I know what you will do when morning comes. I wake before you do and I lie still. Sometimes I doze, but usually I am alert, with my eyes open. I don’t move. I don’t want to disturb you. I can hear your soft, calm breathing and I like that. And then at a certain point you turn toward me without opening your eyes; your hand reaches over, and you touch my shoulder or my back. And then all of you comes close to me. It is as though you were still sleeping—there is no sound from you, just a need, almost urgent but unconscious, to be close to someone. This is how the day begins when you are with me.
It is strange how much unwitting effort it has taken to bring us here. The engineers and software designers could never have guessed, as they laid out their strategies and sought investment, that the thing they were making—the Internet—would cause two strangers to meet and then, after a time, to lie in the half-light of morning, holding each other. Were it not for them, we would never have been together in this place.
One day you ask me if I hate the British, and I say that I do not. All that is over now. It is easy to be Irish these days. Easier maybe than being Jewish and knowing, as you do, that your great-aunts and uncles perished at Hitler’s hands. And that your grandparents, whom you love and visit sometimes out on Long Island, lost their brothers and sisters; they live with that catastrophe day in, day out.
It is a pity that there is such great German music, you say, and I tell you that Germany comes in many guises, and you shrug and say, “Not for us.”
We are in New York, on the Upper West Side, and when I open the blinds in the bedroom we can see the river and the George Washington Bridge. You don’t know, because I will never tell you, how much it frightens me that the bridge is so close and in full view. You know more about music than I do, but I have read books that you have not read. I hope that you will never stumble on a copy of James Baldwin’s “Another Country”; I hope that I will never come into the room and find you reading it, following Rufus through New York to his final journey up this way, on the train, to the bridge, the jump, the water.
There is a year missing in your stories of your life, and this makes everyone who loves you watch you with care. I have asked you about it a few times and seen your hunched shoulders and your vague, empty look, the nerdy look that you have when you are low. I know your parents dislike the fact that I am older than you, but the knowledge that I don’t drink alcohol or take drugs almost makes up for that, or I like to think it does. You don’t drink or take drugs, either, but you do go outside to smoke, and maybe I should take up smoking, too, so that I can watch over you casually when you are out there and not have to wait and then feel relief when I hear the doors of the elevator opening and your key in the lock.
There is no year in my life that I cannot account for, but there are years that I do not think about now, years that went by slowly, in a sort of coiled pain. I have never bothered you with the details. You think I am strong because I am older, and maybe that is the way things should be.
I am old enough to remember when things were different. But no one cares now, in this apartment building or in the world outside, that we are men and we wake often in the same bed. No one cares now that when we touch each other’s face we find that we both need to shave. Or that when I touch your body I find a body like mine, though in better shape and twenty and more years younger. You are circumcised and I am not. That is a difference. We are cut and uncut, as they say in this country where we both live now, where you were born.
Germany, Ireland, the Internet, gay rights, Judaism, Catholicism: they have all brought us here. To this room, to this bed in America. How easy it would have been for this never to have happened. How unlikely it would have seemed in the past.
Sleep, Colm Tóibín, The New Yorker, 16 marzo de 2015
Colm Tóibín, Winston Manrique Sabogal, El País, 11 de septiembre de 2010
Las voces de Colm Tóibín, Antonio Muñoz Molina
