Enigma Variations

by André Aciman

He had the most beautiful face I’d ever seen, and I wasn’t brave enough to look at it.

Unlike his eyes, his hands did not intimidate—instead they welcomed.

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

Wherever I go, everyone I see and crave is ultimately measured by the glow of your light. If my life were a boat, you were the one who stepped on board, turned on its running lights, and was never heard from again. All this might as well be in my head, and in my head it stays. But I’ve lived and loved by your light alone. In a bus, on a busy street, in class, in a crowded concert hall, once or twice a year, whether for a man or a woman, my heart still jolts when I spot your look-alike. 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.

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

Today, all I want is the courage to ask you to hold me as you might have done when I was in that picture at the beach and, after wrestling me to the ground and holding me there with my mouth biting the sand, tell me not to struggle against you, against your mouth, against my life.

He’s the one person who’d understand the inflections of what I felt, the sting and the salve braided together like twin serpents going at each other. 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.

And there they were, her dark, bruise-colored lips, and there were her eyes that bore into me and made me want to rip myself open with a kitchen knife and put my heart on her parents’ kitchen table for her to see how that little organ wobbled and jiggled when she spoke such intimate words to me.

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

The past may or may not be a foreign country. It may morph or lie still, but its capital is always Regret, and what flushes through it is the grand canal of unfledged desires that feed into an archipelago of tiny might-have-beens that never really happened but aren’t unreal for not happening and might still happen though we fear they never will.

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.

We loved with every organ but the heart.

I know one thing: you want me, and I know you love me, as I love you, but I don’t think you ever craved me in your gut. You want something from me, but you don’t know what it is. Perhaps all I am is an idea with a body. There was always something missing. Your hell—and it’s mine too—is that even when you’re with Manfred, you’ll want to be with me again. You and I don’t love the way others do—we run on empty.”