We almost never recognize the most defining of moments. How many sorrows in our lives can we trace to a definite genesis? And the genealogy of what fraction of our joys could we produce? Ex nihilo nihil fit; everything is begotten. But faith is woven silently: We never know whether an ocean was just set in chaotic motion, whose onslaught may already, though in chrysalis, be our faith. It is natural, then, that the day I met my wife passed like any other. I was twelve years old. And although I do not wish to detail the circunstancial aspects of this meeting, I do care to comment on its metaphysics. I find it curious to think that, in that very day, the writing of this entry was fixed; perhaps even the exact combination of its words. As Pascal observed, in infinite time and space, every point, and everyone, is at the center of the universe. When we light a match, fire appears as if instantly combusting before our eyes; in relative terms, however, the match underwent a process of extraordinary duration. Similarly, under the right perspective, any pair of events in life are infinitesimally close to each other, however distant they might seem—And so indeed the day I met my wife, in more than a literary sense, was the day I wrote these words—and the day I died beside her. We sometimes speak of our wish to die with one another; we forget we already have. I am already resting in our warm and common grave—I have been since that twelve-year-old laid eyes on her. And if I make an effort, although trapped in space and time, I feel already that which is the wisest form of peace: The death of one who died in love. It was in such spirit that I wrote the poem:
ves en el corazón de mi agonía
un interior de luz inmarcesible?
ves en mi palidez un imposible
rubor? ves en mi cáscara sombría
cómo mi carne nunca estará fría
si doy feliz el paso ineludible?
aunque mi muerte me es incognoscible
sigue siendo, después de todo, mía…
no llorarás por mí, no verás una
serpiente amanecer en mi retrato
tuya será la paz que me consume
y en el último eclipse de la luna
oirás el rechinar de mi zapato
y olerás en la muerte mi perfume
But my wife and I have different tastes in poetry. She likes to be shocked, caught off guard—she cares not for structure, metrics—she is passionate and also modern. I strive (with little success, that is) for more classical lyricism; to me semantics precede wording; I very rarely enjoy free verse and think no structure almost always implies no pace nor rhythm. And although it would be false to claim this wasn't problematic at first—she doesn't like my poetry, and I am a prideful man—our differences kept a hidden pearl. My wife taught me to appreciate poetry in a different way. I saw that accents could be placed in manners altogether different to those I was accustomed to. For any man of sensibility, to be introduced to new literature or music is a delicious pleasure. But to have our very sense of art renewed and changed, and all by virtue of the generous and honest contributions of a friend, is truly an invaluable gift. In this, and many other ways, she made me a richer man. And this I could never forget.
But this is close to nothing if I think of all the other things which she has given me. It would be immodest to delve too deeply in the conditions of my life before we started to be lovers. I should only say this: No witnesses exist of the anguish and dismality which reigned my life, because I was alone completely—No witnesses even if we were to count myself, for my sorrow was so deep, and the structures which used to support my life were so in ruins, and my identity so forgotten, that I have no memory of that time except for these vexing feelings. An almost total amnesia has consumed the whole year which this crisis lasted. My wife did not precisely save me from this languid and despondent state, and I would be suspicious of the foundations of my love if I were to consider her a savior. As a matter of fact, she came to my life not during this time, but some months after I had started to regain my strength and live again; after a sense of purpose had been restored or manufactured. My wife is not the reason why I managed to survive the crisis—and I speak of survival in a very literal sense. She is, more rightly, the sweet apotheosis of my coming back to life. Put differently, it is not that she infused new life within me: She was the culmination of the vital spirit which somehow guided me to resurrection. She made me understand the Christian concept of guardian angel. (This is so much so that I have wondered, when simply pondering about the joyfulness of her, whether God in fact exists.) It is as if she came to ensure, once I escaped the grip of death, that I should never die again.
