'Naked' or the conjugation of the verb 'to love'

We all remember that verse from the iconic song Boig per tu, which the group Sau sang and said: “How can I love you / if you are so far from me”. The verb ‘estimar’ –from the Latin 'aestimare', with the meaning of determining the value of something– served Catalan to distance itself from the solemnity that ‘amar’ had acquired, a direct heir of the Latin 'amare'. Spanish also resorted to an alternative and found it in ‘querer’, coming from ‘quaerere’, which refers us to the act of wanting to obtain (something). Nino Bravo’s emotional song –with that insistent chorus: “Porque te quiero, / te quiero, te quiero / y hasta el fin te querré”–, carries within it a verb whose semantic history never ceases to suggest a certain idea of determination. Our ‘estimar’, on the other hand, leads us originally to set a price on an inanimate (or animate) referent. If we continue this journey through the Romance languages, Italian and French take the Latin ‘amare’ and make daily use of it. We are reminded of this by songs like Ti amo, by Umberto Tozzi, and Je t’aime, moi non plus, by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin. This duo, with their “I love you and, at the same time, not quite”, proclaimed to the wind the human contradictions implicit in this universal sentiment. A similar tension runs through the novel Nu (diari d’un postadolescent), by Carles Cortés, published by the Vincle publishing house this 2026. The book, which adopts the genre of autofiction and the form of a personal diary, unfolds almost the entire kaleidoscope of meanings that the Romance languages have been depositing in the act of loving: valuing the other, wanting them, possessing them, or surrendering to them. Nu could seem like a novel about male homosexuality and about the need some feel to hide it: “What sadness for those who deny their sexual preference and, due to pressure from their environment or their own actions, end their life with someone who is not to their liking,” says Teseu, the narrator's protagonist and alter ego of the author. Throughout the novel, ambiguities and concealments function, in some characters, as spaces of protection against society. This fear of showing oneself runs through much of the story. Teseu, nearing sixty, reproaches his lover: “You don't want anyone in your circle to know of my existence.” But Nu goes much further, it speaks of the difficulty of loving others and loving oneself. The novel is constructed as a sentimental archaeology made of desires, losses, dependencies, fears, and disappointments surrounding the ethereal ‘to love’. So much so that, upon finishing the reading, the reader can hardly avoid asking themselves a question: do we humans know how to love? It is a question that has occupied art and artists and which Nu formulates with particular intensity. In this sense, Je t’aime, moi non plus seems to permeate much of the story. Teseu remembers that he has never received a hug from his mother and, yet, a few pages later he writes: “I love you, mother.” Between these two sentences lies much of the emotional territory of Nu. The work travels through the skin and soul of Theseus and puts words to that which had remained buried throughout the protagonist's nearly forty years of life to remind us that writing is illuminating areas of memory that had remained hidden. Therefore, towards the end, Theseus admits: “I thought those abuses from when I was fourteen had left no mark”. And it is precisely in this need to put words to life that the diary acquires an almost three-dimensional dimension and presents us with Theseus in his triple condition as a cultured reader, a professor of Catalan Philology, and a renowned writer. From this perspective, literary allusions become games of mirrors that reveal, in turn, the protagonist's biography. When he speaks of The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann, he writes: “I stop the passage of time with reading”. The phrase overflows the simple literary reference, because time is precisely the great protagonist of Mann's novel. Here is the literature professor: he leaves the clue and seeks the complicity of a reader willing to follow the thread.In short, reading Nu is to traverse the kaleidoscope of meanings –‘estimar’, ‘querer’, ‘amare’, ‘aimer’− with which the Romance languages have been verbalizing the fleeting feeling that stars in the novel. Theseus tries to retain this impossibility in three ways: by loving, reading, and speaking. With bodies, he tries to get closer to others; with books, to stop time; with language, to give form to a way of looking at the world. And neither love, nor literature, nor language can fully overcome loss, but all three allow us to inhabit it.