sínfonia [2/3] | raúl/mori
part one here.
(1. the first part was written for acchikocchi for valentinesplay, so i thought it was only fitting that the second part be written not only for her birthday, but also for the lovely labelledcaustic's, because they're two of the most amazing people in my life and also huge r/m fans. enjoy, loves.
2. fernando moved to monaco, not marseille, in his first stint in france, but i think marseille is a prettier city and this is AU and i don't know if he'll return to france again, so that's where he will begin this fic.)
Winter, 2000-01.
Fernando wrote to Raúl.
He had come to Marseille to write, and in the beginning, sitting on sun terraces of small cafés and feeling full of odd pretension and cold wind and French bread with chocolate, that was all he would write: sad letters, longing letters, love letters, letters that talked about the grey skies and mistral winds, the priceyness of coats in boutiques and the snobbiness of young mothers in parks, letters that talked about how bumbling one felt as an America-raised Spaniard in France, letters that were peppered with small French phrases and signed off with “un bisou, Nando.”
“My apartment is small,” began one (dated 18th October 2000 and written at 1:37 a.m. when he was curled on his sofa with half a glass of wine), “and the roof leaks. The landlord will not do anything about it,” he complained, in sweeping strokes of his large handwriting, “I think he dislikes me, because I pay the rent late and play jazz loudly late into the night. It helps me write, the music, and slow, sad jazz is befitting of Marseille. Have you visited? I never asked about where you used to go on summer vacations. If you had, you’d agree, too.”
“French food is delicious,” said another (written on a crumb-stained piece of journal paper at 2: 15 p.m. inside a small restaurant on the 3rd of November, 2000). “Though I don’t know if you would like it too much, it’s very light, very focused on flavour rather than embellishment or spices or creams. Do I sound like a snobby food critic? It’s just that they take their food so seriously, and I want to see what the fuss is about! Though I make so many mistakes. Once, I committed the treason of insulting the spice level of the fish. The waiter glared at me; it’s a mistake to insult French food if you’re going to do it in broken French, apparently. The American accent doesn’t help.”
“The girls are prettier here; the boys: more charming,” said one from half past midnight of 9th November, 2000, ink smudged from the drops of water that fell from Fernando’s hair, which he absently rubbed with a towel as he penned it over the desk of his makeshift study. “It sits well with me: you said I was a flirt once, and I didn’t exactly disagree. But over here, dancing with someone on an empty street in the midnight rain isn’t flirting: it’s just being friendly (or so I hope, otherwise the husband of the charming lady I had dinner with this evening might have some words for me.). I can’t decide, however, if this fact helps me write, or distracts me from it. It’s easier if you were a mathematician I suppose, but I wonder what the musician in you thinks of this? Or is it something you can separate, at all?”
“It’s nearly Christmas. Come here.”: was all one of them said, and it was the last one he ever wrote, and it was dated the 23rd of December 2000 and written in the snow.
He would put each of these letters in a carefully sealed envelope with pretty stamps alive with local scenery, address them with care, his handwriting strained in neat and carefully controlled curves, and then he would put the letters in the second drawer of his old-oak drawer, and not send even a single one. In those days, he did not know if they meant he had found the words or if they were still lost, because he had still not written more of his novel but little anecdotes and jokes and pretty descriptions of little girls playing on street corners or muslim boys with deep eyes praying at mosques had begun to come to his fingers easily, and he would write these stories through compulsion and through love, but he would write only stories that would never be told.
To amuse himself, he made friends. It came to him as naturally as breathing seasoaked air or buying fresh bread on sleepy Sunday mornings or having tricky negotiations with landlords: necessary, and not unpleasant. He talked to old ladies in park benches and laughed at the antics of their dogs; he struck up conversations with bright-lipsticked girls reading the newspapers and smoking on cloudy afternoons and discussed French politics and the nuances of ballet performances over coffee and self-important inflection of voices; he watched Olympique du Marseille regularly at a local pub and learned about the offside rule between getting drunk on cheap beer and getting crushed into weepy hugs by fat, middle-aged men he barely knew. He fucked, because it was easy and because it was a welcome distraction from the words, and the loneliness, and the seaside, and Raúl; he slept with dark haired girls he met at parties his new friends would invite him to, and with light-eyed drugged-up boys from loud clubs, and he slept over the night and sometimes made them brunch, and laughed and fed them fresh strawberries after, and he promised to call them later and never did.
“You fuck like a lonely man,” one of them had said, a sad-eyed red-haired young man, whose voice was hoarse with smoke, and cheeks littered with freckles. “I can’t pinpoint why, you just do.”
Fernando had started, and looked away from the window he had been staring out of. He removed his hand from where it had been stroking the man’s thigh, and lifted it to steal the cigarette from between his lips, inhaling and tipping his head back, letting the calm settle over him. “That’s a kind way to tell me it wasn’t good for you,” he laughed, finally. “I’ve heard worse.”
“Who said it was not a compliment?” the other man had replied, sounding genuinely surprised that his words had caused offence. “People who feel lonely usually fuck best; it’s something about having a lot to give and not being sure who to give it to.”
“I have a lot of friends,” Fernando said, returning the cigarette to the man, their fingers brushing.
“That’s funny,” the other man had said, seriously.
“I know someone else who said that to me,” Fernando sighed in return, rolling on to his side and closing his eyes.
Eventually, Fernando does, in certitude, find the words again, with the snow and the bite of January and the onset of the new year, because at 4:00 p.m. on the 4th of January, 2001, he wrote this: 537 words of a new chapter of his book, and a few scribbled ideas on a corner of a napkin for more.
