Цитаты из книги The Gentleman From Peru

We may no longer be the person we once were, but what if this person did not necessarily die but continued his life in the shadowland of our own, so that you could say that our life is filled with shadow-selves who continue to tag along and to beckon us in all directions even as we live our own lives – all these selves clamouring to have their say, their time, their life, if only we listened and gave in to them!

What if we switch roles from time to time, and become the shadow-self of the person we were two minutes ago? And then sideline that new self moments later for a third or a fourth? What if we are no more than a perpetual three-card monte of reshuffled hinter-selves? We traffic in shadow-selves. The old self, the new self, the shadow-self, self number seven or number eleven, the self we always knew we were but never became, the self we left behind and never recovered, the might-have-been self that couldn't be but might still be, though we both fear yet hope it might come along one day and rescue us from the person we've had to be all our years.

But as I said, it's not just the past that haunts us. What haunts us with equal magnitude is what has not happened yet, for there are shadow-selves and shadow-lives waiting in the wings all the time. We are constantly reworking and reinventing both the past and the future. Sometimes we're in the street or in a crowded bus, and we just know: that one day this person whose glance we caught or whose path we just crossed is another version of someone we know we've loved before and have yet to love again. But that person could just as easily be us in another body.

And the beauty of it is that they feel it just as much as we do. Is this other person us or is it someone destined for us whom we keep missing each lifetime? Us in others, isn't this the definition of love?

The point is we all go back. We spend more time than we know trying to go back. We call it fantasizing, we call it dreaming, we give it all manner of names. But we’re all crawling back, each in his or her own way. Very few of us know the way, most never find the door, much less the key to the door. We’re just groping in the dark. Some of us may even feel we’re not from planet Earth but have come down from elsewhere and are all pretending to be normal earthlings. And yet not one of us is. We might as well come from Mars or, as happens to be my case, from a very distant place, or planet, called Peru, which may no longer even exist for me. Some know their way back and some won’t ever know.

The tiny miracle of love, the tiniest yet most imponderable miracle, is when we stumble on people who see us for who we are and want us just for who we are — and these are the ones we spurn the most, the ones we let into our lives with resentment, scorn and boundless apathy, sometimes even with hatred. But the moment two individuals love each other for who each truly is, then time for them stops, and if these two don't die together, then the partner who lives on never recovers, never forgets, and keeps waiting until they meet again in who knows how many lifetimes. In Shakespeare's own words, either is the other's mine. The beloved always comes back. Always will. But the wait is excruciating — they wait not just to live together but also to die together. You see, it's life that is provisional, not love.

We never recover. Whoever bruised us left a mark that stays there forever. Do we ever recover from our parents? Or from the cruelty of our first arithmetic teacher? Or from someone loved in adolescence? You may seek to recover, and many of us are persuaded we have, until we realize that if we commit the same mistakes time and time again, it’s not because we keep choosing the wrong partner or because we don’t know how to love, but because new loves won’t help us heal from that one ancient wound. All new love can do is mask the wound – and for some, this is good enough.

‘It’s the kind of thing Fellini would have loved, a group of friends working their way down a craggy passage into the underworld where we’re told Styx, the sacred river, ran. There you’ll see the mourning fields, the Lugentes campi,’ explained Raúl. ‘This is where all broken hearts tell their woebegone tales of love to anyone who passes by and cares to stop to listen: Phaedra, who took her own life for loving her stepson after she opened up her heart to him; Dido, who lit a fire and threw herself into it while Aeneas watched her burn from aboard his ship to Italy; Procris, who was mistakenly speared by her lover, and poor Caenis, raped by a god and begging to be turned into a man so as never to be raped again. Haven’t you all been burnt and speared and raped in your hearts at least once?’

‘No comment,’ said Oscar, which made everyone burst out laughing. But no one answered.

‘Which means all of you have,’ said Raúl.

All of us remember having had another self. Which could be a mirage, or a fleeting sense of someone we were long ago, perhaps elsewhere — call it a hinter-self who feels less transient than we’d like to believe. But here’s the catch. This other self of ours may not be a bygone self but a self living elsewhere even as we’re having drinks this very minute in this fabulous hotel.
Call it what you will. But there may be more selves out there: some still unsprung, like tiny egg cells that haven’t been fertilized; some already released; and some waiting for the end. Each one of us is a constellation of selves, some are not even lodged in us, but in other people, which is why sometimes we recognize others right away — because they are us in someone else's body.