Enigma Variations

Elgar's "Enigma Variations" is a suite of 14 orchestral variations on an initial theme.  The variations are reflections on aspects of fourteen individuals who were important in the composer's life.

In his new novel, Enigma Variations, André Aciman has concocted something similar.  The novel is divided into five chapters.  In the first, and longest, chapter, the narrator describes an intense emotional and physical attraction to an older man back when he was a 12-year-old boy.  In the later chapters, he discusses his attempts to achieve romantic relationships with a number of potential partners as an adult, and in the process shows how true is the aphorism: "The child is father to the man."

Paolo and his parents spend their summers in their large summer house on the fictitious island of San Giustiniano, off the coast of Sicily.  A local carpenter and cabinet maker, Giovanni ("Nanni"), a young man in his late 20s, does various odd jobs for them.  The summer Paolo was 12, Nanni was engaged in an exquisitely difficult refinishing of an old desk. 

In something of a reprise of Elio's teenaged infatuation with an older graduate student in Aciman's first novel, Call Me By Your Name, ( see my discussion here), Paolo develops an intense crush on Nanni.  For a long time, Paolo can hardly even look openly at Nanni, or speak an entire sentence to him.  The romance occurs entirely within his secret thoughts; he can conceal his passion for Nanni only by speaking vaguely disparagingly of him to his parents, and by seeming to ignore Nanni's visits to his house.  Eventually, he opens up slightly, and begins spending more and more time at Nanni's shop, "helping" him with his carpentry work.

Eventually, Nanni catches Paolo staring at him with longing eyes, and gently tells the boy that it would be better if he not spend so much time visiting the shop.  Paolo runs off to the ruins of a Norman chapel, where he has often spent time lost in thought, sometimes alone, sometimes chatting with his father.  Following the rejection by Nanni, the abandoned chapel

had seen me suffer and cry as I'd never wept before.  I knew every one of its exposed stones, every inch, every weed, every crawling lizard, down to the feel of the chipped stones and pebbles under my bare feet.  I belonged here the way I belonged to this planet and its people, but on one condition: alone, always alone.

Paolo tells us of these events as he returns for a visit  for the first time to San Giustiniano, ten years later.  As a 22-year-old, he finally learns from villagers something that he should have suspected as a 12-year-old:  Nanni and his father had been secret lovers for many years -- not a secret that could be forever hidden in a small town.  The villagers had been tolerant of the highly educated and respected father, but had become openly hostile toward Nanni.  Nanni had left the island and disappeared;  Paolo never saw him in person again.

The remaining four chapters, occupying seventy percent of the book, take place in Manhattan and Brooklyn.  Paolo, now "Paul," has attended college in a small New England school, and holds an important job in the publishing industry.  The four chapters are sequential, but jump from time period to time period, with no real indication of the length of the gaps.  In the second chapter, Paul seems to be in his 20s.  By the last chapter, he is middle aged.

Paul plays tennis for recreation, at least in the second chapter.  Otherwise, he tells us little about his work or his interests.  He has friends, he is invited to parties, he is considered cheerful and open by his peers.  But his entire interior life is centered on a search for a satisfying relationship.  A search for a new Nanni, the Nanni he never had, never could have had, could only dream about with a 12-year-old's imagination.  A dream object who all along belonged to his own father.

We first see him as an adult, involved in a romantic relationship, perhaps already fading, with a woman named Maud.  But the second chapter is all about his infatuation with a man named Manfred, a German who plays tennis at the same Upper West Side courts as himself.  For two years, he is obsessed with the thought of Manfred, but allows himself to do no more than glance at him, to say no more than "good morning."  As an adult, his ability to meet Manfred in any meaningful way is no better developed than it had been as a child with Nanni.  Ultimately, somewhat unbelievably, the two actually do become lovers for a time and then, by the third chapter, close friends -- Manfred emails Paul from Germany, often on a daily basis, trying to help him meet future partners.

Future partners who are all women.  In the third chapter, he is intensely jealous of his then girlfriend's suspected affair with an attractive client -- a jealousy that proves unwarranted when she laughs, after the client has finished his business relationship, that it was Paul, not her, who the client found attractive.  Meanwhile, Paul has spent the third chapter dying a million deaths, imagining the conversations and interactions between the two.  And feeling a secret thrill of attraction for the client.

As Manfred -- the sane voice of reason -- points out by email in later chapters, Paul lives his life in his mind.  He arranges date after date, each of which he imagines beforehand as ending up with his spending a night in the woman's apartment.  We see his date giving every sign of willingness.  Paul sees the same thing we see, but can never believe what he sees -- there must be some secret agenda he knows nothing about, her willingness to bed with him must be merely politeness, a desire not to hurt his feelings, a sign that actually she is bored and wants to go home -- home without Paul.  He has ended up in bed with many women and -- we suspect -- many men, but only in physical relationships.  With the partner he could love -- the adult version of Nanni, the person to whom he could entrust his entire soul without hesitation -- he is too tongue-tied to show her what he wants.

History repeats itself in the final chapter, and with the most obviously attractive candidate for the position as Paul's soul mate.  Manfred sends frantic emails.  "This woman is real.  You are real."   So Paul prepares his lines.  His script.  They have drinks, dinner together.  And then, at the last moment, Paul pulls back, the moment passes.

I tried to find a way to pry open the block between us.  But the more I realized how much I wanted her, the more the idea of her new beau [probably imaginary] began to muddy my thinking, the more her blandishing dearests began to irk me.  Everything I liked about her, everything she wrote and said had the ring of hollow appeasements thrown around to prevent me from drawing closer ... I became guarded and oblique.

  They say goodby on the sidewalk in front of her apartment house.  She walks sadly away.

And then, to confuse matters, in the final pages of the novel, Paul reveals to us that he's already married.  Married to a woman we met in chapter 2.  Married, but not apparently to a soulmate, not to a reincarnation of the never-forgotten Nanni.  Marriage to a woman for whom he'd never expressed much interest.

As in all his novels, Aciman writes of men who live their lives in their imaginations, who cannot step outside themselves at critical times, cannot step into life.  "This woman is real.  You are real."  The woman had been real, as were the happy hours Paul had spent talking with her in small cafes, but she, and those good times he's spent with her, "belonged to another life, a life unlived, a life I knew had turned its back to me and was being nailed to the wall."  This regret for opportunities lost because of hesitation to act or speak at the critical moment is similar to the regret Aciman had the adult Elio express so vividly at the end of his first novel.

As Paul himself at one point tells friends at a dinner party:

We're torn between regret, which is the price to pay for things not done, and remorse, which is the cost for having done them.  Between one and the other, time plays all its cozy little tricks.

Yes, of course, Aciman might say.  But sometimes one simply does what feels right, and worries about the balance between regret and remorse afterwards.