A Cathedral of Onions (1)

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I once, over a period of a few months before hitting 40, committed myself to twice-weekly visits to a psychoanalyst, at what was it, maybe 40 euros a throw or thereabouts.  My motive, announced during my first visit, was bafflement and frustration over my own behaviour, in particular my manifest inability to extricate myself from a relationship I was in at the time, a relationship that clearly had no future, and was maintained on the basis of studious, calculated insincerity. My question was fundamentally “why can’t I just come clean and tell her it’s over?”, or alternatively, “why am I such a coward?”

I never got an answer. Once, only once, my analyst reflected the question back to me in a different form. “Why,” she asked me in a tone suggestive of bemusement bordering on incredulity, “are you so afraid of a woman’s tears?”

That was, and remains, the real question. All my "committed" relationships with women, from the first to the last, with only one brief exception, have followed exactly the same pattern, the same silent screenplay. First, the woman unequivocally indicated her interest in me (I’ve always been far too passive, too cautious and lacking in confidence to take any risks myself in this regard). Surprised and flattered, I would initially reciprocate. Sooner or later, either before or after going to bed with her, I would come to the conclusion she wasn’t what I wanted. After some hesitation and soul-searching, I would then break it to her. She would then promptly burst into tears. Instantly, and in a blind panic, I would curse myself, unsay everything I had just said, and assure her of my devotion. She would then dry her tears and, the next day, move in with me. There then ensued a relationship, extended over a period of months and sometimes years, in which I continued cursing myself on an hourly basis, more or less, for letting this play-acting farce continue. Seemingly unable to express my gnawing dissatisfaction, I depended on a gradual cessation of sexual activity, combined with the sheer tedium of living with a man who had nothing to talk about and who’d forgotten how to be happy, to wear down her defences to the point she found someone else and initiated the break-up herself. I would then feel lonely for about three days, then quickly brighten up and start enjoying life and freedom... until the next hand touched my knee under the table, and the whole miserable process started again, from the top.

I realise this does not paint me in a flattering light. Yes, I have been consistently cowardly and dishonest in my relationships. The fact that I have robbed myself of the best years of my life does not excuse the fact I robbed others of some of the best years of theirs.

Of course, any such attempt to schematize a whole series of relationships (nine, I think, though it’s hard to keep count) into a single pattern will inevitably lead to oversimplification. There were good moments in most of them, I guess... part of the problem here being that I have a defective memory, so can’t remember any specifics of those moments. All that remains to me, now, when I look back, is a dirty wash of emotional grey with some vague brighter patches here and there on the canvas, suggestive of sky, but the lines and shapes have long passed into oblivion, though a drop of thinner and a palette knife might half-resurrect a few, if I had a reason to, which I don’t. One possibly significant clue to what was going on in my head in all those relationships was the answer I sometimes gave to the question “do you love her?” More than one would-be counsellor asked me that question long-distance over the years, hoping to prompt a crisis of awareness. I never said “no”. I always felt confounded by that question, by the semantic imprecision of the verb. What is love? I wanted to say. If you mean do I care about her, then obviously yes. If you mean am I prepared to sacrifice myself to her, out of a sense of responsibility, then obviously yes: that’s what I’m doing right now. But if you mean does she complete me or make me happy, then no. She never has and never will. And the reason is simple: she doesn’t know who I am.

Let’s go into this a bit deeper.

For reasons it would be otiose to go into here, I never had any confidence in my ability to seduce women, or keep them interested, which is why I never actually initiated any seductions myself (with, as I say, one exception, which may or may not fit into this narrative: we’ll see). It seemed to me likely that most women would, quite reasonably, require a man to be manifestly a man, and there were various ways I failed to fit the bill, even if we dismiss extreme and allegedly toxic stereotypes, and avoid going into anything too personal. To limit the litany to my most visible shortcomings: I have always been a social phobic, ill at ease at parties and drawn to solitude; I have always been a poor, awkward conversationalist; I have always been bad at telling jokes; I have always been, in terms of entertainment value, a sinkhole. While tall and (until recently) fairly slim, I have never been athletic, and fail at all sports. To make matters worse, I have always been an emotional hedonist, haunted by demons, sexually neurasthenic and polymorphously perverse. And I have always been fascinated by rubbish, in the widest sense of the term.

