Chapter One
A
Amor
In Yucatán, you never see the water. It flows underground, beneath a
fragile sheath of earth and limestone. Occasionally, that delicate
Yucatec skin blossoms in eyes of water, in liquid ponds-the
cenotes-that attest to the existence of a mysterious subterranean
current. For me, love is like those hidden rivers and unexpected
streams of Yucatán. On occasion our lives come to resemble those
infinite chasms that would be fathomless if we did not find, at the
very bottom of the void, a flowing river, at times placid and
navigable, wide or narrow, at times steep, but always a liquid
embrace that helps keep us from disappearing forever into the deep
gulf of nothingness. While love may be that river that flows and
sustains life, love and its most treasured qualities-goodness,
beauty, affection, solidarity, memory, companionship, desire,
passion, intimacy, generosity, and the very will to love and be
loved-are still not necessarily free of the one thing that seems to
negate love: evil.
In political life, it is possible to convince oneself that one is
acting out of love for a community while driving that community into
destruction and inspiring hatred from both within and without. I do
not doubt, for example, that Hitler loved Germany. But in Mein
Kampf, he made it clear that the notion of loving his country was
inseparable from the hatred of all those things that he perceived to
be at odds with Germany. The kind of love that is cultivated out of
hatred for others was made explicit in a regime of evil that has no
parallel in all of history. From the beginning, Hitler declared that
he would practice an evil brand of politics in order to achieve
good. He made no attempt to hide this, unlike Stalin, who wrapped
himself in a flag of humanistic Western ideology-Marxism-to
perpetrate an evil comparable to that of Hitler, but that did not
dare utter its name. Hitler’s love of evil led him to a Wagnerian
apocalypse against the backdrop of a Berlin in flames. Stalin’s love
of evil was translated into the slow collapse of a Kremlin built of
sand, washed away by the waves, slow but constant, of the same
history that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat hoped to embody.
The Nazi regime collapsed like a horrid, wounded dragon. Soviet
Communism dragged itself to the grave like a sickly worm. Fafner and
Oblomov.
The Marquis de Sade also proposes a love of evil that seeks carnal
pleasure as a way of grounding the body’s pain and its subsequent
disappearance from earth. Sadistic love, the Marquis tells us, may
be a bad thing for the victim, but represents a supreme good for the
executioner. De Sade, however, did not intend actually to put his
monstrous evil-as-good vision into practice. He was not a
politician; he was a writer who was almost continuously locked up in
prison and thus incapable of acting except in the kingdom of
fantasy. There, he was the monarch of creation. And he warns us: “I
am a libertine, but I am neither a delinquent nor an assassin.”
There is another covert form of evil that presents itself as love.
This consists of imposing our will upon another person “for his own
good”-that is, for the love of someone whom we rob of his liberty in
the name of love, effectively leading him away from the path of his
own destiny. This is one of the eternal themes of literature, and
for me, the person who captures it with the utmost clarity is one of
the great authors who blazed through my youth, François Mauriac.
Thérèse Desqueyroux, Le Désert de l’amour, Le Næud de vipères, Le
Baiser au lépreux, and Le Mal itself are all novels about a
perverted evil that, intending to do good, either destroys or
debases the ability to love through the manipulation of religion,
money, and, above all, social convention and hypocrisy. Thérèse
Desqueyroux, at the height of this drama about good intentions
paving the way to hell, kills in the name of an old offense, and at
the price of her own health, in order to save family face. Society,
family, and honor thus determine, in the name of love owed
to those institutions, the heroine’s erotic slavery and crime of
passion.
The praise of love as the supreme reality or aspiration of human
beings cannot and should not overlook the fraternity of evil even
though, in essence, love overcomes evil in the majority of cases. It
can crush it, but it will never vanquish it fully. Love needs a
cloud of doubt to hover above, against the evil that preys upon it.
