11 Bulgarian Love Songs #3
Acting as disoriented as a castaway, by the time the exhausted yet satisfied Antoine Fernández removed his blindfold and recovered his human appearance, he could no longer spot Jean-Pierre and Paulina.
The lovers had slipped away quickly for a pizza and beer before returning home.
Paulina had left her worries behind in la Tuileries, on the bench of words.
On the last evening, on rue du Trésor, their thoughts came out in streams. It felt like time was slipping away from them, like they didn’t have enough time to say everything.
Did you know that Dante only saw Beatrice once?
They didn’t even exchange a word, and he wrote The Divine Comedy.
Dante was nine and Bice Portinari was only eight.
I’ve never had the patience to read it, don’t hold it against me.
What about Madame Bovary? Yes, Madame Bovary I have.
I’m sure she would have gotten divorced if she had lived today.
Back then you had to suffer, and you suffered.
In the past, love wasn’t love. People tend to think it’s easier if there’s not anxiety about love ending, but no.
It’s the opposite. It’s actually harder.
What do you know? Paulina had said this to Jean-Pierre, taking a risk, knowing nothing about the forty-five years of his life before Julie’s wedding.
Love is like life. If it didn’t have an expiration date—they agreed on that at least—it would be terribly boring.
The grace of it, what moves us, the engine that makes us throb and suffer and strive, is that we don’t know when it ends.
Love and life. It can last into old age, or it can end tomorrow.
It can end suddenly, or it can slowly wither away or arrive gently, like sea-foam.
The key is the illusion that love exists.
There are people who pass through this world without ever catching its scent.
Even if you and I, and the neighbors downstairs, and Julie, and Antoine Fernández, and everyone wrote down our own definitions of love, no two would be alike.
We could put all the definitions in an envelope, open that envelope up, and pull out as many forms of love as there were people who have participated.
The two lovers wanted to believe, however, that their definition, based on what they had said and shared up to that point, would be very similar. Perhaps with some variance.
Paulina hid the dramatics of believing it was her last night. Jean-Pierre, who didn’t want to take stock of his emotions, experienced it like a drop of honey.
“A drop of honey?”
“You don’t like it?”
“Honey? More now than when I was little. But I don’t eat it much.”
“Drops of honey. Did you study Latin in school?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know who Lucretius was?”
“No.”
“He was a Latin philosopher from before Christ was born. He committed suicide in his early forties. They say he went mad because of some love potions he drank. But that’s all a legend, because no one has ever been able to prove it.
The only thing we know is that throughout his whole life Lucretius wrote a single book, De Rerum Natura.
And he wrote it in verse. This was his greatest contribution, my dear Pauline.
He knew he had to explain something as complex as Epicurus’s doctrine through atomic physics.
And he believed that the best way to disperse that knowledge in the period was through poetry.
He believed that it would be easier for people to understand his message in verse. ”
“Don’t lie to me.” Paulina was getting to know him better, but every now and then she still felt Jean-Pierre enjoyed pulling her leg.
“I’m serious, really serious. De Rerum Natura, his book, was written in the form of a long poem, because he thought people would understand it better.
But Epicurus, who was more into physics than rhymes, was annoyed at the didactic way Lucretius treated his discoveries.
So Lucretius pulled a metaphor that still endures to this day out of his sleeve, out of the sleeve of his tunic.
He said that when children refused to take a medicine because it was too bitter, a drop of honey made it easier to swallow.
He argued that the verses were the drops of honey, the honey that is poetry, that helped sweeten his message. ”
“The pleasure of the senses.”
“For me, drops of honey are the moments life gives us. The dance at the wedding, every kiss, every one of your caresses, the visit to Shakespeare and Company, this morning’s breakfast, the Bulgarian voices we listened to with our hearts.
Buying a painting. Going to a concert. A sunset on the river.
Holding a book I’ve spent months looking for.
Dinner with a friend. Seeing your smile, like it is right now.
All drops of honey. We’re not here to give moments away, Pau. It’s always later than you think.”
