I’ve been wanting to spend some time to think about love. I believe I was the ideal candidate for its obsessive kind. You know, the type of love that’s like an addiction, that eats you up, all-consuming, throwing you in a state of utter dependency.
It happened once, my first boyfriend, Richard. He was an ideal man for the times, 18 years old, already attending university. A prodigy. A future Nobel Prize in literature his entourage would say. The beatnik look having been conceived for him, a charcoal worn-out wool sweater with holes, the long sleeves hiding half the hands, the thin scarf loosely thrown around the neck, one side over the shoulder, the dark trench-coat, the feminine fingers yellowed by nicotine, the hair slightly curled and cut unevenly. High cheekbones on a pale face, delicate lips, and piercing eyes behind glasses with a minimalist steel frame.
I met him I was 13, dated him for about a year. Like a debutante entering paradise.
He would call on Thursday evenings to fix a time when we would meet the next day for a synchronized laser-light concert on the music of Schoenberg, the latest Arrabal movie, or a play by Ionesco.
It’s not like today, honey, where with one click on Google I can find the info I need to make a good impression. We’re talking here of a truck load of books borrowed from more than one library, because I could only take out five at a time from each.
In two short sentences, even less sometimes, Richard on the phone would also plug in the names of Arthur Koestler, Sartre, Camus and Gertrude Stein. It left me exactly 24 hours to read these authors’ entire works before I would see Richard again, and start a conversation with “Your assertion, yesterday, about Koestler’s analysis on the maturity of crowds…” And be loved in return. His passion exemplified, proved beyond any doubt with a reply he found me worthy of, quoting German philosophers as an example. Can you imagine the honor? So touched I thought my heart would explode.
Oh, how I loved Richard. Our parties, the air perfumed by hasch, fighting numbness, our bodies stretched on big pillows with Indian motifs, while he would stand like a giant among us reciting his latest poetry, dodecaphonic notes in the background.
Richard had read everything, I mean everything, at least twice.
And he changed me. I was no longer a girl, but myself a walking encyclopedia.
I started to skip school to read, hidden in a park. Trying to assimilate the Greek classics, the surrealists, and Russian literature in the same afternoon. And when I thought I had attained a decent level of knowledge in a field, he would glide into another, and I would rush to learn from scratch all there was on impressionism or cubism. If I breathed, relieved to be able at last to speak a bit about 20th century European writers, he would surprise me with a comment on South-American ones. Loving Richard was eternal. A constant fear my ignorance would be discovered. Preparing myself to attend a Becket’s play, I would dread our discussion afterward. What if he linked Godot to a quote from Russel’s Principia Mathematica? I’d really be fucked.
A full time job to love Richard, sweet one. Every minute so intense, thousands of years of art history condensed over a beer at a jazz club where I had also to tell apart genuine bebop from what’s not, without being caught as an under-aged.
One day, he left me.
Absolute abandonship.
He dumped me for his teacher, a remarkable beautiful blonde, 28 years old, with legs like you wouldn’t believe, herself an aspiring poet. A woman with experience, he told me, twisting the blade deeper to kill me more.
I never got over that disaster. I couldn’t understand. I had read all the right books, at a phenomenal speed. Couldn’t have gone any faster. That was the best I could do, and it hadn’t been enough. My beatnik costume was as good as it could get. My political discourse was in the right direction. I could, from memory, chant as many poems from Rimbaud as she could, maybe even more. I religiously listened everyday to Leonard Cohen, Nina Simone, taking a break only to go with serial music. But I wasn’t as sexy as she was. Still with chubby baby fat. Nothing of a woman yet. I only smelled of patchouli. She had a salary and real bottles of French flowery fragrances.
I was totally outclassed. Devastated. Destroyed.
Oh yes, I obsessed. Calling his friends a dozen times a day to ask what I had done wrong. Unable to let go. To abdicate. To move on.
I just couldn’t understand, honey. A deep mystery over my eyes, making it impossible to consider anything else. A pain I would be incapable of reliving. A distress beyond imagination. My young life wrecked, no recovery possible. Smashed to pieces.
It goes without saying that I would never take any chances after that. Rejection was not an option I could deal with. For years, I stayed alone. No more boyfriends for me I thought.
I embraced the books, the rhymes, the pentameters, the alexandrines, counting the syllables, poetic meters, verses, iambic hexameters, pausing sometimes at caesuras in the lines, thinking I did recognize something in there.
With debilitating obstinacy, I learned by heart that summer the part of Camille in Corneille's Horace. Howling it at night in deserted parks. How did it go, just before Horace kills her? Something like (unsure though of the punctuation):
Rome ! l'unique objet de mon ressentiment
Rome, à qui vient ton bras d'immoler mon amant
Rome qui t'as vu naître, et que ton cœur adore
Rome enfin que je hais parce qu'elle t'honore
Puissent tous ses voisins…
See how your old grandma has today, on account of a lost boyfriend, both a fine classical culture, and the rhythmic metrical memory of a pristine tragedian.
