake of the story? Your duty ends there, you think, at the end of the story. You are the almighty author after all. Somehow, you know that asking for forgiveness is futile, but you do it anyway thinking, hoping that at least one third of the guilt will vanish, just like that, with those two words that you write at the end. You refer to it sometimes as signing a contract by which the internal mechanism of the book is set into motion. What you do not realize is that those two words are like a death sentence to your characters, their sorrows relived with every reader. How could you, dear author, ask for happiness yourself? When your own happiness will be, at one point, sacrificed for the sake of the story?
The Doubtful Recluse 