Everything but love
PART I
My friends have stopped calling me as much as they used to because they know I will be leaving soon.
“It’s hard for me to see you when I know you are going to be leaving so soon. I don’t like to think about it, because you have been very good for me and I feel that maybe when you leave, I will have lost a friend.”
It seems to take Jesi all the courage she can muster just to do all these mundane things with me. But I keep finding ways to be with her. Perhaps it’s because she always leaves me feeling depressed, which is the easiest way for me to feel human.
Today, however, it was a silly little thing I did with Jesi that stood out. Before that silly little thing, I had taken a French class, eaten, written some poetry, tried in vain to get my paycheck, and watched part of a movie. I thought how depressing it is that I ordinarily look forward to things that take my attention away from life.
But today I saw something really beautiful. Jesi really smiled. She forgot everything and was happy, darn near ecstatic. The sky was blue at the time, I stopped to look around and everyone was smiling stupidly, including me. It was a pure moment. Jesi had taken me to see her dog’s new puppy, a beautiful brown cocker spaniel.
“He’s exactly like his father. You can see his eyes, same exact eyes as Cookie. He got that from his father. Don’t you think she looks exactly like Cookie?” she asks me. I say he sure does, withholding the thought that he looks exactly like every other cocker spaniel I’ve seen. I don’t know if the people were smiling more at the birth of a beautiful puppy or at the supreme happiness of an old girl characterized by sad droopy eyes.
Last I saw concerning the impregnation efforts, that cocker spaniel bitch–which the neighbors brought over for the purpose–was giving Cookie a real hard time inseminating her. At some point something must have clicked, because that new dog sure does look a lot like Cookie, except cuter and more agreeable. Cookie Sr. is rather annoying; he always barks like mad when I come to the house, and always seems to do his best to get in the way of my feet. He has that annoying small-dog inferiority complex where every little chance he can, he tries to stand up for his owner, always vigilant, and misunderstanding my intentions with Jesi.
Boy, Jesi sure is proud, bending over, standing up, watching the puppy like a proud parent, crouching down to rub his ears, whispering baby talk, giggling. I find myself smiling too, and look around me and realize we’ve all become just as happy and ingenuous as that puppy, smiling and gawking. In that moment, we still loved life enough to celebrate a new member.
The mother’s owner picks up Cookie Jr. and holds him close to her breast. “I take him to the park, and he runs. My does he run…and he looks around for things, and he stops, does like this”: she makes a face that doesn’t look anything like a dog face to me, but I’m glad she doesn’t care that she looks ridiculous. The puppy is so pure, so naïve, and so cute. He’s living just to live. He doesn’t have a loud bark and its bite is harmless. Sometimes I think that is the hardest part about being a man—no matter what a man does, his genius and viscousness make him dangerous; he can’t be innocent.
I can’t make Jesi smile like that. She can’t have any love for me without any fear mixed in. In fact, that has characterized our relationship—she loves me because she is afraid and afraid because she loves me, while I silently disdain her for choosing to be with me when I don’t make her happy. I am embittered at her because she only loves me as a man, but never as a child. I want to hate her, but I can’t. She’s too helpless to hate. It’s easier to hate myself.
As I think about the whole situation, I smile with a tinge of depression. So many beautiful things are sad if you think about it.
PART II
“Tonight I can write the saddest verses. Verses like: The night is shattered and the stars shiver, blue, in the distance.” –Pablo Neruda.
On a log raft at a countryside lake, I sit next to a shivering Ecuadorian woman, a sweet girl, a romantic, embittered by the disappointment of love. She’s 21 and her first marriage with the love of her life only lasted a couple months. She says she doesn’t believe in love, but she only says that because love hurts and she doesn’t believe in anything else. Perhaps it is the aroma of crushed flowers that drew me to her. Her eyes tell me she will love again in time.
I explain to her the sounds of the aspen trees and some of the birds in Colorado as the ducks quack in the grassy lake next to us and the swooping birds make their cat-call-like whistle as if a thousand beautiful women were passing all over the countryside. The sparse and Dr. Seuss-like eucalyptus speckle the green and rolling hills, and the snow-covered Mt. Chimborazo presides from behind its cloudy veil as a monumental god of the landscape.
It is times like these I like to be silent and listen. So I implore the girl next to me to speak so a young woman’s voice would be added to the birdsong. She only talks of love and how it has betrayed her. She tells me how nice it is to be with me and to laugh. I stare off at the great mountain and think about all the things in Ecuador I will miss. She asks me what I am thinking and I try to explain how I am a little sad that I am leaving and that we had only met a few days before I am to leave, and about how very happy I am that I will be returning home anyway, and how hard it is to wait. She pulls me back to earth with her smile and asks me what there is to miss. I smile in response.
She exhibits the Ecuadorian ability to observe only the present. My present is beautiful, although I fight the cold by blowing into my hands until the moment the sinking sun beckons me to move on. That is what waiting is always like. If you look around you, it is beautiful, and you don’t really want to leave. And this somehow makes leaving all the sweeter.
We wait on the side of the road for the bus, facing each other, doing a shiver dance in the cold. The warmth of the bus, otherwise unremarkable, creates a new mood of satisfaction. On each of our hands, in the fleshy part between thumb and forefinger, is a little heart we drew on each other with a pen. She drew an arrow through mine, and I told her she should probably put two arrows through it and a few more thorns. I added motion lines to hers to indicate that it was still beating, so she added them to mine. The twilight brings out the magic of imagination mixed with the lines of reality.
I take her hand and she takes mine to warm them up. Both hands become involved. She speaks with her hands, letting me see a little of her caged passion, a truly beautiful thing. I touch her arms, she touches my face, I rub my nose on hers, our foreheads rest together as we look into each other’s eyes and say sweet things. She makes me promise to give her a photo of me before I leave with my name on it and offers me one of her earrings in return. I think she is very happy I am here and glad I am leaving soon.
When we get off the bus, it is back to reality. Her face becomes cold again as we say “see you later,” knowing it isn’t certain. But both our hearts whisper an eternal thank you.
Ecuador likes everything sweet but love.
Tags: Travel
Aaron Baldassare