“(he who’s never once dreamt of it
has no right to judge the verses)”
— L.Q.V.
“Negli occhi porta la mia donna Amore,
per che si fa gentil ciò ch’ella mira;”
— D.A.
When I heard Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 Op. 23 in the Grand Amphitheatre of the Sorbonne that day, in my mind suddenly shimmered the image of L.. I can’t say whether L. had ever listened to this piece, or whether L. liked Chopin, or Romantic music in general; for an IKEA devotee and a practitioner of martial arts like L., I just simply didn’t register that as a piece perfectly belonging to the personality puzzle, even though the naïve child in me keeps clutching at an unverifiable faith that people who truly see the real beauty in mathematical formulae would be able to perceive the counterpart in classical melodies. Whatever the reason was, thanks to some unknown spell, I kept thinking of L. all the while the talented pianist of the university’s choir was engrossed in the piece which she had earlier shared convinced her to devote herself to studying the piano and which she was very proud to play in front of the entire hall, over the course of nearly ten minutes.
Perhaps not exactly L., but rather the memory of L. the last time I saw L. a few days before L. left, at the metro station on the windy avenue one sombre early-winter late-afternoon. That station is perchance Paris’ deepest in my perception (though I know it isn’t), with the sprawling, prolonged moving staircases like the monstrous giant gullets sucking the pitiful prey into the abyssal belly of some beastly creature. L. went with me down those endless staircases crowded with people at rush hour, amidst the sound of the ceaselessly harrowing wind from way up above, to catch the same train as me, but would part ways with me where we’d change lines: L. to the Right Bank, I to the Left Bank.
All the way under the ground illuminated by the soulless LEDs casting dull light on the haggard faces, we told each other about our recent big events (mine, to which L. couldn’t come, being completely occupied; L.’s, at which I idly sat but eventually had to leave early), about the next endeavours after an experience as horrifying as it was glorious. I was most equivocal about my future, only saying that I would still stay here, that I didn’t have the blessing to escape this horrible language as L. did. L. told me where L. would go — something I already learned from a couple of friends — and I imagined L. in an observatory tower on a hilltop, looking down over the entire landscape of that town, a misty and rainy land that had given birth to the writer I most adored since childhood, who had written that old bedside book of mine which has appeared ever so tenderly in the film I hold dearest: the mere fact that a passage of film like that exists in the world is already a wonderful grace, an instant forever luminous in eternity — where there is no time and decay — enough for one to hold everlasting faith in love (“Amore”), in life (La Vita, “Vita Nova”); “that is so cool, even for someone already overflowing with it,” I thought to myself without uttering the words.
The rest of the conversation on that not-too-crowded metro (yet where hardly anyone else was in the mood for talking after a long hard day) that had once again allowed me to stand in front of L., I still remember it vividly: pure good-for-nothing talks which perhaps I would no longer have the luck to engage in so spontaneously, and which from then on I shall miss a lot (how could L. always maintain such fervidity and vivacity? right, L. has ever been everything that I am not: “e d’ogni suo difetto allor sospira: / fugge dinanzi a lei superbia ed ira”); it appeared that giving people pieces of time that would never fall into oblivion was a gift only L. possesses: not many can laugh so passionately at these terrible jokes of mine which even I myself after having said them didn’t find funny. And then the voice of L.’s that could caress and comfort even the scared rabbits sitting there in the snow — or as a great poet would sing of it: “the angels’ voices whisper, to the souls of previous times.”
The driverless train carried us, unnoticed, to the stop where we were supposed to change lines (Paris’ actual deepest station, or at least its largest underground one). Who was it — one born and bred in a land where L. too had dwelt (L. had travelled so much, so far; L. had set foot in every country that in the boundlessness of my youthful dreams I had countless times wished to reach) — one whose intellectualism was as prominent as romanticism, whose rationality was no less significant than spirituality — that defended the poetry in that great invention — the “Iron Horse” that brought civilisation to a myriad of barren deserts in another land more than an ocean away — ever since humankind entered the industrial age and started to neglect their inner spiritual world, arguing that it was a work of a magician-being, one which allows humans to conjure passage to any stop of their volition, at any instant of their appointing?
Stepping off the train, we noticed that each of us would have to go to opposite sides of the station to catch the next one. To this day I still wish that I had offered to go with L. to the other side and then come back later (all things considered, it wasn’t like there was much else that would occupy my time that night, once L. had gone), and thus wouldn’t have to carry relentless regrets when things had already been set. So I crammed all the words I wanted to say, all the wishes I wanted to express into a final farewell on the platform, where on both sides of us torrents of people were flowing past. But, as in every parting, or in the most important moments, one rarely knows how to say the things that really need to be said; nor did I manage to share with L. what I had just recently discovered — what made me quietly grateful for all the decisions I had made in the past, all the zeniths and abysses, wonders and agonies they entailed — that L. and I had at one time both lived in a little town surrounded by the mountains in “our own continent”, a little more than two years before we crossed paths several thousand miles away on the other side of the globe.
One would have thought at that moment I’d ask L. for a final parting hug, but I didn’t. I didn’t feel like I needed it, and perhaps neither did L.. It was strange that only a few months before, on an early summer morning suffused with warm and briny breezes on New World shores, a female friend — a compatriot of Chopin’s who once performed, also in a black dress like the pianist at the Sorbonne that day, another Ballade of Chopin’s that completely left me breathless: I can’t figure why I didn’t think of her, who also shared with me a burning hatred for the city Chopin had chosen as his adopted home, when those notes first sounded but do now when I’m writing these lines — at the moment of farewell had given me a most precious hug that had carried me through more than a month of darkness that followed during which I was dead sure I would collapse: a hug as natural as the deep, the sky, as the earth; and yet, with L., the person I knew I’d most want it from, I decided against it and instead just waved goodbye. Probably in that instant, I believed that there are certain connections in the world that no proximity or separation could alter. At any rate, I’ve already had for myself the sun-drenched Arago, the dreamy Val-Fleury, the dreary Merisiers; that much might be enough for an entire passage of being, before arriving at the stars.
That night I received a message from L., thanking me for my gift, a novel steeped in my memories by a great French author (coincidentally, an underground adventure story; “a souvenir for the future islander, from the continent,” I answered L.), having probably read the “heartfelt inscription” of mine on the first page. That dedication must be one of the rare instances in which I had to squeeze my entire brain to distill my heart into words in another’s language, without filling the two empty pages at the beginning of a small book edge to edge. And yet, there was still one passage in there I had translated from “my language” (I have a bad habit of getting stuck forever in one language’s words and phrases once I start thinking about something in that tongue, like any hapless captive of language), messily embedded within multiple appositive clauses and tediously jocular parentheses: L. always strikes T., ever since the first day we met, as the very embodiment of intelligence and grace.
I wonder what I had written in there — whether L. could make sense of it. Be that so, let it remain a little game, a riddle of my own that might never get solved. At least that could have given L. a proper laugh should it read too rough-hewn. Or it may well be that everything was just a product of my runaway imagination.
I gather L. is one year older than me, even though I never asked.
Happy birthday, Four-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, mia donna, someone who might never read and understand all these words.
place de la Sorbonne, 06.06.2025 — 26.12.2025
(originally written in Vietnamese)