There is another sense in which she acted as a restorer of compassion and positive affect. As I said, I knew my wife at a very early age. Some time after, I devoted myself to reading the classical works of the socialist tradition. I studied anarchism and Marxism; in fact, I distinctly recall finishing my reading of Das Kapital the day I turned sixteen, in a hotel bed in Buenos Aires, alone and delighted. I called myself a socialist until I was perhaps twenty, when I became profoundly disillusioned with the way left-wing activism was conducted in practice. I am unsure of whether the reasons which gave way to my disappointment are just or true; some of them I sustain, some I don't. The point, however, is that when depression and dejection seized my life, this disappointment grew more bitter—I could not see mankind as nothing but a hopeless case—My dreams of a world of solidarity seemed ridiculous now. Once, around this time, I conversed with an anarchist young woman: She said in a free, equal and just society, there would be no murders, because there would be no reasons to kill. I still believe this is a silly statement, but the reply I gave is representative of my feelings for mankind at the time; for I condescendingly said: What if having no reason at all is the reason? From this very comment, an educated reader may guess that I was reading Dostoevsky, which is perhaps the stupidest thing a man can do when he is hopeless. Whatever the case, although my conception of human nature remains transformed, and is somewhat darker than it was when I was an adolescent, I have come to the intellectual conclusion that this in no way contradicts a socialist commitment—if anything, it strengthens it. But this intellectual realization came not on its own, but was a consequence of an emotional and sentimental rebirth, induced by the example set daily by my wife.
Indeed, I have never known a more generous person, a soul more decidedly committed to giving. I avoid commenting too much on the lives of those I mention on this diary; suffices to say she lives and breathes for the betterment of human kind, and this in concrete and practical ways, and almost always without getting nor expecting any profit whatsoever for herself. She is so profoundly good—and this, like Machado said, en el buen sentido de la palabra—that she sometimes forgets herself amidst the horrors she deals with; she suspects, for example, that behind her compassion and commitment lay more selfish and obscure motives. That she is willing to question her purity is a proof of decency and intelligence; it is true that nothing in life is pure; and it is true as well that nothing needs be. Our inner lives are mysterious; the criteria to decide upon our worth should, with some exceptions, be reduced to the consideration of the effects we bring about in the world. Whatever the case, the truth is that the more I have gotten to know her in our adult life, the more she has inspired me. I now even suspect the word "inspiration" is imprecise; she rekindled in me the love and solidarity which reigned my younger years, and taught me what I once forgot: That slavery and serfdom are the pities of this world. This was not at all inconsequential; it changed, for example, the course of my professional life. I came to disregard the (constant and assailing) calls of worthless industries for computer scientists, where piles of money are given in exchange for the most unproductive and useless of labors, and shifted my attention to aspects of scientific development which bear at least potential for the betterment of human life. I have written elsewhere on this; those reflections are a product of my wife's example.
Some time ago, I heard a man say there is no such thing like unconditional love. This is, undoubtedly, the prudent stance; the post-romantic vision; the expression of an ethos where affective independence is viewed as the supreme achievement, and love as nothing but a rational arrangement. Very few people, I think, would object to the man's claim. But, although in intellectual matters the appeal to our own experience is an act of vanity, with regards to this I do dare to say: I can attest that the man was wrong. I recall now a story which my father told me many years ago. A crooked son accepts from a miserable man some weight in gold in exchange for his mother's life. To prove the deed is done, the son is to take his mother's heart to the miserable man. That night indeed he kills her; he rips her heart out with the very knife that stole her life. But the night is dark and starless, and a violent rain has filled the ways with mud, and as he runs, his mother's heart in hand, he trips and fall. And then a voice is heard—and the voice comes from the heart—and it is the mother's voice that asks: My son, are you hurt? The moral of the story is not only clear, but true. I acknowledge unconditional love is not a universal fact, not even for motherly love, but it is a fact in any case. Love may transcend a persons actions and, so to speak, reach a person's essence or identity. I had a dream some time ago: My wife, in a strange frenzy, killed me. I died with unspeakable sadness, but I was not sad for me. The thought which broke my dying heart was bound to her: I knew that she would suffer once she realized what she had done. I admit: This is a dream, that is a story; but almost always a tale is not a tale and a dream is not a dream; or this at least was Epicurus claim:
τά τε τῶν μαινομένων φαντάσματα καὶ <τὰ> κατ' ὄναρ ἀληθῆ, κινεῖ γάρ· τὸ δὲ μὴ ὂν οὐ κινεῖ
The imagery of delusion or of dreams is real inasmuch as it is stimulating: what does not exist, does not affect.