It happened like this: a day before, at 8:21 a.m., Fernando had walked into an old bookshop two streets away from his house, and had sat there for 5 hours straight, picking up a translated book of poetry and rereading one page over and over, trying to dissect the anatomy of writing and reconstruct it in his head. At 12:27 p.m., when he was about to close it and head for lunch, an old man spoke over the soft thud of his closing the heavy book.
“Rimbaud was a child,” he said, and Fernando had looked up, surprised. “And you, an author. What will you learn from staring at the same poem over and over?”
“He inspired many,” murmured Fernando in response, looking at the man. He had a pocket watch, but was otherwise normally dressed in a neatly pressed suit, his hair pulled back in a long, salt and pepper ponytail. “How do you know I am an author?”
“The same way I know you feel like you’re not one, anymore,” the man said, dismissively. “You’re scared.”
“And you’re quite the cliché,” Fernando said, an amused smile creeping on his face. “Will you help me regain my muse with some friendly, optimistic, quintessentially European advice?” (In retrospect, he realized: “friendly” and “European” didn’t add up to “quintessential.”)
“Your french is shit,” replied the old man, matter-of-factly, “And what you need is a kick in the ass, not advice.”
“I’m not scared,” said Fernando. He wondered what was in the air of this city, or around him, that promoted random diagnoses of the heart, from strangers and from one-night stands.
“If you weren’t, you would be writing, right now. Any other emotion, you can channel into writing: happiness, joy, anger, grief. Fear, no. Not being able to write, that’s...that’s fear. Fear is poison.”
“And how do you stop fear if you don’t feel scared?”
“You think I’m a philosopher, just because I’m old,” grumbled the man in response. “I don’t know, you just...quit. Like smoking. Just stop.”
“What do the French know about quitting smoking,” Fernando said, even more amused now, getting up and gathering his things. But the next day, he had scratched out the “Dear Raul,” he had begun writing at the top edge of his journal and thought about him instead of to him, and he had taken a deep breath and let go of many things with it, and then he wrote, really wrote.
Summer, 2002.
That academia did not mean solitude was one of the first things Raúl discovered in his first year working in it, and that this did not disconcert him as much as he thought it would was the second. In the first winter, he wrote half of a proof that a postgraduate at the College published without credit to him, and since then, Raúl decided, in the quiet and determined way he decided things, irrevocable and concrete as a mathematical proof, that it would not happen again.
In those two years, he did this: he got two papers published, despite being just an undergraduate, and got an award for one of them. He befriended professors on the Committees and boards, in the cold-hearted manner of a professional: he took them to coffee and politely inquired about their wives and children, and he made himself indispensable to them when they were not paying attention. He learned to displace honesty with use, and it was not hard, because it was logical, like steps from an equation to proof and back. He got a girlfriend, a quiet graduate student who studied physics and liked to accompany him to the opera, and sometimes listened to old recordings of him playing as they both glanced through each other’s homework.
He got into M.I.T., and suddenly, he fell sick with his work, and missed his music more than he realized that he might. “I’m taking a year off and playing in a orchestra,” he said one day, the same rehearsed ten words first to his mentor, who looked at him seriously and nodded, then to the people at the university, who had various reactions he didn’t care to catalogue to memory, then to his girlfriend, who looked sad and told him she was leaving, too. He left methodically like this, breaking hearts and friendships with the non-dramaticness of a scientist, careful to leave no messy endings or untied threads (the only messy endings in his life were the ones left for him.) He finished his outstanding research. He wrote to M.I.T., and told them he’d be joining in a year, and that he was taking time off in Madrid. He got a confirmation from them, and checked if his visa was still unexpired, before he booked the tickets. He marked off the dates on his calendar. He packed his messy room into haphazard boxes, and he called a friend to help with the storage. He packed little for Madrid: his violin, some books, clothes.
“I never pinned you the type to get up and leave,” said his ex-girlfriend, Mamen, whose feet swung back and forth from the window sill on which she was sitting, there to gather her things while he packed away his.
“I’m not,” he said, after a beat, zipping up a suitcase. “I’m not leaving; this is a part of everything. A year of music, then a few years doing my doctorate at M.I.T. And I’ve planned out everything, got a house, got a few auditions with orchestras, and a back-up plan. I’m not leaving anything, or anyone behind.”
“You can’t always calculate life, and friendship, and relationships like this,” she sighed. “I’m a scientist too, Raúl, and I know that.”
“It’s not about science,” Raúl mused. “It’s about knowing what I want, and when.”
“I wish you luck with that,” she said finally, quietly, and rose to give him one last, lingering kiss on the lips.
Two days later, he was almost finished packing, and he came across this: at the back of his shelf, with some dust on the hard cover, a book, a collection of short stories, and an author, “F. MORIENTES”, emblazoned along the side. He had seen it in the store a few months ago and bought it, and never read it, though he had often flipped through the pages and breathed in the new-book must. He thought back to what Mamen said earlier, and he did what academics do, that people never pinned them to doing: take risks as wild as they are carefully calculated, and dialed a number that was scribbled at the back of an old musical text from college.
“I’m coming to Europe,” he said casually, upon hearing a click on the other end, as though they had not been out of touch for two years. “Madrid.”
“So familiar,” Fernando laughed, in mock-disparagement. “So… not adventurous, for someone trying to run away. Typical.”
“I’m not running away,” said Raúl, seriously.
“I’ll visit,” Fernando replied, a smile in his voice.
Fall, 2002-Summer, 2003
“Well, this is familiar,” was the first thing Fernando said, when Raúl opened the door and Fernando dropped his bags at his feet. “All that’s missing is the passionate kiss.”
Raúl rolled his eyes at him, and Fernando leaned in to kiss his cheeks, and he let him. “And I have no wine this time,” he said.
“Oh, bullshit, your aunt seems to be the type to always leave a bottle or two around.”
