Arturo Fontaine - La Vida Doble

“I know I’m not capable of inspiring love,” I tell him out of the blue, and I lean against one of those bleak, forsaken rocks. “I always know I’ll be abandoned and betrayed, it’s what I deserve.” But he caresses me in silence, he wants to redeem me. He thinks his love can save me. “I’d like to believe you,” I tell him.

I know I’m lying to myself. I want someone to forgive me and love me unconditionally, exactly as I was and am and will be. But I’m afraid. I defend myself. I don’t want to tie myself down. I care for Roberto a lot. I need him, but maybe because of that, it’s difficult for me. I defend myself before the fact, in anticipation of rejection. I demand too much, I’m insatiable, I know it. I demand unconditional and absolute love in exchange for nothing. First I want to be loved just because. Then I can start to love. I want to put my misery on display and to be loved for it before anything else. I don’t just want to be loved. Someone also has to pay, someone has to suffer for me, and it will fall to whoever wants to love me now. It falls, though it’s not what I want, to Roberto.

I make the one who loves me submit to tests because I don’t want to believe in his love, and I give little in return because I’m afraid of disappointing him, of boring him. I’m so insecure. I hide inside myself.

Roberto talks to me. He tells me I’m not well, he tells me I’m sick, I need to take my pills. Roberto is so naive sometimes. . I ask him: “How do you know?” He says from my face. “And what is my face like?” I ask. He tells me I’m not going to like the answer. I insist. He says I look ravaged, sometimes: my jaw droops, I breathe roughly through my mouth, my gaze is emptied out as though I’m looking at the void. I say: “The void? Death?” I start to laugh and I look at myself in the mirror. I don’t see what he sees. I’m skinny and gaunt with dark bags under my eyes; ugly, in a word. “That’s what you’re seeing,” I tell him, “I’m ugly. That’s my ‘illness’ you’re so worried about.” He denies it.

But I’m afraid that he won’t find me attractive and I’ll be punished. Roberto is attractive to other women. I realize that. More than to be with him myself, what I want is for him not to be with anyone else. Jealousy consumes me at the mere thought of him with another woman. So I punish him. He doesn’t love me enough. That’s how I feel and I tell him so. I would have liked for him to love me until my jealousy and my fears dissipated. We fought and made up. Obviously. Who doesn’t?

One wretched night, out of pure rage, before he gets into bed, I dump a glass of water on Roberto’s side. When he feels the cold wetness he’s furious. I am forcing him to sleep on the sofa. From then on the fights happen more and more often. We can go weeks without speaking. And I manage it: Roberto, the only person I have, gets tired and leaves me. I am once again what I am. .

I try to let my work as a teacher at Berlitz save me. Once again I walk under the oak trees at the Kungsträdgården. The virgin snow on the naked oaks. I need to be accepted by a human being so that I can be a human being. Some afternoons, Agda’s old friends invite me out. They’re very kind, they take me to see a play at the Dramaten or the Folkoperan and out to eat, and I don’t know why it tends to happen on Thursday and we eat crepes with blueberry jam and they give me good cognac to drink. I go back to my apartment seeing double.

This dull November light in Stockholm, these four hours of light. And my past returns. And my sin is always before me. And seen from the vantage of this wind and this fog, my past is incomprehensible to me. Pills? You want a list of the sleeping pills and antidepressants that I toss back every day? I’m not going to deny that I drank more vodka than I should, I drank Absolut vodka every day, and plenty of it, but I wasn’t an alcoholic. Not that.

Suddenly, a burst of energy, and I go out shopping. At H&M I go into the dressing room and try on lots of clothes. Everything looks fantastic. At the register I have to put one dress back because my card has reached its limit. Then I go by a music store. I buy the Nocturnes. Piano by Arrau. “For when the sorrow comes back,” I say to myself. But what’s that? Georges Brassens: La Mauvaise Réputation. I leave with those two CDs. I drop the bags in the hall of my apartment and I run to put on Brassens. The eleventh song: Il suffit de passer le pont, / C’est tout de suite l’aventure! /. . Je n’ai jamais aimé que vous. Giuseppe making omelets in his little kitchen. He stops all of a sudden and raises his glass of champagne with a mischievous smile. I sigh. I slowly gather up the bags from the floor and I start to try on one of the new dresses. No. Now I don’t like it. I try on more. In the mirror in my room nothing looks good on me anymore. I was tricked by the lights in the dressing room, I tell myself. I look terrible. I yawn. I should go return all this. I’m exhausted. Tomorrow, I think, and I fall into bed.

I force myself to walk under the oaks at the Kungsträdgården. On their naked branches, a layer of snow has hardened. A piece of it comes off and falls with indifferent misfortune. February. The little light there is shines from underneath. There is beauty in those oaks lit up from below, and in the sea that in ancient times was a forest, and in those bees, the same as the ones today, that millions of years ago were trapped in amber. It’s not that I don’t perceive it. It’s that the beauty doesn’t move me anymore. I know it’s there and it should touch my senses, but my senses are dulled now.

This malaise is like that, it’s suffocating. There’s no place for that ironic distance behind which elegant young men like to hide their fear of feeling with their guts. Here there are pathos and poor taste. It’s the brittle feeling of being made of glass , of the body being dragged on and on. The feeling of disquiet eats away at me. And at night, the nightmares. And when I wake up shouting and sweating it’s because I feel Ronco’s breath in my ear. Then, insomnia. I see the color of the crows Van Gogh painted soaring over a wheat field, that truffle black . . Then the black claw returns inside my stomach and the abyss sucks me in and old scenes of horror pile on top of me like black cars trying to run me over. And those old Furies return, as if those black events, so vivid, were happening now. The smell of fear returns: strong and sharp, decayed, old, repugnant. Voices come back to me, slamming doors. “We’ve got another ‘package,”’ shouts Rat, and Ronco laughs. And I see once again, as if it were happening that very moment, the gag, the foam. . I can’t stop my heart from pounding, and I sweat and sweat unable to turn away from what I don’t want to see. I know, I’m in Stockholm, and I curse its skies. I’m the mangy bitch that no one wants as a friend, I tell myself. And in spite of everything, I’m proud. I’ve already told you: I contradict myself.

Why didn’t I run from those claws? Why not one day before I gave Rafa up? The passage of time can’t undo what I did. I’m the one I want to erase from my life. Forgive myself? How could I give myself something I don’t deserve? Unhappiness has been my god. I have lain down in the mud and dried myself off in the crime-infested air. I distrust, and my distrust becomes acid in my guts. Don’t I hate all things noble? Is my spite a lying form of consolation? Because now it hurts my eyes, the light that radiates from a good man like Roberto.

Then, do I still admire Canelo? Like every innocent, he didn’t know he was innocent. Is it because he’s the sacrifice? As if by defying death, he could kill it. His freedom made destiny. Who speaks of victory? To endure is all. And there were women who went through the same terrifying place I did, or even worse places, which of course existed. Today those women prevail with rocklike dignity because they remained in one piece. When they came out, testifying gave them a purpose. That was the case for my friend Claudia, to mention just one. And there were many others like her.