Love with a pool

Dear Summer Love:

Before we get into this summer-and-a-pool story, let me make things clear. There are many kinds of love—family, friendship, community, country—but to hell with them all. In this section, Doctor Love will only discuss love that is the product of that crisis called falling in love. That is, erotic love, passionate love, the love of lovers, love with no rules other than those the protagonists themselves desire.

Anyone who loves, anyone who desires to be in love, while feeling in love, falling in love, or not being in love enough, raises numerous questions about the great enigma of love. You can buy a body and a will, but you can never buy to be loved, nor can you ever stop loving when perhaps you should. We revolve, dependent, sometimes joyful, sometimes sad, around falling in love. Vulnerable and anxious, at the mercy of others other than ourselves or of our own self-destructive impulses.

Pure and generous erotic love is very strange: we all want something from each other, at almost any price, and there are those who don't love, but simply reflect on the feelings of another. To hell with pure and generous lovers too: we'll talk about imperfect beings at the mercy of their emotions, desires, needs, and dreams. As a cultured introduction and before getting into the subject, we'll quote Mary Oliver when in one of her poems she points out, "Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be amazed. Tell it," and as a boorish introduction to the Ramones: "Hey ho, let's go."

You can buy a body and a will, but you can never buy love.

Let's go with an email that comes to us under the pseudonym Amor de verano (Summer Love )—AM from now on—who takes us back to the summer of 1979. We know this because his uncles' neighbor in the housing estate constantly plays the Bee Gees' Greatest compilation. AM is a teenager who has experienced his first love in the city and at school, but the summer has separated him. She goes to Muiños, the capital of Ourense, while he stays in Barcelona, the capital of Barcelona.

He experiences this love as a pure and sincere feeling, calm and barely desperate, disguised and controlled, slightly sexual, almost a distorted copy of the adult world. Since his family is modest and his parents juggle several jobs, AM's vacation consists of staying in the city and relying on the solidarity of neighbors and relatives who rent or buy second homes.

AM's family is invited by Luisa and Juan, his aunt and uncle, to their summer villa just an hour from the city. The stay is for the day, with no overnight stay, but like Dante during his encounter with Beatrice on the Ponte Vecchio, AM needed nothing more. The villa had a pool, and they all went there, unaware that, next door, was his great love, part of another family with a pool, two daughters, and the Bee Gees at full blast. The four faces of the Greatest. One after the other.

The chalet had a swimming pool and they all went there, our reader unaware that, next door, was his great love.

The pools were separated by a low wall. And at one point, AM saw her. In a pink bikini, circling the pool and diving in, getting out, flopping down on a lounger, sunbathing. Like the faces on the record. Over and over again. AM was immediately fascinated, completely gripped by a terrible, sudden, and unexpected love. That body, that way of moving, those drops of chlorinated water on her skin, her curves, her nooks and crannies, her nose in her wet hair before—whoosh!—throwing her head back like AM had only ever seen the City Police horses do. And all of this while "Spirits (Having Flown)" was playing.

The result was devastating. The best day of his life, the worst day of his life, in true Dickensian fashion. He spent that morning in the pool, ate in the pool, continued the afternoon in the pool, spent the night there, and in the early hours spent the night in the Sant Pau emergency room with severe burns, but that's another story. He never saw her again. He never learned her name. The following summer, the family was different, and they listened to Dyango.

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Years and decades have passed, he married—not that love in Galicia, how can he continue after the love that happened in that pool?—he had children, but he could never forget that girl in that pink bikini. AM remains convinced that if he had been able to talk to her, get to know her, and get together, his life would have been so much happier. He has no doubt about it. What he felt and continues to feel was unrepeatable.

AM doesn't ask for advice or raise questions. He's selling his Bee Gees discography on Wallapop in a vain attempt to forget.