“I finished them last night,” Raúl grinned. “In any case, you’ve never met my aunt.”
“I’ve fucked in her bedroom; I’m well positioned to make a conjecture.”
“You’re not getting me drunk again,” said Raúl, and wondered why this was so easy, helping Fernando move his things to the guest room.
“You were hardly drunk the first time,” said Fernando, and if Raúl didn’t know him better, he would have said the other man sounded injured. “Well enough to talk to me about the composition of the music when we lay on top of each other after.”
“Salieri, wasn’t it?”
“Stravinsky,” said Fernando, and this time, he sounded genuinely injured.
“I’m flattered that you remember,” said Raúl, after a pause.
“Don’t be,” said Fernando, briefly.
That afternoon, they go out to lunch. Raúl made a turn on the curb at the corner of which there was an Italian restaurant they both liked, but suddenly, Fernando gripped his wrist, and his fingers are warmer than the wet air. “Here,” he murmured with a tug, and suddenly, they’re in front of a chaotic street market, and there’s a lady selling oranges and apples and ironies behind them, beckoning at them.
“Let me cook you lunch instead,” said Fernando, on impulse.
Raúl stared at him. “Do you?” He paused. “Can you?”
Fernando’s lips looked to begin a pout, before he scratched the back of his head, having the decency to look sheepish as he said, “Well, no. I live on take out and sunshine cafés in Marseille.” He brightened, a second later. “All the more reason we should, though, no?”
Raúl took a moment to consider this. “If we have a recipe,” he said finally, and Fernando broke into a broad grin. “Your aunt is just the type to have cookbooks in the bottom rack of her bookshelf,” he said cheerfully, ignoring Raúl’s dry response of “Did they teach you this obnoxious habit of dissecting people you barely know in France?” and beginning to attempt to charm a bargain for basil and thyme and fresh cherry tomatoes from the old woman at the stall.
They both attempted to cook as they lived, and the result was this: perfect, messy, a disaster.
“The recipe says a spoonful of butter,” said Raúl, batting away Fernando’s hand from the saucepan.
“But I like butter,” Fernando objected, finding a way to circumvent Raúl’s hand. “More than the man who wrote the recipe, I bet.”
Raúl eyed the picture at the front of the cookbook, a fat, grinning man in a chef’s hat thumbs-upping them. “I doubt it,” he said, with a sigh. Fernando looked at him, like Fernando always did when he joked, to check if he was serious or not, and for a minute, they look into each other’s eyes and laugh, and in that minute, Fernando escaped Raúl’s protective hands, and slipped another pat of butter into the sizzling pan.
They took more than an hour to cook lunch that day. Fernando would claim, later, in the days that those would be fond memories and not fond farewells, that it was Raúl’s fault: he took ages to cut the vegetables with precision, and it really wouldn’t matter, he was sure, if they were supposed to be diced or sliced or cubed. Raúl would counter, later, when those times were abstractions of love and not of loss, that it was definitively Fernando’s fault: he spilt flour and salt and olive oil on the counter, and added extra dashes of peppers and butter and cumin seeds where they weren’t supposed to go, and it would take ages for Raúl to recalculate the flavours to add into the recipes.
At the end of it, they had this: flour, on Raúl’s nose, accompanying the disapproving frown, because the pesto sauce was swimming in more butter and olive oil than was healthy or accurate to any standard of haute cuisine; the smell of eggs in Fernando’s fingers that lingered after washing them with soap; two plates of spaghetti and a mess of vegetables toppling over to the side; roast chicken and mushroom; laughter; a slightly ruined cookbook with splatters of green and red inside the pages, carefully tucked to the back of the bookshelf with hushed, childish giggles; Gene Kelly and Peter Cincotti playing in the background; and only one fork.
“I forgot, she donated a bunch of stuff last summer,” said Raúl, dismally. “Who in hell throws out cutlery?”
“You can have it,” said Fernando, with seeming magnanimity, and then ignored Raúl’s “You’re not going to--Fernando!” as he grabbed trails of pasta between his fingers, and stuffed it between his lips, with a catlike wink. Raúl looked at him, then shook his head, muttering something that sounded like “incorrigible,” and “don’t touch me with those hands until you’ve washed them,” and hid the smile that threatened to creep up on his face when he tasted the food, too; later, he hid his smile again when Fernando kissed him over a dessert of fruits and milk in wine-glasses (“I told you her stash was over,”), and swallowed down a noise of complaint, when the crushed basil off Fernando’s fingers stained the cloth of his shirt.
Falling in love was like riding a bicycle: rickety, and unnecessary unless you were touring Europe or something, and something that you couldn’t unlearn, because it came back to your muscle memory and the tips of your fingers, familiar and automatic. Between those kisses that tasted of fresh pasta and milk and promise, and in that rain and over that year, they learned what they had unlearned, and they fell into a routine that felt something like hope, something like promise, a lot like love.
They fell in a routine that felt like this-fresh ground coffee and Spanish omelettes on late mornings, living off Fernando’s book royalties and the small income that Raúl’s orchestra paid him, trips to the Opera and late nights, sunsets: outside and sometimes on park benches and sometimes walking back from small restaurants in other barrios, talking, over afternoon coffee and evening tea and midnight wine-like when they were tethering on twenty and conversations still held the mystery of independent film and book-like dialogue to them, sex. The sex was different from the Madrid nights of their summer in college: it was slower and less desperate; it was less lonely from Fernando; it was less hesitant from Raúl. They alternated between fucking and sex and making love and blowjobs in street corners and flushed, incredulous cheeks, and afternoon sex with open windows and the smell of flowers; they experimented like young lovers, with fumbling hands and whispers and laughter and little slips and gasps and curls of body and tongue; they experimented like teenagers and twenty year olds, hiding their face in each other’s neck and mumbling secret fantasies, using faded neckties and thumbing the marks they left on each other’s torsos and necks and wrists with wonder; they fucked with the quietness of secret lovers; they made love with the occasional ecstasy of newlyweds.
