Enigma Variations

by André Aciman

“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. “Yes,” he agreed. “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.”

He knew so much and yet, when he’d sigh before answering, he sounded so vulnerable and so wary of the unexpected turns things took sometimes.

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.

And I thought of the years ahead of me and knew that this was never going to go away, that even if the burning subsided and wore itself off, I would never live down the shame or ever forgive myself or him for making me do this. I would sit on this very same spot in the years to come and remember that never in my life had I known the sort of loneliness that you can actually touch on your body.

And yet my life started here and stopped here one summer long ago, in this house, which no longer exists, in this decade, which slipped away so fast, with this never love that altered everything but went nowhere. You made me who I am today, Nanni. 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.

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

But this is good rain. It comes down not in torrents or in sheets that pour down so powerfully that they’ll lash about the avenues like sails flailing in stormy weather. Tonight the rain feels so meek and muted that brushing it away with a hand might make it stop. It lacks conviction, has lost its vigor. Don’t bother with umbrellas, it seems to say. I’m about to stop anyway, my heart’s not in it tonight.

Tenderness is sham love, easy love, the muted, civil face of love.

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

“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.”

Nothing killed it. But was it ever alive? And when you looked up close, was ours even love? And if not love, then what? Broken, battered, blighted, wasted love shuddering in a cold alley like an injured pet that had lost its owner and scarcely survived a run-in with a bad dog, was this really love?—without heart, without kindness, without charity, without love, even. Our love was like stagnant water behind locked sluices. Nothing lived in it.

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

‘You’re still young. And because you’re young, you may be the one who’s right.’ It occurred to me then that he, past his fifties, was perhaps younger than I was.”

I miss it now for the-days-when, the way I miss places I’ve never traveled to or things I’ve never done.”

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.

Regret is how we hope to back into our real lives once we find the will, the blind drive and courage, to trade in the life we’re given for the life that bears our name and ours only. 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.

I wasn’t even born yet but had already misspent my time.

We loved with every organ but the heart.