Dear A,
I started writing this letter to you last year. I am horribly slow, you could say. My tongue was seduced by one language, my head by another – the delights of polyamory. I didn’t know how you say ‘comrade’ in Spanish and I wanted to call you that, even though I feel you may not like it. I also don’t know whether ‘afinidad’ will convey to you what I want it to say – the Romanian ‘afinitate’ doesn’t quite work the same. What I do know is this: that I listened to you move through language, in your kitchen, lining joy with rawness and cynicism with laughter, with the same grace of your morning coffee ritual, and of your egun on – it could have been buen dia, but Euskera claims its seat at the breakfast table as well. That in the background of our conversations in my mind there is the sea in your delightful little village where I am sure the person at the bar was very queer (and very hot – I told you so). And there is, too, that street corner in the city, where you said the word ‘amorio’ about someone, a word that for you maybe slips off the tongue inconspicuously, but to my ear it was a reminder of how we wrap our palms around our gentlest feelings and protect them.
La esquina es mi corazón is your gift to me. Not directly. But wandering the streets of Chueca, alone like you told me, where I have so many conflicting feelings, it feels like your gift. Who knew that progressive queer flags could sit among the flower-pots like that? Who knew that there could be so much gay–lesbian–queer–trans–all colours of the rainbow merchandise–barber shops–clothing items? Who can afford to buy them I wonder, as I walk. Or to live in a place like this. I always find the queers who are too polished and too neat a little scary. But wandering around under pin-like drops of rain, feeling a little out of place, a little lost, a little sad, I somehow end up finding Lemebel. No tengo amigos, tengo amores is too thin. A fact that I deeply resent. Reading the titles on the covers is as frustrating as it is to be in a bookshop full of Gujarati or Hindi. English just gives itself away.
I am slow, awkward, working very hard to avoid the gaze of the (other) very hot queer person in the bookstore here. They are arguing out loud with the design of a card on their computer screen. Their text insists on running away from them. I am eavesdropping, clearly. One moment away from a cheesy embarrassing confession that being in a bookstore with so much queerness and transness in so little floor space leaves me a little bit breathless, a little bit dazed – sentiments I probably would never have mustered the words for, so it is just as well that my hand reaches up for the slim volume of Lemebel.
The book comes with me from city to city. My first book in Spanish, I remember where sentences sit on each page. Where I struggled. Where I drew breath. ‘No lloro, no tengo lágrimas. He tratado de llorar, pero me cayó una perla’ sits on a familiar page (p. 91, let me tell you just in case). In Bombay, I do a bad job of translating it for friends – I don’t cry, I have no tears. I tried to cry but what fell from my eyes was a pearl, not a tear. I want to share it but what I share instead is my inability to capture the turn of phrase that is neither maudlin, nor cheesy, nor weak. ‘Me cayo.’ ‘Mi-a cazut.’ ‘Mi-a picat.’ It fell from me – English is unrelenting. I read Tengo miedo, torero. I read everything. Without catching my breath. To be politically queer in a new language is an intoxication of all senses, revelation, outrageous freedom. Wilderness.
En la esquina de mi corazón, I have held language always gingerly. Afraid that when I speak, it will feel used, just like an instrument. Frustrated that I don’t know how to be me, that words take time to find, that when the words roll off my tongue they’re stripped of humour and of narrative, they’re way too bare. I am no friend of nudity, I tell Lemebel in my head. Lemebel has an answer to it. El desnudo siempre es liberador. Es sacarse cosas. Shedding your clothes is always liberating. It’s the casting off of things. When Lemebel says it I feel it, in ways I never have in my own skin. Cuando te sacás la ropa, también te desprendes de los problemas. Do you – did you – I ask, detach yourself from all your troubles when you dropped off your clothes? The line sits on the same page, lower still, from where it touches characters and lines across all cronicas (Chronicles? Memoirs? Hybrid records of queerness?) of which I can think. I pause and find myself becoming people that in English I don’t know how to be.
I have always clothed both love and grief in scripts. Under the focused pencil writing Malayalam, line after line, filling notebooks for hours, days, months, lay a reckoning. With the Bengali, Odiya, Tamizh scripts I had brief affairs. I learned to love queerly in English (people, life, politics, places), then suddenly in Romanian Patrick throws at me the word ‘dragoste’, with the casualness of trans comrades and friends. He says ‘dragoste,’ not ‘iubire’. Say ‘dragoste’ and once you say it, tell me that the roll of those consonants does not send through your chest a feeling that’s like the bark of old pine trees. Tall. Unapologetic. Almost grotesque in its wilderness.
Gujarati is a whole different story. Or maybe not so different, really. Dear A, maybe I will tell you about it someday. When we talk about how on my tongue I still taste the queerness of Lemebel, and yours, and how they do not taste the same. Spanish twists and turns itself around the crevices of the place – Gipuzkoa, Chile. Gujarati does the same. Each sibilant settles somewhere along the map, gently over Kheda, Charotar, Bhal or Surat, Mandal, Vyara, Unai, Subir. That is another letter, in another script. Maybe next year, once my tongue has had its fill. Lemebel curls a bit in the monsoon, pulls rain out of the air. Raises in me a hunger to crush against my palate the taste of revolution, let it explode in words. In every language we can speak.
References:
- Brăila, P. (Director). (2016). Pieptiș / Abreast [Short film]. Romania.
- Lemebel, P. (2018). No tengo amigos, tengo amores. Alquimia Ediciones.
- Lemebel, P. (2004). La esquina es mi corazón. Grupo Editorial Planeta.
- Lemebel, P. (2001). Tengo miedo, torero. Anagrama.