And so, although I should not wish to test this theory, both the dream I mentioned as well as mental experimentation force me to the conclusion that I would not cease to love my wife, even if she were to kill me. And nothing is worst than murder. It follows, then, in the most classic syllogistic manner, that nothing she could do would make me cease to love her. Who can dispute to me then that there is no such thing like unconditional love? Of course, the cynic will claim that a mental experiment is a safe and comfortable place; that should the imagined scenario be actually true my love would disappear. He is right in claiming that something would disappear: My desire to be with her, for example, would surely cease. But not my love, I think. Her identity is the object of my love; that which is referred by the word she; this has no bearing with eventual actions; nothing but time affects this.
A typical contemporary person will detest these imaginations. How sick to claim that love could endure attempted murder! They may be right in claiming that it shouldn't; but to claim that it couldn't seems too audacious to me. It is said that we have overcome the romantic spirit; that we are saner, more prudent, smarter. I am suspicious of these claims, although this is no place to speak of this. I will not make the case, not here, that a romantic ethos is superior to our contemporary obsession with contractual arrangements and our sober apathy. I should only wish to say my love for my wife is, at least in its core, romantic—in the true sense of the word. I say in its core because merely romantic love almost always never lasts—or at least such is my experience. Like a series of concentric rings, whose center is the most incandescent passion, different realms of more mundane affective experience are arranged in such a way that heat is preserved in the system. An amicable daily life, for example, is an aspect of such arrangement. The tender universe of friendship, which is tranquile and warm, is another. Passion exists in these regions, of course, as if diffused from the core, in delightful affective irrigation; but it is certainly no protagonist. Love, as I experience it, is twofold: It may refer to the romantic passion which is at the center of our bond, or to the sundry amalgam of tender, though quieter affect which is conformed around such center. Almost nothing in life can be sustained or grow if not embedded quietly in day-to-day life; and so, in love, passion is and is not the constant: It is, in the sense that it lays at the center of the zeal and impetus which moves our bond at every point; but it is not, in the sense that it cannot continuously be the principal actor in our life without rapidly disarranging it. Romantic passion is the background of a daily life where more tranquile affects are protagonists—it is el fondo where the shining astrums of quieter affections gently flow and blaze—it is an atmosphere, an ambiance that only at times devours it all.
On another note, our memories of love are truly a singular curiosity. I have many times endeavored to predict that a particular moment I was living would not be forgotten. Almost always this prediction is wrong, and I am left only with the memory of my intention to remember. And if I suspend, at least as much as anybody can, the willing direction of my thoughts, and allow memories of my wife to appear before me in a somewhat random fashion, I find many that I would not have suspected were preserved. Most of these are precious; some are maybe sad; no love can exist, I think, without a mixture of these two sentiments, which are mistakenly taken to be simple opposites, instead of complementary ones. This is so true indeed that I cannot imagine a more beautiful image than the face of my wife when, saddened by a minor or a serious event, tears are shedding from her eyes and through the blushing cheeks. The imagination is painful, yes, but it is also beautiful. My wife, particularly, cries quite a lot, and for the most minor of occasions; so much so that I anticipate her tears whenever we, say, set out to watch a movie or listen to certain music. This does not trouble me at all; I am fond of her sensibility. Besides, at least compared to the mean of the masculine distribution, I cry rather often too, though in general not from sadness. I am particularly sensible to the merciless whip of music, and my tears are often effected by overwhelming or sublime artistic expression rather than melancholic dejection. I do not think, however, that my wife has seen me cry that often, nor anybody for that matter; it is almost always a secret moment. She is, this I concede, the only one who has seen me shed tears of gratitude and love, of profuse and staggering joy, and more importantly the only one who has provoked them. It was a warm and tropical night and we were laying in our couch; I suddenly recalled Kathy's song and played it. This is a song I heard in loop the night before she came to me, as I expected her coming to me, as all rejoiced that she would come to me; and hearing it once more, with some years of love behind us, produced such overflow of gratitude and passion as I had never felt.
