Colored by a more human tragedy

I indulged in the luxury of wandering through a bookstore the other day, hoping, as I do, that some miraculous book would stop me in my tracks and beg to come home with me. And so this bright little yellow thing popped up, announcing its author as Yasushi Inoue. Why do I know that name?, I thought. Life of a Counterfeiter. Is the universe calling me out as a fake?

This, this is the question I need to confront head on, as I do ― every few months, it seems. It percolates beneath my consciousness and then erupts with a vengeance of self-awareness that washes me in a mist of confident vulnerability, and leaves me standing in a puddle of my own urine and tears. What kind of person do I want to be?

I'm reminded of that Kenneth Branagh movie, where Robin Williams tells him, "Someone is either a smoker or a nonsmoker. There's no in-between. The trick is to find out which one you are, and be that." Of all the potential mes, which one is true?

I met a man who likes to roleplay. It said so, right there in his profile. But you never know what someone means by roleplay. He proposed we meet on neutral territory, a sheet of paper on a bistro table, armed only with pens. Bring your imagination, he said. I did.

I thought about how I'd like to be an objet d'art, positioned, examined, admired. I thought about the surgical gloves I have, how I could be the doctor, for once. I thought about how I might hire a reader, so at bedtime I could settle between my sheets and don a sleep mask; feeling a little jesuitical, I'd request, say, Walter M Miller, and he would pull a book from the shelf and start reading, say, Henry Miller, an honest mistake, but I wouldn't correct him, I would start to masturbate, and he..., well, I don't know, I can't see, I'm wearing a sleep mask.

He wrote on the paper just one word, monogamy, which we discussed at length, and about which we see eye to eye. I think he was wary of offending my sensibilities. He suggested that roleplay can nudge people to explore behaviour they might otherwise not engage in. I'm sure that's true for many people, I said. I didn't say, maybe for people who are afraid, but I'm not afraid, I don't need to hide behind a persona, my problem with roleplay, which is surely the appeal for many, is the artifice.

For example, he said, I could be a football player and you could be a cheerleader. Or, he continued, I could be the principal calling you, the student, into my office to be disciplined. Or, I didn't say, we could try something different, truly transgressive, and subvert your predictably suburban patriarchal tropes. I didn't say anything. I think I rolled my eyes. Use your imagination, I didn't say.

I left the rest of the paper blank, because I like blankness, I like life unscripted.

Maybe I am a counterfeiter, I think, unable to create something out of nothing, to fill my inarticulable void. I borrow words from books and string them together, inky threads that wash away. What of any of this is mine? Where am I in this? Why can't I know who I want to be? Become what you are.

And yet I find myself trying on personas. I'm thinking of taking up smoking this weekend, as I read the stories of Yasushi Inoue.

I saw Hōsen's life for the first time not as a dark, turbid stream that issued from something he had carried with him into the world, but as the tragedy of an ordinary, unremarkable man who ground himself down when the burden of his encounter with a genius proved too heavy to bear. The gloomy, fatalistic impression the counterfeiter's life had left faded away, and Hara Hōsen rose us before me in a new light, colored by a more human tragedy.

"Yes, I have loved."

We humans are, in the end, stupid creatures who cannot help desiring that someone know us as we are. 

Our first night together, we made love for endless hours. The hallways creaked with other people's stories, but Room 205 was a haven from the early December cold. The city was in another phase of lockdown, so we'd packed a picnic supper; I don't remember eating. We inhaled each other. 

We stepped out into the night for a cigarette and a stroll, only to encounter hordes of homeless looking for Covid-free shelter. It felt apocalyptic, and possibly we were desperate to lose ourselves. Back inside, he drew us a bath and we washed away the sins of the world.

Finally I was tired and closed my eyes, and he read to me, in French, from one of his favourite novels. I drifted off to hazy images of a solitary man with a gun in early winter who is a hunter but not a hunter, in a muddle of what words mean and who people really are.

It's only now, five months to the day, that I remark how odd it was, that he should have brought with him this treasured book, to commune with me, essentially a stranger then, in a hired bed during such strange times. 

