Just slightly above this still life, a giant pendulum swings back and forth. Comparative to the egg, it is the size and material of a tank. THE INFINITE NO is the name of the pendulum, and it swings with such uncontrolled power, such limitlessness. There is the INFINITE NO travelling back and forth as if on patrol to crush, or cut time in bite-size pieces, just at fingernail-distance above the perfect egg on a spotless surface.
In that centimetre of air between the egg and the pendulum, is all hope, are endless possibilities–the reality of that hope, however, is a matter of millimetres, one way or the other.
Do you remember the bees? The strange swarms of bees that kept coming. Thousands of them. I opened the windows in my bedroom and they flew in. The first time they found their way into my bedroom on their own, the next time I had to invite them by opening all four windows. They were so calm and friendly and landed in clusters–one hanging from the opening in the mosquito-net around my bed and another in one of the window frames. I couldn’t close my window for days. At night a few stayed inside my closed net, I knew they meant no harm. These bees were acting strangely; they weren’t so alive that they were busy stinging themselves to death. I liked having a house that big swarms of bees would circumnavigate and enter through cracks and openings. The fact that they all got weaker and eventually fell down dead on the floor one by one, was the part I chose to not take seriously.
It happened three times in a week Margaret, my giant soft-spoken Kamba2 maid, kept sweeping them out, without any sign of surprise or inquisitiveness about the one room in the house that kept filling up with bees. Her serious sweeping made me laugh and I used it as a picture later, in one of my letters to you.
As you remember I started off saying, ‘Maybe we will be together one day’ and then it became, ‘maybe we will be together in twenty-five years’. You used to get so cross when I said that, you hated it and refused to express any kind of amusement at the thought. You were not the kind of person who would let a piece of chocolate melt in your hand. Or a piece of ice–strange, all those newspapers would call me that later. You see our love was all a bit frightening at first. For several reasons. I was with another man who had since long chosen to become my best friend as opposed to a lover, but I still thought I would hurt him frightfully by being the first to let go. I was wrong. After we parted he turned to another woman without the slightest pause. He only ever once met me after that. He made the meeting as brief as possible and then, very strangely, handed me a bunch of cigars on his way out from the room I had taken in a hotel for squirmishly chirpy Kilimanjaro climbers. For months I kept coming across the silver holsters of Romeo y Julieta amongst my shoes and clothes.
There is nothing I could have done or wanted to do to stop you from becoming my life’s love. The heart is the heart, but it mattered to try to square things with a man I had spent so many years with. I needed to look him in the eyes and tell him that I had moved on as soon as he came back, I didn’t want to do it over the telephone. It looks so childish now that I have lost my love and my best friend forever. Disaster, pain and death swallowed us all up anyway.
I had tried; I tried to push you away, until both of us settle our affairs. I even tried convincing myself that it was just lust at first. Of course you wouldn’t stay away and the emotions I tried to calm with fragments of self-deceit in the form of simple indulgences were getting totally out of control.
With fear I watched myself search for solutions far more likely than true love. Love would always deprive me of my freedom. That was before we laughingly understood that it was a fear we had always both had. The fear of not being close enough when close, and not far enough apart when apart, yet always together.
I lay on my bed one afternoon whispering to the bees, who by then knew most of my thoughts, as they flew in and out of my bedroom,
‘Ja visst gör del ont när knoppar brister. Varför skulle annars våren tveka? Varför skulle all vår heta längtan bindas I det frusna bitterbleka? Höljet var ju knoppen hela vintern…’3
With a teacup in your right hand and one in my left, searchingly as if I didn’t know whether I was to find gold or a land-mine, I probed my way forward one Thursday until I found myself completely lost in love. I wanted to say, but I couldn’t, not yet.
The cracking of denial makes a hell of a noise to one’s own ears from inside the space woven to protect soft-skinned change from prying eyes.
A cat was let out of a bag. Out it jumped, wild-eyed, disoriented, pupils gone mad with darkness. A simple, wild cat really. But smart, oh very smart. Quickly it assesses the situation. Fortunately it has a sense of humour, it can see the tragic, the painful, but also the funny in being a cat let out of a bag. Now let’s watch it. Let’s watch it compose itself, lick its ruffled fur into place. As any cat would, as any cat should really. It is OK that it will eventually utterly compose itself. Soon it is a cat of the world, like it used to be, before this wretched sack business. It might even get a walking-stick.
Eventually the event will be forgotten. Forgotten is the look of fright and panic on its face, forgotten is how terribly savage it looked. A cat of utter elegance with only one subtle fear that nobody knows about any more.
I thought I had everything under control.
A week later, when I went to let you out of my house, I could not look into your eyes. You asked if I was angry with you about something. I answered the next day. I told you that it had been something far worse I had tried to keep concealed that midday. Much worse, in its most ironic sense. Not kept hidden like a present, which only at first is charmingly hidden in a box. A present promises revelation, and the biggest feeling of all; expectation! To be followed no doubt by the clapping of excited hands and a moment or many moments of unfearful gratitude and balance.
I tried merely in the most practical sense to protect what was so naked, pigment-free. An albino emotion, with a desperate need to set out in search for the lightest spot possible.
‘I don’t know what we will let life bring us,’ I said, ‘but until we do I will just clutch this feeling to my chest. Crossed arms, holding it close, keeping it from burning. Telling it to half-close its red tearful eyes. For no other reasons than I selfishly adore it.’
So finally, I let go and told you that I had found Margaret sweeping out the years one morning. That I had woken up that day to wide-open doors and clouds of years being swept out into the morning breeze before I could stop her. I told you to blame it all on my giant maid. You told me you didn’t dare to, so we better just accept it. ‘Until the moment we can be together,’ I wrote, ‘I shall just try to breathe in, breathe out. All in a steady rhythm. I shall imagine my chest as a balloon being blown up by a purple-faced child who doesn’t have the capacity to ever get past that hard point. So it tries again and again and again. Breathe in, breathe out.’
But that all happened much later.
When I was already yours.
I have always been slightly shocked by the dishonest way English people sign off their letters. ‘Yours’ they will write to a person they hardly know. The English have such a rich language yet they sign off letters like this to more or less any kind of person with no meaning to their life. Perhaps they have too many words to appreciate them.
But to me words have a literal meaning. I often signed off my letters to you ‘Yours’. Of course you understood immediately.
‘Don’t you love the expression “to watch