The Case of Lisandra P. (16 page)

I wonder who it was that began to take him away from me. Who it was that he looked at one day, when before, he had eyes only for me. He grew distant gradually. Falling out of love is progressive. Before you no longer love, you love less. And less again, then no more at all. But it's not something you are aware of. Falling out of love. A relationship gone lukewarm, humdrum, pragmatic, everyday, utilitarian and habit-worn, and you don't even think it through because you don't think about it at all. Some people can live without passion, but not me. I cannot live without passion. I will die because this man has stopped loving me. One day, when we were first together, he told me he didn't look at other women anymore. He never should have told me that. The unthinkable pleasure I got from hearing these few words was not worth the despair I felt one day when I saw him look at another woman. It would have been a smile that started it, creating the distance between us. Eyes. A gaze. A ponytail. A word. A pair of breasts. All of it
dazzling in a panorama of all the women on earth. And he wouldn't even have noticed, not really.

I wanted to forestall the inevitable. I stopped using the same toothpaste, the same soap, the same shampoo as him, habits from a shared everyday life that cancel out the pH on your skin and tend to make them the same. Like the perfume you no longer smell on the other person's skin. I dyed my hair, gradually, week by week, so that I, too, could have that erectile blonde color, but it's too late now, it no longer has any effect on him, since I'm the one wearing it. If faithfulness were merely a matter of hair color it would be common knowledge. I have no more subterfuges. It's not just loud noises that accompany disasters, little sounds do, too, and even silence. There is no antechamber to unhappiness; unhappiness often just lands on you.

Vittorio has become distant. He says he hasn't but I know he has. I can feel it. He lies to me. He has a smell in the fold of his chin that disgusts me. The fold beneath his lips. No matter how much he washes, there is a place you cannot wash. That's the fold in the chin. And there I can smell it. I can describe her perfume, not an actual perfume but her female smell. The smell of this woman doesn't leave him. I tried to limit everything, to control and avoid and reduce. Our meetings with others. Our evenings out. Our trips. But I could not stop him doing his job. I am sure that is where he found her. I am sure it's one of his patients. The same patterns, over and over. Find a new woman the way he found me. In the same place. In the same circumstances. I took him from another woman; there's no reason why another woman shouldn't take him from me. It was bound to happen. How could it be otherwise? Shut away all day one-on-one. It's the law of close quarters. Of recurrent physical proximity. It's pernicious, the sexual tension is there, it's a fact, a reality with which two people in each other's presence must contend. Their stinking, simpering ways . . . I know very well what they're up to in there. And
the laughter I hear—not all the women consult because they have problems, believe me. Before, between each appointment he would come to our room and give me a kiss. Say a few words. Now his trajectory is limited to the space between the office and the front door. No more detour to come and see me. I study his footsteps. The way he sees a patient to the door. If his steps are quick, I tell myself he's eager to see the next patient. If his steps are slow, I tell myself he's enjoying the company of this one. For months I've been cutting the telephone line in his office so he can't make any calls I cannot eavesdrop on. If I could, I'd install a camera in his office. To see everything. To know everything. I listen out for the inflections in his voice, for any slips. If only I could read his mind . . . that's all I can think of, reading his mind. Everything means something. I've become a lie detector. He's thinking about someone else, I know he is; the first chance he gets he lets go of my hand, finding something better to do than to let me leave it there. The dishes. Read the newspaper. Wipe his ass. I feel as if this mouth of mine where he used to drown himself—it stinks now, I feel as if it has taken on that fetid, bitter smell of a mouth that is too little kissed, too little loved. He goes to see her once a week, I know he does; he told me he goes to the cinema, to the theater—just because I don't feel like going out anymore doesn't mean he should deprive himself. I have been caught in my own trap. My jealousy gave him the best pretext to cheat on me with complete peace of mind. And now he even goes out two nights a week. Soon he'll want to go out every night. Every day without me. He'll want to leave. Never mind who with, I don't care who the girl is, I don't care how beautiful she is. Even subjugating beauty can't keep a man; only novelty has any appeal. Because what we really love about beauty when we encounter it is novelty. And even if beauty doesn't fade it does lose its intensity; a few months in its presence and even beauty makes us weary. There is no way to stop love's
changing of the guard. This girl he sees every Thursday, I know, doesn't prove anything by herself. Other than the fact that he no longer loves me, or that he still loves me but I am no longer enough, which amounts to the same. It doesn't matter who she is, in a few months he'll turn away from her, too. She, too, will end up boring him, but I don't care about that; for me the harm has been done. He has moved on. And yet, we did love each other so much.

