Love Doesn't Work

by Henning Koch

  The fourth time I entered her shop was important. I had a sense of wanting to achieve something that fourth time. I had some vague idea of asking her for dinner, or a drink. Where, though? There weren’t any restaurants around. And what bars did she like?

  Or might I cook for her?

  The day before, I had seen her strolling down the Corso, occasionally glancing into shop windows, moving towards me from about a hundred meters away. I stared at the ground to avoid catching her eye, thinking to myself that as we got closer I would look up and smile at her. Then I’d stop and try to start up a conversation.

  Ten seconds passed, then I looked up.

  She’d gone!

  At first I was disappointed. I realized she must have gone into a shop.

  Then it occurred to me that she had probably wanted to avoid me. But why? A whole range of possibilities arose in my mind. Was she being elusive to enflame me and test my mettle?

  Another thought occurred to me. Maybe she didn’t know what to say to me, just as I didn’t to her?

  In either case, now I knew she was aware of my presence. I wasn’t just someone with a burning interest in wristwatches.

  So, as I was saying, the fourth visit was significant, because now we both knew that there was something in the air. As I walked across the cool stone tiles, she was watching me with a tentative smile. She had a slight edge to her. I felt she was expecting me to do or say something. I lost my nerve and stood before her, uncomfortable in my own body. I seemed incapable of lightness in her presence.

  Finally, at a loss, I asked for a cheap quartz watch with a rubber strap. Even my voice seemed to have lost its normal timbre. When I was paying I noticed my hand was trembling. I took fractionally too long getting my money out and when I slotted the wallet into my inside pocket I got it caught in the frayed silk lining.

  She seemed to be watching my every move. There was a kind of weariness about her, and I realized I had overstepped the mark in some way. Not by saying anything, not even really by doing anything. Just by being. By existing in her presence I had made her weary.

  I said goodbye and left. Later that day I bumped into her again in the street and she quite blatantly dived into a souvenir shop to avoid me when I was only some ten meters in front of her. I walked past and told myself it was now crystal clear why she had been avoiding me. She didn’t like me, found me unpleasant and heavy-footed with my poor command of Italian, my awkward northern manners. It was an embarrassment, this fawning passion I had developed for her. I decided never to bother her again, and never to go into the watch shop again.

  That would have been the end of the story, except there were some other convolutions. First, I met her sister, because she started working in the ice cream bar. I didn’t know for sure if she was Gradisca’s sister, and I didn’t ask. But they looked the same. The sister was like her twin, except she looked older. I had a feeling she was married and more settled. Every day a guy in a vintage roadster picked her up.

  It was a two-seater, so I never saw Gradisca get a lift with them.

  I never saw Gradisca with anyone. Only when she was working in the shop was she actually with someone else. Sometimes I saw her talking to people in the street, but I always had the impression they were acquaintances to meet for an aperitif.

  Never a man, holding her possessively.

  Gradisca’s sister had more solidity about her. She wasn’t ethereal. Beauty must have been a family trait, but even though she looked more matronly I fancied she was actually younger than Gradisca.

  Oddly enough, I found the sister very easy to talk to. Not like Gradisca at all. She had a basic command of English; I made jokes and we had some half-reasonable times in there, just talking about ice cream or how to mix drinks or what sort of cakes we liked with our coffee.

  One day while we were talking it hit me! Jesus, what an idiot I had been.

  Gradisca had a boyfriend. Obviously!

  A girl like that, poised and well groomed and gorgeous with it. Of course! How could I have ignored this most obvious explanation of all?

  My speculation didn’t lead anywhere, until one day after too many drinks I told a friend I had developed a crush on a woman in town.

  “Tell me who?” he said, interrupting me with a delighted grin.

  “She works in a shop.”

  “Which one?”

  “The watch shop.”

  He chuckled. “Gradisca? Excellent!”

  “Go on!”

  “Everyone likes her, and she knows it.”