They got matching tattoos. It was an ill-thought out decision on a wet March night, and they were both drunk and laughing and they had too many cigarettes, and littered between them was spilled drink and ash and hopes that were too light and winged for either of their hearts to bear, and Fernando had said he thought tattoos were beautiful, and men and women with them more so, and Raúl had said he liked the permanency of ink on skin, and they had left before either of them had a chance to think it over, and had woken up, tangled over each other, necks aching from their position sleeping in some alleyway corner, and seen lines of black and promise and permanency dancing and twisted and stamped across their ankles. (Raúl had tipped his head back and groaned. Fernando had laughed.)
Their conversations, too, were different from that stolen summer years ago, and this was perhaps because they, too were different people now. They talked with more seriousness now, and less fanciful dreams: and yet they dreamt together, unafraid: Raúl talked about being a professor at England, Fernando, of writing a book that would mean something important.
“How did you find your muse again?” murmured Raúl, one night when they had sprawled their limbs out under the dryness of the incoming summer winds.
Fernando inhaled his cigarette, a habit he couldn’t seem to shake off from the days of writing in cloudy evening cafés, and shrugged. “I started thinking about things that hurt too much to think about. Pain spills over into paper, you know. It’s fuel, for a writer. Emotion, really, is fuel for a writer. Sometimes…sometimes you go running. To feel things; experience everything. Not because you want to, or because it’s pleasant, or it isn’t. It’s necessary. It’s fuel.”
“Are we that, then?” Raúl said softly. “Fuel?”
Fernando looked at him for a long time, before replying. “As if we’re anything different to you: a gap-year of meaningless enjoyment, a hiccough to ensure you don’t tire out your career with tedium? You’re different, Raúl. You look at things for their meaning, rather than in the meaning of things.”
“I’m ambitious,” Raúl shrugged. “It’s not the worst thing to be.”
“No,” Fernando mused, settling back, inhaling another puff. “No, it isn’t, maybe.”
Summer slowly became hotter and dryer. Their routine of carefully planned morning breakfast and newspapers and outdoor afternoons and chaos persisted, but a new thought began to hang over their heads: with the change of the fresh fruits and the drying up of rivers and the very different sounds of traffic and hot afternoons: August and the end of summer and the rains was closing in quicker than they had expected or wanted, and M.I.T’s new term began in September.
“Come with me,” Raúl had said, unexpected as the rain in summer in Madrid, one morning, over overcooked eggs and burnt coffee. Fernando had said, “I’ll think about it,” in reply, because he didn’t want to.
“Come with me,” Raúl had said again, panting, as they separated one night in July, their bodies tired with sweat and come and promises that were dancing on the edge of broken. “You aren’t tied to anything here,” Raúl had continued, in earnest. “You’re not writing your next book, yet. It’ll be like how we thought we would be, post-college.”
Fernando had turned to his side, and pretended to be asleep.
“No,” he tried one time, when Raúl had asked him again, when they were cooking together again, no less haphazard or prolonged than the attempt from nearly a year ago.
Raúl had raised an eyebrow, looking more pleased with the fact of a response than annoyed at the content of it.
“Why not?”
“I’m not a kept man,” Fernando said, lightly, dropping too many chilli peppers into the sauce. “I can’t just move everything at your biding.”
Raúl stared at him. “You’re living out of a suitcase now. There’s not much of a life here without me, for you.”
“That’s what you think. Antonio the fish-seller who roams outside on Sunday, and Maria, the vegetable lady. I get along splendidly with them; I was thinking of inviting them to dinner tomorrow.”
“Now is not the time to joke,” Raúl snapped, surprising himself. Fernando looked up, wide eyed, and that’s when it hit Raúl.
“You’re scared,” he said, and his voice softened. “Of what this could mean? Fernando Morientes, published author: when did you concede to such a cliché?”
“Why does everyone and their mothers want to tell me I’m scared?” Fernando muttered in response, then made a face at the coffee, setting the mug aside. “Is there a wide eyed Dickensian orphan look of terror in my eyes, permanently? Like that Barcelona player, what’s his name. Bojan.”
Your football references annoy me, Raúl thought. Your jokes are not funny. Just because you managed to write that novel, doesn’t mean you’ve stopped being scared, Raúl wanted to tell him. You’re running away again, he wanted to say. Instead, he repeated, “Come with me, Fernando,” and this time, Fernando said nothing again, not even no.
On 15th of August, 2003 (a date Fernando etched to memory and later ink and paper, as he did with all dates), at some time mid afternoon that Raúl did not care to remember, because he never did, Raúl woke up to find Fernando’s things gone, and a note that said, “I’m leaving for Valencia.” The room was clean, and Raúl cursed himself for being a heavy sleeper, and the room looked as if nothing much was missing, because Fernando’s things were only one open suitcase in the corner of the floor with clothes half spilling out, and a bag of books on the study floor, but there was something suffocating about the smell of rain from the window. Fernando had left some things behind: an unfinished book still by their bedside, an old tshirt on the floor.
“Why Valencia,” Raúl said out loud, to the silence of fall. It seemed a more pressing question than it was, and there was a weight on his feet that would not let him move.
He left Madrid too, a week later, on a ticket booked two months in advance and a seat that got upgraded to one with extra legroom. He left some things behind when he left, too: a few pots and pans too heavily to carry, and some summer clothes, and although he took Fernando’s shirt, he left behind his note, and the tiny phone number, penned hastily in the corner of it.
