One second. A lot, or a little? Two hundred and twenty million. Seconds that have passed.
Sometimes it returns. Every year, a few days before the first of February. We argue, travel, visit Grandma, and drink beer. Just life… in a dream.
I don’t go back. Not even to photos. Conventional wisdom says that over the years, anniversaries stop tearing at the soul. But my calendar doesn’t respect that truth. It has its own. I can’t look at photos. He took so many of them, instilled in me that harmless type of madness that divides all of reality, colorful, gray, black and white, into frames, images, shots, searching for beauty in their composition.
What could I think about today? Supposedly, after seven years, nothing remains of who I was that day. All the body’s cells are replaced with new ones, the cycle ends. Supposedly… Only memory is not obedient to the laws of biology. It remains, changes its shape, color, form, scent. It becomes blurred… But it remains.
What then could I think about today? In a foreign country, whose language has become as familiar to me as my native one. Native, meaning the language of my father. By a summer-hot river, on the beach, among almost naked young bodies, firm breasts, dark complexions, long black hair… Would I think about what was and will not return, about what is and exists in this very moment, about what will be or not? I always felt that above all, I desired women, their closeness, their physicality. My thoughts inevitably head in that direction and it is a normal kind of madness.
However I look at it, he was the same. In the language of a poetess, we differ only in so very similar ways. Drop for drop different. How could I thank him for that? Now, when the expanse of time makes every word I speak inaudible to him. When I was a little tyke, he taught me a mysteriously sounding phrase: verba volant, scripta manent. He himself wrote a lot, it was his job. In an era when the word computer was a term from futurology, he always needed a typewriter, a concept now almost forgotten, and two copies of his work. One for the court, the other ad acta. When he happened to forget to put in the carbon paper, he would rage. Shouting in contemporary Latin: fucking bedlam! I hated those screams. How I wish to hear them once again.
So, I write too, and discover that it’s better than sex. The more I write, the more I want. The longer I write, the more passionate are the kisses with the world that exists only for me. The more gently I choose words, the more it reveals its secrets to me. I waited so many years until the anxiety of passing and the lust for expression reached a critical mass. Funny, that an atomic explosion can remain unnoticed by so-called objective reality. Since God spared me the grace of belief in objective reality, I don’t really care. I do what must be done, the river flows, the sun shines, women bloom and turn to autumn. And I write. This is a dangerous kind of madness.
In a public place like this social expectations focus on going to the beach and soaking one’s parts, on drunkenness, flirting, and its continuation. By the way, what a wonderful concert the neighbor from the nearby tent gave yesterday! Vivat free love! Bravo pianist! In a public place like this writing anything arouses the concern of others. Latinos are an open mentality, full of life. Every now and then someone approaches me to ask what I’m doing and why I don’t go swimming with them.
Swimming? Memory is relentless. One day he dragged me deeper into the sea, where I no longer had the ground under my feet. And now swim – he said. I trusted the waves, though earlier I thought I couldn’t. And I swim on. Sometimes I run out of breath, but I know I will not stop. Until the very end, to the goal, which I do not yet sense or can imagine, which will be only mine, personal, private, and intimate. I swim. And that is the mortal kind of madness. I will swim until the last second, long enough for an entire life to flash before my eyes and to feel…
His last second played out between a tree, a ditch, and a forty-ton truck. I console myself that at least he had time to feel that it was worth living. After all, he always knew that…
To My Father, on the seventh anniversary of his death. 2013.02.01