On another note, I don't think I know a man more disgusted by the idea of marriage than my father—although it is abundantly clear, at least to anyone that knows him, that none of his opinions on this matter are but a projection of his own frustrations. He is, in many senses, a great man; but he is also, quite sadly, a lawyer, by which I mean to say that any point whatever which he wishes to make, he shall strive to make it through whatever casuistry available. A rich library on sociology rests in his house, my old familiar home, whose only purpose at times is to provide him with material to justify his prejudices on these matters. Thus, I grew not only a witness of the catastrophic end of my parent's marriage, whose divorce went wrong in virtually every possible way imaginable, but also under the intellectual claim that marriage is but a bourgeois institution; a guillotine for superficial loves and aspirational idiots; a sham, a lie, a trap, a mistake. Most women (in my father's words, of course not all women, but ninety percent surely!) only wish to seduce a distracted and innocent men, to fool him into marriage (in Spanish, casarlo, which implies the subject is passive), and to make a baby out of him (hacerle un hijo, again the man is passive). If a man is masculine and intelligent, he will resist these tricks and retain his liberty; if he is not, he is lost. This view of marriage is more common than I would have imagined. It belongs to a set of myths that aim to represent frustrations arising from stupidity and impotence rather than from the institution of marriage itself. Perhaps the most common of these myths, at least among men, is that the relationship between husband and wife is almost sexless, if not completely. That there are sexless relations I do not doubt, but this is not unique to marriage. And though it is true that, for some couples, the frequency of their sexual interactions decreases after an initial period of intense activity, it is absurd to think, if the couple is healthy, that they will have less sex than they would if they were single. Let us not speak of human kind as some abstraction floating in the air; we are, above all, a biological creature, and it is a simple fact that a stable relationship provides a constant source of sexual satisfaction, which in every person is a natural necessity, though in varying degree. In what comes to the alleged pleasure derived from a varied set of sexual partners, which partly sustains the idea that monogamy is but fetters, I very much think it is tremendously overestimated. Dating with multiple people, simultaneously or not, or even having casual sexual interactions, is not only ridiculously costly in terms of time and resources, material and emotional, but it has a tremendous drawback: Most people are not worth interacting with. But let us not delve in this too much; for, even if you still desire the liberty to sleep with multiple people, nothing stops you from discussing it with your wife or husband and coming to some arrangement on the matter. I do not see why marriage should imply monogamy. This is at least superior to what seem to be the two natural alternatives: To cheat or, even worse, to grow resentful due to lacking a liberty which you would probably not even enjoy in any case. Many men blame marriage for a sexless life, or at least a boring sex life; but I suspect that almost always it is their incapacity to pose a difficult conversation, their cowardice in living up to their desires, which is to blame.
As far as my personal experience goes, the constancy of marriage, and the trust and comfort which I feel around my wife, allowed for exploration and curiosity to blossom unprecedentedly. I have always treated sensual pleasures in a somewhat oriental manner; having no religious education, no taboos nor impediments hindered my pursuit of a rich and varied sexual life from a relatively early age. And yet, it was marriage what allowed for the richest and more voluptuous life imaginable. Sexual commerce, like conversation, grows in quality through mutual discovery and acquaintance; my generation, I think, puts too much emphasis in the sexual discovery of oneself, but it is in the other where mystery lays. Quite obviously, a prerequisite for this is to feel genuine attraction for one's partner. The number of people committed to partners which they don't find attractive is incredible; in some cases, their partners became unattractive, be it due to a deterioration in their aspect or simply out of boredom; in other cases, which are to me rather strange, physical attraction was never particularly present. As for myself, I am very much attracted to my wife, the description of whose beauty is impossible in words. And so, I have found that the masculine teachings of our previous generation were, in this regard, blatantly wrong. Not only marriage does not lead to a sexless life, but it allows for the richest and more continual of sensual explorations. One must only take the rather sensible precaution of marrying someone one finds attractive, and whose sexual interests and desires are compatible with their own. And while it is true that keeping the sensual tension alive through many years is not something that happens on its own, and that attraction may cease if certain matters are left unattended, it is also the case that keeping these things alive is not that difficult either, at least not in normal conditions. And this at least in normal conditions leads us to another important point in what comes to the teachings I was given with regards to marriage.
