The Four Horsemen

This is long overdue. But since Multiply is under repair, and my environment paper is starting to reach perpetual ubiquity, and I’m kinda pissed off, I’m going to write why I am a horseman.

Have you ever heard of the novel Le Hussard Sur Le Toit, or to be more conversational, The Horseman on the Roof? Yes, they also made a movie based on it. I was able to read the book and watch the movie (thrice), and from that point on, I told myself I kinda like this horseman character.

Sort of funny, why the horseman in the story went with a woman while the latter was looking for her husband. Silly right? I mean, what is the point of staying, when the woman is another’s, or will be another’s, as Pablo Neruda puts it. 

Worse, when through the efforts of the horseman, directly or unwittingly, the husband was found, and the former had to stride away, and never look back ever again.  She is another’s. She has always been another’s.

I didn’t understand at first.  Who would, based on the circumstances?  The horseman had the option to fight on, win the woman, cross the line.  But he didn’t, he mustn’t; now I know, it was not because he chickened out, but because love (damn, I used the word that Rilke forbids) is not only a risk, but a forbearance. 

The horseman fears that he will not be remembered, worse, forgotten, but it does not matter anymore.  He was there when he was needed, even when he was not, because ultimately, finally, he needed the woman more than she needed him.

It’s fiction. Very fiction. It does not happen in real life, but if it does, I would rather be the horseman than the husband.  To watch from afar, where no one can see him, or hear his breath, or measure the solitude of his consolation.

Memory beckons: at least he once was there.

It’s melancholic this way, but this will be his, my, way, however futile or pathetic, to stay.

(Insert their horseman stories now.)