Sara

I met Sara here. In general, people write me to give me their feedback or asking for a photo. And when I'm abroad that seems to happen more often and quickly. Maybe out of curiosity, because they consider it more exotic or, who knows, for fear of getting home and finding a sloppy or senseless link. In this specific case, Sara didn’t write me. I didn’t think much about it but if someone had asked me “Zé, was there anyone you met the last time you went to Milan and whose contact slipped you by?”, I would answer “Sara.. probably Sara”. Nobody asked and I didn’t answer and I must confess that I didn’t loose my sleep because of it. The truth is that, out of pure chance, we met again online days before I went back to Milan. She gave me her number and a clear indication to use it while I was there. But I lost it. And it was in a mixture of joy (mine) and disappointment (hers) that we found each other in another outdoor café (again, by pure chance) in Brera. I joined her and her friend and before I left we agreed on having dinner that night. And so we did. I met Sara and some friends at Tratoria Toscana in Corso di Porta Ticinese. There I was introduced to several people whom the next day I would have difficulty remembering their exact name, their origin and what the hell they were doing there. But there was someone, besides Sara, that also charmed me. Alejandro (that unlike his skin, hair and clear eyes might suggest) is Mexican. He shared an apartment with Sara for some time and during that night I also started feeling that I had shared a house with them. They made me feel welcomed into their lives and I felt the enormous trust that one feels instinctively when we like someone but whom we know will return to their place some thousand kilometers away, taking all we confided with them. And that’s how I knew details about Sara’s boyfriend and Alejandro’s loves and flirts. But when I met Alejandro I didn’t assimilate him in the reducing sense of a “gay Mexican”. Because Alejandro was not gay in the true sense of a man that sleeps with another man. Alejandro was gay in all the plenitude of the word. In the same sense that I learned in my 7^th grade French classes. Because that was not the strict meaning that my teacher taught me. Gay as in someone who is bright and cheerful. Someone with a contagious joy. Someone that embodies the original meaning of the word and that we all seem to have forgotten. And when I remembered that meaning I found a joyful person in all those people that I met that night, in all those that talked, smiled or touched me. In all those that welcomed me, that wanted to know my origins, where I came from and where I was going. Like someone once wrote in the comments box of this blog “true freedom is not saying that we like women or men, but being able to like both and be completely happy with that, without dichotomies and the need to define ourselves as straight, gay or lesbian”. And that comment (or his fear of it) transported me to an article that José António Saraiva once wrote where he seemed to fear the extinction of the differences between the genders, as if the habits revolution is leading us to the inevitable condition of androgynous. I don’t criticize him and I don’t find it strange. If I were thirty years older I’m sure all of this would sound really bizarre. Even because, to be completely honest, I consider to myself the most dichotomized of worlds between males and females, between rude and violent creatures and fragile and sweet human beings. Because among my group of friends just one drink is enough for us to start treating one other as “machos”, using brutality to prove one´s high levels of testosterone that we have available for the most delicate of the females. You see, without this dichotomized world I don’t even feel lust. But that world does not overlap over the other one, the human one. And in that world I fall in love not with women but, like the anonymous on July 18^th, 11:53 PM, suggested, I fall in love with people. With my closest family members, with my dearest friends and with some of those that I run into and that I don’t have time to know more deeply. That night I fell in love with Sara and also with Alejandro. My feelings for them were deeper than those I felt about the feminine silhouette with whom I would lay with later that day. Because that passion is much important that the libido spiral drew by my lust. After all, this last one doesn't make me much different than a dog in heat. The next morning, when I left that well-decorated apartment and scribbled the note that I had seen been scribbled so many times in films when I was a kid, it was not its recipient that I had on my mind, but Sara and Alejandro. And that’s why I yesterday wrote to Alejandro and asked if I could also write about him. For the same reason that he replied saying that that was the most flattering thing that I could have asked him. For the very same reason that when I heard Sara saying that she wanted to take some photos to start a blog with a friend I reminded her “I’m still around tomorrow, call me when you wake up and we'll take care of it”. And so we did. And now that it’s done, if Sara asked me again (just like she did in that Corso Garibaldi outdoor café where we ran into each other) “what’s your favorite photo?” I would probably have answered her:

- yours, Sara, your photograph