  I told him about our trysts in the shop, how I felt there was something between us, then my puzzlement about the way she had avoided me in the street.

  “You can’t just expect a woman to stop and talk to you in the street, can you? You don’t even know her. Anyway, Gradisca’s a bit of a special case. And she has a boyfriend.”

  “Aha! That’s what I thought.”

  “A boring fat doctor. No one can understand what she’s doing with him. Maybe she likes the money? But I also hear they’re just about to split up.”

  “So she’s famous in town?”

  “Everyone’s famous, even you,” he said. “People notice everything you do here. Gradisca used to be married, I know that. It didn’t work and she came back. I don’t have much detail on that, though.”

  He paused then shook his head and smiled. “Today I saw her wearing this green knitwear thing that reached down to her navel more or less, and her lovely big ass was kind of screaming. She’s everyone’s fantasy but she’s in her own world. Like she’s playing a game. She comes into our bar sometimes, stands there having a drink and wiggling what she’s got, then leaves without saying much. I never go into her shop, though. My wife knows I have a thing about Gradisca, I’ve told her, there’s no point denying it. Everyone’s got a thing about Gradisca.”

  “So what does she get out of it? Going to your bar like that?”

  “It’s a kind of theatre. Like the struggle between us.”

  “Who?”

  “Boys, girls. The battle.”

  Later, walking home, it occurred to me that his words were a sort of distortion. Not in their essential points of fact: I believed that Gradisca had been married, otherwise it would not make sense, anything about her. I believed that she had come back in disgrace. The other stuff about her looking for attention, being a cockteaser, struck me as off-the-point and also untrue. Gradisca had grace! All she’d done was walk into a bar! The truth was, I felt admiration for her, the way my friend had described her standing there, confronting the builders, the drinkers and shepherds.

  In a way, she was saying to them: “Go home, toss off in your rooms, do what the hell you like, I can stand here, I can do anything I want, and if you desire me that’s not my problem.” I tried to imagine how it would feel to be a fantasy. Walking round, having all these women looking at me dreamily, eyeing up my bulging crotch, then coming up to ask for directions, smiling appreciatively at my every word.

  No wonder Gradisca had turned slightly tricky. If everyone I met desired me, I would find it hard to choose. Not choosing anyone would be the most likely scenario. I would keep myself to myself. Or perhaps I would turn into a player, a fleshpot, always finding new women to distract myself with: tall, small-titted Cuban dancers, pallid Chinese women with shining tresses of jet-black hair.

  When would my search ever end?

  Oddly enough I think it would end the day I met Gradisca and we spent our nights close together with nothing between us but a film of sweat; and our evenings after she came home from work sitting on my terrace, eating melon and drinking Campari sodas.

  ii) Gradisca’s Shadow

  “…there is another side to the Don Juan character which is found in the fused Hebrew-Arabic-Castilian philosophy and concept of reality. This concept is simply that exterior reality has no existence in and of itself. One reaches toward it, and it recedes… Don Juan, thus, somewhat like the wandering Spanish pìcaro, clutches again and again a
t a phantom. In his case it is the phantom of femininity…”

  (John Armstrong Crow, “Spain, the Root and the Flower”)

  I

  What is Gradisca’s shadow? It seems to have a life all of its own. An obscure Christian veil? Or guilt, obsession?

  Every moment in our lives represents some choice that will affect everything.

  Jung was right. We move through a world of mythical significance.

  Behind every beautiful woman you desire, comes a question: Why?

  After she has gone, you dwell in the footsteps she left behind. You compose songs on the shore, in honor of Urania who sailed away.

  II

  Sexual love is love, but love is only love if it is for The One, and by that I mean the beloved object.

  The Platonic Love Ideal is an invention designed to focus the mind on the possibilities of Monotheistic Worship. The tribes of Judea invented the One God. In a universe inhabited by One Great Holy Ghost, Man would also have to find the One Beloved Woman (Object as Non-Object) and claim her by a ring on her finger.

