If you were my beloved,
I wouldn’t promise you great things.
Great things exhaust people.
Even God.
I would take you to look at small things.
The bustle of people in the middle of the city.
A path covered in yellowing leaves.
A mountain white with snow in winter.
I would want you to understand that we don’t climb a mountain to conquer it.
What a mistake.
The mountain had been there almost forever.
We climb only to reach that place above,
from where we can look out.
If you were my beloved,
we would surely laugh a lot.
Like two children who haven’t yet discovered
that the world is supposed to be explained.
We would invent adventures out of nothing.
You know, people have always been mistaken…
They searched for exceptional things
in order to feel wonder.
They forgot that wonder transforms simple things
into extraordinary ones.
If you were my beloved,
one day I would take you to the sea.
Not to watch the sunrise.
Everyone wants to watch the sunrise.
But to see the light caress your face,
so I could keep it from being forgotten.
And to marvel that we are there,
two people
on a piece of rock lost among billions of suns.
Loving.
Watching.
Existing.
The impossible made real.
And perhaps one morning,
after a night when the world had fallen silent for a while,
you would be packing your things into your bag.
I would be sitting in a dusty armchair,
behind you,
my head resting in my hand,
not knowing that I was about to hear the sentence
I had been searching for all my life.
And you would say,
more to yourself than to me:
“Do you realize that we have already been in Paradise?”
And I would simply freeze.
Because there are sentences you don’t merely hear.
They strike you.
I would probably say something ordinary:
“Do you realize what you just said?”
And you would smile.
Because people who speak great truths
often don’t know they have spoken them.
And I, who had read thousands of books,
who had tried to explain everything in this world,
would understand that I had missed the essential thing.
Paradise had not been lost.
It had gone unnoticed.
If you were my beloved,
I wouldn’t promise you eternity.
Who can promise such a thing?
Not even God.
I would sing of you in my books,
in my thoughts,
hoping, somehow,
that as long as someone is reading you,
you will not die.
Ever.
Or perhaps I could do something much simpler.
I would see you.
Truly.
Perhaps that is all a human being is searching for.
Someone who, once in a lifetime,
will say:
“I was there.
I saw you.”
Because nothing that has truly been seen
ever disappears.
It remains in the world. Forever.
A glance.
A smile.
A beautiful body.
A blade of grass trembling beneath the water.
A woman packing her things into a bag.
They all remain somewhere.
Not in time.
Time dissolves everything.
Bodies.
Memories.
Even regrets.
Whatever remains
remains only in wonder.
If you were my beloved…
perhaps that is all I would do:
bear witness that you existed.
And that, for a moment,
the world was more beautiful than it could bear.
And yes, that moment will come.
Longed for.
Dreamed of.
Unrepeatable.
Slowly, there before me,
you will begin to take off your clothes.
And the whole world will turn upside down.
And everything I thought I knew until then
will mean nothing anymore.
And then,
as if in a trance,
I will begin to caress your body.
As I would an ancient statue.
And I will finally understand
a truth so simple
that it had escaped me all my life:
there can be no other meaning in this world
than to be there,
in those very moments,
to touch you,
with trembling hands,
and be overwhelmed with ecstasy
before your absolute beauty.
And then to understand
that the universe chose me, of all people,
to bear witness to this miracle.
YOU.
If you were my beloved,
even buying a loaf of bread would be an adventure.
You would laugh, of course.
You would say:
“Why is it that with you
even going to the supermarket becomes an adventure?”
And I wouldn’t know how to explain it.
Because important things,
as I have told you before,
cannot be explained.
We would simply walk between the aisles,
buy things we don’t need,
the cashier would fall in love with my jokes,
and for a few minutes
that ordinary place would become ours.
Because that is what people do.
They don’t discover magical places.
They transform them
through luminous wonder.
Up there,
on the snow-covered
mountain ridges,
one day you would say:
“If you make footprints,
I’ll follow in them.”
And I would smile
because I wouldn’t believe you.
But the surprise would be immense
when,
through the white, glittering drifts,
I saw you,
upright,
coming…
Following my footprints.
Your footprints,
over mine.
Two identities
becoming one.
If you were my beloved,
we would make love for hours.
Like two people trying
to forget that each of them lives
in a world of their own.
Not for pleasure.
Or not only for that.
I understood that
only near the end.
And at some point
you would ask me:
“Where did you learn to make love like that?”
“From movies,” I would answer.
You would laugh.
“You can’t learn something like that from movies.”
And you would say nothing more.
We would do it to tell each other:
I am here.
You are here.
We exist.
Together.
If you were my beloved,
we would walk along mountain ridges.
In winter.
You would be scared to death
and say:
“Tell my mother I loved her.”
And I would smile.
And later,
at night,
in that white clearing,
filled with stars,
you would tell me:
“It was the most beautiful day of my life.”
And one day you would be talking to your friends.
