This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

Silvia

The first and the last, says the poet to Artemis in the marvelous poem by Gérard de Nerval. . “Et c’est toujours la seule — ou c’est le seul moment”. . If all the women I have loved could be encapsulated in one, the only woman that I have loved forever encapsulates all the others. They are the stars. Silvia is the galaxy itself. She has everything. Beauty. Erotic pleasure as well as the simple pleasure of being together, eating together, sleeping and waking up, walking, traveling together, sharing friends, discussing doubts, making plans, understanding flaws, accepting mistakes, and loving each other even for the things that we find irritating or unpleasant in our respective personalities and behaviors. The joy of having children. The pain of losing them. The communion of memory. The respect that comes with the passage of time. Different tastes. Our complementary vocations, intellects, emotions: we are different and we each give the other what the other no longer even lacks because all that is mine flows into her just as all that is hers flows into me. The labyrinth of genealogies, friendships, favorite cities, the splendid detail lavished on food, restaurants, our common love of film, theater, opera. All that unites us and even those things that might separate us, become a meeting point, question mark and, in the end, alliance. We are very different physically. She is delicate, petite, blond, with sensual eyes that change from blue to green to gray as the hours go by. Her mien is European, but her skin is olive-colored, with a lovely oriental glow. Her penchant for clothes is extreme, to my delight. I love her because I am the most punctual man in the world and she always arrives, punctually, late. This is part of her charm. To be waited for. The Europeans of the seventeenth century hoped that death would arrive from Spain, so that it would arrive late. No, death arrived early for us when we lost our son Carlos. We were always united, and then death arrived to bring us together even closer than before. She knows how to keep Carlos present at every hour while I, either less sensitive or more cowardly, have learned to summon my son, with a force that surprises me, only at the moment when I begin to write. That is when he appears at my side, in some way fulfilling his truncated destiny through my daily effort to write. That is how everything is perpetuated and then comes back to live inside the union of the couple. Apollinaire once said that some people die so that they may be loved. In our case, my son is alive because the love that drew us (Silvia, Carlos, and me) together continues to live on in our lives. But it is she, the woman, who reveals the specificity and inclusivity of love. It is she, Silvia, who crowns my life’s quest to pay attention— sexual, erotic, political, literary, fraternal. Pay attention, or you will not have the right to love me and be loved by me. When Tomás Eloy Martínez, our dear Argentinian friend, lost his beautiful wife, Susana Rotker, he wrote a vivid, searing requiem that ends by saying, “I would have given everything I am and everything I have to be in your place. I would have loved to watch her grow old. I would have wanted her to watch me die.”

A couple can never know which person will outlive the other, or if they will die together. The one who survives will always be a delegate of death rather than simply grieving. The love that delegates itself through death is Eros. After all the nights, days, years of flesh united, its absence can only be filled through the erotic imagination. “Eroticism is the approval of life, even in death,” Georges Bataille tells us, thinking of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Sexuality necessarily implies death because reproduction signifies eventual disappearance from earth. To understand this is to understand erotic life after the death of a lover. To understand this is to understand the sexual relationship in the present at its most intense degree and to surpass it, erotically speaking, each and every hour that the beloved does not return in the physical sense.

But then shouldn’t there exist, even in the most complete love, an anticipation of loss that intensifies the sexual present? Sometimes, as I watch Silvia sleep, I wish I could steal her name, her appearance, her experience from her, so that I could be the absolute master of her existence, the jealous guardian of her secrets. Without her, I can only conceive of love standing before a mirror, trembling from the memory of her. And then, disturbed and hungry, I hastily return to her closeness. I treat her body as if it were mine. With Silvia I learn to feel both passion and respect for the female body united with mine. I only praise her in the name of the perfection that I ascribe to her, even if she does not possess it, the perfection that she offers up to me, even though she may not see it.

Every night I leave an invisible note on her pillow that says, “I like you.”

Women are the fleeting voyagers of the dawn. Each one is the bearer of a different destiny. My destiny was to find Silvia and to make all that is mine hers.