One of my favorite poems about the end of love is by Cristina Peri Rossi and it is called After:
“And now begins / the small life / of the survivor of the catastrophe of love: / hello, small dogs, / hello, homeless people, / hello, buses and pedestrians. / I am a breast-fed child / I have just been born / from the terrible birth of love. / I no longer love. / Now I can practice in the world / enroll in it / I am one more cog in the machine. / I am no longer crazy.”
In such critical moments I would recommend being conceptually neat. Let’s not get involved and end up using a heartbreak song, no matter how perfect it may be (say, for example, I try to forget youof Manuel Alejandrothe total poem, invincible if sung by Bambino).
No. Heartbreak is about experiencing lack from one’s own bones and one’s own flesh, but the end of love is about letting go of a body: not that of the other, which is also true, but one’s own. It is the ecdysis. One peels off the cuticle in order to grow and eliminate parasites, such as snakes.
This fascinates me. I would like to be a snake. Stay soft and soft after love, ready to harden again.
I read that snakes smell with their tongue. I also want to do this, or maybe I already do it a little.
The end of love, I think now on account of the breakup of The Javisis about to change its shell. Spain talks about the divorce of filmmakers as a separation, and I imagine one of those life-or-death operations in which they separate conjoined babies.
The lies are full, they are poisoned. The Javis were in love and on top of that they are handsome, young, talented, rich and they have a great time: these are faults that Spain does not forgive so easily, especially the last one.
Anyway, let Spain wake up with its greenish rages. One has the right to be brilliant and to be loved by others at the same time, right?
Or is it that people like you better the worse things go for you?
That is the vileness.
What worries me most about the end of love (anyone’s) is changing your name, like a newly elected Pope. I call myself differently because now I owe myself to other things. No one will call us again what our old love used to call us, with that name he invented for us, so small. So intimate. Blushing, perhaps, or dirty or overly romantic. You called me and I looked, and that name is no longer mine when I leave here.
But even more inri is the case of Los Javis with the issue of sharing a stage name. The name by which Spain called them with this familiarity that is so familiar to us that at times it is cringey, like when someone calls Gabo Gabo. Gabriel Garcia Marquez as if it were his compadre or his room neighbor.
Ha ha. This is where we don’t respect anything, man.
The greatest concession one makes is when one falls in love (or becomes best friends) with someone with the same name, as happened to The Javis. I couldn’t, I’m sorry. I have to defend something about myself, I have to safeguard my tiny kingdom.
One has few things in life. He barely has anything more than his name. A name to delimit oneself, to sign, to exist. I’m going to death with my lyrics, with my sound that whistles in its own way… Lorena: neither pretty nor ugly. Simply mine. They gave it to me and I gave it body.
One’s name is one’s trench, the meager heritage of our dignity.
It happens to trans people when they take control of their own name and banish the previous one, that clumsy name that others called them and that was never theirs, that never referred to them because they did not choose it or embody it. What freedom, today life begins, life begins when you call me by my true name, the one that is mine alone, and not anyone else’s!
Ah, how terrified I felt when I read that the filmmaker Isaki Lacuesta (who signs titles as celebrated as The legend of time, One year, one night, Second prize or now, Flowers for Antoniothe movie Antonio Flores) is not really called that: this is a nickname, an acronym that mixes its original name, Iñakiwith that of his partner and co-writer, Isa Campo.
This is certainly eloquent, because love is the fantasy of melting into the other as in a kiss. Munchbut… the fantasy! Just the fantasy, for God’s sake. This crazy baptism, this buzzy pacha name is like taking the daydreams of love with an abrupt, rude literality.
Everything Isaki does and everything he does in his life will now belong to both of them, forever. Is this really a gesture of love? Or is it more of a trap, and also somewhat sexist, because her merit is embedded in his identity? What is this about? That she, as a screenwriter, cannot take center stage in their joint successes?
What is mine is mine, and what is yours is both of us.
It’s like the sister-in-law joke Ramon y Cajal or of Ortega y Gassetbut worse, because here there are two real ones and the one in the middle falls.
Javier Ambrossi, Pedro Almodóvar and Javier Calvo, during the filming of ‘Pedro x Javis’.
What will they do if one day they leave him? Will it be named after the next love? This is psychoanalysis and it is a nightmare: in Hiroshima, mon amourthat impeccable script from the powerful Margaret Durasone was named after his trauma. Your name is like your great pain, like your great love: your name is Hiroshima. That shit doesn’t let you emancipate yourself from what happened to you.
Never again, never again let us hand over the name, because handing over the name will mean handing over the weapons.
I hope that the Javis can go their separate ways taking what is theirs, each one with their signature in tow, with their ideas and their individual history: that is what everyone deserves to be happy.
Take the name, take it by the lapels and throw it on our shoulders. Leave forever with our small but whole and brave name.
Leave knowing who you are, leave irreducible and so slowly, and wherever you go, I will not be any nickname or any diminutive.
Wherever I go, only I will be called like me.