  The Greek Gods, each a facet of the Jungian diamond, receded. Men would no longer explore the variegations of the feminine serpent, nor the cloven-hoofed Satyr.

  III

  Beauty/sex is a shadow, because it promises something that is incomplete. Beauty/sex is only a beginning, a door. Men who follow it are men who prefer to loiter on the outside.

  When men are young they set out and see the world. Later, when they are older they must cast illusion aside.

  “Beauty” is one such illusion.

  As men grow older and acquire wisdom, which is after their fortieth year, they should be thinking of their woman and bride. They should spend much of their time in mountains. They should exert themselves greatly for the good of their house.

  When I see a beautiful woman I feel pity for her.

  IV

  Sexual ecstasy is a veil. If you pursue it, know this at least, that it will lead you away from the pursuit of the One God and the One Love.

  Life, as we all know, is decrepitude and descent into death.

  Sexual desire is like a sail made of sweet-wrappers. It will not perform, but its making was sweet.

  V

  Hamlet was right, there is no better thing than lying between maiden thighs.

  I listen to the maiden’s fluting voice whilst moonlight falls upon a bunch of dried flowers.

  VI

  I have never seen a forty-three-year-old man who is happy and constantly pursuing young beautiful women, unless he is a man of the world, concerned with matter and ownership and the outward shape of things.

  Such a man will be satisfied as long as he gets the grand prize, a small clam situated in the region of the crotch. In return he will offer his local delicacy, a sausage-like thing with mayonnaise coming out the end.

  VII

  I am standing on a hill. Snow is falling, settling on my shoulders.

  I see myself as extraneous in the human universe. Sometimes I wonder if I am not already living in a society that has dissolved? Insurance companies and banks send me letters, all inconsequential crap. I rip them into small pieces and put them in my painted waste paper basket from Rajasthan.

  The world is full of Freudians. God damn the Freudians, with their dumb goatee beards like pig’s bristle on their weak chins.

  I am a Jungian, standing on a hill, with frost settling on my shoulders. The fields are barren. I am barren too.

  VIII

  Could it be that there is some sort of shadow moving across my world, my life? Am I intrinsically flawed—a man with a design fault? Why, when things are in front of me, do I turn away, disdain them? I have turned my life into a struggle against rules I have imposed to bind myself?

  IX

  What does One Love mean?

  Is it anything but idealization, the Love Object surrounded by dark shadows?

  Have I chosen to live in One Love surrounded by encroaching shadows?

  X

  If I could kiss Gradisca’s lips today, if I could thrust myself into her innermost womb and expend myself there, would she turn into One Love? No, because One Love is invented myth. Most myths are spontaneous, true, and demotic. One Love does not keep company with other myths; it feeds on fatty, unwholesome soup. Its object is unreality.

  XI

  Everything is illusion. Life has no real meaning.

  Heaven is a place invented by people too lazy to make their own.

  I am sure there is no heaven except when I am lying in the arms of my darling, and tonight she is so very far away. It makes me feel alone.

  I’m so fucking stoned I could die.

  iii) The Night of San Giorgio

  Earlier, the streets had been packed with people wearing black, the men with large wooden phalli, which they’d pointed enthusiastically at the women whilst singing crude, folkloric songs. Some had wrapped slices of lard around their carved phalli.

  Now, by the dark of night, everyone wore white and carried candles whilst eulogizing the Lord. The priests were out in force. Tonight was the eve of San Giorgio. I’d been told by the drunks in the bar that this was a night when anything could happen. Watch out for the frustrated housewives, the young girls with hot thighs, they said. Tonight they were all wild, all the women!

  Every man had to go out and be ready for the approach of his very own Pagan Queen. Many children were born nine months after San Giorgio, or at least that was what the wooden-phalli-guys told me, big grins on their faces.