I am craving “us.” An overwhelming desire to fuck. With him. I can think of nothing else. But only with him. And I wish I could think about it with everyone. Taking a first lover. And then another. Watch my desire diversify, multiply. And then I would understand why he, too, should have a mistress. Why he, too, should desire other women. Those first times we made love: I'd give anything for him to take me like that again, one last time, like in the beginning. Our lovemaking was so good before. Why do we do it so badly now? So rarely. So blandly. When we make love, I open my eyes and look into his closed eyes, and the only thing that will make me come are images of him with another woman. Because a man will go on fucking at home, even if he's fucking elsewhere, too. A man will fuck whenever he gets the chance. This is immediately obvious to a woman. When she's prepared to see it. So is everything doomed to collapse? In the old days practically all women fainted. Now almost none of them do. Where are the smelling salts? Where are the women? Everywhere they have become so strong, so powerful, so beautiful. Why not me? Those whose love will not die are dying from love. I am rotting. Fear makes a body heavy. I've put on weight, but I haven't gotten fatter. It's not fat. It's not water. It's fear. Fear makes a body heavier. I notice it when I dance. The lightness is gone. It's the fear of losing him. Jealousy has an influence on thoughts, but also on the body; my muscles, my nerves are completely focused on him. Filled with
him. My bodily tissue is subjected to the orders of jealousy. I am suffocating.

How many times have I thought of his death? Not in a criminal way; simply to ensure my survival. I know I am in such great danger that I want to eliminate him. To recover some peace of mind, like when you switch off the music. Not because of the music, but to regain your tranquillity. But even the mere idea, the fantasy, of his death stimulates my jealousy. I can imagine him as all-powerful, infiltrating everywhere, able to see all the women, naked in their showers, in their bathtubs, in another's arms, Vittorio the Dead Man with a thousand lovers. But he's had his fill of me, he's saturated, disgusted; he won't even ever come to visit me.

The woman he knew before me. The woman with whom he is cheating on me. And the one he will leave me for. I can't find refuge anywhere. Not in the past, nor in the present, nor in the future. No refuge in time can shelter me. I have nothing left. I would like to meet my double to speak to her, and my opposite to distract me. I am suffocating. Jealousy is burning up my brain. The entire right-hand side of my head feels hot. Electricity from my neurons. Too many images, too much imagination, too many fantasies. I have cramps in my right eye. I would like to take photographs of my brain. Wherever it is that jealousy is located, so that I can have it surgically removed. I want a a knife, a flint, a pair of shears, that I could ram into my brain to cut it out. No more nerve endings. But you can't survive jealousy. It's an execution of the individual. A bullfight. One lance, then another and another; the picadors are busy. There, between the eyes, red, red, red everywhere. I am that enraged bull, meant to live in freedom, but let loose in an enclosure, in a bullring, before the excited gazes of those who will watch the bull die.

“Why do you shake your patient's hand when you say hello and when you say good-bye?”

“Why?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I don't know, I just got into the habit.”

“All that, just so you can touch them, admit it, go on.”

And I keep wondering which one he jerks off to. Maybe he doesn't wash his hands, so he can jerk off with the last one he touched.