(1. the first part was written for acchikocchi for valentinesplay, so i thought it was only fitting that the second part be written not only for her birthday, but also for the lovely labelledcaustic's, because they're two of the most amazing people in my life and also huge r/m fans. enjoy, loves.
2. fernando moved to monaco, not marseille, in his first stint in france, but i think marseille is a prettier city and this is AU and i don't know if he'll return to france again, so that's where he will begin this fic.)
Winter, 2000-01.
Fernando wrote to Raúl.
He had come to Marseille to write, and in the beginning, sitting on sun terraces of small cafés and feeling full of odd pretension and cold wind and French bread with chocolate, that was all he would write: sad letters, longing letters, love letters, letters that talked about the grey skies and mistral winds, the priceyness of coats in boutiques and the snobbiness of young mothers in parks, letters that talked about how bumbling one felt as an America-raised Spaniard in France, letters that were peppered with small French phrases and signed off with “un bisou, Nando.”
“My apartment is small,” began one (dated 18th October 2000 and written at 1:37 a.m. when he was curled on his sofa with half a glass of wine), “and the roof leaks. The landlord will not do anything about it,” he complained, in sweeping strokes of his large handwriting, “I think he dislikes me, because I pay the rent late and play jazz loudly late into the night. It helps me write, the music, and slow, sad jazz is befitting of Marseille. Have you visited? I never asked about where you used to go on summer vacations. If you had, you’d agree, too.”
“French food is delicious,” said another (written on a crumb-stained piece of journal paper at 2: 15 p.m. inside a small restaurant on the 3rd of November, 2000). “Though I don’t know if you would like it too much, it’s very light, very focused on flavour rather than embellishment or spices or creams. Do I sound like a snobby food critic? It’s just that they take their food so seriously, and I want to see what the fuss is about! Though I make so many mistakes. Once, I committed the treason of insulting the spice level of the fish. The waiter glared at me; it’s a mistake to insult French food if you’re going to do it in broken French, apparently. The American accent doesn’t help.”
“The girls are prettier here; the boys: more charming,” said one from half past midnight of 9th November, 2000, ink smudged from the drops of water that fell from Fernando’s hair, which he absently rubbed with a towel as he penned it over the desk of his makeshift study. “It sits well with me: you said I was a flirt once, and I didn’t exactly disagree. But over here, dancing with someone on an empty street in the midnight rain isn’t flirting: it’s just being friendly (or so I hope, otherwise the husband of the charming lady I had dinner with this evening might have some words for me.). I can’t decide, however, if this fact helps me write, or distracts me from it. It’s easier if you were a mathematician I suppose, but I wonder what the musician in you thinks of this? Or is it something you can separate, at all?”
“It’s nearly Christmas. Come here.”: was all one of them said, and it was the last one he ever wrote, and it was dated the 23rd of December 2000 and written in the snow.
He would put each of these letters in a carefully sealed envelope with pretty stamps alive with local scenery, address them with care, his handwriting strained in neat and carefully controlled curves, and then he would put the letters in the second drawer of his old-oak drawer, and not send even a single one. In those days, he did not know if they meant he had found the words or if they were still lost, because he had still not written more of his novel but little anecdotes and jokes and pretty descriptions of little girls playing on street corners or muslim boys with deep eyes praying at mosques had begun to come to his fingers easily, and he would write these stories through compulsion and through love, but he would write only stories that would never be told.
To amuse himself, he made friends. It came to him as naturally as breathing seasoaked air or buying fresh bread on sleepy Sunday mornings or having tricky negotiations with landlords: necessary, and not unpleasant. He talked to old ladies in park benches and laughed at the antics of their dogs; he struck up conversations with bright-lipsticked girls reading the newspapers and smoking on cloudy afternoons and discussed French politics and the nuances of ballet performances over coffee and self-important inflection of voices; he watched Olympique du Marseille regularly at a local pub and learned about the offside rule between getting drunk on cheap beer and getting crushed into weepy hugs by fat, middle-aged men he barely knew. He fucked, because it was easy and because it was a welcome distraction from the words, and the loneliness, and the seaside, and Raúl; he slept with dark haired girls he met at parties his new friends would invite him to, and with light-eyed drugged-up boys from loud clubs, and he slept over the night and sometimes made them brunch, and laughed and fed them fresh strawberries after, and he promised to call them later and never did.
“You fuck like a lonely man,” one of them had said, a sad-eyed red-haired young man, whose voice was hoarse with smoke, and cheeks littered with freckles. “I can’t pinpoint why, you just do.”
Fernando had started, and looked away from the window he had been staring out of. He removed his hand from where it had been stroking the man’s thigh, and lifted it to steal the cigarette from between his lips, inhaling and tipping his head back, letting the calm settle over him. “That’s a kind way to tell me it wasn’t good for you,” he laughed, finally. “I’ve heard worse.”
“Who said it was not a compliment?” the other man had replied, sounding genuinely surprised that his words had caused offence. “People who feel lonely usually fuck best; it’s something about having a lot to give and not being sure who to give it to.”
“I have a lot of friends,” Fernando said, returning the cigarette to the man, their fingers brushing.
“That’s funny,” the other man had said, seriously.
“I know someone else who said that to me,” Fernando sighed in return, rolling on to his side and closing his eyes.
Eventually, Fernando does, in certitude, find the words again, with the snow and the bite of January and the onset of the new year, because at 4:00 p.m. on the 4th of January, 2001, he wrote this: 537 words of a new chapter of his book, and a few scribbled ideas on a corner of a napkin for more.
