When one thinks of pain, one summons thoughts about one’s earliest encounters with the most common experiences that have accompanied any childhood-toothache. In that moment of discomfort when you were told by your grandmother, to not ever touch that jar of candies, there stood also behind her, a grandfather, stern, and with the clear features you would never have. He was explaining: there’s no pain coming from the tooth; they are in those nerves. In your young mind made older by the persistent pain, you imagined ‘nerves,’ long, mangled, twisted, mindless, impertinent thin lines with openings exposed raw, by themselves mindless of the acute sensation.
The color of that malaise that had left you mindless was white. You had met the neutral color and neutrality in your apolitical mind was not painless. But as the aches intensified, the pain became silver, an alloy of sensations. ‘Why would my Guardian Angel give a glorious sheen to the pain that is punishing me now,’ you asked. In that magical pause that occurred in boyhood pain, you answered it yourself: so that I will listen to my immortal grandmother, and to never touch that jar of the sweetest candies again.
And yet silver also loses its glimmer, and with all the memories of pains the glimmer of sterling. There follows forgetfulness and its color is bronze. It fades and the rust has the scent of grasses that have been cut, of barks, twigs and branches too vile for the most vivid scenarios. Conjure an object that has lost its use both for the sacred and the profane. Forgetting is another pain and its hue will never transcend the perfect color for vanishing-the bronze born out of soil-brown with no desire to shine like any metal.
If forgetting is a form of pain, can it be the opposite of remembering. That little boy now nearly the age of his grandparents may be the one with answers. In remembering is embedded another pain and its color is overpowering yellow. We often try to remember events, people that appeared to inhabit the farthest point of our mind, which has assumed the form of a long, tortuous mental colonnade. The problem is the Universe has gifted the act of remembering the painful colors radiating from warm to unforgiving noon sunlight. Look up and that already is the sun, a star with no memories because its power blocks dimension. It ignores aches. The mind squints and it only reaches events of these days. These occurrences have not yet developed the patina of importance or even of nostalgia. The little boy may not have realized yet that what he is looking farthest at is himself, now remembered with pain-tears and love -by other minds gathering their own memories.
It was one of those days: the sun was out but pale, the wind was strong, bringing down the clouds. The parcel arrived, which surprised me because it was a book I gave her. True to her witchcraft desire, the book opened and scattered golden stars. The effect was not what she would have wanted but knowing she was in a room somewhere, in her last days and nights, the cutouts were more than gilded. After the stars came the note: ‘My dear friend, it’s time to return this to you.’ The book was about deconstruction, then our new coping mechanism against our mind. The note, however, was devout. She said last night, the pain she was waiting for arrived. ‘I don’t know where it came from.’
When a torment does not have an origin, the pain it bears does not lose its color. It retains a purple velvet outside, within is agony, in a dark cave with surprises of soreness, lacerations and lesions the tint of ruined uterus and mangled breasts – burnt sienna, incarnadine, crimson and the innocent pink rearing its ribbons of smarting pains.
We lost her to all these colors of pain.
In our family, we found our eldest brother’s pain embedded in other colors. It was from him that we learned the opposite value of an illness diagnosed to be terminal. Moved to our parents’ room in his last days, he was surrounded by colorful swaths of curtains that were blown by the wind from the wide windows. In that room, I would go, massaging his feet gently. We would not talk much. My sister was there, conversing with him in near whisper. His three children were always there. Was he in pain? I cannot recall. What I remember were his seemingly interminable stories to the three children. They were without deadlines. If he were in pain then, those convulsions had taken the varied colors of his room -green, yellow, brown, blue, red. Being an artist he would have mixed all of them, and whatever the mixture was produced, he would have called it hope and love. For that was what the room was about: his final time with his loved ones. And his unfinished arts.
His pain was not black; it was a crazy shifting of hues. An illusion of rainbows even when cold rains covered his sight.
Pain is bodily, but literature and arts have a favored subject-love. That which creates bonds broken only and, sometimes, not even by decay. Lovers color the pain of love with the cliche of red; think or love again and find there the truest gray waiting for all kinds of love. There in love is the pain itself of love, matte in anticipation of the invention of luminosity from all kinds of love.
The sordid pain known by those who loved and did not love because of it is that the potency of love is embedded in its power to leave. It has a cache of goodbyes and they are cozy in shades of blue. The complexion of stains disguises the truest color of love when it’s gone.
Pablo Neruda has it in one of the lines from his ‘100 Love Sonnets’: ‘So I wait for you like a lonely house/till you will see me again and live in me./Till then my windows ache.’Love vanished shows its true color-black with the shadow of the unknown giving it the slow strokes. In the darkness hides the utmost pains of love.