After all, even Raj deserves a man like Toníno here

Who was that Lili? Well, there was a certain Veronika.

Actually, there were two Veronikas. I used to play doctor with one of them in childhood and shoved a blade of grass into her little shell.

I had never used that word before, so it might seem inappropriate. Honestly, if I had used any other word, it would have been the same. I'm not well-versed in naming female jewels. With the male ones, it's noticeably easier.

And then there were also two films – Veronika Decides to Die and The Double Life of Veronique. And lovers of these two films met at the Portyč cinema in Písek for the film Dancer in the Dark. And that's sort of how a strange friendship began, which glimmers through the story of Besame mucho. Except in the book PNVNY, the character of Lili is blended from both women – Martina, and Veronika.

More than Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Double Life of Veronique, I like his Blue. It spoke to me back then and it speaks to me today. I have to put myself in the right mood for La double vie de Véronique, but Blue draws me in with its mood and I understand the character of Julie, played by Juliette Binoche, better and she is in some ways similar to me. But Martina admired Irène Jacob as Veronika – and so I admired her too.

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So, who was that Veronika? A woman with a whimsical destiny, whom my poem captures perfectly:

ECCENTRIC

The gentleman looked at her through a hole
no bigger than a cigarette filter,
pushing his glasses higher,
wiping beads of sweat from his forehead.

And when he met her later,
she asked: "Is it possible to play
the piano and feel as guilty afterwards as—" and left it unfinished.

Masturbation was flying through his head
like a crazy penis in trousers.
Without opening his coat,
he felt like her when she plays the piano.

– so the answer is: "Yes."

6.10.2003, 20:14, TV Tower – Prague

"The gentleman is the main hero of my collection of self-deception Boy of cum. We travel with him – he is a guide through life, we experience with him what he experiences. We meet the people he meets. We feel the pain he feels.

But why is it called Boy of cum? Cum is the very beginning of our life, it has a penetrating scent, a bitter taste, it is a metaphor for life. And so we can still relish cum, feed on it. But we must not let ourselves be intoxicated, it is like drinking blood – the stomach cannot bear it and forces us to vomit – and that is then that self-deception."

I do not know where it will lead us, even Pan is a fallible man, straying onto the wrong path. But he asks himself no more why he lives the life he lives.

Understand Pan, his life and poems, that is not something immutable – it is constant movement, and therefore I change the verses, rewrite them, give them a new shape. And most often – I rearrange them – because that is how I align his life, give it meaning and order.

That is surely what we lack the most – nowadays."

Oct 5, 2003 – notes on the poetry collection

Veronika was precisely that type of girl, of woman – whom you could watch through that keyhole, just as Pan watched her, and project all your phantasmagoric dreams onto her – and Veronika, at that time, would enthusiastically fulfill them for you.

Veronika's life is – in a certain way, an allegory of my work – where the primary meaning is not essential (nor does it make much sense), but what is hidden and less visible is far more essential.

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While Pan strays down the wrong path, the Lover of the King of the Night leads me onto the right one.

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There is a place in Prague where I like to go – it is a place where the stories of my love merge into one. It is on the bottom left corner of Náměstí Míru, I call that drinking fountain the Little New York Fountain. At a similar drinking fountain, Finnegan Bell and Estella meet in the film Great Expectations.

It is one of my favorite films. Because of it, I swallowed my pride regarding my insufficient knowledge of films—which was the reason, simply put, why I didn't get into film studies in Olomouc, nor later at FAMU. I never had as much talent as I would have liked. Alfonso Cuarón has been my favorite director ever since (by far not the only one, though).

The drinking fountain scene from the film later left its imprint on the chapter Femme fatale in the first installment of Poslední noc v New Yorku, in Besame mucho, where Benjamin meets Lili at Dr. Kováčová's party. Besame mucho is a song that appears both in the film Great Expectations, where it is sung by Cesária Évora, and it is a song that was composed and recorded for my story by none other than...

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Mark Hickpolen and Wil Lemansch, cousins with an artistic bent. We met once upon a time on the Orkut social network, just as I also met Saba Riazi, an Iranian film director who was the only woman I would have ever been willing to marry and who would have been willing to marry me. We were united by a mutual fondness for smoking at the time. In one of her emails to her, she even wrote to me that she didn't know whether she was coughing from cigarettes or the Tehran smog.

Saba used to call me Ulyssé...

The fact that Marc and Wil were gay helped us become better friends. Marc and Wil, that was the group Coquelux, which was active from 2001 to 2008—sometime in 2005, Felipe Reinoso also joined them.

During one of his business trips, Norbertino met Marc and Wil. But I wasn't so fortunate. I regret to say that around the time of the first coronavirus wave, Marc died. My heart wept bitterly.

The truth remains that I have given away my heart all my life, and shards of love flew toward these two men as well.

Perhaps it's due to the fact that over the past year both of my parents remarried, and also because these are uncertain times—the COVID-19 illness heavily shook my existential safety net—and quite possibly Rajneesh heard it too.

I didn't ask him why he did it – why right now, but I feel that if not now – then when else? I had never thought about marrying Rajneesh Pranapati – but when I think about it – nuns also surrender themselves to Christ.

I didn't have any such thought in my head. But when I toasted Toníno and Raj on their marriage – tears welled up in my eyes when the words were spoken:

„After all, even Raj deserves a man like Toníno here.“

And that is true.