Mornings in the Mountains

[dotinthesky]

Studying French in the guesthouse’s reception area. Photo by the author.

Mom coughs in the guesthouse’s living room, our cleaning lady Jéssica moves through mom's bedroom, and the maritacas make their usual racket in the garden.

I'll venture out later with Merlin – Cornell University’s bird app – to capture their songs and log them in. Yesterday, the app recorded a bird I'd never heard before—just the one. I'd been hearing its song from the garden, just outside my office window, plus the wood tapping of a woodpecker; a toucan too. Eventually I stepped outside but never spotted the mysterious bird; my only proof of its passage was its song on the app. 

---

Yesterday, I entered four worlds. Late afternoon brought modern-day Dublin to life through the eyes of a set designer in a Colm Tóibín short story—an Irish woman living in California who returns to Ireland to work on a film and realises that she'll never come home again. I followed that up with escapism through Marvel's Hell's Kitchen and its violent gangsters in the TV show Daredevil. After sunset, I dipped into a Danish/Icelandic short film, Nest (2022), that made me think of an old friend, H. Finally, sleepy and tucked into bed, I slipped inside the pages of a fourth world: Kundera's novel L'identité, set in France—a story that explores philosophical questions around aging, the fragility of relationships and the pain of no longer being desirable or chosen.

Nest stayed with me after the lights were out. It reminded me of H. as a youth. In this short film, three siblings build a tree house and then spend a whole year coming and going from it. Their inquisitiveness and desire to build were like little versions of H., who loves DIY to this day. Also, the moment one of them slipped and fell out of the tree house brought me back to the 90s, to a time as teenagers when H. and I climbed onto the roof of his condo, 26 floors high – just the two of us on a windy, winter night – and he jumped onto the ledge as a dare. He scared the shit out of me! He just wanted to impress me—this beautiful and arrogant 16-years-old—but he could have fallen and changed our lives forever.

The movie streaming service MUBI had the option afterwards to send Nest to a friend, so I sent it to him. H. watched it in the morning and messaged me a thank you. I wished him a beautiful day; he wished the same back.

If only this exchange had been done from a shared bed, his body close to mine, my arms wrapped around him.

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Mom coughs and coughs all the time now—a slow deterioration. I spread cold butter on her bread rolls in the morning and think of how one day that will be my regular task, when she’s too blind from her cataracts.

I open the guesthouse after breakfast and take the living room’s carpet outside to air. My brother arrives on his brand new bicycle. I then head for my office for more translation work—a speculative crime novel set in Rio de Janeiro by a Brazilian author now based in Portugal.

Once Jéssica’s done with the living room, I move to the guesthouse’s reception and study French while she cleans my office. Rod Stewart’s Greatest Hits on mom’s TV drifts over my French grammaire. We take a pause for takeaway lunch and I then return to the translation after a short snooze in the hammock. I'm in no rush to finish the translation, and neither is the author.

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H., I remember your smile on Madame’s 80s dance floor, and the many ways you've looked at me over the years. I also remember how I’ve never been chosen, how you naturally gravitate towards women, and that it serves me well to always remember this. If you’d ever wanted anything between us, it would have been inevitable.

It doesn't stop me from daydreaming, of course, nor feeling attracted to you when we catch up via video and you’re in a white wife-beater and underwear.

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One of my cats, Kikita, hops onto my office table. It's sunny but chilly in our corner of Brazil. Temperatures have finally dropped; winter arrived late.

Kikita scratched the office’s door last night, wanting out, but she'd been fed and watered, and had a warm blanket. I knew she'd be fine, and she eventually settled down. I woke up, however, at 3 A.M. and struggled to return to sleep.

---

We spend three weeks visiting Singapore and Hong Kong. We stay in hotels with fantastic views. We stand close together by each window, high up, surveying these cities that I once knew so well. Then we take a shower together—or a bath. We talk about life; I listen to you.

Later, we order food; fuck; sleep in each other's arms. We have matured; we know better what we want; we appreciate the time left to us and all that can be given.

Your words are sweet and devoid of judgment. In our silences, I think only of how I can help you, make you happy, and ensure you get what you want from life; of how we’ll share challenges and victories, and be good friends to each other.

A new love and companionship has been claimed, and a new life restarted.

Kikita offering her support to literary translation work. Photo by the author.

Also posted on Substack.

Comments

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Nice pictures, seems like a nice place to be.