Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

Can you fall in love with someone you don’t like?

Who? Me?

Can a person fall in love with someone he doesn’t like?

I suppose some kind of attachment is possible, but I don’t know if I’d call it love.

Because, asked Zafar, you fall in love with the person , the person you don’t know?

Because like is an aspect of love.

* * *

In the following summer, not so long after the proposal and laughter but long enough for memory to find an accommodation, we went to Tuscany. Villa Fontana, which belonged to Emily’s grandmother, whom I had yet to meet, sat on a hillside not far from Lucca. A steep tarmac road, under a bright blue sky, curled around the hill overlooking olive groves. To my unaccustomed eyes, the bark of those trees looked as dry as kindling. In our hired car, we inched toward a huddle of cyclists, each one dressed the part: cycling shorts and streamlining sunglasses.

There was a sense, even when we had climbed only a hundred yards, that the view higher up would be spectacular. I remember the sound of the car, its agonies as the incline fought us, a shrill plea for mercy. I glanced at the gear lever.

It’s at times like these, I said, you wish you had another gear between neutral and first.

Yes, she replied.

A second passed before she shifted the gears down to first and overtook the cyclists.

When we pulled up outside Villa Fontana, I was surprised to see that it was no more than forty yards from the side of the road. I had been expecting — I don’t know why — something set deep within much larger grounds. My first instinct was to look for the fountains, but there were none, which fact I interpreted as a sign of the age of the place.

At that time, everything basked in a favorable light. A colonnade of conifers lined a path to a two-story house with tall windows, their shutters open flat against the exterior walls. The house had an unkempt outer appearance. I remembered a story I’d heard about the Englischer Garten in Munich. My guide, an American friend I was visiting, who had taken up a year-long fellowship at the Max Planck Institute, explained to me that the English Garden, a large park in the center of Munich, was so-called because it was organized along principles that in parts of mainland Europe were known as the English style, disorganized, unkempt, and overgrown, rather like areas of Hampstead Heath, I suppose. Standing in front of the villa in Tuscany, I remembered the corollary my friend had added: Apparently, this kind of natural disorder requires a lot of work — more than any other kind of garden.

We spent a week there, eating, reading, making love, and floating on wide inflatables in the pool. Emily never liked walking very much. If she visited a tourist spot, a thing to see, she might have been compelled by a sense of obligation, but walking for its own sake never held anything for her. So I went on walks by myself whenever she chose to read or take a nap or simply lounge by the pool. We did walk together once, up the road we came on, up around the house and to the top of the hill, and when we came over the crest, the view opened onto a wide vista of a deep valley carved from the earth leading west to a dwindling sun. I read somewhere of a particular view that is found in paintings across cultures and across time. It is apparently a universal aesthetic, and it consists of a valley, of hills directing the eye to the center, of trees and shrubbery of varying colors of green, and a path, either explicit or implicit in the contours of the land, that winds through the valley to an expanse of water in the near distance, a lake. Evolutionary biologists have speculated that a view with such elements is ubiquitous in our art because it was engrained in the psyche during man’s formative evolutionary period, for it is the view of a land that is hospitable to human habitation, a welcome sight to early humans in search of new beginnings. Nature maketh man to lie down in green pastures and leadeth him beside the still waters. And it was the very view from the hill that Emily and I stood on. Behind us was a church, its walls crumbling, its paintwork mottled by moss and rain, because in the end the earth takes back everything and all God’s work. Beside it, under the evening sky, and on an incline that made the act unfamiliar and new, Emily and I made love, and it was every bit as romantic and tender and urgent as any two human bodies have ever willed.

The sex was extraordinary. For me, I mean. Generally speaking. At other times, I mean. By that I don’t mean it was full of gymnastics or contorted geometries. Sure, there was spontaneous sex in unlikely places. There was enough of the drama, but what I mean is that it was powerful. It was almost always fucking, animal-like, but fucking in the head for me. It was not so much that she was good at sex but rather that the idea of Emily never failed to arouse me. I felt moved to greater and greater efforts and attentions. I learned more and more about the workings of her body, the pathways of stimulus and response. Sex was the realm in which I could take control of her being, the only place where I could approach understanding, so that sometimes — quite often, in fact — her body became an extension of mine. The scents of my own body came to remind me of her. You know, I hesitate to use the word control. I don’t recall any explicit evidence of a desire to control her, to control her actions or her thoughts. But in the end, control is the right word, because I wanted to control the Emily in my head, which was the Emily that was more and more in control of me , of my mental composure, of my waking thoughts, more and more the source of anxiety. A wise man once said to me — a psychiatrist, but to say more would be to get ahead of myself — that I had placed too much faith in trying to understand her. I was trying to understand her because … well, because understanding is what we set so much store in, understanding others, ourselves, understanding the world; because of that, but also because understanding is a mode of control, it subdues the unruliness of people in one’s head, it brings order and confers control where it is most sought, in that theater in the mind in which the avatars of people we know stand as actors resisting direction.

* * *

Tomaso visited on day six. Something happened that morning, before he arrived. I was perusing the villa’s bookshelves again, hoping against hope that another search would give up something overlooked, in the same way a man might open the fridge several times in an hour, half hoping the contents have miraculously changed. Only, that’s never what we really hope for, is it? What we won’t admit to ourselves is that we’re hoping our preferences might change, that the cheese and the tomatoes might suddenly appeal, or that the book we passed over before might somehow now catch our interest.

Emily came up beside me.

Found anything?

Not yet, I replied.

Look here, she said, pulling out a book. Have you read this?

She was holding Erewhon by Samuel Butler.

See. The title spells nowhere backward, she said.

I looked again at the title.

No, it doesn’t, I said. Though I’m no man of letters, I added.

Yes, it does, she replied.

I looked again.

Prove it, I said.

She took a closer look.

You’re right, she said.

I tell you what is cute though, I said. Nowhere can also be read as Now-here , which means exactly the opposite.

She wasn’t listening. She looked crestfallen, perhaps even defeated, but I tell you I did not have it in mind to defeat her. Hers seemed to me an easy enough mistake to make, and I think now of our human tendency — her tendency, my tendency — to see only what we wish to be true.