Introduction

      The title of this book comes from a dream I once had. The day before, my Pilates teacher Arianna, who has long helped me to mend my poor back worn out by thirty years of practising psychoanalysis, had given me a particular exercise to do. Lying on my back and holding my knees together, I had to rotate one leg at a time. Whilst holding this uncomfortable and unnatural posture, Arianna told me to ‘maintain the kiss’ between my knees, which the leg rotation tended to break. ‘Massimo’, she told me sternly, ‘maintain the kiss.’

      In the dream, this day residue (as Freud would define it) developed in a surprising way. At that time, I had a provisional title for this book that I was not entirely happy with, and my dream developed both the day residue of the Pilates lesson and this dissatisfaction. In the dream I am at the Fondazione Feltrinelli in Milan. I am striding up the stairs to the floor where the publishing house is. No one is there apart from the editorial director, who is waiting for me in his office. I am meeting him to tell him the title of my next book, which will be ‘Enduring Kiss’. His reaction is incredibly positive. Then he asks me, ‘Where does it come from?’ I answer, ‘The same place as the others.’ ‘Which is?’, he asks. ‘My unconscious.’

I wake up with a feeling of childlike happiness and a new title for my book, one that I am entirely happy with.

      The kiss is the image that, perhaps more than any other, encompasses the beauty and poetry of love. It’s no coincidence that the kiss doesn’t feature in contractual love; even in pornography it is rare. The kiss is a moment of intimacy that unites the place of the word and that of the body in a remarkable way. If there is no love without a declaration of love, equally there is no love without a kiss. If there is no love without you or I saying ‘I love you’, there can never be love without a kiss.

      Every love is required to maintain the kiss, to make it last. Only the kiss joins the tongue that declares love with the body of the lover. There is no loving kiss that doesn’t involve the tongue. We are well aware of this. It is the tongue that distinguishes a loving kiss from other kinds of kisses. One can kiss a child, a friend, a sibling or parent with affection, but only the presence of the tongue implies the eroticism of desire.

      Love binds this eroticism – the eroticism of the tongue, of the kiss ‘of’ or ‘with’ the tongue, that can also be simply sexual or sensual – to the declaration of love, to the words of love, to their declaration: ‘I love you.’ Every loving kiss, always and silently, declares ‘I love you.’ It is from the silence of the tongue that the kiss’s declaration of love emerges. To feel the beloved’s tongue is like feeling their heartbeat: it is the declaration of my love, it makes love exist. It is like making love.

Whilst I maintain the kiss, I touch your tongue, your voice, your word, your name. Whilst I maintain the kiss, I transform your body into a new language and a new alphabet. I feel the whole history of your body deposited on the unique mystery that is your tongue. I feel all the life I have lived pass into this new tongue that we have now become.

      So, I maintain the kiss; I trap it in memory and time. Your tongue like roses or caramel, like rain or snow, like sea or wind. Your tongue like a new frontier. I tie and untie myself from the memory of all the times and first kisses I have experienced. I discover my body is made to be opened up, to host a new tongue and to combine mine with yours. I discover that my body is exposed to the new event of your unpronounceable tongue.

      This is the immense joy of the Two, when it occurs: feeling your entire body in your tongue. Learning to talk in a new way. Learning a new presence in me. Experiencing the tongue that, like the world, is born once more.

      The kiss does not unite. It doesn’t penetrate, it doesn’t meld the lovers into a single body. In the kiss, the bodies stay divided, separate, distinct. The intimacy of the kiss causes One to fall deeply into the Other, but the bodies remain Two.

      Rather, it is only because the bodies remain Two that the kiss is possible. A rapid descent of the stairs or a mountain valley, of a drop onto the sea. The plunging heart.

      I kiss you as if wrapped in a spring breeze, and I pour my whole tongue, my entire world, my very being into you. My whole being is in the tongue that kisses you and talks to you. I am in every point of your mouth, of your voice, of your body, of the unknown words of your tongue.

I maintain the kiss in the dark of night and the light of day. I maintain it in the time that passes. I maintain it in the burning rage of the world, in all its ferociousness. Lovers carve out their hiding holes, finding their peace from war, from the infinite pain of being. When they kiss the noise of the world is silenced, its laws broken, time is stolen from its normal continuity. They fall together in their distinct, embraced tongues.

      I carry my first kiss from when I was a boy with me like an amulet. When I kissed the girl for the first time, she tasted of mint. She had pulled close to me in the dark oratory cinema room. Our hearts between us, beating. I had passed a threshold, and no other has ever been so sweet and mysterious. My tongue was in hers. I can still see her half-closed eyes and her face abandoning themselves on my shoulders. I found a tongue I knew nothing about. Did it even have an alphabet? A dictionary? A code?

      Though there are long, drawn-out kisses, kissing competitions, Guinness world record kisses, the kiss is only ever fleeting when compared to the love story of the Two. The extinction of the kiss and, most importantly, of the desire to kiss one’s beloved is always an indication of a crisis, announcing the imminent demise of love.

      To maintain the kiss means keeping the promise of the tongue, the promise of a secret that cannot be dissolved. The foreign and inappropriable nature of the tongue as that of the Other.

In the exercise Arianna asked me to do, a tension that came from the contraction of the abdominal muscles should have kept the knees from drawing apart. Indeed, as she explained, a certain tension is required to ensure an ‘enduring kiss’, to maintain that kiss. This tension is the same one that overwhelms lovers: will they know how to keep the secret of their foreign tongues? Will they know how to value the direction of their travel, the continual creation and dissolution of their kisses?

      You know that when I kiss you, you who did not share that first kiss, you who became my woman, my wife, every one of our kisses is like the first. You know that when I kiss you, I still feel my heart in my tongue like in that first kiss. So, I maintain our kiss, holding my knees tight. I still hold your heart on my tongue and my heart on yours.

      Is it really possible to give lessons on love? Obviously not. It is never possible to explain love, never possible to reduce love to a concept. It is, however, possible and necessary to speak of love, to keep