It happened like this: a day before, at 8:21 a.m., Fernando had walked into an old bookshop two streets away from his house, and had sat there for 5 hours straight, picking up a translated book of poetry and rereading one page over and over, trying to dissect the anatomy of writing and reconstruct it in his head. At 12:27 p.m., when he was about to close it and head for lunch, an old man spoke over the soft thud of his closing the heavy book.
“Rimbaud was a child,” he said, and Fernando had looked up, surprised. “And you, an author. What will you learn from staring at the same poem over and over?”
“He inspired many,” murmured Fernando in response, looking at the man. He had a pocket watch, but was otherwise normally dressed in a neatly pressed suit, his hair pulled back in a long, salt and pepper ponytail. “How do you know I am an author?”
“The same way I know you feel like you’re not one, anymore,” the man said, dismissively. “You’re scared.”
“And you’re quite the cliché,” Fernando said, an amused smile creeping on his face. “Will you help me regain my muse with some friendly, optimistic, quintessentially European advice?” (In retrospect, he realized: “friendly” and “European” didn’t add up to “quintessential.”)
“Your french is shit,” replied the old man, matter-of-factly, “And what you need is a kick in the ass, not advice.”
“I’m not scared,” said Fernando. He wondered what was in the air of this city, or around him, that promoted random diagnoses of the heart, from strangers and from one-night stands.
“If you weren’t, you would be writing, right now. Any other emotion, you can channel into writing: happiness, joy, anger, grief. Fear, no. Not being able to write, that’s...that’s fear. Fear is poison.”
“And how do you stop fear if you don’t feel scared?”
“You think I’m a philosopher, just because I’m old,” grumbled the man in response. “I don’t know, you just...quit. Like smoking. Just stop.”
“What do the French know about quitting smoking,” Fernando said, even more amused now, getting up and gathering his things. But the next day, he had scratched out the “Dear Raul,” he had begun writing at the top edge of his journal and thought about him instead of to him, and he had taken a deep breath and let go of many things with it, and then he wrote, really wrote.
Summer, 2002.
That academia did not mean solitude was one of the first things Raúl discovered in his first year working in it, and that this did not disconcert him as much as he thought it would was the second. In the first winter, he wrote half of a proof that a postgraduate at the College published without credit to him, and since then, Raúl decided, in the quiet and determined way he decided things, irrevocable and concrete as a mathematical proof, that it would not happen again.
In those two years, he did this: he got two papers published, despite being just an undergraduate, and got an award for one of them. He befriended professors on the Committees and boards, in the cold-hearted manner of a professional: he took them to coffee and politely inquired about their wives and children, and he made himself indispensable to them when they were not paying attention. He learned to displace honesty with use, and it was not hard, because it was logical, like steps from an equation to proof and back. He got a girlfriend, a quiet graduate student who studied physics and liked to accompany him to the opera, and sometimes listened to old recordings of him playing as they both glanced through each other’s homework.
He got into M.I.T., and suddenly, he fell sick with his work, and missed his music more than he realized that he might. “I’m taking a year off and playing in a orchestra,” he said one day, the same rehearsed ten words first to his mentor, who looked at him seriously and nodded, then to the people at the university, who had various reactions he didn’t care to catalogue to memory, then to his girlfriend, who looked sad and told him she was leaving, too. He left methodically like this, breaking hearts and friendships with the non-dramaticness of a scientist, careful to leave no messy endings or untied threads (the only messy endings in his life were the ones left for him.) He finished his outstanding research. He wrote to M.I.T., and told them he’d be joining in a year, and that he was taking time off in Madrid. He got a confirmation from them, and checked if his visa was still unexpired, before he booked the tickets. He marked off the dates on his calendar. He packed his messy room into haphazard boxes, and he called a friend to help with the storage. He packed little for Madrid: his violin, some books, clothes.
“I never pinned you the type to get up and leave,” said his ex-girlfriend, Mamen, whose feet swung back and forth from the window sill on which she was sitting, there to gather her things while he packed away his.
“I’m not,” he said, after a beat, zipping up a suitcase. “I’m not leaving; this is a part of everything. A year of music, then a few years doing my doctorate at M.I.T. And I’ve planned out everything, got a house, got a few auditions with orchestras, and a back-up plan. I’m not leaving anything, or anyone behind.”
“You can’t always calculate life, and friendship, and relationships like this,” she sighed. “I’m a scientist too, Raúl, and I know that.”
“It’s not about science,” Raúl mused. “It’s about knowing what I want, and when.”
“I wish you luck with that,” she said finally, quietly, and rose to give him one last, lingering kiss on the lips.
Two days later, he was almost finished packing, and he came across this: at the back of his shelf, with some dust on the hard cover, a book, a collection of short stories, and an author, “F. MORIENTES”, emblazoned along the side. He had seen it in the store a few months ago and bought it, and never read it, though he had often flipped through the pages and breathed in the new-book must. He thought back to what Mamen said earlier, and he did what academics do, that people never pinned them to doing: take risks as wild as they are carefully calculated, and dialed a number that was scribbled at the back of an old musical text from college.
“I’m coming to Europe,” he said casually, upon hearing a click on the other end, as though they had not been out of touch for two years. “Madrid.”
“So familiar,” Fernando laughed, in mock-disparagement. “So… not adventurous, for someone trying to run away. Typical.”
“I’m not running away,” said Raúl, seriously.
“I’ll visit,” Fernando replied, a smile in his voice.
Fall, 2002-Summer, 2003
“Well, this is familiar,” was the first thing Fernando said, when Raúl opened the door and Fernando dropped his bags at his feet. “All that’s missing is the passionate kiss.”
Raúl rolled his eyes at him, and Fernando leaned in to kiss his cheeks, and he let him. “And I have no wine this time,” he said.
“Oh, bullshit, your aunt seems to be the type to always leave a bottle or two around.”
