18 Suddenly, the Cliff
Suddenly, the Cliff
Black Friday
My dear and heartbroken Julie,
You called to tell me two days ago at this time.
And I’m writing first of all to thank you for thinking of me immediately.
I’m grateful for the call, but I still can’t accept it.
I simply don’t believe it. It’s too much.
I don’t believe it or want to believe it.
Pauline. It can’t be. Thirty-one. She was fine, you told me.
You were crying so hard, and I was in so much shock—and I still am—that I’m not sure I understood you.
She woke up with a headache? She asked her husband to take the little girl to school, because she was going back to bed.
Is that what you told me? And it was already too late by the time the maid arrived?
Either way, the details aside . . . A cerebral hemorrhage.
At thirty-one? I’ve never heard of a case like that.
It’s hard to believe and, more than anything, hard to swallow.
The grief is enormous, the pain insatiable, and the rage infinite.
The sorrow, as you can imagine, isn’t for me—no doubt it’s the same for you—but for her.
A life cut short, so young, all at once, without the chance to see Gina grow up. Suddenly everything goes to hell.
Life begins, life ends. We all know that, but the injustice makes me feel rebellious.
Right now, furious and crushed, I would grab fate by the throat.
Even though I’d have everything to lose and it would serve no purpose, I’d confront it and insult it until I lose my voice, my strength, and my dignity.
I walk, Julie, back and forth, from here to there, and I don’t know what to do or think during these black days and in the ones to come.
It’s hard to think, and even harder to order the thoughts and the memories that rush out of me, like tears.
And I have a headache from crying so much. Is it the same for you?
Sometimes, when I manage to calm myself down, I think that I have loved only one woman and that I lost her twice.
It’s too late for reproaches. I know. But at the airport, when she was returning home from your wedding, maybe if I had insisted that .
. . When there is no cure, what good is it to poison your own blood?
And now I have lost her for good, without being able to tell her: “You know what, Pauline, every day since I met you, I’ve seen your smile at my side when I close my eyes.
” I have so many things to say . . . Why do we always wait so long to say them?
Why do we live holding back words and feelings?
Why do we never realize it’s getting late?
In one of the letters, I wrote that I didn’t miss her because I had her.
That’s how I felt. Maybe because I knew that at any moment we could see each other, or communicate with each other, one way or another.
I learned to live far from her because I felt her near, always with me.
You know those fire hose cabinets in theaters and hotels that say “Break the glass only in case of emergency”?
In that same metaphor, that is not very poetic, I admit, I convinced myself on more than one occasion that maybe one day, she or I would smash that emergency glass with a hammer to meet each other again and experience our love at leisure.
So I confess, after the fact, that deep down I also didn’t say I missed her because I maintained a secret hope that we would be together again.
Physically together. Forever. And suddenly, the cliff.
In a single minute, my dreams and hopes have been swept out to sea.
Now that death has cruelly shattered all those possibilities, I have to confess to you, with tears flooding the table from where I write, that I missed her, I miss her, and I will miss her hopelessly.
No matter how I remember every hour of our four splendid days together, no matter how I venerate her with a lover’s pride, no matter how much I love her like I have never loved anyone, the only truth is that yes: I will miss her.
So much. Every day. Until the gentle foam comes to collect me too.
Do you know what seems to me the cruelest and most unbelievable thing of all?
To accept that Pau is no longer part of this world, that she will know nothing of what will happen tomorrow and the day after that, and the next year, to her family or on the other side of the world.
I remember that, at our first dinner at Les Deux Magots, we argued—no, we didn’t argue, we discussed—when history began.
Before Christ is prehistory. After Christ, and up to a second ago, is history, she told me, sure of her theory.
The counter of history restarts at zero with the birth of writing, I insisted.
And that would be with cuneiform in Mesopotamia thirty-five hundred years before Christ. And Julie, honestly, what nonsense it was.
Sticking the label a little more in this direction or that direction doesn’t matter, not one bit.
What I mean is that your cousin, like all of us, knew what happened in the Stone Age.
She distinguished between the Paleolithic era and the Neolithic era.
She was aware of how we evolved from caveman to Homo sapiens.
She didn’t confuse the Bronze Age with the Iron Age.
She studied how the pyramids were built in ancient Egypt, what people ate in the Middle Ages, how far the Byzantine Empire extended.
And of the Renaissance—the era in which I’d pay everything I have to spend a week in—we studied what Michelangelo meant throughout every square inch of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
We know by heart whose head was chopped in the French Revolution, why the railroad was key to the development of the United States, and how Hitler’s last hours went—or Marilyn Monroe’s.
Pauline knew it all about everything before her, her contemporaries, and her family. She will know nothing about everything after her. To me, that is the most brutal thing about death: period. Before here, everything. Back from here, nothing. Absolute.
“So then, when do we live?” That’s how our conversation continued at Les Deux Magots.
We exist while we are here, and while we are remembered.
And I can see it as if it were now. We came up with three additional examples.
Einstein, Flaubert, Kandinsky remain. They are immortal because their work makes them eternal, we concluded.
But people like that are few. Out of the more than one hundred billion people estimated to have been born on earth in all of human history, we chose four, Christ included.
How many names do we know? A thousand? Two thousand privileged people everyone knows and knows what they did?
Fine. And all the rest? We are here while we exist, or while our children and friends remember us, and then our grandchildren.
By the next generation practically no one mentions us, no one remembers us for anything, no one even knows we existed.
The whirlpool of time swallows the drops to return them to the ocean. And in no time, we stop existing.
That’s why, Julie, in these bitter hours—between sobs and curses—an idea has begun to roll around in my head.
It’s absurd, maybe. Maybe it’s only a fixation, but I’m so blinded right now that I can’t tell what is and isn’t worth it.
I won’t be the one to do it, but I’ve thought that someone—who, I’m not sure—should know your cousin’s story and tell it.
Only that way can Pauline be immortal, and only that way can our love, hidden until now, endure forever.
One day, in my apartment on rue du Trésor, she said: “I ask only one thing: Don’t turn our story into a novel.
It has to be for the two of us.” But now I think, what harm would there be in revealing it?
On the contrary. Perhaps a long time from now, when I’m gone too, someone will be drawn to the spine of a book, pick it up, and find a modest story inside that tells them what kind of woman Pauline was.
How she felt, how she lived, how she loved .
. . And afterward, the reader might place a hand on the cover and exclaim, “Friends, love exists. Love is the answer.”
Because that is the answer, isn’t it?
I realized it in Girona, one morning. Did Pauline ever tell you about our meeting?
Did she tell you anything about the most intense moment of our lives?
Almost two years ago, I had to go down to Perpignan to buy a series by Villeglé owned by a political graffiti collector in the south.
I remember it was a Friday. I closed the deal.
I was in the hotel room, ready to take a shower, and after turning it over and over in my head, I decided to do what for months and months I hadn’t dared.
I called Pauline’s home in Barcelona. Just as you heard, I did it.
I still don’t know how I dared do it. As I keyed in the numbers, the adrenaline, the pulse, the tension .
. . everything came out of me. And despite the regret, my fingers were faster than I was, and the tones of an international call sounded at once.
Once the number had been dialed, I came up with a plan.
If someone other than Pauline answered, I would hang up immediately.
If it was her, I had a short and quick proposal.
Of course, I wanted to say a thousand things, but I had to resist temptation and let her, when she set the receiver down, say: I don’t know who it is. Wrong number.