De Mica En Mica
Joan Manuel Serrat
Little by Little
In that small café where neither the streetlight nor the respectable people want to enter, I found your gaze, melancholic and distant like the mist that arises at the port, in the early morning. I offered you a hand and you followed me in the night like a lost puppy begging for a caress. You filled the sadness of my bed with colors, with evening reds and Galician greens. And my corner will be your corner too. You are young and beautiful. I started playing and little by little I started loving you. I got used little by little to your name, to your warmth and your words, to the sound of your steps climbing the stairs and to your way of setting the table. To the smell of your hands that every night wandered around my body like a delicate gauze. But everything collapsed when I heard you say: 'I'm going to look for the sun. The house is too dark.' 'No one is waiting for me. Thank you for everything, Joan...' You are young and beautiful. Suddenly, what I was losing little by little left. I felt so cold on those summer nights. I cursed a thousand times the small tavern... How many afternoons I went to take my tears to the river. How many sleepless nights I spent, like the glowworm. But I also got used to living alone without tearing up the papers or the photographs. If I'm hungry, I eat bread. If I'm cold, I light a fire and think: 'If it rains today, tomorrow will be a nice day.' And I go back to the café and think that maybe you are young and beautiful. But time has passed and little by little I have been forgetting you.