From a Spanish movie, roughly translated. An adult son was tidying up his late father’s study when he discovered, on top of the bookshelf, a locked metal box. There was no key, so he broke the lock with a hammer. Inside the metal box, he found a whole bunch of letters.
”I began to know my father on the day he died. A bit late don’t you think? Or maybe it was the right time? My father always liked proverbs. One of his favorites was: “Better late than never.” Well, for once I have to agree with him. Dad, it was worth the wait . . .
As well as liking proverbs, my father was a methodical man. A place for everything and everything in its place. His family wasn’t exempt from this fastidious sense of order. I was the middle brother who came after the eldest one, but before the youngest. Perfect. I was never quite so clear about where my mother fitted in and neither was she, I suspect. Maybe now that he is lying beside her, they’ll have time to talk it over.
Lack of communication was always another family theme. We never talked about it, or about the other issue or lots of other things. We never talked about anything that wasn’t perfectly trivial and transient. perfectly civilized.
So when my two brothers delegated me to share out our father’s estate, rather than disliking the task, it filled me with a secret hope. maybe amongst my father’s momentos, I could find something to make me suspect, even for a moment, that beneath that impertubable character, there was a human being with doubts, fantasies, fears and love.
My father’s letters, how could they not be, were catalogued down to the last detail. No surprises at all. Nothing of any interest. That was the last bundle. Or was it?
And now here, in front of me, a new opportunity to defy my father, to probe his secrets. This time a thrashing won’t be of much use to him.
I couldn’t find a key, so I used a hammer to open the box.
Why weren’t these letters not cataloged with the others? Why had my father classed them as special, like those sweets from the provinces, and locked them away?
No mention of the sender? But the address is always in the same handwriting. Some of them were torn up and fixed. Who was this anonymous correspondent, who could trigger in him such feelings? Make no mistake, my father tore things up because he wanted them torn up. He never, and I mean never, made a mistake.
Or that’s what I thought . . .”
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My dear Rafael
It’s three weeks since I saw you last and all I can say, is that nothing and no one can put you out of my thoughts, which are troubled by your insatiable absence, by the evocative memory of your presence.
The days are long and featureless like a sterile plateau on which nothing grows if you are not walking there.
In a week’s time I will hold you in my arms, imagining a world in which nothing exists except you and I and this love that overwhelms me; nothing is like it is, but all is how it should be.
I love you so much that it hurts me even to write it. Is it possible to to love so much that it hurts?
I dream about you every night, every day with my eyes open or closed, with my soul distant and orphaned without you.
Good bye, my love.
J
My dear Rafael
I’m writing this letter in desperation, like everything I do when it’s connected with you, like every one of my days since I met you.
I never would have imagined a love like this. I never could have dreamed of a bile so sweet, of a pain so pleasurable . . .
It’s bad to make assumptions, especially in matters of the heart, which have more in common with the lottery than Mathematics; although that’s a common place you must have come across already.
At least, once in your life, you have to take the plunge and jump into a deep abyss. The landing may be painful. but . . . the freefall is. . . unforgettable!
J
Die Oerknal van die liefde 