Go to the other side

The day is terrible without scruples. What does happiness or despair matter to the day if the day is an inert thing. I look at the sky white as cartilage. When I was a girl, it was enough for me to think that when I grew up I would be a French woman, that I would swim in the tropics, that I would go to New York nightclubs wearing 15-centimeter heels and bright lipstick, that I would live in Bali, that I would see Africa, that there would always be a horse I could ride. Those thoughts made me quite happy. I also imagined a simple existence: rice fields, my hut, a hammock, a small table, a boat, a notebook, the sun surrendering like a saint at sunset. The sea, the smell of fish, nets, brown feet, docks without pride, pebbles like cold thoughts, conversations with women and men whose languages ​​I would mostly not know, streets wet by the soft bed of hanging clothes. I did some of those things. I had many more. No complaints. But today the hours smell like shadow stubble. The day destroys to pieces whatever is in front of it: a human face, a snout. The days of dreaming are over, says the day. The times of believing are over. There is no more talk of oysters and kings. Goodbye to the well-tempered rhyme, to memory and honey, to the music of time. No more fragrant silence. The day spreads bone remains in its role as a murderer and shows who is boss. And he rules. Of the epiphanies, of the gallop of that heart—which was mine—little remains. Of what seemed triumphant, of what seemed invincible: little remains. The day, its sharp rage, circumspectly transports the rigid architecture of what was not, of what could not be, of what will not be. “(…) there is always a little bit of everything left,” writes Carlos Drummond de Andrade, “Sometimes a button. Sometimes a rat.” We already know: the gates of heaven are disguised in darkness. You have to slide boldly, gently, through the tunnel and find what remains. Because the absence of tenderness is hell.