I do everything I can to restrain myself. To act as if there's nothing wrong. I try to keep it all to myself. As much as I can. And often I deflect our arguments; I come up with any old excuse, everyday things, to vent my hatred, which in fact is stimulated by jealousy. But sometimes it breaks out. It boils over, it explodes; it's dreadful. Jealousy does not like discretion, jealousy drives its victims into a rage and then, only then, it exults. Jealousy starts in the head and ends up in the body, with blows. It's like a rush of air. Rising. In a second. A rush of air that radiates through my hands. That goes through me and settles into my palms. A cold rush of air, and that is when I want to hit him as hard as I can, to kill him. Shout scream hit him. So he will stop, so he will stop taking me for a ride so he will tell me so he will confess so he will talk so he will choose.
Go ahead, go ahead, since that's all you can think about, go on, get out, you don't owe me a thing, go away, get out.
Snap his penis in two, twist it, crush it. If Vittorio could read my thoughts, he would run for his life; he cannot imagine what is lying around in my brain, he simply cannot. Jealousy is a mental illness, the mother of all human failings, cruelty, hatred, misanthropy, the closing of your soul, selfishness, stinginess. And the worst of it is the horrible feeling that you are going mad. Because I can tell I'm going mad. And it serves no purpose, going mad.

Of course I tried to get over it. I've tried everything. But you cannot cure yourself of jealousy—you can dissect it, you can analyze it
when you're aware of it, you can try to justify it, to explain it, but you cannot get over it. Because I read them all, all the books on jealousy, all the ones I could find in his office, every book, every chapter, every footnote, trying to find the needle in a haystack that might enable me to recover from this cancer of the soul and be cured. According to the books, jealous people have two alternatives: they can be either a “repressed unfaithful individual” or a “repressed homosexual.”
Repressed.
That's all I am. But beyond these mediocre explanations, the texts about jealousy do not propose a treatment, they merely describe. “No solidity to narcissistic foundations.” I know that when Vittorio entered me once and forever, the first time he kissed me I felt my body leave me behind and make room for a new body, his body in mine. This man has become my blood. Perhaps because of the child we never had. The child I never wanted to give him. Now I know it. It's not jealousy that makes a person unhappy, it's unhappiness that causes jealousy. The important thing is to know the source of the unhappiness that has caused the jealousy. And I know this
unhappiness
, I do, I know the wound. We always have every reason to be what we are. And I know why I am what I am.

That is why I am not angry with Vittorio. I cannot ask of him what no human being can give. I'm the one who is asking for too much. He is not the torturer. It is I who am the tyrant. But I will not be his prison. I will not become the woman he can no longer stand because he cannot leave her. I will let him go without a fight, because in love if you have to fight you have already lost. So I want to have the courage to leave. I've already tried packing my bags, several times. But then a furious hatred takes me in its grip and stops me. And a torrent of thoughts rushes over me. Where is he? And I can imagine him happy, laughing because he has forgotten me; I no longer exist in his thoughts, in his life I am no longer there, I have disappeared, he has regained the pleasure of thinking about someone else, of
being with someone else and wishing for nothing else on earth but to be filled to the brim by this other woman. So then I unpack my bags, I stay there, and I cry. I dream of being able to leave, and I dream of being able to stay with him all my life even if he is with other women. To see without being seen. I get the impression that this way, I will be happy at last. To see without being seen. Jealousy is “repressed candaulism”; I didn't know the meaning of the word “candaulism,” so I looked it up in a book. And I found this list.

Abasiophilia—Uncontrollable, repeated, and intense erotic interest in choosing a partner who cannot move without the use of a wheelchair or some other aid to walking.

Acomoclitism—Sexual attraction to shaved pubic area.

Allorgasmia—Sexual arousal brought on by fantasizing about another person during sexual intercourse.

Anasyrma—Uncontrollable erotic urge on the part of a woman to reveal her genital organs. According to Greek mythology, Baubo lifted up her skirt to show her genitals to the goddess Demeter. The gesture was meant to distract Demeter, who was suffering from the loss of her daughter Persephone, abducted by Hades, lord of the dead.

Apron fetishism—Attraction to women's aprons (and by extension, to maids' outfits). Often coupled with an immoderate passion for amorous adventures with servants.

Axillism—Sexual attraction to armpits.