Monday, March 5, 2018

Passionate Cursive


Life of my heart, the only woman I have ever kissed, I want to kneel at your feet forever… my 28-year-old father writes.

A stack of letters between my parents has lately come into my hands. The first letter dates from 1941, at the very start of their courtship, when he is her violin teacher, and the last is probably from 1953, the year before we leave Spain for Ecuador.

Between those two dates there are dozens of letters, most of them written by my father in Barcelona during the times my mother is at her parents’ farm in the country. But during their courtship he writes even while they are both in the city and he sees her every day. He walks her home from the university and then goes to his parents’ apartment, finds a quiet corner and pours out his adoration on paper (goddess of my dreams, star of my firmament, joy of my life…).

The next day he meets her at the usual place. “When I would see him coming,” my mother once told me, “I always looked at his breast pocket, to see if there was a letter peeking out.”

There usually was, and these and the letters that he wrote during their times apart make for overwhelming reading. The first time I plowed through them, I had to take breaks, because their intensity made me gasp.

Does anybody still write love letters like these (adorable angel, without you the city is a desert, gray and dead, and I wander the streets like a soul in torment…)? Her beautiful hair, the soft skin of her cheeks, her hands, her eyes, her sublime spirit have kindled in him a flame that will never be extinguished…With his music and her love, he tells her over and over, he needs neither wealth nor fame to be the happiest man on earth.

In letter after letter, my father’s elegant handwriting unfolds across the page like a visual melody. How can these harmonious loops and strokes, these impeccably parallel lines, hold so much ardor?

My mother’s letters—there are several in the collection—match his in intensity, but the writing is often illegible. Sometimes the handwriting leans forward, others backward, and the words stretch out or bunch irregularly on the page, propelled by the changing rhythms of her feelings. 

But my musician father was accustomed to containing his emotions within the boundaries of a certain form, and even in the transports of amorous passion, his pen-holding fingers kept a steady beat. Which is why, reading his letters almost a century later, I can feel his young heart, beating in my hands.


8 comments :

  1. Wow, Lali! -you come by your wonderful writing talent naturally! Just Beautiful.

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  2. My parents are both gone now, and I haven't had the strength to open the box of their letter to me when I was in college, all of which I've saved for almost 50 years. Not your kind of letters - but my Mexican grandfather wrote that kind to my American grandmother, but I don't know what Mother did with them; she just told me how he adored her. Almost too personal to read.

    They had such a strong knowledge of how precious - and how fleeting - life and love could be.

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  3. I waited four years after my mother died (my father died long ago) before reading those letters.
    About the similarities with your grandfather's letters, I've wondered if the intensity of my fathers' was culturally related. Plus, it was all so long ago, it was practically the Victorian era.

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  4. This is a beautiful piece. So romantic. And the last two paragraphs - as a wanna-be writer (who used to write at all angles too, trying to find my natural style) and musician - are unexpected but gorgeous.

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    Replies
    1. I too used to write at different angles, and still do sometimes. I've often wondered if it means anything.

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  5. Having known them both, I find this column most meaningful!

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