“I finished them last night,” Raúl grinned. “In any case, you’ve never met my aunt.”
“I’ve fucked in her bedroom; I’m well positioned to make a conjecture.”
“You’re not getting me drunk again,” said Raúl, and wondered why this was so easy, helping Fernando move his things to the guest room.
“You were hardly drunk the first time,” said Fernando, and if Raúl didn’t know him better, he would have said the other man sounded injured. “Well enough to talk to me about the composition of the music when we lay on top of each other after.”
“Salieri, wasn’t it?”
“Stravinsky,” said Fernando, and this time, he sounded genuinely injured.
“I’m flattered that you remember,” said Raúl, after a pause.
“Don’t be,” said Fernando, briefly.
That afternoon, they go out to lunch. Raúl made a turn on the curb at the corner of which there was an Italian restaurant they both liked, but suddenly, Fernando gripped his wrist, and his fingers are warmer than the wet air. “Here,” he murmured with a tug, and suddenly, they’re in front of a chaotic street market, and there’s a lady selling oranges and apples and ironies behind them, beckoning at them.
“Let me cook you lunch instead,” said Fernando, on impulse.
Raúl stared at him. “Do you?” He paused. “Can you?”
Fernando’s lips looked to begin a pout, before he scratched the back of his head, having the decency to look sheepish as he said, “Well, no. I live on take out and sunshine cafés in Marseille.” He brightened, a second later. “All the more reason we should, though, no?”
Raúl took a moment to consider this. “If we have a recipe,” he said finally, and Fernando broke into a broad grin. “Your aunt is just the type to have cookbooks in the bottom rack of her bookshelf,” he said cheerfully, ignoring Raúl’s dry response of “Did they teach you this obnoxious habit of dissecting people you barely know in France?” and beginning to attempt to charm a bargain for basil and thyme and fresh cherry tomatoes from the old woman at the stall.
They both attempted to cook as they lived, and the result was this: perfect, messy, a disaster.
“The recipe says a spoonful of butter,” said Raúl, batting away Fernando’s hand from the saucepan.
“But I like butter,” Fernando objected, finding a way to circumvent Raúl’s hand. “More than the man who wrote the recipe, I bet.”
Raúl eyed the picture at the front of the cookbook, a fat, grinning man in a chef’s hat thumbs-upping them. “I doubt it,” he said, with a sigh. Fernando looked at him, like Fernando always did when he joked, to check if he was serious or not, and for a minute, they look into each other’s eyes and laugh, and in that minute, Fernando escaped Raúl’s protective hands, and slipped another pat of butter into the sizzling pan.
They took more than an hour to cook lunch that day. Fernando would claim, later, in the days that those would be fond memories and not fond farewells, that it was Raúl’s fault: he took ages to cut the vegetables with precision, and it really wouldn’t matter, he was sure, if they were supposed to be diced or sliced or cubed. Raúl would counter, later, when those times were abstractions of love and not of loss, that it was definitively Fernando’s fault: he spilt flour and salt and olive oil on the counter, and added extra dashes of peppers and butter and cumin seeds where they weren’t supposed to go, and it would take ages for Raúl to recalculate the flavours to add into the recipes.
At the end of it, they had this: flour, on Raúl’s nose, accompanying the disapproving frown, because the pesto sauce was swimming in more butter and olive oil than was healthy or accurate to any standard of haute cuisine; the smell of eggs in Fernando’s fingers that lingered after washing them with soap; two plates of spaghetti and a mess of vegetables toppling over to the side; roast chicken and mushroom; laughter; a slightly ruined cookbook with splatters of green and red inside the pages, carefully tucked to the back of the bookshelf with hushed, childish giggles; Gene Kelly and Peter Cincotti playing in the background; and only one fork.
“I forgot, she donated a bunch of stuff last summer,” said Raúl, dismally. “Who in hell throws out cutlery?”
“You can have it,” said Fernando, with seeming magnanimity, and then ignored Raúl’s “You’re not going to--Fernando!” as he grabbed trails of pasta between his fingers, and stuffed it between his lips, with a catlike wink. Raúl looked at him, then shook his head, muttering something that sounded like “incorrigible,” and “don’t touch me with those hands until you’ve washed them,” and hid the smile that threatened to creep up on his face when he tasted the food, too; later, he hid his smile again when Fernando kissed him over a dessert of fruits and milk in wine-glasses (“I told you her stash was over,”), and swallowed down a noise of complaint, when the crushed basil off Fernando’s fingers stained the cloth of his shirt.
Falling in love was like riding a bicycle: rickety, and unnecessary unless you were touring Europe or something, and something that you couldn’t unlearn, because it came back to your muscle memory and the tips of your fingers, familiar and automatic. Between those kisses that tasted of fresh pasta and milk and promise, and in that rain and over that year, they learned what they had unlearned, and they fell into a routine that felt something like hope, something like promise, a lot like love.
They fell in a routine that felt like this-fresh ground coffee and Spanish omelettes on late mornings, living off Fernando’s book royalties and the small income that Raúl’s orchestra paid him, trips to the Opera and late nights, sunsets: outside and sometimes on park benches and sometimes walking back from small restaurants in other barrios, talking, over afternoon coffee and evening tea and midnight wine-like when they were tethering on twenty and conversations still held the mystery of independent film and book-like dialogue to them, sex. The sex was different from the Madrid nights of their summer in college: it was slower and less desperate; it was less lonely from Fernando; it was less hesitant from Raúl. They alternated between fucking and sex and making love and blowjobs in street corners and flushed, incredulous cheeks, and afternoon sex with open windows and the smell of flowers; they experimented like young lovers, with fumbling hands and whispers and laughter and little slips and gasps and curls of body and tongue; they experimented like teenagers and twenty year olds, hiding their face in each other’s neck and mumbling secret fantasies, using faded neckties and thumbing the marks they left on each other’s torsos and necks and wrists with wonder; they fucked with the quietness of secret lovers; they made love with the occasional ecstasy of newlyweds.