Inevitably, though, the cloud and the rage of the heavens will
dissolve into pleasure, tenderness, sometimes even blind passion or
the fleeting happiness of love as men and women experience it. The
most ardent romantic passion can languish and fall into habit or
irritation with the passage of time. A couple begin to know each
other because, first and foremost, they know so little of each
other. Everything is surprise. When there are no surprises left,
love can die. Sometimes love yearns to recover the wonder of its
earliest moments but inevitably comes to realize that the second
time around the wonder is nothing more than nostalgia. Some people
perceive the notion of habit as a terrible burden-a conclusive,
repetitive, tedious desert whose only oasis is death, television, or
separate bedrooms. But then again, aren’t there also many couples
who have discovered, through habit, the truest and most lasting form
of love, the love that is best able to welcome and protect the
companionship and support that also signify love? And doesn’t
another kind of desert exist as well, one that is fiery by day but
frozen by night? I mean the desert of endless passion, so
excruciating that the great protagonists of romantic love have
preferred premature, passionate death at the very height of the love
experience to the slow loss of passion through the monotony of
day-to-day life. Can Romeo and Juliet grow old together? Maybe. But
young Werther cannot end his days watching Big Brother on television
as his only form of vicarious participation in passions less
lethargic than his own.
Love wishes to be, for as long as possible, the pinnacle of
pleasure: desire blossoming from inside and extending out to the
hands, the fingers, the thighs, the waist, the open flesh; caresses
and an anxious pulse; the universe of love-blessed skin, the lovers
reduced to the discovery of the world; voices that speak in silence;
the interior baptism of all things. It is when we think of nothing
at all so that this moment will never end. Or when we think of
everything possible, precisely so as not to think of this and give
the pleasures of the flesh their freedom and their longest brevity;
when we concede that St. Augustine was right, and yes, love is more
bestiarum (in the manner of animals) but with one difference: human
beings are the only animals that make love face to face
(complications notwithstanding, of course). For the animal, there
are no exceptions. For us, the animal exception is the human rule.
When is the felicity of love greatest? In the act of love or in the
leap forward in the imagination of what the subsequent lovers’ union
will be like? The exhausted joy of memory and then, once again,
abundant desire, enhanced by love, a new act of love: is this
felicity? The pleasure of love leaves us stunned. How is it possible
that the entire being, without any kind of waste or abandon, can
lose itself in the flesh and the gaze of the beloved, and at the
same time lose all notion of the exterior world? How is this
possible? How can one pay for this love, this pleasure, this
illusion?
The prices that the world exacts for love are many. But, just as in
the theater or the sports arena, there are various entrance prices
and even preferred seating. The gaze is the essential ticket of
love. As the saying goes in Spanish, love enters through the eyes.
And it is true: when we fall in love, we have eyes for no one but
our beloved. One night when I was in Buenos Aires I discovered-not
without a mixture of modesty, poignancy, and shame-yet another
dimension of the amorous gaze: its absence. Our friend Luisa
Valenzuela had taken my wife and me to a tango bar on the endless
Avenida Rivadavia. It was a genuine dance hall-no tourists, no light
shows, no paralyzing strobe lights. A popular neighborhood haunt,
with its orchestra of piano, violin, and accordion. Everyone sitting
on chairs lined up around the perimeter of the wall, like at a
family party. Couples of all ages and sizes. And a queen of the
dance floor. A blind girl, in dark glasses and a flowered dress. The
reincarnation of Delia Garcés, the fragile Argentine actress. She
was the most sought after dancer in the place. Resting her white
cane on her chair, she would get up to dance without seeing but
being seen. She was a marvelous dancer. She evoked the tango exactly
as Santos Discépolo defined it: “a sad thought that is danced.” It
was a lovely and strange kind of love that was danceable in both
light and darkness. Half-darkness, yes.
