03.25.08

My Life With the Wave (Octavio Paz)

Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 3:54 am by Miracle ♪♫

A Familiar Relationship

With days to go before the recital –
before humiliating myself by playing Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a theme of
Paganini in the possible presence of Madame Ingrid *shudders*, it was a
very good idea to treat Mama and myself for hair spa and divert this amateur’s attention from
the anxieties of public performing.

To adorn as a cherry on top of my
cream of relaxation, I brought along The Eye of the Heart. Franz,
you would love this book.  (No, it’s not that cosmological/metaphysical
book that will appear if you search this title online.)  Provided by one
of my phantom book donors, it’s a rusty treasure of compiled Latin American
short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, and so much more.

As a quasi-drag queen fiddled with
my always uneventful hair, I was dipping in Octavio Paz’ My Life with the
Wave. It tells of a man who falls in love with a wave of the sea, and
the title itself fulfilled my expectation that this book was a pure plethora of
Magic Realism… BUT, it turned out to be more than just that.  If we look
deeper into the story’s fathomage, we realize that it is not just about a man who
falls in love with a wave.  It is a surreal representation of many
relationships that are betiding today.

In this story, the wave follows the
man to the city…
“She [the wave] cried, screamed,
hugged…”

…then a passionate relationship
begins…
“Her presence changed my life.
The house of dark corridors and dusty furniture was filled with the air, with
sun, with sounds and green and blue reflections, a numerous and happy populace
of reverberations and echoes.  How many waves is one wave, and how it can
make a beach or a rock or jetty out of a wall, a chest, a forehead that it
crowns with foam!  Even the abandoned corners, the abject corners of dust
and debris were touched by her light hands.  Everything began to laugh and
everywhere shined with teeth.  The sun entered the old rooms with pleasure
and stayed in my house for hours, abandoning other houses, the district, the
city, the country.  And some nights, very late, the scandalized stars
watched it sneak from my house.

All was beach, sand, a bed of
sheets that were always fresh.  If I embraced her, she swelled with pride,
incredibly tall, like the liquid stalk of a poplar; and soon that thinness
flowered into a fountain of white feathers, into a plume of smiles that fell
over my head and back and covered me with whiteness.  Or she stretched out
in front of me, infinite as the horizon, until I too became horizon and silence.
Full and sinuous, it enveloped me like music or some giant lips.  Her
presence was a going and coming of caresses, of murmurs, of kisses.
Entered in her waters, I was drenched to the socks and in a wink of an eye I
found myself up above, at the height of vertigo, mysteriously suspended, to
fall like a stone and feel myself gently deposited on the dryness, like a
feather.  Nothing is comparable to sleeping in those waters, to wake up
pounded by a thousand happy light lashes, by a thousand assaults that withdrew
laughing.

Stretched out side by side, we
exchanged confidences, whispers, smiles.  Curled up, she fell on my chest
and there unfolded like a vegetation of murmurs.  She sang in my ear, a
little snail.  She became humble and transparent, clutching my feet like a
small animal, calm water.  She was so clear I could read all of her
thoughts.  Certain nights her skin was covered with phosphorescence and to
embrace her was to embrace a piece of night tattooed with fire.

Being a woman, wouldn’t it augment our feelings if a man said these things of us? And you being a man, wouldn’t you like to fall in love in this manner? But wait…
“But never did I reach the center of
her being… perhaps it does not exist in waves… Her sensibility, like that of
women, spread in ripples, only they weren’t concentric ripples, but rather excentric,
spreading each time farther, until they touched other galaxies… but her center…
no, she had no center, just an emptiness as in a whirlwind, that sucked me and
smothered me.”

…and as if I wasn’t being enough of
a spoiler already, I suggest you read the rest of the story.  My hair is done
and it remains unremarkable but Paz and a deeper dive made the hour of
relaxation worth it.

Men, beware of waves. There are too
many of them in the ocean.

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