Around the neighborhood I usually see two men walking arm in arm. In winter they wear a long coat, both the same model; in summer, a dark jacket and a red tie. One is a little taller than the other, they are old and fragile. Are very similar. I don’t know if it’s because they wear the same clothes, shoes, glasses. It would seem that they are brothers, even twins. They could also be a couple. They say that couples who have been living together for a long time end up looking alike. Like the owners and their dogs.
Being born at a time that was not conducive to showing their love abroad, it could be that they had chosen to wear the same clothes, comb their hair the same way and thus pass as brothers. To protect yourself. To be able to walk arm in arm down the street in peace.
I see them, early in the morning, when they go shopping. They walk slowly. If I walk by their side, they speak softly, as if they were protecting their bubble so that no one bothers them. A silence surrounds them that exudes tenderness. They go for the bread and enter the market. They don’t push a cart to load for the whole week, they couldn’t handle that effort. Just a bag. What are we going to eat today? For dinner, a piece of cheese and some fruit.
Whether they are siblings, friends or lovers, their story could accompany the twelve that journalist Marta Vives has written in Diguem-ne amor. Loves of youth who did not know how to tell him. Love of solidarity, neighbors, colleagues, to help each other. Love and polyamory, overcome jealousy, flee from the feeling of ownership. Loves that go beyond established conventions and add even more love around them. Friends who shared a student flat and twenty-five years later rent that same flat for a weekend, now converted into a tourist apartment. They relive memories and know that they can count on each other as time passes.
Vives invites us to enter the intimacy of characters and experiences in which we can recognize ourselves in some corner, that surprise us, that touch us. With it we puncture the bubble of those people whom we have observed having a coffee in the same bar, with whom we have shared a song, who work with us, who live on the same stairs or whom we see early in the morning arm in arm on the way to look for bread. “Without silence, love is not possible.”
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