LIV AND INGMAR

I was experiencing another human being. He was experiencing me. And we didn’t need to talk about it.

I was barefoot in the sand so fine. it felt as if it breathed beneath my feet. I never wondered what might come of our relationship. It was as if I were living within soft walls of sunlight and desire and happiness.

No summer since, has ever been like that. Not like that looking at me, I knew he had recognized me and deep down, I thought  “lf I’m really recognized,  I’m worth… loving.”

My dear Liv.

You are everywhere, in the light against’ a window. It hurts like hell to see you on the other side of the glass wall. I pray you bond with me. My heart misses you as if I no longer had any skin on my body. That you would embrace me and obtain me in what is you,  in your femininity and tenderness.

This is a little like hell. Almost romantic. Very much in the beginning, when we understood, “It’s us”. Perhaps our love, originated in the loneliness. We both had known before.

His hunger for togetherness, was insatiable. That hunger became a vital necessity for me. In a way, each seeded a revolution in the other. We opened to each other so completely, not only physically, not only sexually, but like human beings related, in a secret way.

We bound ourselves together.

Now there is only one demand and that is to be alive. Dare to give life. Dare to receive life.

And dare to let it hurt and dare to let it feel good. To dare, my love.

Once, we wandered far away from the others, discovered a small ridge of gray stones with barren, unfertile earth beyond. We sat and looked at the sea, which for once lay completely still in the sunlight.

He took my hand in his and said. “I had a dream last night, that you and I are painfully connected.”

We entered underneath the thin scaffolding. Into the skeleton of our home. We walked on the beach, which was nothing but rocks and took pictures of each other. I look happy in all of them. But I know what I was thinking. “This is a dream. I am taking part in someone else’s dream.”

Wind Gusting

It started to be someone else’s dream, living here, because it was restricted. He didn’t want me to have visitors. The first – next summer… He built a big wall of stone around. So if people somehow came around here. They could never look in at the house.

And it started to be someone else’s dream… Someone who really wanted complete isolation with me and him. And he didn’t want me  to leave either and go home.

We made two movies. When I was living with him. But yes, it became a prison and everything was unfamiliar. In the winter, it was cold and it was black and these trees had no color, and on the nights when he couldn’t sleep. I would lie silent beside him afraid of what he was thinking.

Perhaps that I was not a part of the island. That I disturbed the harmony he tried to create within himself. In the nature and the stillness that meant so much to him. My security became living the way he wished for only then was he secure.

I can reach my hands towards you and say: “Don’t be afraid, Liv. I will not do you any harm. I love you.”

The demons have left’ me for now, but it was terrible while it lasted.

IS YOUR HAND IN MINE?

Liv] At night  and I’m not talking sexually now, lying in that bed, listening to the ocean and the way he held around me and there was nothing. Unquestioned.

How can I explain. The enormous feeling of security. In knowing that now she was with me in the world?

Soon her bed would stand next to mine. We would fall asleep hand in hand. We would listen to music and look at beautiful pictures together.

We would discuss everything in life and find the answers in long, confidential conversations. He had to live his own life, near us, but never with us.

I lay in my bed the first night. No danger in the world could reach me that night.

Dreams seldom become reality.

In the loneliness on the island. I was often nervous and a short-tempered mother. There were days

with guilt feelings, when I became the doormat for both of them. He who sat in his study and wanted to own me alone and she who could barely walk and cried for me from the other end of the house.

[Crying Continues]

I rushed from one to the other. Always with a bad conscience. Never able to completely give. What I yearned to receive. I was lonely, but that loneliness belonged to me.

It was nothing he created. Nobody creates your loneliness. Nobody creates that darkness you have in your tummy,  because we all have that.

It’s how we deal with it. That’s… what makes the difference.

No, you’re strangling me. My belief is still that there exists an evil which cannot be explained, a virulent, seductive evil which, among all beasts, exists only for man. An irrational evil not subject to any laws.

Cosmic. Without reason. There is nothing man fears more than this incomprehensible. Inexplicable evil.<

Poor Anna. You were so happy before we met. I had happy memories of my husband and our love. And now you don’t?

I lived in truth.

– Really?

– You destroyed it with your damned lies.

