A Love Letter
–Julio Cortázar
Everything I’d want from you
is finally so little
because finally it’s everything
like a dog going by, or a hill,
those meaningless things, mundane,
wheat ear and long hair and two lumps of sugar,
the smell of your body,
whatever you say about anything
with or against me,
all that which is so little
I want from you because I love you
May you look beyond me,
may you love me with violent disregard
for tomorrow, let the cry
of your coming explode
in the boss’s face in some office
and let the pleasure we invent together
be one more sign of freedom.
Original
Una carta de amor
Todo lo que de vos quisiera
es tan poco en el fondo
porque en el fondo es todo,
como un perro que pasa, una colina,
esas cosas de nada, cotidianas,
espiga y cabellera y dos terrones,
el olor de tu cuerpo,
lo que decís de cualquier cosa,
conmigo o contra mía,
todo eso es tan poco,
yo lo quiero de vos porque te quiero.
Que mires más allá de mí,
que me ames con violenta prescindencia
del mañana, que el grito
de tu entrega se estrelle
en la cara de un jefe de oficina,
y que el placer que juntos inventamos
sea otro signo de la libertad.
Inflation Lies
–Julio Cortázar
Mirrors are free
but how costly to really look at yourself, and how
to see yourself
without it being a pre-stamped postcard
greeting with a view of the leaning
tower.
Rabid dogs are free
you never pay a cent for those things
on the other hand this roll this cup
of tapioca or the morning cappuccino
price reliable eighty cents plus tip
maybe included maybe not
The sun is free and this eraser
fifty cents. pay to destroy! Cats
are free chickenpox
accidents the wisps of smoke
gracefully streaming from the peanut vendors’ carts.
Eclipses are free so pretty and the speeches
in the Plaza de Mayo. A nation
that does everything for its children. Read
the guidebook with the map: two forty.
Love is free you pay at the end or okay
they pay you (depending on luck or your necktie).
Various prices: Lin Yutang Boca Juniors
you see it you try it on you take it away
Death is free. One two and three
a spoonful for papa
and another for mama and such a cute baby
Original
Inflación que mentira
Los espejos son gratis
pero qué caro mirarse de verdad, y cómo verse
que no sea saludo a precio fijo
postal con la vista de la torre
inclinada.
Los perros rabiosos son gratis
por esas cosas nunca paga nada
en cambio este felipe esta tacita
de tapioca o el capuchino del amanecer
ticket seguro cero ochenta y el servicio
quizá lo encuentre comprendido quizá no.
El sol es gratis y esta goma de lápiz
cero cincuenta pague para destruir! Los gatos
son gratis La viruela boba
los accidentes el humito
que da prestigio a la locomotora de los maniseros.
Los eclipses son gratis tan bonitos y los discursos
en la Plaza de Mayo. Una nación
que lo hace todo por sus hijos. Lea
la guía con el plano: dos cuarenta.
El amor es gratis paga al final o bien
le pagan (depende de la suerte o la corbata).
Precios variables: Lin Yu Tang Boca Júniors
usted lo ve lo prueba y se lo lleva.
La muerte es gratis. Una dos y tres
una cucharada para papá
y otra para mamá así lindo el nene.
Me siento morir en ti, atravesado de espacios
que crecen, que me comen igual que mariposas
hambrientas.
Cierro los ojos y estoy tendido en tu memoria,
apenas vivo,
con los abiertos labios donde remonta el río del
olvido.
Y tú, con delicadas pinzas de paciencia me
arrancas
los dientes, las pestañas, me desnudas
el trébol de la voz, la sombra del deseo,
vas abriendo en mi nombre ventanas al espacio
y agujeros azules en mi pecho
por donde los veranos huyen lamentándose.
Transparente, aguzado, entretejido de aire
floto en la duermevela, y todavía
digo tu nombre y despierto acongojado.
Pero te esfuerzas y me olvidas,
yo soy apenas la burbuja
que te refleja, que destruirás
con sólo un parpadeo.
If I’m to live without you, let it be hard and bloody,
cold soup, broken shoes, or in the midst of opulence
let the dry branch of a cough jerk through me, barking
your twisted name, the foaming vowels, and let the bedsheets
stick to my fingers, and nothing give me peace.
I won’t learn to love you any better this way,
but abandoned by happiness
I’ll know how much you gave me just by sometimes being around.
I think I understand this, but I’m kidding myself:
there’ll need to be frost on the lintel
so the one taking shelter in the vestibule feels
the light in the dining room, the milky tablecloths, and the smell
of bread passing its brown hand through the crack.
