Losing is What Matters by Manuel Pérez Subirana

Author:Manuel Pérez Subirana
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press

6

TOO QUICKLY WE grow accustomed to the charms of the one we love. Too quickly the qualities we valued so highly are diluted by the daily habits of a shared life, and we stop paying attention to them. And we discover that what made us fall in love didn’t bring in its wake, as we first thought it would, a hidden, mysterious world. Because we fall in love less with a gesture performed with exquisite precision, or the unsurpassed beauty of a face, than with what that gesture or that face seem to conceal. Trusting in that promise, our imagination takes wing.

Every one of Elisenda’s features, every gesture, every glance, every word were for me, at first, only the outer manifestation, precise and exquisite, of a boundless, magical world, like the cherry you taste before cutting into the cake. Elisenda’s smile, her blond hair, and the green color of her eyes were not my end goal; they weren’t, so to speak, an end in themselves. Rather, they were the doorway to a mysterious, redemptive region, free from the dull, wretched yoke of everyday life. When she was introduced to me, at a dinner put on by mutual friends, and I saw her for the first time and gazed at the radiance of her face and the soft, round contours of her figure, my body responded sexually—maybe her smile as she offered me her hand gave me an erection—but at the same time, perhaps as part of the physical response, through her radiant face, her perfect figure, her gentle smile, I thought I’d seen something wholly unprecedented, something (and I can only call it “something,” since nothing about it matched any concept then known to me) which seemed to be the repository of every answer, seemed to contain within it the keys to my very existence, something which, in short, once unstopped would set free all the happiness that I could lay claim to in this life.

Predictably, after that first encounter, I succumbed to an imperious need to win Elisenda over, to make her mine. Yet the desire for possession wasn’t directed at her body, or her smile, or her intelligence, all of which were only secondary goals; what I hoped to possess, what I wanted to gain and make mine forever, were the depths that her body and her smile and her intelligence hinted at. I didn’t realize (no one in love does) that she could never open the doors for me to those redeeming depths, and she couldn’t do so simply because that desired world existed solely in my imagination, and I had created it out of my own history, my hardships, my traumas, my hopes, my sorrows. In truth, what I hoped to gain was inside me more than inside her.

When I got her to come live with me I was happy, happy like a child about to open a present, happy like a town on the eve of a festival, happy like the runner who rounds a bend and catches sight of the finish line.

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