The pasta from past lives – 10/11/2023 – Cozinha Bruta

I have my problems with plane travel. It’s not the fear of dying, I’ve already lost that. It’s the discomfort.

The physical discomfort of a large body in a small armchair. On long journeys, contortion to eat the meal (a meal that I don’t criticize, it’s the possible food) without hurting or dirtying the passenger next to me.

And there is the strangeness of boarding a tin tube and disembarking in a completely different place, without following the transition of landscapes and people.

Transoceanic flights have their own time, suspended at 30,000 feet above sea level. You are nowhere, and that space is the present world. The hours are reluctant to pass.

At least there are films to smooth the journey.

On the way back from London to São Paulo, I saw one of the best films of recent times: “Past Lives”, by Korean-Canadian Celine Song. It was showing in England when I got there; in Brazil, for whatever reason, it should only debut next year.

Very briefly, “Past Lives” narrates Na-Young’s never-consummated romance with Hae-Sung. They are inseparable friends until she emigrates, leaving him in Seoul, when they are both 12 years old.

Three decades later, he goes to New York to meet his high school sweetheart, now married and Americanized.

The couple, with the awkward presence of Na-Young’s American husband, rambles about the life they had, the life they have and the life they could have had. The present life and the past lives.

There are longings for what we never experienced and regrets that are as useless as they are inevitable. Everyone has them. “Past Lives” caught me off guard there over the Atlantic, when I was returning from a temporary life to official real life.

In London, I lived with my daughter for the first time since she was two years old. Now she’s a woman of 28, with a three-year-old son on his way to becoming a little Londoner.

There was an obvious risk of friction causing sparks that cause explosions. But there was no explosion, just the janitor knocking on the door because the steak I was frying set off the fire alarm.

I was happy in London because I was genuinely welcomed by those I love and who love me. I destroyed the inhospitable image I had of the city. I made what I like to make most: pasta to share with loved ones.

Like the characters in the film, I felt remorse and traveled in the counterfactual.

What if I had insisted on London when I went to live there? What if I had insisted on living with my daughter when she was a child? In the first hypothesis, the daughter would not have been born; in the second, the one who wouldn’t exist is my other son, from another mother, now 11 years old.

He was the one who brought me quickly to the ground as soon as I landed in São Paulo. He had broken his arm, he was going to undergo surgery, he needed me. I was here and I’m happy for that too.

On the day of the operation, a Friday, for the first time I stopped writing an unpublished text for the column. That’s exactly what I was going to talk about. Here it is, two weeks late.

LINK PRESENT: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access five free accesses from any link per day. Just click the blue F below.