However, I eventually realised that even someone as ineligible as me could be what certain women wanted. Generally, these were women who had had a bad experience with a Real Man, and were looking for something different. So, all I really had to do to keep them happy was be that something different.

Put like that, it isn’t obvious that this would require any insincerity on my part. If I was genuinely a wimp, and the woman I was with happened to want a wimp, then why could I not be content being myself? The answer is simply that I refused to identify inwardly as that harmless, ineffectual, bumbling, biddable, exquisitely considerate milquetoast I appeared to be on the outside. I saw him as a role I had been condemned by fate to play, as a necessary compromise with the practical day-to-day requirement of living in society and not getting into trouble. The real me was something else, something I had to keep buried and hidden, both for my own sake and for hers. Inside me, chained in a dark attic of my psyche, was an actual man: murmuring, starved, violent, dangerous. A repulsive monster who wanted things for himself, and could easily hurt people without even meaning to. Perhaps one day, I would meet a woman capable of divining his presence, and of conversing with him, and helping me integrate him into a more genuine attempt at a personality. But in all my relationships, save one, there was clearly no chance of this. If I gave even the smallest hint of what was inside me, the innocent, trusting, delicate creature I was with would be traumatised for life. He had to be kept hidden.

The constant effort of guarding this shameful secret, this alternative and unconfessable me, during my entire waking life consumed my energy, and ensured I succeeded at nothing I attempted.

I don’t know if I can precisely pinpoint the origin of this malady, of this secretiveness, of this radical walking absence of honesty and spontaneity. Many things fed into it. Being British didn’t help. Being brought up Catholic didn’t help either. But one thing that certainly made it worse was the sheer bad luck of having had a feminist as my first girlfriend. I think, more than anything else, it was she who slammed the heavy iron door definitively shut on the shivering, imprisoned, mad basement ape. It was she who taught me to hate myself, taught me that to be a man was to be the worst thing in the world, and if you couldn’t entirely stop being one, the next best thing you could do was keep him hidden. Even if you didn’t know what he really was or what he was capable of, or whether his potential for harm was perhaps exaggerated, you couldn’t take the risk. He had to go.

All of which continued through a string of failed relationships until I turned 40, and met Carmen. I don’t want to go through the whole story. It only lasted three months anyway. Point being: that very first evening, bizarrely and inexplicably, she opened the rusty iron door and beckoned the ape out of its dungeon... as if she had known all along what was in there. I still don’t know how she did it, how she figured it out. It’s not as if she was even particularly bright.

The result was curious. I liken it to a horse that has grown up in a narrow pen, unable to do more than walk in circles, hating every minute of its cramped, hobbled existence. One day, someone walks over to the pen, casually unlocks the gate and leaves it wide open. You’d think the horse would give a tremulous, delighted whinny and gallop out to freedom. No, it doesn’t do that. It stands there for a long time, just looking at the wide open gate, breathing fast, its legs trembling. Then it resumes its slow, methodical, unhurried, circular walk. It walks straight past the open gate and continues round and round, round and round. Why does it do this? Because it realised, in that moment of agonized, wistful hesitation, that it had forgotten how to do anything else.

I think Carmen could have taught the horse to gallop, over time, if she had had the patience, but she didn’t and I don’t really blame her: she was pretty and could do a lot better for herself, and time was running out on her uterus. Right at the end, on that last afternoon, she at least persuaded it to take a turn outside the corral. “Cabrón,” she said, delightedly, when it happened. I have lived on that one word ever since. It made me human at last. I found I could be a cabrón for a few seconds over a kitchen table and absolutely nothing happened, except that a stake was finally driven through the heart of the undead, zombie me, the one that pretended to be good, and the monster was laid to rest.

As I wrote at the time: when you are given permission to be yourself, you realise that’s all you wanted, just the acceptance, the wink, nothing more. She didn’t love me, and I didn’t want her to. That would just have made things needlessly difficult. I suspect she wasn’t especially good at loving people anyway, any more than I am: like me, she had certain demons going back to childhood. But she was world class at accepting, at touching fingertips. I’ve never met anyone, leastways any woman, who could get close to her on that. It was a gift at least as mysterious as any thaumaturgy.

...

(Bets are currently open on whether this post will have a follow-up, or whether it, and the preceding one, will disappear from this blog as soon as the effect of the cheap wine wears off.)

(Edit: bury it somewhere a year or two back, with no tags. No one will ever find it then. Sorted.)