“Because in love I am an idiot / who has suffered a thousand defeats / I don’t have the strength to defend myself,” sings Polo Montañez as I write this Tuesday, the last of June 2021, the 29th of the month. I object to getting up to dance between the impulse of procrastination and the need to give in to the demands of my feet to walk the gray floor of my room and thus evoke those many times that I have walked with my fingers intertwined with those of some gentleman, so close to his body that I can perceive the temperature of the sweat and the textures of his desire, resisting, sometimes successfully, sometimes in a lustful failure, to end the night on someone else’s bed. Guillermo Arriaga wrote it well in his Save the fire: “… There is no worse tyrant for a man than sex. It concentrates millennia of evolution. Search, seduce, attack, turn, fight, crouch, jump. Sex, the great autocrat turning orders ”.
Although rebellious by nature, sometimes I succumb to tyrannical sex and do an involuntary tribute to Grupo Niche and its “We burst, we are bursting / every time we look at each other head-on / and we touch our feet under the table / and a stolen kiss remains always as goodbye ”, without precisely fleeing the stolen kiss, but using it as a prelude to a more pleasant time; After all, not all relationships end in a deep involvement of the motivations of the soul but you go to what you go, as the character of Alex of the story I adore you by Cristina Peri Rossi: “How can I be talking about German romanticism if I only think of her ass?”
As I learned from my own broken heart some years ago that Alain de Botton’s wisdom in Love lasts three years It is infallible and “love can be born at first sight, but it does not die with the corresponding speed”, I decided that my thing, my thing, was to enjoy the “try to seduce me very slowly / and I do not repair what everything in the act will do to you ”By Chichi Peralta while it lasted, before listening to the affected person utter disastrous or liberating words, such as those of Gilberto Santa Rosa in Countdown: “Now there are only numbers in your head / of a relationship that does not give for more”, and it is that one lives a “dreaming, with you, wanting our idyll to be fulfilled” that Willie Colón probably only hallucinated because, if I am frank, After so much trial and error, encounters and disagreements, I am finally thinking that what was written by Coral Herrera in Owner of my love, “Men, better as lovers!”, Is the conviction that one should set in stone not to end up as the wife of The beauty of the husband of Anne Carson when pronouncing a sentence as accurate as ironic: “Double desire is love and double love is madness.”
I remember
At the end of the day “this life is the same as a book / each page is a day lived / Let’s not try to run before we walk / tonight we are alive / only this moment is reality”, as Luis Enrique’s salsa anthem says, we are here to enjoy the arts of the body and the intellect and remember that “the simplest division that can be made of the human race is between people who take things seriously and people who take them lightly” (what a wisdom of Henry James on Bostonians).
So I better stop this tirade right now. Rubén Blades tells the story of the poor Pedro navaja and his deadly coincidence with a New York prostitute and my feet can’t help but pressure me to ditch my chair and computer and conquer the gray floor. I breathe, I smile and I remember that “life gives you surprises / surprises gives you life.”
Oh, and that salsa and books can definitely explain it all.
–