– Stop it.

– I’ll say what I want!

Stop shouting.

– You can’t order me around!

– Stop shouting at me.

You can go to hell!

] After a short time, I was confronted with his jealousy violent and without bounds. Now all doors were closed. Friends and family, even memories, became a threat to our relationship.

Terrified, I felt I only had him. And when his jealousy had placed limits on my freedom. I entered into his territory. In order to create the same limits there for him experienced my own security. Only as far as I could control his life. Our needs were impossible to satisfy. That became our hell, our drama.

– I said shut up!

– Are you crazy?

If that’s how you want it!

I could kill you!

I could kill you!

I have a lot of anger in me, but I don’t always let it out and she is furious. I got it all out…

What are you doing?

– I’m praying for Johan.

You’re praying for yourself.

Go away.

Leave me alone.

Go away.

Goddamn lousy acting.

Goddamn acting.

Liv. His jealousy was violent. I mean, more psychologically than using force, physical force. Because he knew how to say things that would stay with you forever. I was to stand and watch a fire and he must have been angry, because he said, “Liv, go closer!”

And I went as close as I could. “Liv, I told you to go closer. ”

And I went closer. You know, I would almost have gone into the fire because you do what your director says, especially if it’s Ingmar Bergman. But afterwards, I knew that anger in his voice was not directing.

That anger in the voice was Ingmar to Liv.

Dear Liv…

I think that Ingmar Bergman is unbearable sometimes and I have to apologize on his behalf.

Liv. The fear diminished and the loneliness was easier to bear when I saw his insecurity. I’d become filled

with tenderness and look beyond his violence and his injustice.

 “I cannot and will not live with you anymore. I don’t believe in trying again, as neither you nor I seriously want to change. But I won’t give in, because that will only lead to new complications, which in turn will bring on terrible mental disturbances, physical and psychological violence.”

I don’t understand.

I don’t understand anything. I don’t understand you. I’m just afraid. You think I want to stay here and risk being killed?

Think I enjoy watching you, running after that woman and talking to your phantoms? Having to watch my back every moment?

But I stay.

Liv. When I cried, stormed against him. When he shut himself in his study. When he left me for a day. While it was all very painful. I knew that it did help me develop.

I had always followed others because I was insecure. I was accustomed to reach for the hands of others for help and understanding. But now, when I was more afraid and more alone than ever. I achieved for the first time a sense of security with myself. And I longed for the man who sat writing in his study.

I wanted to share with him this new knowledge but I couldn’t.

 Jan.

What will it be like, if we can never talk to each other?

This time he was really cruel. I hated him so much and I was planning, “I’m going to leave him. I’m going to leave him.”

‘Cause how can you do like that to your woman? And he probably never knew my anger. I was no longer blind to his faults and weaknesses as I had been in the beginning but my understanding and respect for him grew.

The adoration disappeared. I noticed that his hair was gray. He was much older than I. He was wise and stimulating. He was vain and egoistical. And I discovered to my surprise. That this was love with sadness, I realized that it would soon be over that I had come to him when he was already. On his way somewhere else.

I looked at our child and realized that I would soon have the responsibility alone. During the last year, I fought for our relationship. Even though I knew it was hopeless and not right for either of us.

– Good-bye.

We’d make a fresh start. We’d throw out our stale old routines. We’d talk about the past. Figure out where we went wrong. You’d hear no accusations from me.

Johan

This all seems so unreal.

I don’t know what to do.

Johan,

you’re shutting me out.

Any solution would be better than this.

Couldn’t you promise to come back?

That would tide me over. Then you wouldn’t be leaving me without hope. Even if you have no intention of returning, you could say you do. I have to go now.

Marianne!

Door Shuts,

You know, there is pain in the world, big pain that you and I so far have not felt of hunger and destruction and many things like that  but there is one pain which is enormous too and that is to be left.

That is a very lonely and deep and  hurtful pain. When the final separation came, we didn’t talk about it. We pretended that it had no meaning. It would have been too obvious. Too final.

I wanted to open my arms and embrace it all but because my fear that it would never be mine was so great. It never became mine. I lived there for a brief period of my life and what I brought away with me was not the stones and the trees and the beauty.

