Helsinki night club

Throughout this four-part conclusion to the Cuenta, I will be telling you a few nice little vignettes, little gem stories that are very shiny and heartbreaking. But I want you all to know, that I will really be writing about something else entirely, something that has nothing to do with Helsinki, or a boat, or leather jackets, or France.

And while I could let you all guess what that something else is, I would rather just come right out and say it: I will be writing about how I became a chaser of metaphysical butterflies, little creatures fluttering always out of reach, playing keep-away with their own heavenly, euphoric bodies. (I hear eating moths is poisonous, but it seems justifiable to assume eating butterflies is magic, like encountering and eating god … if only we could eat metaphysical butterflies!)

Chasing these beautiful creatures is always romantic and risky, and leaves one, inevitably, exhausted. There are butterfly catchers and chasers, and so far, I am just a chaser.

It might help, too, to let you know that I am writing you about this romantic sport, tacitly, from the third-floor balcony of the Hotel Caulaincourt in Paris, which is a block away from where thousands of drunks, tourists and lovers (all of whom are, I think, butterfly watchers), gather at night on weekends to see the city twinkle and the Eiffel tower effervesce – which it does every so often. I have a little round wooden table, which faces the window, and on the table I have propped up a small canvas oil painting by Gauguin, called “femmes aux mangues”, and it is Sunday. I have also three cans of Heineken, and just met my new roommate, who says he comes from Istanbul but is a student in Portugal. When I want to smoke I lean out the window and I can see the lovers walking up and down the steep and long series of stone steps, hugging Montmartre.

I also want you careful readers, and especially the very careful readers – the ones who love me – to know, that while most of what I am about to tell you is true, there are some lies – rather big lies – that I am about to effect. Sometimes I will make it clear that I am lying – inventing – and sometimes I will not, and will allow the deceit to live and grow inside your heads with dignity.

The thing is, however, the lies are essential. It is impossible to catch butterflies with a net built by Descartes. Metaphysical butterfly nets are not woven in square-like predictable patterns, with horizontal and vertical axes of cotton thread; they are dances of the loom. Drunken ladies of shalott, from their medieval towers, they weave these nets, from the blossoming, shrieking nature they wantonly ingest, from those shiny, legendary mirrors.

There was a precedent I wanted to set before ending this blog, and I lusted for a defiant, greedy success with the papillions. But I have only just started using my mazy net, and am now headed back “home.” Home, home, home.

Home: written under erasure. Home. (In a recent entry in my journal, I lost all connection to the meaning of the word. As I wrote in a frenzy from the steps of the Sacre Coeur Basilica, as the stars of the city fluttered around my head, I referred several times, by accident, to Buenos Aires and Argentina as my “home”, which, taken as Freud would have, is an incredible, joy-tweaking thing to watch happen . . . It’s strange how I wrote that, just now, “watch happen”, watch me, myself, write, as I watched myself write about home, about my home, me. )

As I was saying, I am headed back to Canada. My flight is tomorrow, and I have only just begun . . . and well, we will get to this part again, a little closer to the finish line, but for now let’s move on with the program.

I wanted to start by telling you about Helsinki … however, I have just come from a little stroll down Caullaincours and the simplest things were beautiful. Some shiny green gems, to be polished, like the two men with lapdogs, eating at the café terrace in the court yard. Or the two other middle aged men, well dressed, outside a very busy bistro, laughing as one of the men fished a lighter out of his glass, laughing as he sucks the wine off the orange plastic lighter. Or the little child, with blonde hair in pony tails, a little girl in an orange and purple flower dress, skipping along the grassy part of the boulevard, lassoing sparrows with a shoe lace noose, as an old clochard watches in amazement from his pile of newspapers. The little girl hopping along, with three or four black sparrows like kites on the end of short white strings, and the drunk smoking, and drinking, and disbelieving, smiling toothlessly.

But no. I wanted to tell you about Helsinki, there was a good reason for it. So I will and I should start now, as the sun dips and the tides, somewhere, spring.

(to be continued)