The in-house language unravelled, it grew unfamiliar to Chloe, or rather, she feigned forgetting, so as not to admit denial. She refused complicity in the language, she played the foreigner, she began reading me against the grain, and found errors. I could not understand why things I was saying and that in the past had proved so attractive were now suddenly so irritating. I could not understand why, having not changed myself, I should now be accused of being offensive in a hundred different ways. Panicking, I embarked on an attempt to return to the golden age, asking myself, "What had I been doing then that I perhaps am not doing now?' I became a desperate conformist to a past self that had been the object of love. What I had failed to realize was that the past self was the one now proving so annoying, and that I was therefore doing nothing but accelerating the process towards dissolution.
I became an irritant, one who has gone beyond caring for reciprocation. I bought her books, I took her jackets to the dry cleaner's, I paid for dinner, I suggested we make a trip to Paris at Christmas time to celebrate our anniversary. But humiliation could be the only result of loving against all evidence. She could sulk me, shout at me, ignore me, tease me, trick me, hit me, kick me, and still I would not react -and thereby grew abhorrent.
19. At the end of a meal I had spent two hours preparing (largely taken up by an odd argument we fell into over Balkan history after Chloe began a peculiar defence of Serbian nationalism), I took Chloe's hand and told her, 1 just wanted to say, and I know it sounds sentimental, that however much we fight and everything, I still really care about you and want things to work out between us. You mean everything to me, you know that.'
Chloe (who had always read more psychoanalysis than fiction) looked at me suspiciously and replied, 'Listen, it's kind of you to say so, but it worries me; you've got to stop turning me into your ego ideal like this.'
20. Things had reduced themselves to a tragicomic scenario: on the one hand, the man identifying the woman as an angel, on the other, the angel identifying love as some- thing only a little short of a pathology.
18
Romantic Terrorism
Why don't you love me? is as impossible a question (though a far less pleasant one) to ask as Why do you love me? In both cases, we come up against our lack of conscious control in the amorous structure, the fact that love has been brought to us as a gift for reasons we never wholly determine or deserve. To ask such questions, we are forced to veer on one side towards complete arrogance, on the other to complete humility: What have I done to deserve love? asks the humble lover; I can have done nothing. What have 1 done to be denied love? protests the betrayed one, arrogantly claiming possession of a gift that is never one's due. To both questions, the one who hands out love can only reply: Because you are you – an answer that leaves the beloved dangerously and unpredictably strung between grandiosity and depression.
Love may be born at first sight, but it does not die with corresponding rapidity. Chloe must have feared that to talk or even leave would have been hasty, that she might have been opting for a life offering no more favourable alternative. It was hence a slow separation, the masonry of affect only gradually prising itself loose from the loved one. There was guilt at the residual sense of responsibility towards a once-prized object, a form of treacly liquid left at the bottom of the glass that needed time to drain off.
3. When every decision is difficult, no decision is taken. Chloe prevaricated, I joined her (for how could any decision be pleasant for me?). We continued to see one another and sleep with one another. We even made plans to visit Paris at Christmas time, yet Chloe was curiously disengaged from the process, as though she were making arrangements for someone else – perhaps because it was easier to deal in air- line tickets than the issues that lay behind their purchase or non-purchase. Her apathy embodied the hope that by doing nothing, another might take the decision for her, that by displaying her indecision and frustration while not acting on it I would ultimately perform the move that she had needed (but been too scared) to make herself.
4. We entered the era of romantic terrorism.
‘Is there anything wrong?’
'No, why, should there be?'
'I just thought you might want to talk about things.'
'What things?'
'About us.'
'You mean about you,' snapped Chloe.
'No, I mean about us.'
'Well, what about us?'
'I don't know, really. It's just a sense I have that ever since about the middle of September, we haven't really been communicating. It's like there's a wall between us and you're refusing to acknowledge it's there.'
'I don't see a wall.'
'That's what I mean. You're even refusing to admit there was ever anything other than this.'
'Than what?'
Once a partner has begun to lose interest, there is apparently little the other can do to arrest the process. Like seduction, withdrawal suffers under a blanket of reticence. The very breakdown of communication is hard to discuss, unless both parties have a desire to see it restored. This leaves the lover in a desperate situation. Honest dialogue seems to produce only irritation and smothers love in the attempt to revive it. Desperate to woo the partner back at any cost, the lover might at this point be tempted to turn to romantic terrorism, the product of irredeemable situations, a gamut of tricks (sulking, jealousy, guilt) that attempt to force the partner to return love, by blowing up (in fits of tears, rage or otherwise) in front of the loved one. The terroristic partner knows he cannot realistically hope to see his love reciprocated, but the futility of something is not always (in love or in politics) a sufficient argument against it. Certain things are said not because they will be heard, but because it is important to speak.
When political dialogue has failed to resolve a grievance, the injured party may also in desperation resort to terrorist activity, extracting by force the concession it has been unable to seduce peacefully from its opposite number. Political terrorism is born out of deadlocked situations, behaviour that combines a party's need to act with an awareness (conscious or semi-conscious) that action will not go any way towards achieving the desired end – and will if anything only alienate the other party further. The negativity of terrorism betrays all the signs of childish rage, a rage at one's own impotence in the face of a more powerful adversary.
7. In May 1972, three members of the Japanese Red Army, who had been armed, briefed and financed by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), landed on a scheduled flight at Lod Airport, near Tel Aviv. They disembarked, followed the other passengers into the terminal building, and once inside, pulled machine-guns and grenades out of their hand luggage. They began firing on the crowd indiscriminately, slaughtering twenty-four people and injuring a further seven before they were themselves killed by the security forces. What relation did such butchery have with the cause of Palestinian autonomy? The murders did not accelerate the peace process, they only hardened Israeli public opinion against the Palestinian cause, and in a final irony for the terrorists, it turned out the majority of their victims were not even Israelis, but belonged to a party of Puerto Rican Christians who had been on a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Yet the action found its justification elsewhere, in the need to vent frustration in a cause where dialogue had ceased to produce results.