Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!

The rumbling swell woke me up in front of a breakwater wall that blocked my view of the sea, but the water sprays climbed above it, like a ranging whale expelling air from its blowholes, in each assault with the force of a geyser. Through the windshield of the car, I spotted Leire walking over the dike without caring about getting soaked from the volatilized foam in the air; she was barefoot to walk on her own.

I opened the door and shouted her name, assuming she wouldn’t hear me. Returning to the car, I removed my patent-leather shoes, dress blues, beret, and tie, which were already starting to bother me after the formalities of the wake.

Although autumn arrived, it was still September, and the nights were still mild. I bolted on that washed concrete until I got beside her and asked her what the sea was called in Basque.

“Itsaso,” she replied. There was also a word for the late Joshua: “indar,” which means strength. I agreed. I couldn’t help but wonder where he got that laid-back vibe. Did she know?

“It was something passed down through their family,” she explained. “But it wasn’t the kind of gift that could be freely given. It had to be returned to the earth at the first sign of corruption.”

“I don't quite understand what you meant,” I said.

“He didn't commit suicide. It wasn’t an accident. It was bound to happen.”

Without acknowledging defeat, after relentlessly battering the boulders, the waves receded with a deep sigh. A slow but determined rolling motion began, as many tons of salty water surged back, shaking with white crest towards us. That formidable blue monster that the night concealed unleashed its full power, causing the earth to tremble. I thought it was time for us to retreat. I was unprotected in that dike with those dark masses rocking to assault once again. And Leire struck me as strange when she spoke about Joshua’s fate. The feeling of not knowing where I was treading with the woman I was sleeping with when Joshua ignored her, afflicted me, if by affliction is meant causing pain or trouble.

Would Leire recall Joshua's most loving caresses? She was moving towards the end of that dark breakwater, right where the beast had kicked, sweeping away everything in its path, and whatever I was shaking, following the beat of the same swell, which had regrouped for a heart-rending charge, I found myself unable to accompany Leire, who followed her walk unperturbed by such a threat, a walk with love and death.

I was losing her, and I knew it. Why fool myself? If things had been different, I wouldn’t have felt such crystals lodged in my throat, those that prevented me from shouting their name with the feeling of my gut. Without Joshua’s natural flair, “indar”, the same strength I needed to make her hear me over that rumble, I chose to kneel and sit on the concrete while the water sprays came to dress me in bubbles.

I was weakness and loneliness with outstretched arms. I searched for Leire in the darkness, but I couldn't see her anymore. I remembered those whispers when I stealthily approached her, when she told me that her warmth was reserved for someone else but me. But I was a star of mutable light and candor was touch, and love a game full of curiosity and defiance. Like a mélange in which globules of iridescent walls fluctuated, emerged, and exploded where I caught glimpses of pretensions, hopes, fascinations, paroxysms of the soul and flesh and blood, presumptions, whims, silences, and absences, quarrels of dissatisfaction and mistakes. Leire loving me, and I loving Leire—the mirror of lies.

In reality, it all boils down to a fundamental mismatch: she getting lost on the jetty, and me waiting for that elusive miracle that lovers always yearn for. Why did I compel myself to endure so much? It would have been enough to go to the car, and that pain would never reach its peak. But no, in the narrow world of lovers, there are only two paths: the one that leads towards the object of desire and the one that moves away. Just like that breakwater. Either it forced me to go to where Leire was, or she would walk away. The centuries of wisdom accumulated in libraries or the Apollo XI moon landing held no relevance. In the end, I would be as vulnerable as any man at any given moment. I would be swept away by a force not as spectacular as the waves, yet as simple and measurable as a woman who hopelessly distanced herself. There was no other force in nature that dragged me so far, not even that shown by the blue monster. I owed myself to the explosive nature of a love affair, to the lady and her shards.

