Enigma Variations

by André Aciman

The memory of the scent

stirred a trace of fear and discomfort that I found as thrilling now as I did then, though I was still unable to name that unsettling inflection of fear, shame, and excitement any better a decade later. Nothing had changed. Perhaps I hadn’t changed.

stained and kept staining as he showed me, slowly, smoothly, sedulously.

Sedulously - with dedication.

told them that I was running upstairs to change, took everything off, left all my wet clothes on the floor, and came right downstairs in my bathrobe and stood in the doorway, thinking, I worship this man.

Then I saw him still staring at me. And his eyes were so beautiful and, as it hit me for the first time, so thoroughly green, that I had to look at them some more. My impulse had always been to look away to avoid his eyes, but they held me, and I wanted to be held by them, for they were ordering me not to turn away this time, for this was why adults stared each other in the eye: you looked straight back and there was no running away for cover, because you were invited to stare too, because it was no longer a breach of any kind, it was a breach not to stare—which is when I realized that 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. And this, on one of my last afternoons in his shop and in that distant part of the globe, was a wellspring of happiness, hope, and friendship. He had looked at me with sorrow because I was leaving soon. I was his friend. There was nothing more to want.

But I knew that day that if I was ever going to come back as an adult to the island it would be to build my home in that chapel. It had seen me suffer and cry as I’d never wept before. I knew every one of its exposed stones, every inch, every weed, every crawling lizard, down to the feel of the chipped stones and pebbles under my bare feet. I belonged here the way I belonged to this planet and its people, but on one condition: alone, always alone.

expiate

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. *

itself

She looked so expansive, so ebullient and rapt. I haven’t seen her like this in so long. Part of me was even happy to watch her beam, one elbow resting ever so nonchalantly on the thin ledge that was supporting the large mirror behind them as she touched his hair, looking like a model for Mauboussin’s bracelets. She is beautiful. So why am I not jealous?

They say the signs are always there, right before you, but like the stars at night, they are impossible to count, much less read. Besides, signs are no better than oracles. They speak the truth provided they’re not heeded.