Carta Sophie Calle

Esta carta estuvo expuesta en el museo de Louisiana en Dinamarca el verano pasado:

Sophie, 

I have been meaning to write and reply to your last email for a while. At the same time, 

I thought it would be better to talk to you and tell you what I have to say out loud. 

Still, at least it will be written. 

As you have noticed, I have not been quite right recently. As if I no longer recognized myself 

in my own existence. A terrible feeling of anxiety, which I cannot really fight, other than 

keeping on going to try and overtake it, as I have always done. Whe we met, you laid down 

one condition: not to become the "fourth". I stood by that promise: it has been months now since I have seen the "others", because I obviously could find no way of seeing them 

without making you one of them. 

I thought that would be enough, I thought that loving you and your love would be enough so that 

this anxiety - which constantly drives me to look to further afield and which means that I will never feel quiet and at rest or probably even just happy or "generous" - would be calmed when I was 

with you, with the certainty that the love you have for me was the best for me, the best I have 

ever had, you know that. I thought that my writing would be a remedy, that my "disquiet" would dissolve into it so that I could find you. But no. In fact it even became worse, I cannot even tell you the sort of state I am in. So I started calling the "others" again this week. 

And I know what that means to me and the cycle that it will drag me into. 

I have never lied to you and I do not intend to start lying now. 

There was another rule you laid down at the beginning of our affair: the day we 

stopped being lovers you would no longer be able to envisage seeing me. You know this 

constraint can only ever strike me as disastrous, and unjust (when you still see B. and R. ...) 

and understandable (obviously...); so I can never become your friend. 

But now you can gauge how significant my decision is from the fact that I am prepared to bend 

to your will, even though there are so many things - not seeing you or talking to you or catching 

the way you look at people and things, and your gentleness towards me - that I will miss terribly. 

Whatever happens, remember that I will always love you in the same way, my own way, that I have 

ever since I met you; that it will carry on within me and, I am sure, will never die. 

But it would be the worst kind of masquerade to prolong a situation now when, you know 

as well as I do, it has become irreparable by the santards of the very love I have for you and

you have for me, a love which is now forcing me to be so frank with you, as final proof of what 

happened between us and will always be unique. 

I would have liked things to have turned out differently. 

Take care of yourself. 

X