Paul, time and the end

Chilean Enrique Lihn tells in a poem the story of a friend "from other years" who at night fled from the hospital where he was hospitalized and knocked on the doors of "damned beautiful" friends who no longer desired him or had never done so. Afflicted by a mortal illness, the man sought to be received at all costs, he was in a hurry, he was running out of time, after which Lihn imagines the scene in which those women and even their husbands return him to his place of origin "in the midst of the great silence".

The sick person, that being pressed by pain and death, has a special relationship with time. However, one does not have to be fully aware of his or her vital closing date to be possessed by the demons of this particular conscience. I know that these are not the reflections of thirty-somethings; I know this because I was that age myself.

I was always struck by how attracted by the passage of time was Pablo Milanés, a composer, let's say, with an accentuated ontological aspect whose songs I listened to endlessly on that Sylverstone record player made of good wood that rested in a corner of my house and that finally succumbed to strange, persistent insects in the mid-nineties. I remember with special fondness the LP Life is worthlessfrom 1976, with its glossy black cover and the image of the troubadour, almost a somewhat dour silhouette, with his afro and his wide horn-rimmed glasses. Or that one, Querido Pablo1985, colorful, coral.

The publications of this man, especially those of the seventies and eighties, give an account of this obsession to which I refer: Time, the implacable one, the one that has passed ("As we recount we are leaving"), To live ("and now try to conquer with vain eagerness this lost time"), Today I saw her ("I woke up the morning it couldn't be"), Years ("Years go by and how what I feel changes"), That age is already gone ("take a journey from which you will never return"), The spring ("Once upon a time a road died of years and pain"), How much I won, how much I lost ("Where will yesterday's friends be") or My sweet girl ("You went through all my years").

I am not interested in proposing here a philosophical or musical analysis of any depth. I do not know how to do it. It is enough for me to point out that these are lyrics that can be beautiful listened to at 16, at 22 years old, but that take on a harsh, resounding value after 40, when the weight of time is already different, or when we enter the following decade with trembling. (I insist, these are not the problems of 30-year-olds, no, they cannot be, and it's a good thing that they are).

One, who at 51 years of age has just undergone heart surgery and who has been disconnected from this world for the first time for almost four hours of silence, comes out of it pondering emphatically about time and the way in which everything tends to unravel. Nothing that is not, in a pedestrian way, what poets, novelists, philosophers have been doing for centuries.

The first thing I did when I heard about the death of Pablo Milanés was to go back to his topic Take a good look at mefrom 1982, possibly one of the most poignant songs, along with Happiness (1988), which he was able to compose, and which tells the story of a mature man who seeks to detach himself, not without pain, from a much younger woman he has loved.

Take a good look at me, I don't think I'm the man
That any lady may be astonished
And my best time is behind me
I take a good look at you, you cause me to wonder
Any man likes you, your life has begun.

I will avoid placing all the lyrics in this space; far be it from me to abuse the reader's patience. In a few words, its verses are about the impossibility, not physical, of loving a woman who is 15, 20 years younger (I don't know how it could happen in other sexual orientations; I speak for myself and for what this song has been warning me for decades). Because you have to be very deluded or arrogant not to realize that nothing is the same.

It is basically a matter of beauty: of the freshness that one no longer has, of the impossibility of retaining the beauty and vitality of others in all its splendor, and of the "tragic pain", as Milanés himself points out, with which one ends up living in secret. That one persists is another thing, the feeling of anxiety will be there, a reminder, a cilice, an inner calvary.

Look no further, do not force your destiny.
One day on the road you'll find your true love
I will return to that desired peace
Though I want nothing, and there, I will remember.

The final stanza is forceful. The poet says goodbye to his beloved and the song closes with the same limpid piano touch with which it opened.

Right around that time, Raúl Rivero published Poem with girl:

When you reach my age
I will be gone
When I passed by yours
you were not there.
Now I wait for you in this photo
I wait for you in this timeless photo.
Don't be late
the ship that can be sailed
tenderness awaits
or shipwreck.

Everything I have written here with my throat stuck in my throat responds to a sentimental upbringing and to a pathos I do not intend to abdicate.

As Enrique Lihn said: "Ours is the fever that declines and does not abate".