“Oh, Jean-Pierre, I love you so much. Will you say it to me?”
She threw herself onto Jean-Pierre, sitting on top of his legs, and they kissed with a whole lifetime’s worth of passion. Paulina felt sweaty. She was uncomfortable. She thought Jean-Pierre might notice.
“I haven’t told you about Rosseta, have I?”
“It doesn’t ring a bell.”
“I’ll take a shower and then tell you.”
Jean-Pierre played some motets by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and sat down on the sofa.
Paulina reappeared twenty minutes later, clean, refreshed, ready for her last night on Trésor.
She had tied a thick white towel around her body and a smaller one around her head so that her soaking hair wouldn’t drip.
“You smell great.”
She liked that Jean-Pierre had noticed.
“You smell different,” he continued.
“Maybe it’s the lotion I put on my legs. They felt sore. But maybe it’s because today is the day we walked the least.”
“It smells like coconut. It’s nice.”
It wasn’t just her scent. Paulina knew how to play with the opening of her towel, revealing her sensual, gleaming, carefully well-maintained legs.
She knew which way to sit so she showed off her long thighs, her round knees, her strong calves, her well-proportioned ankles.
There was not an ounce of excess skin anywhere.
Paulina had a real obsession with her legs.
Her mother had always said she should be euthanized when she got to the age where she had turtle legs, wrinkled legs with toes twisted by arthritis and mussel-shell nails.
It never came to that. She still had perfect legs when she choked on a chestnut, mere days after turning sixty.
Her father, Senyor Homs, an accountant at a textile company on Carrer Casp in Barcelona, had seen Ava Gardner’s legs at the movies and went back three Sundays in a row. Mogambo.
“For a couple of years my parents and I spent the summers in a house in Espinavessa, not far from the lake . . . Does Banyoles sound familiar to you?”
“No.”
“You’re missing out. Espinavessa is near Girona and Banyoles.
It’s a combination of wheat fields and forests.
Landscapes made to be painted. I must have been six or seven, no older than that.
We lived in a modest home that I thought was ours until, much later, I discovered we only rented it for the summer.
There, where everything was quite flat, I learned how to ride a bike, and once I knew how, they sent me to fetch the milk every morning.
At night, my dad and I counted bats. Every afternoon, my mother and I ate a snack at the spring below the village, on the path to the washhouses.
“One day my mother said to me, ‘We’re going on a hike today.’ She had packed water and sandwiches into a backpack, slung it over her shoulders, and said, ‘I’ve found a path we’ve never walked.
We’ll take it all the way to Orfes.’ It was an adventure.
Seven kilometers there and seven back, along a little trail that ran through the middle of nowhere.
It didn’t seem we’d run into any fields or pass through the threshing floor of any house. We hardly saw any farmhouses.
“Suddenly, once we were already quite far from an abandoned home, we heard a dog barking. The barking quickly got closer. And soon we saw a dog galloping straight toward us at full speed. ‘Don’t worry,’ my mother said.
I was paralyzed. I grabbed her hand and noticed she was just as frozen as I was.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said. All the while the wolf dog, and its gnashing teeth, kept getting nearer and nearer.
The idea of what it intended to do scared the living daylights out of me.
I remember that feeling, Jean-Pierre, of thinking, This is it.
This is where my mother and I will die, eaten up.
It was the most scared I’ve ever been. The creature was probably four meters away from us, when my mother suddenly let go of my hand and screamed ‘Stop!’ She motioned her hand at it.
She screamed at that dog and threatened it in a way she had never done to me.
The wolf dog suddenly stopped short, frightened either by the gesture or the yell.
I don’t know. The truth is that the dog took two steps back.
We stood there for a few seconds, motionless.
“Tired from its run, it looked at us with sad eyes, its mouth open and tongue lolling out. Our hearts racing, we looked back at it, not knowing whether we should retreat or keep moving. At least now it was no longer barking. It had stopped, and it didn’t quite have the look of a serial killer.
On the contrary. Now it looked like a dog who had been mistreated, like it had taken a few beatings.