Enigma Variations

by André Aciman

But I didn’t trust my love,

Everything felt familiar, nothing had changed. And yet everything felt distant, frayed, unreachable, as though something in me were unable to register that all this was real, that so much of it had once belonged to me.

His eyes were too clear. I didn’t know whether I wanted to touch them or swim in them.

But looking into his eyes was like looking down a steep, craggy cliff leading to a billowing green ocean below—you were pulled in and were told not to fight back but warned not to stare, so that you could never look long enough to know why you kept wanting to stare.

“And now they’re suddenly here—but he is not.”

“This is the cruel thing about the dead. They come back in ways that always catch us off guard, don’t they, Signor Giovanni?” Mother said.

“Sometimes, just wanting to tell them something that would have mattered to them, or to ask about people and places only they would have known about, reminds us that they’ll never hear us, won’t answer, don’t care. But perhaps it’s much worse for them: maybe they are the ones calling out to us and it is we who can’t listen and don’t seem to care.”

I could feel the burning begin to spread on my cheek and intensify, and it hurt, but I didn’t mind, because he had said it wouldn’t hurt, and I wanted him to know that I trusted him, trusted everything,

We make assumptions about how our lives are being charted without knowing that we’re even making these assumptions—which is the beauty of assumptions: they anchor us without the slightest clue that what we’re doing is trusting that nothing changes. We believe that the street we live on will remain the same and bear its name forever. We believe that our friends will stay our friends, and that those we love we’ll love forever. We trust and, by dint of trusting, forget we trusted.

what I’d been craving all this time was his eyes, not his hands, not his voice, not his knees, or even his friendship, just his eyes, for I wanted his eyes to rest forever on me the way they were doing just now, because I loved the way they hovered over my face and eventually landed on my eyes like the hand of a holy man who is about to touch your eyelids, your forehead, your whole face, because his eyes kept swearing I was the dearest thing in the world, because there was piety, grace, and beneficence in his gaze that favored me with its beauty and told me there was no less piety, beauty, and grace in mine.

I belonged here the way I belonged to this planet and its people, but on one condition: alone, always alone.

Wherever I go, everyone I see and crave is ultimately measured by the glow of your light.

We love only once in our lives, my father had said, sometimes too early, sometimes too late; the other times are always a touch deliberate.

Nothing spoke to me. Even jotting a few thoughts in my notebook failed to mean anything. I wanted something and could not begin to know what it was. The last thing I’d written was I’ve come back for him.

“Called old age. May the good Lord spare you that craggy abyss.”

Fate always leaves a mark, and those of us who are truly lucky know the signs and how to read them.

Is this love, or just compassion for someone who is chasing after romance, the way I and everyone else craves the luster of romance in our lives?

We crossed the bridge and didn’t even see the water underneath.

As long as we can be one with something, anything, we’re okay.

I must have looked absent, fragile, angry; I had no one in my life.

many lives and identities, I feel I’m just another Sicily—confused and lonely.

You see me. But you don’t see me. Everyone else sees me. And yet no one has the foggiest notion of the gathering storm within me. It’s my secret private little hell. I live with it, I sleep with it. I love that no one knows. I wish you knew. Sometimes I fear you do.

Even if I can’t ever touch you, just looking at you makes me happy. Wanting you makes me happy. Thinking that I could steal one fraction of a second to place a cheek on the damp down on your chest after you’ve just showered gives more meaning and brings more joy than anything else I’ve wanted or done in a long time. I think of your skin all day, all the time.

When I see you, there’s lightning and then silence.

I prefer the illusion of perpetual fasting to the certainty of famine. I have, I think, what’s called a broken heart.

just a whiff of the brisk night air and it’ll all come back to me: I’m wasting my life, I am so alone. A rush of tenderness fills my heart. But I’m not fooled. Tenderness is sham love, easy love, the muted, civil face of love.

and in the crowd I’ll lose you and won’t remember your face.

I like thinking of you coming. It brings you down to earth, makes you human, gives a sound to exertions that might otherwise slip unnoticed.

The circuit is always the same: from attraction to tenderness to obsessive longing, and then to surrender, desuetude, apathy, fatigue, and finally scorn.

There is grace, and skill, and follow-through in everything you do. No affectation, no exaggeration, just the thing itself. I envied you.

I was savoring my misery, trying to remember your voice, or just the words you’d said in case I was unable to summon your voice. But nothing came to me. I wanted to think of you. But nothing stirred there either, except a feeling at once sad yet not unpleasant. I’m in love, aren’t I? Yes, I think so.

This is love, he would have said, diffidence is love, fear itself is love, even the scorn you feel is love. Each of us comes by it the wrong way. Some spot it right away, others need years, and for some it comes in retrospect only.

he must have feared and indeed foreseen it might never be given to him to find love again, which is why he treasured it until the end.

Dreams inflect our face, our smile, and on our voice lingers the timbre of desire we weren’t willing to hide while dreaming.

I’ll never forget the moment when it finally dawned on me that we are mirror images of each other. And yet … so many months, so much time wasted.

and I know that I want to know you for the rest of my life.

Things turn sour, she said, they so often did with her, plus she hated the fallout, the postmortems, the rancid days when one or the other gets too close but the other doesn’t.

“You make me like who I am and what I want.”

But on e-mail we were lovers, as though a fever coursed through our veins. As soon as I saw her name on my screen, I’d be unable to think of anything or anyone else. There was no use pretending I could wait. I would drop whatever I was doing, shut my door if I was at the office, muffle the rest of life around me, and think of her, just her, almost speaking her name,

I told her that this is what making love to her had meant to me: not that she knew me from inside my head and that being known this way was precisely what I found so arousing every time I thought of our bodies together, but that when we stared at each other in the way she wanted and had taught me to want, she and I were one life, one voice, one big, timeless something broken up into two meaningless parts called people. Two trees grafted into each other by nature, by longing, by time itself.

“I’m telling you this because you and I are the exact opposite. We’ll stay in love until everything about us rots, down to our teeth, our fingernails, our hair. Which means nothing, of course, since we couldn’t survive a weekend together.”

We’d always been in love, she and I. But what had we done with our love? Nothing. Perhaps because the model for such love didn’t exist, and neither of us had either the faith, the courage, or the will to come up with one.

Faking love was easy enough; thinking I wasn’t faking, easier yet.

“Yes, the past is a foreign country,” I said, “but some of us are full-fledged citizens, others occasional tourists, and some floating itinerants, itching to get out yet always aching to return.

“There’s a life that takes place in ordinary time,” I said, “and another that bursts in but just as suddenly fizzles out. And then there’s the life we may never reach but that could so easily be ours if only we knew how to find it.

‘Learn to see what’s not always there to be seen and maybe then you’ll become someone.’

He lived in a future that wouldn’t be his to live in and longed for a past that hadn’t been his either. There was no turning back and no going forward.

Regret is how we look forward to things we’ve long lost yet never really had. Regret is hope without conviction, I said. We’re torn between regret, which is the price to pay for things not done, and remorse, which is the cost for having done them. Between one and the other, time plays all its cozy little tricks.

“Why should you be upset?”

“Because my heart is racing right now and it’s been so long. All those years, and it won’t go away,”