The corny bad conscience

The primitive arithmetic of love is that "one plus one makes two, but one plus one plus one doesn't make three, but rather makes one too many". Can two people love each other, in the romantic sense, at the same time? Without a doubt: it is perfectly possible. We have polyamory, we have open relationships... But in practice, the thing is complicated. This is the core of the book by Theodor Kallifatides that now reaches us: Love (Galàxia Gutenberg, translated by Elsa Compte). Love, according to Kallifatides, who we never know if he is the protagonist of his novels, but who often seems to be. Also in this case.

The book was published in Swedish in 1978, at the end of the hippie movement, when the author was 40 years old. The protagonist is the Greek-Swede Laki Sarris who, at the age of 40, married to Lena and with a young son, Johan, falls passionately in love with young Li. So far, all normal enough, right?

The defining feature of the story is the philosophical way in which Laki approaches his sentimental crossroads: from his ethical intuition, he does not want to hurt either of the two women he loves. "No, it is not that love is impossible in our world. Quite the contrary, love is simply too possible. What is impossible are our ideas about love".

The facts drag him along, the ideas distract him, paralyze him. Laki is dominated by what he defines as "old-fashioned bad conscience". Impossible to escape it and, at the same time, impossible to decide on one or the other. It doesn't happen to him like in the bolero Corazón loco: his bad vibes are not an indomitable madness, it is an internal emotional and conceptual pain: a conflict of values. He feels the intellectual need to order what is happening to him, and then the way he orders it is a moral action.

What morality? What bad conscience? Despite not believing in any God, his morality is Christian, he can't help it. Further back, he has Plato. But his two loves are not Platonic, but very real, physical: with their smells and words, with dinners and getaways, with routines, with all the psychological and material burden. Because, like a good Greek, he needs to surround himself with people, friendships, feelings, love. "Greek life is, first and foremost, a life in common. And I am Greek", says Laki. Of course: idiot, in Greek, means individual. Loneliness is a defeat.

Laki-Kallifatides says that we fall in love because we are tired of being who we are: we are not looking for another person, but another self. But then, time and again, we fall into all the mistakes of the first infatuation. What else? Well, the mystery of love is that the one who is loved never understands the one who loves. Neither Lena nor Li understand him. Nor does he really understand what is happening to him or know how to get out of the web. He is capable of thinking a lot and incapable of acting.

As for theories, he doesn't lack them: first we fall in love with our desire, then we fall in love with our falling in love, and finally, sometimes, very rarely, we fall in love with the other person. Or: in love there is the age of sex and the age of words. And, also: "Longing is my lifestyle". He also realizes that for Li, who is much younger, dangers are a temptation, and, conversely, for him temptations are a danger.

This is how the days go by and this is how it is they, Lena and Li, who decide for him. Laki, unlike the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, does not know how to say no to love. And he would like to cry out: "Eli, eli! Lema sabaktani?". "My God, my God! Why have you forsaken me?". But there is no God, no miracle, and no destiny that can rescue him.

This old-new Kallifatides reflecting on love is once again an enjoyable and intelligent read.