In general, those circumstances that ruin married life, whether endogenous or exogenous, are simply those that ruin life itself. The exogenous ones are universal and simple: Poverty, the fetters of debt, a serious health condition, etc. Some endogenous factors are unstable patterns of behavior on whichever end of the couple, dishonesty, and greed. All of these things make existence, in marriage or without it, bitter and rough. It is hard to imagine the perish of a loving marriage when two decent people meet and coexist with not too overwhelming existential hardship. And it is obvious that the existential threats which I have named are more easily dealt with in companionship than in solitude. For most people, the odds are set out against them, and I find it only natural that they should strive to partner up and better their chances against the numberless calamities which constantly assail them. The most significant dangers to marriage are the significant dangers to life; they are peculiar to marriage in no way whatsoever. If there is one peril specific to marriage, it is only this: Time. In this strange dimension, almost everything is lost; and who is to say not only what they will become, but what their partner will become, in five or twenty years? With regards to this, however precious a marriage might be, no matter how solid its foundation, there is nothing but complete and utter uncertainty. This is the great gamble in love, its most extraordinary stake; we risk it all, our eyes closed, our inferences weak, to this: That those who will take the place of us, husband and wife, two lovers, two friends, in twenty years, will also be meant for each other. Absolutely nothing justifies any prediction on this matter; it is a myth that personalities are constant, and a fact that circumstances are changing. This is the primary reason for divorce, of which no marriage is safe. And nothing can be done: True lovers close their eyes, cross their arms across their chest, and throw themselves into that river of which Heraclitus spoke. Ceteris paribus, it is time who rules them all. If anything at all can set the stakes in their favor, although I doubt anything can, is to keep the blindest of faiths, the most radical commitment; for it is true, as Virgil said, that
Possunt, quia posse videntur.
It is precisely this art, to can by virtue of believing that one can, the one at which my wife excels. Contrarily to myself, she was born in a working class family, with virtually all odds set out against her. An absent father, economic instability, a mother suffering from a psychiatric disorder, and many others were the factors which made, to any sensible observer, impossible to guess what she would become. I am no advocate of self-made stories, but her story, though not exactly one of those, undeniably has many of the features. To prove this, I would have to tell of her numberless successes in life, both in terms of the education which she managed to obtain, as well as her professional achievements. But both topics are unrelated to the subject of marriage. To give proof of her unbreakable spirit, of her character, and of her capacity to accomplish that which she sets to achieve, I would have to tell too much of our romantic story; and I do not wish to share anecdotes here. Suffices to say, I have known no person so devoted to her goals, and so capable of achieving them; so focused and hard-working; so serious and committed. This is such a desirable trait in a wife as I could not express, for that same force of spirit and devotion are exerted on our marriage, with the purpose of making the relationship grow as well as to further our advancement in life.
This is, for now, as much as I care to share. Love is, no doubt, the supreme force in life; and though marriage, as an institution, implies love in now necessary way, I came to find it acts as a protective and fostering ring when love exists. I am aware that many of the joys I have spoken about are not peculiar to marriage, but rather to the fact that I married a loving and extraordinary individual. Perhaps the praises I have given of the institution are but a diversion; perhaps I have been only too lucky. I have a wife that I miss when left without her; a wife that I find attractive; a wife of remarkable intelligence and talent; kind and tranquile, generous and loving. Does marriage require extraordinary individuals, extraordinary relations, in order to function properly? Statistics suggest so, for an impassioned analysis of the facts leads to the conclusion that marriage can be, and almost always is, a recipe for disaster; half of marriages end in divorce; of those that don't, how many are truly happy? But enough of this. I praise my wife with due devotion; I know no love as giving, unselfish and generous as that we have for each other. I wish everybody knew what it is like to experience the wonder of such a love; most people live a loveless life.