The Hunting Gun, by Yasushi Inoue, is a tragedy told by three players — the lover, her daughter, and the neglected wife — who revolve around a man with a hunting gun, once inadvertently captured in a prose poem. He is a symbol of solitude yet a gravitational force. (This 1949 epistolary novella tells of a love affair that began in 1934 Japan; the translation reads like a smooth and timeless classic.) All three letter writers yield confessions of a sort, acknowledging secrets and shame as the love affair is exposed from each perspective.

A man's lies can sometimes elevate a woman, you know, to the very level of the divine.

Everyone has a snake living inside them, the hunter believes, an idea that haunts his lover:

What are these snakes we carry inside us? Egotism, jealousy, destiny... the sum of all these things, I guess, a sort of karma too strong for us to fight. I regret that I will never have the occasion to learn what you meant. At any rate, these snakes  inside us are pitiful creatures. I remember coming across the phrase "the sadness of living", or something close to that, in a book; as I write these words, I feel my heart brushing up against a similar emotion, irredeemably sad and cold. Oh, what is this thing we carry inside us — intolerably unpleasant, yet at the same time unbearably sad!

The snakes are simultaneously sins and sin-eaters, I think. (The snake inside me eats all my words.)

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To love, to be loved — how sad such human doings are. I remember once, in my second or third year at girls' school, we had a series of questions in an English exam about the active and passive forms of verbs. To hit, to be hit, to see, to be seen... and there among the other words on that list were two that sparkled brilliantly: to love, to be loved. As we were all peering down at the questions, licking our pencils, some joker, I never knew who, quietly sent a slip of paper around the room. Two options were there, each in a different style of handwriting: Is it, maiden, your desire to love? Or do you rather desire to be loved? Many circles had been drawn in blue and red ink, or in pencil, under the phrase "to be loved", but not one girl had been moved to place her mark below "to love". I was not different from the rest, of course, and I drew my own small circle underneath "to be loved". I guess even at the tender age of sixteen or seventeen, before we know much about what it means to love or be loved, our noses are still able to sniff out, instinctively, the joy of being loved.

When the girl in the seat next to mine took the paper from me, however, she glanced down at it for a moment and then, with hardly any hesitation, pencilled a big circle into the blank area beneath the words "to love". I desire to love. I've always remembered very clearly how I felt when I saw her do it — provoked by her intransigence, but also caught off guard, uncertain what to think. This girl was not one of the better students in our class, and she had a sort of gloomy, unremarkable air. Her hair had a reddish-brown tinge; she was always by herself. I have no way of knowing what became of her when she grew up, but now, as I write these words twenty years later, I find myself recalling, for some reason, again and again, her forlorn face.

When, at the end of her life, a woman lies quietly in bed with her face turned to the wall of death, does God allow her to feel at peace if she has tasted to the full the joy of being loved, or if she is able to declare without any trepidation that, while she may not have been very happy, she loved? I wonder, though — can any woman in this world say with real conviction, before God, that she has truly loved? No, no — I'm sure there are women like that. Maybe that thin-haired girl was among the chosen few when she grew up. A woman like that, I'm sure, would walk around with her hair in a wild tangle, her body scarred all over, her clothing ripped to shreds, and yet she would proudly lift her face and say, "Yes, I have loved." And then, having spoken those words, she would die.

Oh, it's unbearable — I wish I could escape it. But as hard as I try to chase the vision of that girl's face away, I can't do it, it keeps coming back. What is this intolerable unease that clings to me as I sit here, hours before I am to die? I suppose I am simply reaping the punishment I am due as a woman incapable of enduring the pain of loving, who wanted for herself only the joy of being loved.

I was the dying woman, but now I'm the thin-haired girl, with the forlorn face, always by myself. I needed so badly to be seen, I didn't know what it was I was seeing with my own eyes, my own heart, until now. I say with conviction, before God, that I have truly loved. "Yes, I have loved." Poorly and recognized too late, but I understand now that I loved him.

I know you as you are, V., and you are loved. Thank you for teaching me this.