What else could compel me to turn back? I recalled the many times when her hands went up on my back, the leftovers I picked up hungrily on the rich man's table, the delights of the naïve naked, and the passionate touch that ignited my desire, the spontaneous lives born in countless wet kisses, the torrid jizz in the shadows of licentiousness. Of course, I lacked “indar,” but I felt like a fading star: a dense concentration of matter that eventually collapsed inward. Nothing, regardless of its lightness, could escape the intense gravitational pull of my being, not even light. I had become a black hole.

Leire returned safely and sound from her walk along the jetty’s end; her black silhouette advanced towards me, and for a fleeting moment, I yearned to believe in the miracle I had eagerly awaited. She was drenched, her clothes clinging to her body, and her hair cascading down her face. She rubbed her arms to warm herself, and when she sat beside me, she requested a hug because she was freezing, extremely cold. I obliged with a joy that made me burst into laughter. Leire remarked that the tone of my laughter was peculiar, almost hateful. But I couldn't contain myself: I knew that this was the last time I would hug her and laugh so as not to start crying. She was aware of it and remained indifferent.

"What am I supposed to do?" I couldn't answer her. I had enough work to do with trying to contain my nervous laughter. She bit me on the chest of my shirt, and I stopped laughing hard enough to let out a groan. I would let her do it, would let her be loved with a passivity provoked by that calm that the sense of an ending gave me. Whatever she did, whether it was good or bad, Leire was going to leave anyway as soon as she finished.

Whenever we made love, I secretly harbored some hope for the future. But not then. And yet, I felt good, at ease, comfortable in the role of poor, hopeless idiot. I accepted the slurp with equanimity, without a shadow of becoming crazier than I was about lending myself to a civilized farewell. Why become sad? Leire tried to take off my shirt, but the fastened cuffs kept me handcuffed and clumsy. My dress with a thousand crackling bubbles, she couldn’t manage to take it off at all. Salt water dripped onto the tip of her nose and onto her locks, and I couldn't get those drops off with my shirt turned inside out. In the swaying of the waters, I found that music that I had not noticed until then. I contemplated the waves with another gaze, a stare that wasn’t lost in the whirlpools, the fearful blow rushing with all its weight, and the roar of defeat, but a gaze that sought serrated manes between the crests of the foam, the serrated manes of a runaway horse. And so she had taken me and was putting me in her to wildly ride me.

"Don't move."

But I didn't intend to move at all. I was too engrossed in that swaying that had initially been so menacing, unable to follow her because of the fear that the blue monster would strike me with all its fury. She moved in rhythm with the waves, and pleasure wrapped us up in each bellow of the beast and its water sprays. And each time pleasure gained a greater echo, each time it achieved that nothing distracted us more than the pleasure itself. In that slow pace, the fearsome blow was the most intimate of kisses, and the roar of defeat was a promise. She brushed away with one hand her face’s dripping locks and also they were dripping on me, and with the other she leaned with her palm open on my chest. The stars still hung across the firmament; soon, I stopped listening to the waves and heard within me the clattering hooves of a galloping horse approaching from nowhere, the bantam animal that did not ask for explanations in its path, more terrifying if possible, merciless in its march, almost ebrious of speed and the music of blood. It advanced without stopping, advanced until riding into the ground. As Joshua when he went to meet his death. And as I would do myself if one day I ever had the chance. And so in that ardent jizz that was about to burst into her womb, there was nothing but despair and its fleeting colors, there was nothing but the avidity with which it felt the last time. Nothing but the shadow of death, the longed-for click that proclaims non-being: the mutable glint in the eyes of a runaway horse.

The small death and then the intense cold—the opposite of the real death experienced by someone who bleeds—yet it was no less a death and no less the sorrow that compelled one to withdraw into oneself. Especially when I knew that the time had come to bid her farewell, and that goodbye deeply hurt me. She lay on my chest, curling up against the cold, refusing to let me slip away. As if the goodbye was not thorny enough and needed to be extended until the beast’s eternal kicking subsided. I tried to be complacent, even though I already felt the venom of spite, and embraced her with a warmth that would remain forever sealed in the heart’s lounges, those lounges where light, water, and dust do not filter, but keeps its treasures timeless, waiting for the chance that never comes.