You would smile a little.
And you would tell them:
“Come and meet an interesting man.”
And I would protest.
Of course I would protest.
Because interesting people
never know they are interesting.
Only boring people are certain of it.
And then, in the evening,
in that little room of ours,
the universe of our quietude,
I would tell you about eternal truths.
And you would recite to me,
with delight,
from the books you had read,
as though, in that very moment,
you were discovering a new world.
And together,
with nostalgia,
we would live through
the great love stories.
Once again we would be,
if you remember,
like two children
who, in the evening,
by the light of a flashlight,
read,
enchanted,
the immortal tales.
And you would dance
every evening.
For me.
Wearing that funny little hat of yours.
Your curls bouncing in the air.
And you would laugh. Genuinely.
A truly playful laugh.
I don’t know what else to call it.
And you would be happy.
Because in those moments
you would somehow feel
that the whole world belonged to you.
And I would be happy.
Because you were happy.
Happiness shared.
Like a warm kind of wonder.
If you were my beloved,
I would take you through museums.
We would stand in front of paintings.
For a long time.
Far too long.
Until the guards began looking at us strangely.
And you would ask me:
“What do you see?”
And I would say:
“I don’t know.”
Because that is beauty.
The moment when you no longer know
and all that remains
is wonder.
And after that unforgettable night,
when the cosmos itself
had been left a little bewildered by us,
you would say,
with that mischievous smile of yours,
yours and yours alone:
“I have a new title
for your novel:
Oh, my God!”
I would take you through forgotten cities,
down narrow streets,
through squares where no one knows us.
To watch people.
Faces.
Stories.
Loves.
An entire world existing without us.
And we would listen,
together,
to magnificent music.
After the concert,
in the middle of that silent crowd,
I would hold out my hand to you.
Your hand
in my palm.
And you would feel that unforgettable shiver,
the one
you would never forget.
If you were my beloved,
I would tell you many stories.
A thousand stories.
Because, as you know very well,
all my life
I have been,
above all else,
a storyteller.
And you would listen, filled with wonder,
to all those stories.
And you would live a thousand lives.
And perhaps one day you would ask me:
“Why do you do all this?
Why do you want me to see everything you see?”
And again I wouldn’t know what to answer.
For the first time,
I,
who had answers for all the foolish little things in the world,
would fall silent.
But much later, much, much later, I would understand.
Because I didn’t want to be the only witness.
It wouldn’t be right.
It wouldn’t be natural.
The world is too beautiful
to be looked at alone.
There have to be two.
One who asks:
“Did you see?”
And the other who answers:
“Yes. I saw.”
Perhaps that is love.
Not looking endlessly at each other.
But looking at the same world
and marveling
that the other person is there beside you, seeing it too.
If you were my beloved,
I would probably tell you
far too many times that you are beautiful.
That yours is an exhausting beauty.
Absolutely unbearable.
You would laugh.
You would roll your eyes.
You would tell me I was exaggerating.
But somewhere,
in a hidden corner of your soul,
you would be happy.
Because that is what we all want.
Not to be admired.
Not to be praised.
But to be seen.
And one day you would understand.
A wanderer
had stopped in the middle of his journey through the world,
looked at you,
and said:
“Yes.
You were here.
I saw you.”
If you were my beloved,
I would listen to you for hours.
Because everyone needs,
sometimes,
to have their anxieties heard.
Their despair.
The fears they tell no one.
And perhaps I wouldn’t give you any answer.
But I would stay there.
Beside you.
Until the world
became bearable again.
And then that moment would come too.
It surely would.
And your words
would shake me:
“When you tell me to leave,
I will understand
and I will go…
And then I will die
from missing you.”
If you were my beloved,
I wouldn’t promise to stop time.
No one can.
But perhaps I could do something simpler.
Take one moment with you
that otherwise would have disappeared,
look at it,
marvel at it,
and say to it:
“Stay.”
Then, one day,
you would say to me angrily:
“You’re a rogue.”
You would probably be right.
But perhaps you would smile
to yourself,
before you had even finished the sentence.
And still angry, you would tell me:
“It’s simply over.”
And yet, sometimes,
with nostalgia,
you would whisper to yourself:
“My God, all that wonder…”
And out of that wonder,
one day you would come back
and tell me something
that would make me tremble.
Again.
“Mark my words:
in this whole wide world
there isn’t a girl,
young and beautiful,
who could love you
the way I love you.”
And after saying it,
you would fall silent.
And I would see on your face
just how much
love can hurt.
If you were my beloved,
I wouldn’t try to make you immortal.
No one can do that.
I would only try
to write about you so truthfully
that,
many years from now,
someone who never knew either of us
would close the book,
sit silently for a few moments,
and whisper
to themselves:
“That must be what love was like.”
If you were my beloved…
you would walk through the world with me.
And I would walk with you.
Two witnesses
to the same miracle.
