Still I Miss You by Inês Pedrosa

Author:Inês Pedrosa [Pedrosa, Inês]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781542093330
Published: 2019-07-01T06:00:00+00:00

23

I see the wind stirring up the trees’ spirits, pushing clouds along, cleansing the heavens—but I can’t feel it. You hunch your shoulders against it in your jacket. If only I could control it, even just for a second, could give it the shape of my dead fingers and slowly stroke your tousled white hair. I follow you so that time will exist. Because you walk and look up at the sky and sometimes find that it’s black, or glittering like a dark sea of jewels, or rainy, or sun parched, I know that the days are passing.

But I know less and less all the time. Suddenly, that passing grows elastic, and you, ponytail and all, become my first boyfriend, pointing out constellations in a distant firmament. I can’t make out the contours of that boy during that period when I loved him, short-haired and perpetually dressed in black. But I am swept by a sudden vertigo because of those beloved bodies; you stand before me with the features, the movements, the gait of other men I loved in other ways. Oh, if I’d experienced this vertigo in life, I could have gone far.

Open up a book, please. Open Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair and read me that scene where the two lovers separate after the first time they’re reunited. Maurice lets go of Sarah’s hand and walks away, without looking back, as if everything of any importance in the world exists in that other, nonexistent place toward which his steps are carrying him. But Sarah coughs, and, to fend off the hollow sound of that repeated cough, Maurice tries to imagine a melody that might drown it out, but he can’t do it. I have no ear for music, he thinks, I think now, on the verge of the tears spinning on the CD player. “People can love without seeing each other, can’t they?” Sarah used to ask, having left you in order to save you. Left Maurice, I mean. Same difference.

We can love in the dark, yes; we can love in the somnambulant light of absence: we invented God, after all. You used to say God was your favorite fictional character. But you refused to understand that fictional characters exist just as thoroughly as you do. Sometimes, many times, even more so. Read me the end of Tolstoy’s Resurrection, tell me that Maslova went back to being Katusha, wearing a white dress with a blue sash, surrounded by candles, on the fervent night of that Easter mass when Nekhludoff loved her in her immovable eternity.

Read me the María Zambrano essays I taught you to love, tell me that “the heart is the drinking glass of love” and pour your blood into my dead, undying heart. You haven’t learned everything yet, friend—you’re taking too long. You still haven’t learned to kill me. Everybody else buried me in the brightly lit cemetery of the TV news, effusively praising my dignity. May fame be gentle with them—I will be resting here in peace to forgive them that minute of glory.

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