I admit she thought of me as savior, or at the very least, I believed as much. It was the crux of our relationship, and I acted to maintain that illusion, though I knew it was illusion. It was a want of my own for salvation that kept me close to her. She was savior, though I played the role. As in the give-and-take of any human relations, the complexities, the agitations and the euphoria, were born of the need of each party to derive strength from the other.

She came to me with an offer (some said it was a sacrifice, to gain my attention, to inspire a devotion I had not yet conceived), and I viewed it as a sign of hope. It was the secrecy, the covert amplitude, of what each wanted to share with the other that planted disintegration among the possible fruits of our commingling.

I misled her, pretended to have a degree of certainty, a level of virtue, I could not have had. I had never known anyone with those qualities, and neither had she, so the fiction mounted naturally, as I had to extract it from my own person, my own history refracted, and so the deceit was viable.

We gave ourselves to an illusion, but I never overcame my own knowledge that deceit was involved. Though she was committed fully, hopelessly, in search of salvation, and I was feigning mystification, in search of security, I began to doubt her, and the illusion unraveled. She began to challenge certain posturing she felt could only have emerged from guilt, from some hidden reservoir of unsaid motives and achievements, and I became determined not to relent.

It was a brazen contention, each of us warring emotionally against the inherent fragility of what we had initiated. Which of us would suffer the first pangs of attrition, turn away and reveal the part of the scheming he or she knew? Which of us would be forced to explain under merciless lamplight proceedings our covert intentions?

I took the name Manuel at the close of nineteen years. I had been told in childhood that the name meant 'light of the world', and the world had begun to seem truly irrevocably dark to me. Hope was scarce, but not dead. I had recently lost my grandmother, the only family I remember having, and for the first time, it fell to me, from within my own intellect, to describe the nature of things to myself. The little hope I had, and the remnants of a family estate that had included a small maritime transport service and some bonds, allowed me to continue to study.

I became involved in the study of ethics, and while reading for a literature class at Santiago de Chile, I discovered Unamuno. He wrote not only lyric poetry, not only treatises and social critique and drama, but also wonderful philosophical fictions. Among these, San Manuel Bueno, mártir had a particular resonance for me. Don Manuel was a priest who suffered grave doubts about his faith, doubts which carried him to vertiginous examinations of suicide, vertigo which he endured for the sake of the community to which he ministered.

I put the character together with my grandmother's long-ago explanation of the name, Manuel, and I fell in love with the idea of the ethical virtue of a willingness to doubt, to question, to seek beyond comprehension. (I should confess here that since then, I have been able to diagnose said fascination as being partly bound up in a desire to explain, justify, even beautify my solitary condition in the world.) Having uncovered this new intellectual circuitry, I wanted to refine my use of them, to embark upon a life lived artfully.

My first impression of her involvement in my life was that she would hear me without judgement, and so I became something like a counterfeit savior, in order to obtain salvation, which I also knew was counterfeit.

© 2002 Joseph Robertson

 

PSEUDO-MANUEL
JOSEPH ROBERTSON

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