They got matching tattoos. It was an ill-thought out decision on a wet March night, and they were both drunk and laughing and they had too many cigarettes, and littered between them was spilled drink and ash and hopes that were too light and winged for either of their hearts to bear, and Fernando had said he thought tattoos were beautiful, and men and women with them more so, and Raúl had said he liked the permanency of ink on skin, and they had left before either of them had a chance to think it over, and had woken up, tangled over each other, necks aching from their position sleeping in some alleyway corner, and seen lines of black and promise and permanency dancing and twisted and stamped across their ankles. (Raúl had tipped his head back and groaned. Fernando had laughed.)
Their conversations, too, were different from that stolen summer years ago, and this was perhaps because they, too were different people now. They talked with more seriousness now, and less fanciful dreams: and yet they dreamt together, unafraid: Raúl talked about being a professor at England, Fernando, of writing a book that would mean something important.
“How did you find your muse again?” murmured Raúl, one night when they had sprawled their limbs out under the dryness of the incoming summer winds.
Fernando inhaled his cigarette, a habit he couldn’t seem to shake off from the days of writing in cloudy evening cafés, and shrugged. “I started thinking about things that hurt too much to think about. Pain spills over into paper, you know. It’s fuel, for a writer. Emotion, really, is fuel for a writer. Sometimes…sometimes you go running. To feel things; experience everything. Not because you want to, or because it’s pleasant, or it isn’t. It’s necessary. It’s fuel.”
“Are we that, then?” Raúl said softly. “Fuel?”
Fernando looked at him for a long time, before replying. “As if we’re anything different to you: a gap-year of meaningless enjoyment, a hiccough to ensure you don’t tire out your career with tedium? You’re different, Raúl. You look at things for their meaning, rather than in the meaning of things.”
“I’m ambitious,” Raúl shrugged. “It’s not the worst thing to be.”
“No,” Fernando mused, settling back, inhaling another puff. “No, it isn’t, maybe.”
Summer slowly became hotter and dryer. Their routine of carefully planned morning breakfast and newspapers and outdoor afternoons and chaos persisted, but a new thought began to hang over their heads: with the change of the fresh fruits and the drying up of rivers and the very different sounds of traffic and hot afternoons: August and the end of summer and the rains was closing in quicker than they had expected or wanted, and M.I.T’s new term began in September.
“Come with me,” Raúl had said, unexpected as the rain in summer in Madrid, one morning, over overcooked eggs and burnt coffee. Fernando had said, “I’ll think about it,” in reply, because he didn’t want to.
“Come with me,” Raúl had said again, panting, as they separated one night in July, their bodies tired with sweat and come and promises that were dancing on the edge of broken. “You aren’t tied to anything here,” Raúl had continued, in earnest. “You’re not writing your next book, yet. It’ll be like how we thought we would be, post-college.”
Fernando had turned to his side, and pretended to be asleep.
“No,” he tried one time, when Raúl had asked him again, when they were cooking together again, no less haphazard or prolonged than the attempt from nearly a year ago.
Raúl had raised an eyebrow, looking more pleased with the fact of a response than annoyed at the content of it.
“Why not?”
“I’m not a kept man,” Fernando said, lightly, dropping too many chilli peppers into the sauce. “I can’t just move everything at your biding.”
Raúl stared at him. “You’re living out of a suitcase now. There’s not much of a life here without me, for you.”
“That’s what you think. Antonio the fish-seller who roams outside on Sunday, and Maria, the vegetable lady. I get along splendidly with them; I was thinking of inviting them to dinner tomorrow.”
“Now is not the time to joke,” Raúl snapped, surprising himself. Fernando looked up, wide eyed, and that’s when it hit Raúl.
“You’re scared,” he said, and his voice softened. “Of what this could mean? Fernando Morientes, published author: when did you concede to such a cliché?”
“Why does everyone and their mothers want to tell me I’m scared?” Fernando muttered in response, then made a face at the coffee, setting the mug aside. “Is there a wide eyed Dickensian orphan look of terror in my eyes, permanently? Like that Barcelona player, what’s his name. Bojan.”
Your football references annoy me, Raúl thought. Your jokes are not funny. Just because you managed to write that novel, doesn’t mean you’ve stopped being scared, Raúl wanted to tell him. You’re running away again, he wanted to say. Instead, he repeated, “Come with me, Fernando,” and this time, Fernando said nothing again, not even no.
On 15th of August, 2003 (a date Fernando etched to memory and later ink and paper, as he did with all dates), at some time mid afternoon that Raúl did not care to remember, because he never did, Raúl woke up to find Fernando’s things gone, and a note that said, “I’m leaving for Valencia.” The room was clean, and Raúl cursed himself for being a heavy sleeper, and the room looked as if nothing much was missing, because Fernando’s things were only one open suitcase in the corner of the floor with clothes half spilling out, and a bag of books on the study floor, but there was something suffocating about the smell of rain from the window. Fernando had left some things behind: an unfinished book still by their bedside, an old tshirt on the floor.
“Why Valencia,” Raúl said out loud, to the silence of fall. It seemed a more pressing question than it was, and there was a weight on his feet that would not let him move.
He left Madrid too, a week later, on a ticket booked two months in advance and a seat that got upgraded to one with extra legroom. He left some things behind when he left, too: a few pots and pans too heavily to carry, and some summer clothes, and although he took Fernando’s shirt, he left behind his note, and the tiny phone number, penned hastily in the corner of it.