As far apart from you
as one eye from the other,
out of this affliction I’ve taken on
will be born the gaze that deserves you at last.
Original
Si he de vivir sin ti, que sea duro y cruento,
la sopa fría, los zapatos rotos,
o que en mitad de la opulencia se alce la rama seca de la tos,
ladrándome tu nombre deformado, las vocales de espuma,
y en los dedos se me peguen las sábanas, y nada me dé paz.
No aprenderé por eso a quererte mejor,
pero desalojado de la felicidad
sabré cuánta me dabas
con solamente a veces estar cerca.
Esto creo entenderlo, pero me engaño:
hará falta la escarcha del dintel
para que el guarecido en el portal
comprendala luz del comedor,
los manteles de leche,
y el aroma del pan
que pasa su morena mano por la hendija.
Tan lejos ya de ti como un ojo del otro,
de esta asumida adversidad nacerá la mirada
que por fin te merezca.
I had given a lot of thought to mirrors – both literal and figurative – in the days leading up to his sharing a random thought about mirrors and their uses. I twirled that around in my mind – how is it that each thought he expresses is like a mirror of my own thoughts? Not just general “thinking similarly” but near-verbatim captures, as though he were me and shared my consciousness, overlapping in time and meaning. I would think something, be overcome by something, silently, and he would voice the next logical thought or feeling for me. It should have been frightening to realize this interchangeability, but instead it was comforting to feel that a shared mind could express what I could not, or could extend my expressions, without my exerting any effort at all. An intellectual and mental mirror image.
My considerations, informed by a complete overload of reading, centered on how mirrors and reflections (both the visual and the intellectual varieties) intertwine effortlessly with memory, desire, identity and our whole concept of time, i.e. what the past and future mean to us as we creep through the minutes and hours of the present.
We know there is no objective truth when it comes to human reflection, but does that make it all reflective deceit? Our reflections have value, but at what cost?
“At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it. Not everything that seems valuable above the mirror maintains its force when mirrored.” – Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
“Los espejos son gratis pero qué caro mirarse de verdad…” – Julio Cortázar, “Inflación qué mentira” (Mirrors are free but how dear to really see yourself”)
Particularly given how memory is tricky, slippery and totally enmeshed in personal consciousness.
“La memoria es un espejo que miente escandalosamente.” -Cortázar (Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies)
The fallibility and subjectivity of memory means it cannot be trusted.
“Stuck On Repeat” – Little Boots – because repeating shit is what I do: “Every time I try to break free/then something comes along to intervene”
But we’re alive,
full of memory and thought,
love, sometimes regret,
and at moments we take a special pride
because the future cries in us
and its tumult makes us human.
(“y que el placer que juntos inventamos
sea otro signo de la libertad.”)
When he told me I had complete “handlingsfrihet”, I was exhilarated. At least for that brief moment. With him, I knew it was just fantasy and would never come to pass. Total liberty and freedom to do whatever I wanted was possible only in our shared imagination in those very limited moments.
In reality, the only place I have complete control, artistic license, the freedom to choose and speak is in using my voice. I could hear my true voice somewhere inside but never really pushed it into the world with any degree of authenticity. As soon as I consciously decided to write something (other than a letter, a school paper), all kinds of artifice and “trying to make things sound good” clouded the basic premise of the writing and the core idea of what I wanted to express. Still, the voice was there. It was just muffled under layers of my own doubt.
Even when I was young, teachers and influential adults around me told me I would be a writer. Teachers in whose classes I was never a student even referred to me this way. I don’t know where the reputation came from nor how it spread. By the time I was a confused adolescent, I had convinced myself that all these adults were praising my writing only as a means to bolster my self-confidence, not because there was any truth to it. I felt cheated, mistrustful and misled. In my own dorky academic way, I rebelled – I could not live up to the expectations they had created (I thought) and did not want to be told what I was. I took language classes but steered clear of explicitly writing-focused courses (journalism, creative writing, etc.) and never looked back. My life ever since has still been all about writing – academic, corporate or what have you. But the practice of writing a short story every day, as I had done effortlessly when I was 13, was and is long gone.
These days I think a lot about writing and freedom and how, for me, they are intertwined. I can only escape from the unhealthy misery I feel right now if I embrace writing as a rope with which to climb out of the space I am increasingly feeling trapped in.
Handlingsfrihet will be mine, one way or another. (Baking and recipe posts coming soon.)
