Hungry for love
On a beautiful Saturday morning, a trip to the cinematheque to see the Belgian film “Here” brings back old stories that have barely been digested.
Beautiful days like today always make me want to get in the car and travel, preferably without a destination. Stopping here and there, with no appointment. But today's trip was short and ended in the dark room of a movie theater, as has been my Saturday morning routine ever since I joined my town's film club.
I have a theory that a movie is only good when it stirs your insides and awakens fears and memories. Today's movie, “Here”, did its job. It reminded me of a carnival trip a few years ago, when we rented a house in Porto Seguro. Everything was a simple matter of arithmetic: a three-bedroom house, with the expenses divided between three couples of friends. But at the last minute, an acquaintance joined the group, who had just had a fight with her boyfriend and was inconsolable. Only the joy of the carnival blocks and trios elétricos on the Bahian coast could ease her pain, she said. “That's fine”, one of the couples replied for all of us, ‘after all, the sofa bed in the living room is unoccupied’. And so it was decided.
A few days before our departure, my boyfriend and I learned that this friend would be traveling by car with us, as we were the people in the group who knew her best. In fact, I knew her very little, and my boyfriend had met her and her friends shortly before, during the time we were at odds. But none of that could faze us. Soon the three of us were traveling in a, shall we say, cozy little car. She, sitting in the middle of the back seat, had her face in the tiny space between mine and my boyfriend's, speaking loudly to be understood.
The distance between Rio de Janeiro and Porto Seguro is 1100km, the equivalent of 15 hours on the road. During the journey, I noticed that she had apparently set herself the challenge of distracting us by telling us her whole life story and letting us know when it was time to eat. Until then, I had never seen anyone so hungry.
Halfway through the trip, she bombastically declared that my companion reminded her a lot of an old boyfriend who had died at the height of their passion. From then on, dear reader, I was relegated to the world of the invisible. There was nothing I could say or do that could get a reaction out of our fellow traveler. All her attention was on him, and my boyfriend was thrilled.
When we arrived in Porto Seguro, we went out to eat once more. Shortly afterwards, she went ecstatically to the craft markets along the waterfront, trying on all the hats and necklaces in search of his look of approval. When we finally returned to the house we had rented, she refused to sleep on the sofa bed in the living room. “I'm scared!” she said, her eyes filled with tears. “I can't bear to sleep alone in a strange place. Can I sleep in the room with you?”
Half an hour later, she was snoring on a pile of mattresses, while I was angrily examining the cracks in the ceiling and in my pride. Before sunrise, I walked the few kilometers between the rented house and the bus station. I was dragging my wheelie suitcase through the cobbled streets, full of bikinis and bathing suits that hadn't seen the color of the sea. All I had left behind was a little note. “Have fun,” it said. My reaction had obviously ruined the carnival for the bitch and her ex-boyfriend and caused astonishment in my travel companion to Rio. Sitting in the seat next to me was a stranger, who spent the first hour of the bus ride asking me questions in a vain effort to understand why a poor mortal with a crying face would leave the city with the best carnival in northeastern Brazil on Carnival Saturday.
From this event onwards, I would come to understand the expression “love hunger” and would never again be able to bear the company of a woman with a voracious appetite who was close to a boyfriend of mine. The mere memory of the desperate actions of a woman who didn't even have a real interest in my boyfriend twisted my insides. Today I prefer the company of anorexics...
If you've seen “Here”, you're probably wondering why on earth this movie brought back memories of this creature bulimic with love, aren't you? Strangely enough, the drama of a man and a woman who live their lives in complete solitude and who fight against their own apathy in the process of seduction reminded me of my own personal story. So different from the couple who spend the entire interval of the movie groping their way through a world of discovery, amid the sound of splashing rain and birdsong echoing through the surround sound of the movie theater.
The movie is a reminder to all of us that the day of discovering love also comes for the shy. But what day will it be?
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Voltar