Enigma Variations

by André Aciman

The fear, the panic, the old tightness in my throat, which only a sob could release and which might erupt of its own if he so much as stared at me longer than I could stand. He stares at you, you get worked up, and all you want is to find a quiet spot to let yourself cry the moment you’re alone, because nothing, not even failing a Latin and Greek exam or getting badly yelled at, could leave you feeling so beaten and undone. I remembered everything. The wanting to cry, especially, and the waiting to see him because the waiting and hoping were unbearable, the wish to hate everything about him because one short glance from him and suddenly you felt totally distraught and couldn’t smile or laugh or find joy in anything.

“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.”

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 loved seeing was the ease with which he spoke to my father, as so many others did in San Giustiniano. I had never confided in anyone this way, not even my father. What it also told me was that this way of baring one’s soul with people was itself the very essence of friendship,

I’d have made up something crass about him or pointed to a birth defect here, a tremor there, if only to censor anything that betrayed what I felt each time I found the courage to look in his eyes.

And as I stood inside the abandoned chapel that I had sworn someday to rebuild and make my home, I also knew then that if I had to wait ten years to see Nanni again, I would rather die now. Take me now, I asked, just take me now. I didn’t have such a decade in me. But what I also began to sense after sundown that evening, as I’d already sensed on the evening I stood burning in my nakedness in this old sanctuary, was the certainty that I was lying, that I would indeed be willing to wait and still wait, as those who stop their lives to expiate forgotten crimes are told to wait, because their true punishment is no longer to know whether they’re actually waiting for pardon and grace, or whether what they’ve waited for has long been granted unbeknownst to them, and that they’d lived out the term of their life without ever holding what was theirs to have and theirs alone. This was my first encounter with time. I became a person that evening, and I had him to thank. And blame.

what else could one say about honor and friendship and loyalty, except that time undoes them all,

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.

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.

Fate always leaves a mark, and those of us who are truly lucky know the signs and how to read them. He would have taught me everything, and most likely given me everything. Instead, years after, I sought out the wrong people, learned from the wrong teachers, took from those who had less to give and almost nothing I wanted.

Part of me wanted to keep walking around town at this hour of the afternoon and pretend that eventually I’d find the shop open. I had forgotten nothing; this could easily have been ten years ago.

I replied two years later. “Dear Nanni,” I wrote. “We received your package about five years ago. But it is only now that I’m writing to you. I don’t know why it took so long to write back. My father died six years ago. We never spoke about you. But I knew. Perhaps you never knew this, but I was more like my father with you than you suspected. Or perhaps you knew. Yes, I’m sure you knew. You’ve been with me all my life.”

Millions have been hurt before, millions more will continue to be. I should find someone to speak to, but—and the thought jolts me because I wasn’t careful to nip it—the only one who’d understand is the very one I wish to lash out against. I’m like those seeking comfort or, better yet, advice, from the very person who abuses them.

Sometimes work gets in the way. Work keeps me busy. Work is my screen. My whole life is a screen. I am a screen. The real me has no face, no voice, isn’t always with me. Like thunder after lightning, the real me could be many, many miles away. Sometimes, there is no thunder. Just lightning and then silence. 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.

Dreams are like practice runs and mini-rehearsals; they tell us what we’ll do, when to ask, how we’ll touch when the time comes, if the time comes.

And then it hits me: I’ve lost you. You now rank among the things I’ll always regret: opportunities lost, children never had, things I might have accomplished or done far better, lovers who have come and gone. In a few years, I’ll remember this shabby tennis house and its puddles and think back on the splash of your yellow flip-flops.

But as I was about to stand up to walk to my office, I felt something almost like pain in my chest. I liked the pain. And once again I wished my father were alive. 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.

I remembered him standing at the dock waving farewell as our ferry was chugging away from the island. Here was a sad man, I thought. Little did he know then that this would be his last summer of love. But knowing him as I did now, 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.

That day changed everything. I was devastated, quietly, as though barbarians had swept through my life and forgotten to kill me after slaughtering everyone and eradicating everything, including memory.

And just as you utter these words, I know with unshakable certainty that those few minutes when we walk hand in hand together are, even in a dream, more real and better than anything I’d ever know in life, and that I would be lying if I called what I’ve been doing all these years living. The happiness that came with the dream stayed with me all day.

After years in the real world, I had shed some of my indecision, my fears, hurdles had come down, the risks not a worry—if I get burned, I get burned.

In her mouth truth had no use for velvet sheathes. It spoke serrated daggers.

‘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.

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.

The new setup made us feel odd, like strangers who’d time-traveled and landed home in the wrong century.

But that reasoning perhaps was as much a mask as the others. In the end, and without ever admitting it to myself, I’d grown to love serving two masters—perhaps so as never truly to answer to either one.

You and I were both quick and easy with men, and quick and easy was the last thing I wanted with you. So I waited. Then I got used to waiting. Eventually, waiting was more real than what we had.”

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.” She touched my face, my forehead. “I could tell you to be happy that you have him, but it won’t help. I could tell you to be happy we’ve got two days, but that won’t help either. You’re alone, as I’m alone, and the cruelest thing is that finding each other and saying let us be alone together won’t solve a thing.”

“Star love, my love, star love. It may not live but it never dies. It’s the only thing I’m taking with me, and you will too, when the time comes.”

Courage, he said, comes from what we want, which is why we take; skepticism from the price we’ll pay, which is why we fail.

I wanted to scream. When I’m with you, I feel I can take what others call my life and turn its face away from the wall. My entire life faces the wall except when I’m with you. I stare at my life and want to undo every mistake, every deceit, turn a new leaf, turn the table, turn the clock. I want to put a real face on my life, not the drab front I’ve been wearing since forever.