Issue No. 604
Living
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19 - 25 September 2002 Issue No. 604 Living |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Mood Swings
Close encounters of the third kind
I do not know who came up with the idea of eternal love or irreversible commitment. In my own experience, no love is eternal, unless it is not human love. People can love books, or money, or certain items of furniture for all their life. But the norm for humans is that love fades. Parents and children are a different story, perhaps, but even here the argument can be made that we objectify our closest siblings, we do not take in their personality as a whole. We start by denying their sexuality and then proceed to make them, in a sense, eternal beings. Things are different with our peers. We humanise them. This is why we fall in and out of love with them. But what is love?
A few months ago, I was perilously drawn to a woman I should not be in love with. Can't help it, I think, as the legendary Marlene Dietrich so huskily, hopelessly, keeps whispering in my ears. The person in question was someone I could be sanely attached to, quietly, sensibly, but no more. She was clever, sweet, funny, and half my age. Now, put yourself in my old sandals, buddy. Men in their fifties should keep their dignity, for they have little else, aside from fantastic careers and respectable bank accounts, to hold on to. You age and suddenly you're a pillar of society. People look up to you, laugh at your words as if congratulating you that you have any sense of humour left in your bones. The young do enjoy your company, for you can -- of course you can -- remember how Ataba Square looked in the late 50s, the open-sided trams, and the deserted streets of Mohandessin, where you took your first driving lessons in the early 1970s. They also -- and this is tricky -- hold you to higher moral standards, as if you're an industrial democracy with some institutional legacy to pass on. So, I wisen up. I step on the unreliable brakes of love, and pull up to the curb of sanity. Again, what is love?
Aside from parental-filial love, which I exclude on the basis of predictability, there are various kinds of love, rateable according to intensity. The first kind is auxiliary love. This is the love we have for our outer cycle of friends. We enjoy a movie, a drink, and love to have them somewhere in the background. This is the equivalent of emotional interior decoration, like having a wall painted in an interesting colour, or an elegant table with the right candleholders placed beside a sofa stuffed to exact mellowness. Background friends are lovely. If you're lucky, they will come and go and you won't even notice it. You will, of course, but don't worry. Eventually, you won't. Every now and then you throw a party, they are moving to another country, you buy them a CD, you look forward for their e-mail. But no pangs. No threat. God bless them, wherever they are.
Now, turn the intensity a bit higher and you get relations. This is when the ambiance becomes secondary to the person. This is the kind of people you want to be with, who phone you regularly, whose absence you immediately notice, who are just as fun talking to, even for hours, as going to the movies with. This is the type of people you get mad at when they leave and never write. Some will. Some won't.
Now to the intensity Marlene Dietrich croons about, the can't-help-it variety. I remember sitting in a bar in a Mediterranean island 20 years ago with a friend, discussing things of the heart. He told me about this woman, Italian I think, he was in love with. And he said something that was really childish for a man in his early thirties. He said that the first time he was with her, alone, he started trembling and could not stop himself. Now, this is icky and totally disrespectable and cannot happen. Except it did, to me, four years later, with a woman who reciprocated the intensity. The outcome, a year later, was disastrous. This is love of the third kind. The kind in which the background not only becomes irrelevant, it dissipates. There is complete stillness, a presence in the room, the one you love. Icky? Can't help it.
The thing about this latter type, what people call true love, is that it is so fragile, and nothing so fragile lasts. We knock around a lot of kitchenware, all the time, and forget an instance later. But every now and then, we don't. A few weeks ago, I was visiting my sister and somehow an extra-fine stem glass that used to belong to my mother came into my sight. I still remember drinking coke of that same set (originally six, four surviving) as a very young child. A crazy occasion I am sure, for my mother kept it under guard in a display cabinet. I still remember the bubbles rising to the surface as I held on to the glass with both hands, taking slow, small sips, trying to prolong the privilege. Decades later, in my sister's flat, I decided to recapture the moment. No one in my family was touching this set, or what remains of it. It has turned into a family heirloom, a veteran that retired from all service, daily or honourary. After the meal, I washed the glass myself, for extra care, and dried it, or tried to. It broke. The damn little horrible old lovely thing broke in my hands. Just like that. It didn't even fall to the floor. My sister looked at me, looked at the glass, still in my hands, looked at me again. Now there are only three left, she said, curtly. And I will be damned if I ever let you use one again, she did not add, wisely. I should have felt the loss, but I was just mad at the glass. Mad at its fragility. Mad at this final act of betrayal. How could something so beautiful go away so easily? Don't know. Can't help it.
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