But I was talking about Blake. Pity is what I need more than anything else. The world’s pity, the pity of some other, even a single one, and pity for myself, to love myself even though I haven’t accomplished anything in my life, nothing beyond changing my body, loving a few people, and looking for your daughter, a girl who not for a single second of her life has ever had me in her thoughts, since she doesn’t even know I exist. I can no longer tell whether that girl is the same one I am carrying inside. My pregnancy no longer seems like a miracle to me, not even an achievement; birth eludes me. I’m beginning to feel as if it’s no more than a punishment, that I’m a Sisyphus watching how the stone he’s lugged to the top of the mountain insists on rolling back down again. Only what in Greek myth is a stone, in real life is me. I’m the gargantuan rock I bear; the gargantuan rock I’ve created so as not to be alone.
When I consider the few things I’ve actually accomplished in my life, I can’t help but wonder where I’m going to get the strength to pull myself out of the well I’m in. I have no faith or hope in a future or in the tenderness of your love, which is now stored in the past; nor do I have the will to inhabit the present. For years, I think, I’ve lived like a puppeteer; all my energy has gone into making something move, something that is lifeless without me, but that has only the appearance of being alive with me. More than anything else, I feel exhausted. I wonder when the puppet will free itself so it can hold me up, pull the strings that move my back, my ankles, my head—especially my head. It seems as though every time I wake up, I am forced to organize these strings that have touched nothing but my hands and the ground, to separate and clean the strings that I’m dragging, with the sole purpose that if one day my puppet should return me the favor and pull me up, make me jump or fly or run or trip, it doesn’t find the strings in a tangle. But that day is slow in coming, and for that reason, my love, sometimes I consider cutting the strings. Of course I think about it. Cutting the strings and forever falling like a stick and a piece of cloth to be shunted about and broken by the tip of some random passerby’s shoe, nobody imagining that there at one time a brain had fired and a heart thumped. How easy it would be to disconnect myself, and yet how difficult it is to grab the scissors and cut those strings if not of life, at least of motion.
One simple act is what separates my life from my death, one stroke of the scissors, something a toothy rat could accomplish. How can it be that the only thing keeping such dissimilar states apart from each other is no more than an artless nip or nibble? Why now, when I’ve emptied my life of all value, does it still have enough consequence to suck me dry just trying to keep my breath kindled—all that effort to feed myself, wash myself, put my hair up, turn the lights on or off? Why is so much sacrifice needed just to maintain something that is supposed to be so valuable but in fact can be obliterated just like that, in a snap? It seems so strange to me, once I’ve decided I don’t want to live anymore, that people who see me in the subway or walking down the street aren’t able to distinguish how little I want to be alive in comparison with others. How can such an enormous decision be invisible to others or not alter their perception of me somehow? I contemplate all these things, and yet, you see, I’m alive, and not only that—sometimes I’m overcome with a sense of rage that leads me to consider not cutting my own strings, but perhaps one day, who knows when, cutting the strings of others.
Piety. Blake’s watercolor speaks of piety and that’s why I like it, and that’s surely why Irrational Number chose it to watch over me while I slept. His devotion to these pious images is not in vain, in the purely pagan or religious senses of the word; while piety in this work is rendered artistically as something traditionally religious, Irrational Number sees it as full of personal connotations. He’s always been avid to know the genealogies of words and feelings, so a few weeks ago he told me a story derived from his commitment to the ideas of empathy and compassion, which is supported by other pictorial works representing piety. It’s one of the most beautiful stories anyone has ever told me since you went quiet, with two main characters: a man in chains, usually an elderly one, in what invariably appears to be a prison; and a woman substantially younger than him placing her breast in the old man’s mouth. When Irrational Number explained who the characters were, I understood the tale to constitute the simplest act of kindness. Let me tell you the story. I think several versions exist, but they all share the same outline. A man is sentenced to death by starvation for an unspecified crime. He’s allowed to receive visits in the jail by his daughter, but permission is granted with a single condition: the daughter is not allowed to bring in food of any kind. Time goes by and the man shows no signs of dying, so the warden begins suspecting foul play. He can’t fathom what’s keeping him alive, since the girl, as he himself corroborates with every visit, hasn’t brought a single form of nutrition. One afternoon he decides to spy on them and finally discovers what is afoot: the daughter, who had given birth a few weeks earlier, has been breastfeeding her father. The authorities, far from being outraged, take the act as a symbol of what would later be known as Roman charity and free the father—the father whom the daughter had transformed, through her charity, into her baby.
I’ve ruminated often on the image of the jailed old man ever since Irrational Number told me that story, particularly when he went out to buy something or walk the dog, and I felt even lonelier. I felt as miserable as I possibly could: old man and lonely woman, or lonely man and old woman, two sorrows and opposing genders, the kind that produce friction when they grate against each other, like a square wheel in the soul, rusty and timeworn. This was another period of descending into hell. I find it hard to keep track of them anymore, and it doesn’t really matter because instead of descents into hell, they are like numerous hells spread over the same floor. A colossal floor with rooms all on the same level, each one with its signature brand of suffering so unlike the rest that its very newness is what makes it seem like you’re falling again. That one was, as far as I remember, the third hell to the right.
Irrational Number tried to get me out of the house on several occasions during that time, but I always rebuffed his efforts. I just couldn’t. This continued until the morning he came up with an idea. He said that if I preferred not to walk, he would carry me on his back. At first it seemed a ridiculous notion. As you can see, I’m still reluctant to act the fool, I who have had to forgo my fear of ridicule so many times when people judged as extravagant or shameful attitudes that were wholly innate to me, intrinsic features of my nature, simply the way my mother brought me into the world—features that for a long time (as you well know) I was able to conserve.