  At this precise moment I was standing under an awning outside a bar overlooking the main piazza. There was a marble fountain in the middle, filled with dry leaves and cobwebs. I looked up and saw Gradisca standing there, all dressed in white, her face terribly pale. I realized with a jolt that she was not happy. Across a sea of faces our eyes met; then we looked away, as if by magnetic resistance.

  Could I possibly be mistaken? This woman looked too pale, and her hair was too short, too dark. Wasn’t this in fact Gradisca’s sister, the woman I knew from the ice cream bar?

  Again and again I felt my eyes involuntarily sliding back, dwelling on her.

  If I could have stepped forward and put my hand on Gradisca’s arm, the fantasy would have been dispelled. On the night of San Giorgio I would have overcome this thing that was consuming me.

  Once or twice she threw a speculative glance in my direction, as if waiting for me, but somehow I couldn’t bridge the gap. All I could manage was to torpidly follow her as she moved off, disappearing into a crowd assembled before a stage, where a skimpily dressed dancer was performing a sort of erotic Egyptian dance, as if to goad her audience to orgiastic feats.

  I stood there, searching for Gradisca. Could she really be this pale virgin I had seen? Gradisca was a gold-burnished creature in a blood-red skirt. All summer I had watched her long hair cascading in auburn luxuriance down her tapered back.

  It was winter now. In some mysterious way she had redefined herself—put herself beyond my reach.

  When the dance was over I walked back to my house and let myself in, waiting as the slow-starting fluorescent tube threw a white glare over everything. On the floor in the hall, a stray dog I had adopted stood up and put her tail between her legs. I stroked her and told her to stay in her basket. She licked my hand gratefully.

  With heavy steps I climbed the stairs and got into my cold, damp bed.

  iv) Epilogue

  Somewhere inside of me there’s a little dark man, or maybe a large dark man.

  Either way, he’s dark, and darksome. He feels something has been lost which will never again be found. In fact it is love that has gone; for the rest of his days he must go in search of it; even though it will never again be there, perfect and wholly possessed, in his hands.

  This evening I walked through my town. The clouds were flying fast. The mistral came blowing in, and a sheet of light sea-mist slid over the top of the valley. The shops were lit, and on the rim of the horizon a dark
halo seemed to be rising from the choppy sea, although the spume was almost luminous as the breakers came hissing in.

  In the watch shop I saw a Greek chorus of women, all doe-eyed and intent on me as I glanced inside to catch a glimpse of Gradisca. She was wearing her dark blue jeans that show off her slightly disproportionate rump, offset by her shapely legs.

  Gradisca was standing in an almost choreographed position, twisting at the waist to look out of the plate glass window, her legs like vines encircling a pillar.

  The women knew I had come to look at her. I could hear their chorus chanting as I passed:

  “Who is that sad, prowling man, and why does he make no attempt to come in? Why does he always walk past without waving at us, greeting us? Why does he look at us but never come in and have words with us? Does he think we are stones? See the darkling thrush, see those melancholy eyes! Beware, beware, for he has drunk from melancholic springs and courted fair Persephone!”

  As I walked away I felt a deep sadness, as if something were dying inside of me.

  Even so I doubled back and hovered round the piazza that Gradisca sometimes crosses on her way to and from the shop.

  Driving rain whipped across the paving stones. The place was deserted. I waited under a palm tree, then decided to buy some red wine and steak and head back home.

  At a corner of the piazza I crashed into Gradisca, in her raincoat and umbrella.

  “Ciao,” she said breezily, as if I were no one in particular.

  As she crossed the street and headed for the river, a late sun broke through the clouds. There was something almost heroic about her slight figure, clutching her shopping bags and rushing homeward under the swaying palms, through squalls of illuminated rain.

  I had spent all this time dreaming about her, observing her. Now that I had seen her subsumed at last—looking to all intents and purposes like any other human being—I was left with a question in my mind, a question I might never be able to answer.