Lisa

By Geoffrey Gaskill.

I do not believe in love at first sight. It always seemed to me to be a fanciful, sentimental notion. Fanciful does not mean the thought of it isn’t wonderful at the same time. Who wouldn’t want to lay eyes on someone and know at once, that here was the love of your life? No more looking and wishing and hoping and wondering.

Married as I was, and in love with a wonderful woman who had pledged to share her life with me, I was not immune.

That love-at-first-sight-as-nonsense notion I laid to rest when I saw …

Her.

Lisa was her name and to say she was beautiful would be doing her an injustice of monstrous proportions.

It was in Paris when it happened, where I saw her. How apposite, I thought. Where else could it have been? Paris is the city of light after all.

It was my first trip there. Paris. Just the name conjures up a city for lovers. A walk along the Seine. The Eiffel Tower. The buskers playing ‘La Vie en Rose’. They do it for the tourists, I know, but still …

So I suppose it was not unusual that I would fall as I did. The trouble was, I had a wife by my side. And here I was, not just obsessed with another woman, but obsessed at first sight! It should have been ridiculous. Or tragic. Or … something else.

But it wasn’t.

Did I feel guilty?

Not for one second!

I turned to my wife at that moment and I confessed my love of Lisa. ‘I’m in love,’ I told her. ‘And it’s with another woman. I can’t explain it. Forgive me.’ I blurted it all out like a schoolboy.

In turn, she smiled and patted me on the cheek. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘This is Paris. You’ll get over it.’ Didn’t she think I wasn’t serious?

I didn’t get over it.

I didn’t want to.

Should I have?

Well, maybe.

I turned away from my disbelieving spouse and stared at the vision of loveliness before me. Lisa was sitting looking cool and composed though I doubt if the word ‘cool’ would have found its way into her vocabulary. What was more, as I watched her I realised that she was sitting, hands folded and looking back at me!

No! That’s not true. She wasn’t just looking at me. She was looking through me. It was as though she was seeing into my very soul and could read what was there. I had to avert my eyes but at the same time I smiled and felt a warm lump in the pit of my stomach. Then an ache in my heart. This was love, no doubt about it.

I peeked back at her. One look at that smile and I was done. The colour of the sky I could see through the windows changed and, as well as the lump in my stomach and the ache in my heart, I could hear singing and music and all the other things that songs and films tell us happens when we meet such a one.

Until that moment I don’t think I had seen anything or anyone more beautiful in my life.

Bella signora! I wanted to tell her. I wanted to sing to her. I wanted to throw myself at her feet. It was a bit on the dramatic side, I confess, but Paris can do that.

At that moment I didn’t know her full name. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know she was more than a Lisa. She was very Italian. It didn’t matter. All that did was that her face was the most beautiful I’d ever laid my eyes on.

Cara mia!

The trouble with falling in love is how all-consuming it is.

Passion.

Fire.

Lovers will say that they want to be with the object of their desire day and night, to be everything to them. Why should I be any different? I wanted to be with her and bathe in the warmth of her, to own her, possess her – if that’s not an ungallant thing to say. But I know she would have understood. I wanted to believe she was the kind of woman who would want to be with me and possess me too.

It wasn’t that I was some callow youth. I was a man, a married man of – well, let’s just say, mature years – a man who should not be falling in love like a schoolboy and be mooning over a woman like I was over Lisa – and with my wife standing next to me, my confession notwithstanding.

I presume to call her Lisa even though we’d only exchanged a look across a crowded room, as it were. But I wanted to believe that she’d have given me more than a passing glance.

I could see that she was no ingenue. Her smile told me that more than her eyes. I could imagine touching her skin. Stroking it. That thought was as sensual as those eyes and her smile were seductive. Married, I expected. I was proved right. I also found out to my dismay that many men – I’ll use the word lovers – were, as I stood and stared at her, also vying, not just for her attention, but, like me wanted to possess her. There and then.

There and forever.

It was a comfort to me to know that I had good taste.

Lascia che ti ami! Per favore!

Perhaps I’m making her out to be a flirtare. I don’t mean to. I doubt if she was. She seemed oblivious of her attraction to all those others. Her smile wasn’t flirtatious. It was something else. Seductive, yes but it spoke of a life lead in contentment and joy. But also, I hoped in my own selfish way, lacking … something that only I could give her.

Me! I wanted to say. Take me! Love makes fools of us all.

No lei e pura! Modesto! I hadn’t heard her voice though with those eyes and that smile she didn’t need to speak. Her look was enough. Should I have been jealous of those others? No. I could understand why men, greater, lesser, better and worse, more estimable men than I, fell over themselves to pay her compliments, to be with her and try to make her their own. Witness my own inelegant and unseemly desire.

Her husband, I discovered when I overheard one of those potential suitors talking, was a certain Francesco Del Giocondo and they had five children. A matron of a happy family then? I despaired until I thought of that smile that was nothing of the sort. Maybe there was more here than met the eye. Was hers a happy family? A happy marriage?

What Francesco would have thought of all the attention lavished on his wife I never did find out. Maybe he didn’t care. Maybe he thought it a compliment. ‘I’ve got what you want! Eat your heart out one and all.’ If he didn’t care then neither did I.

But that deed was done.

It was pointless being resentful of a man who had snaffled her attention, her affection. Affection? I hoped not. Though I did wonder what sort of man he was. Did he fulfil her? Make her feel wanted and beautiful the way I told myself I could – and would? Alas what goes on between man and wife in the privacy of their lives, their bedroom, seldom gets a public airing.

By all accounts Francesco was well-off. Lisa would have wanted for little. I confess, I couldn’t give her what he did. Then again, I reasoned, material wealth isn’t everything. If he’d been older than she well, that might explain a lot. Or maybe not. That might make her a gold-digger. I looked at that face again and dismissed the thought. She was incapable of such baseness.

Lisa, my love, I will worship you till the day I die. I did not care if Francesco knew or found out. What could he do that would make me feel worse than I did in my silent frustration?

I snuck a photo of her. I doubt if she noticed. Whenever I look at it, my heart sinks. Lisa, my love, you grow more beautiful every time I look at you! Every time I think on you.

She is ageless.

She is Eve.

She is Juliet.

She is Helen.

She is Iseult.

Guinevere.

Thisbe.

Heloise.

Beatrice.

She is my everywoman.

She is mine – and she is not, nor can ever be.

Bella signora!

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Geoff spent thirty something years of his working life telling children how to write.

At retirement he decided to practise what he preached. Much of this output sits in his top drawer at varying stages of ‘completion’.

Otherwise he is an actor and director in the local theatre scene. After all, actors and directors are storytellers too.