In time, the crepúsculo interior or “interior twilight” of the
Donato and Lenzi tango also teaches us that it is possible to love
the imperfection of one’s beloved. Not despite the imperfection but
because of it. Because some specific shortcoming, an identifiable
defect, makes the person we love that much more adorable; not
because it makes us feel superior-the Greeks, in fact, punished
hubris as a tragic offense, not just against the gods, but against
human limitations-but rather because of the very opposite, because
it allows us to admit the things that we ourselves lack and, as
such, compensate for with someone else. This is different from the
form of love that can be defined as the will to love: an ambiguous
condition that can wave along with the flags of solidarity, but can
also show off the rags of self-interest, cunning, or that brand of
friendship-out-of-convenience that Aristotle so aptly described. We
would do well to distinguish very clearly between these two forms of
love, because the first is an exercise in generosity while the
second revolves around egotism.
“A perfect egotism between two people” is Sacha Guitry’s very French
definition of love, placing a rather ironic twist on intimacy. On
the one hand, shared egotism implies accepting, tolerating, or
remaining discreet in the face of the many miseries that, in the
words of Hamlet, “flesh is heir to.” But, on the other hand, bald
egotism-radical, miserly solitude-implies both separation from the
other as well as separation from oneself. There is always someone
who will say that the greatest moment of love is separation,
loneliness, the melancholy of remembrance, the solitary moment …
And this situation is certainly preferable to the melancholy of a
love that never existed-out of shyness, indifference, or haste.
There wasn’t the time, we say to ourselves. There wasn’t the time
for the last word. There wasn’t time to say so many things about
love.
Love, whether it is will or habit, generosity or imperfection,
beauty and plenitude, intimacy and separation, is a human act that
pays, as do all human acts, the price of finality. If we make love
the worthiest goal and most worthwhile pleasure of our lives, it is
because in order for it to exist at all (or perhaps because it does
in fact exist) we must envision it as limitless precisely because it
is so fatally limited. Love can only conceive of itself without
limit. At the same time, lovers know that their love has limits-even
if they are blinded by passion and deny this-if not in life then
surely in the death that is, according to Bataille, the empire of
true eroticism: “The perpetuation of a love more intense in the
mortal absence of the beloved.” Cathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering
Heights, Pedro Páramo and Susana San Juan in Juan Rulfo’s novel
Pedro Páramo. But in life itself, can even the most absolute,
abundant love ever fully satisfy us? Don’t we always want more? If
we were infinite, we would be God, the poet tells us. But we want,
at the very least, to love infinitely, for this is our only possible
brush with divinity. It is our gaze of farewell and our gaze upon
God. Dios y adiós.
I hope the reader of this book will discover the various kinds of
love that are contained in each chapter of my personal alphabet.
There is one kind, however, that I would like to highlight so as
always to keep it present in my mind. I refer to the quality of
attention. Love as attention. Paying attention to the other person.
Opening oneself to attention. Because extreme attention is the
creative faculty, and its condition is love.
Agnes Heller, the philosopher of Hungarian extraction, writes of how
ethics are concerned with the personal responsibility we assume on
behalf of another person; our response to the call of the other. All
ethics culminate in a morality of responsibility: we are morally
responsible for ourselves and others. However, how can one single
person assume responsibility for everyone? This is the central theme
of all Dostoevsky’s novels.
How can we begin to absorb the full experience of a suffering,
humiliated, yearning human race? This is the question that
Dostoevsky posed, with youthful desperation, to the greatest Russian
critic of his day, Vissarion Gregorievich Bielinsky. The critic’s
reply was overwhelmingly succinct: start with one human being, the
person closest to you. With love, place your hand in the hand of the
last man, the last woman you have seen, and in their eyes you will
see the reflection of all the needs, all the hopes, and all the love
known to all of humanity.
(Continues…)
Random House
Copyright © 2005
Carlos Fuentes
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-4000-6246-2
Excerpted from This I Believe
by Carlos Fuentes
Copyright © 2005 by Carlos Fuentes.
Excerpted by permission.
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