Laolao
It happened once, my first boyfriend, Richard. He was an ideal man for the times, 18 years old, already attending university. A prodigy. A future Nobel Prize in literature his entourage would say. The beatnik look having been conceived for him, a charcoal worn-out wool sweater with holes, the long sleeves hiding half the hands, the thin scarf loosely thrown around the neck, one side over the shoulder, the dark trench-coat, the feminine fingers yellowed by nicotine, the hair slightly curled and cut unevenly. High cheekbones on a pale face, delicate lips, and piercing eyes behind glasses with a minimalist steel frame.
I met him I was 13, dated him for about a year. Like a debutante entering paradise.
He would call on Thursday evenings to fix a time when we would meet the next day for a synchronized laser-light concert on the music of Schoenberg, the latest Arrabal movie, or a play by Ionesco.
It’s not like today, honey, where with one click on Google I can find the info I need to make a good impression. We’re talking here of a truck load of books borrowed from more than one library, because I could only take out five at a time from each.
In two short sentences, even less sometimes, Richard on the phone would also plug in the names of Arthur Koestler, Sartre, Camus and Gertrude Stein. It left me exactly 24 hours to read these authors’ entire works before I would see Richard again, and start a conversation with “Your assertion, yesterday, about Koestler’s analysis on the maturity of crowds…” And be loved in return. His passion exemplified, proved beyond any doubt with a reply he found me worthy of, quoting German philosophers as an example. Can you imagine the honor? So touched I thought my heart would explode.
Oh, how I loved Richard. Our parties, the air perfumed by hasch, fighting numbness, our bodies stretched on big pillows with Indian motifs, while he would stand like a giant among us reciting his latest poetry, dodecaphonic notes in the background.
Richard had read everything, I mean everything, at least twice.
And he changed me. I was no longer a girl, but myself a walking encyclopedia.
I started to skip school to read, hidden in a park. Trying to assimilate the Greek classics, the surrealists, and Russian literature in the same afternoon. And when I thought I had attained a decent level of knowledge in a field, he would glide into another, and I would rush to learn from scratch all there was on impressionism or cubism. If I breathed, relieved to be able at last to speak a bit about 20th century European writers, he would surprise me with a comment on South-American ones. Loving Richard was eternal. A constant fear my ignorance would be discovered. Preparing myself to attend a Becket’s play, I would dread our discussion afterward. What if he linked Godot to a quote from Russel’s Principia Mathematica? I’d really be fucked.
A full time job to love Richard, sweet one. Every minute so intense, thousands of years of art history condensed over a beer at a jazz club where I had also to tell apart genuine bebop from what’s not, without being caught as an under-aged.
One day, he left me.
Absolute abandonship.
He dumped me for his teacher, a remarkable beautiful blonde, 28 years old, with legs like you wouldn’t believe, herself an aspiring poet. A woman with experience, he told me, twisting the blade deeper to kill me more.
I never got over that disaster. I couldn’t understand. I had read all the right books, at a phenomenal speed. Couldn’t have gone any faster. That was the best I could do, and it hadn’t been enough. My beatnik costume was as good as it could get. My political discourse was in the right direction. I could, from memory, chant as many poems from Rimbaud as she could, maybe even more. I religiously listened everyday to Leonard Cohen, Nina Simone, taking a break only to go with serial music. But I wasn’t as sexy as she was. Still with chubby baby fat. Nothing of a woman yet. I only smelled of patchouli. She had a salary and real bottles of French flowery fragrances.
I was totally outclassed. Devastated. Destroyed.
Oh yes, I obsessed. Calling his friends a dozen times a day to ask what I had done wrong. Unable to let go. To abdicate. To move on.
I just couldn’t understand, honey. A deep mystery over my eyes, making it impossible to consider anything else. A pain I would be incapable of reliving. A distress beyond imagination. My young life wrecked, no recovery possible. Smashed to pieces.
It goes without saying that I would never take any chances after that. Rejection was not an option I could deal with. For years, I stayed alone. No more boyfriends for me I thought.
I embraced the books, the rhymes, the pentameters, the alexandrines, counting the syllables, poetic meters, verses, iambic hexameters, pausing sometimes at caesuras in the lines, thinking I did recognize something in there.
With debilitating obstinacy, I learned by heart that summer the part of Camille in Corneille's Horace. Howling it at night in deserted parks. How did it go, just before Horace kills her? Something like (unsure though of the punctuation):
Rome ! l'unique objet de mon ressentiment
Rome, à qui vient ton bras d'immoler mon amant
Rome qui t'as vu naître, et que ton cœur adore
Rome enfin que je hais parce qu'elle t'honore
Puissent tous ses voisins…
See how your old grandma has today, on account of a lost boyfriend, both a fine classical culture, and the rhythmic metrical memory of a pristine tragedian.
Laolao
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