I left with loneliness in my baggage and the feeling that something inside of me had changed forever. What is there to tell about the actual departure? The publicity around the private grief?

The newspapers that pushed into our lives, stomped on what was painful? “His new life without Liv. Read the end of the story.”

In our misery, we were on an intimate footing…

Nora stands in the door and says: “I don’t know what will become of me. I don’t know where I’m going. I only know that I can no longer bother about what others say. I must find my own way.”

To me… That would be too easy. This is not how we leave someone we have loved, presumably still love. On stage, what I’m acting is reality for me. In the same way that my reality is acting, each a part of the whole.

“Sometimes I feel a bit lonely.”

“You have me.”

“But grown-ups need other grown-ups as well.”

Liv.

Now I can see that this separation was absolutely necessary. Otherwise, We would have definitely, set each other on fire and we could have still managed to have some sort of life together.

By the Way. I am in constant physical and emotional pain.  You see, I love you so much, my little beloved friend. You let go… and that’s a good lesson to learn in life.

Let go.

Let go.

That was a fact, and nothing could alter it. But I still had myself contact with my own being.

Everything in me that I wanted to take forward. I missed his daily presence but I knew I had his friendship and it was up to me, who at that time needed it most to find a new point of contact at which we both could meet. With all the power I owned. I built a bridge between us and after that, everything was better.

When we broke up, he was really there. You meet a better class of people in your dreams. Sometimes you do in your dreams than in real life, but you have to deal with that. That’s true. Well, you are not a disappointment, I can say that. When something inside me protested. I reminded myself, I would soon be home again.

On the island in Sweden.I was like a figurehead on an old ship. She who is standing seemingly

so proud at the bow and plows through the waves and gazes ahead. While her whole body,

at an angle is pressed close to the ship to which she belongs.

Something had been crushed in me and something was more alive. I had undergone a change and when bitterness and hate and despair were gone. I was sure I had experienced love and been enriched. But I would never be able to talk about it. I’d seen into another person and was full of tenderness for what I had found. For a period of time, we had taken each other’s hands and been painfully connected.

But only when it was all over, did we become true friends. I can only speak for myself. I love you in my own imperfect, selfish way. And sometimes I think you love me in your own fussy, pestering way. I think we just love each other in an earthly and imperfect way.

But you’re so demanding.

Yes, I am.

But here I am, in the middle of the night, in a dark house, somewhere in the world. Sitting with my arms around you. And your arms are around me. I’m not the most compassionate of men.

– No, you’re not.

– I don’t have the imagination for it.

You are rather unimaginative.

I don’t know what my love looks like, and I can’t describe it. Most of the time I can’t feel it.

You really think I love you too?

Yes, I do.

But if we harp on it, our love will evaporate.

Both you and I have a lot of intensive presence and an enormous ability to put ourselves. In other people’s emotions and especially each other’s. We also have an intensive ability to affect other people and make them experience, what we experience. And we have an ability to affect each other. We make each other alive. Does it make a difference if it hurts ? You are my Stradivarius!

“Now I have no one,” he cried.

and he was completely defenseless. I knew that I could never leave him. And in a way, I never have. How strange. I don’t understand. I understand, you are not understanding.

And I came here in the afternoon and he was here, and at this time, we couldn’t speak with words – or I spoke. And he was there…

And then I pretended that he said to me…

 “Why did you come?”

I answered…

 “Because you called for me.”

And then I left, and I’m happy I was here because that same night, at some time that night – we don’t really know when – he continued his voyage. But now in the universe somewhere, you know?

And actually, I think he’s been here a lot, because the light has changed. The wind comes when you want it… The sun comes when we want it and even rain.

Many, many years ago. I wrote him a little note. And today I – I found out he had kept it in his teddy bear. I used to call him “Pingmar” –

 “Dearest Pingmar” – and I’ll say it in English:

 “Not many people can experience  what my meeting with you, gave me here in life. It is 35 years since we sat here – and you said to me ‘We are painfully connected.’ Yes… Such a connection is full of grace.

Thank you. Your Liv.

I am so enormously… fond of you. And then a little heart. You know, sometimes you miss, and you don’t even know, how much.