«Dis-lui que je la méprise
Qu'elle me dégoûte à pleurer»
Over the period 2005-2025, I shared my life with that of Elena del Valle, at which point, she decided that she had had enough of me. Fair enough.
I met her when my father—and with him, my childhood—was dying. I have no doubt that God put her on my path towards Him at the moment where I most needed someone to keep going. I don't know why He thought that after twenty years, I was finally ready to carry on by myself, alone, on my own. Maybe He wanted to see me go a little bit unattended, too, with no safety net, with no reasonable, wise, responsible adult to put me boundaries, with nobody to keep me from going too far on the detours I always wanted to take. Well, we'll see how this goes...
Until Elena decided I was the worst thing to happen to her, everything went great. She indeed took good care of us. How many times I narrowly got us killed, by insisting that we walk atop a mountain, go through the woods at night, cross a river, move to still another country, make a new theory of light-matter interactions...
We have two children, Julia and Luz. They are ten and five; Luz is still a baby. Julia is too much of a grown-up, she's been fast-forwarded in life, partly due to me—bringing the family in the UK, where she had to learn English from scratch and find her ways on her own—partly due to her mum, who wanted her a progressive young artist and brought her to music schools, which is good, but also to performing places, in touch with people who were neither her age (too old) nor of her mother's age (too young), which I don't think is so good. As a result, Julia thinks she knows and understands things that escape even adults. In particular, she got to opine on her mum's life decisions for the family. Which I think is definitely wrong. Children should remain children, it's the most beautiful thing they have.
Now, on my own, for the first time ever, maybe my life is finally starting. «Tout peut commencer, parce que tout recommence.» How far will I go? How much farther can one go without one's father? How much more above can one go without love?
Si tu rencontres la femme
Qui te transformera
Qui fera voler ton crâne
En trois cent millions d'éclats
Dis-lui qu'elle me téléphone
Dis-lui qu'elle me trouvera
Couché dans la peau de personne
Je te raconte pas
We did a lot, more than most, much more. Not enough, I think... yet, still too much for Elena. Oh, how furious I have been when she refused to keep going! How hard I have been on her. I remained the same but she changed. She wanted to become settled, average, quiet, peaceful. To me, I was hard on her lukewarm attachment to comfort, to reason, to boredom. But of course, I really was hard on her.
Si tu retrouves la trace
Par montagnes et déserts
De ses chevilles de glace
Qui assoifferaient la mer
Dis-lui que je m'abandonne
Dis-lui que j'ai rien d'autre à faire
Que de m'asseoir près du téléphone
Je dis ça en l'air
Elena was an artist. She still is, but to me she's in the past now. Something in me had moved the artist in her to accept my excess, my extravagances, to follow us in our adventures, those chased by the wild and curious child which I was, always wanting to open a forbidden door or do something inappropriate. I haven't changed. Or not much. I am the same me than I was twenty years ago. In fact a better me, and older one, but also wiser, more considerate, less excessive too.
She met me, she came to me. She said she loved me before meeting me. She had read my thesis and beyond the equations, she saw something that talked to her. I had put it there too. We recently had a research proposal rejected for funding, of which one Referee remarked "despite the literary expression..." That's me alright. I need to put poetry everywhere. I'll stop doing this when I'm dead. Or I'll start doing it with good poetry, maybe.
When our paths crossed in both space and time—this was in Maratea, in a summer school—she got the first-hand confirmation that I was as crazy and excessive as she had dreamed. And happened what happens to Spanish people: she wanted that. Spaniards don't say "I love you", they say "Te quiero", which means "I want you". It was part of my excess to reciprocate that: to propose to wed the first woman with whom I had gotten into a relationship. And to build our life together. I'm this type of person. If you open a door, I'll go in.
Si tu rencontres la femme
Qui voudra t'enfermer
Dans un cachot sans larmes
Beau comme la vérité
Dis-lui que je la méprise
Qu'elle me dégoûte à pleurer
Qu'elle finisse par lâcher sa prise,
Par m'oublier.
I thus can't say that I fell in love with Elena. I wouldn't have had the first interest in her if she hadn't dared me to try. I walked into love, instead. Have I been a poor lover, a bad husband, for this reason? I don't think so. I still gave her everything. Of me and beyond. When I entered the opened door, I closed it behind me and went till the end of where it would lead me. Which is some day in July earlier this year.
I always give everything, when I start to; which is also why I have scarce and distant relations with most people. I think I have the type of relations that people had centuries ago: intense but with few people. In friendship, in kinship, in everything. We live instead in a world where one needs to give a little bit to a lot of people. We live in times of mobile phones, where you can be in contact with hundreds of people at any time of the day. This is not for me.
Everything or nothing. This is for me.
So, I did all and more than a lover can do for his loved one. Maybe this wasn't enough. I still did more than most. In this age of metrics, where you measure everything, you'd definitely put me in the 90% percentile of passionate and dedicated lovers. If at least for the fact that I don't party, never had an affair, I don't drink, gamble, don't have addictions or stupid hobbies like video games or any type of selfish activity, I never hid anything from her, I have always been fully open, honest, transparent, also never compelled her to anything, gave her full freedom to everything, let her with the full control of our finances, buy all that she wants, live on two salaries as my needs are extremely modests—books and the leftover of the food I was buying and cooking for her... I put her at the head of a little fortune, with properties, wealth, not only financial freedom but even comfort. For all this, I think you can definitely put me in, come on, at least the 75% percentile. I spent most, if not all of my time on duties of both the household and our professional careers. Was there any motive to divorce me? None that I can see. Just the Zeitgeist, just to do what everybody else. Conformism! That will have chased me and tortured me my entire life.
Our main frictions have always been on fairly minor existential problems, all things considered. Elena complained constantly of my disorder, that I would leave things scattered all around, papers, socks, cutlery... I do that, yes. I, on the other hand, complained constantly of her wasting, food in particular, not caring for the price of things she buys, of throwing away stuff that still looks brand new to me.
Although I didn't fell in love in the sense that I wasn't pushed by fate into her arms, that I did not got smitten by accident and stumbled into a precipice which she had suddenly opened, I am probably too hard on ourselves by saying that I walked into it. Really, I dived into it. I still plunged into it. It was a choice, a conscious one, but still I jumped. I felt the free fall too. I went with everything, all the passion, all the extravagance, the excess, the romanticism.
I won't detail it here and now, but she had more romance in her life than most women will ever experience. I'm fairly creative and generous with fireworks. She was thus the recipient of more attention, more care, more dedication than most people on Earth. I brought her to the most beautiful places on the planet, from Iona to Saint Petersburg passing by the unaccountably attractive door in Hambledon, the shadows of Oberschleißheim, the birthplace of the Tajo, Cannock Chase, and most other similarly important places, and hundreds of hikes, in the forests, the mountains, the rivers... I wanted us to do that. To meet the world, to go everywhere, to touch and embrace beauty in every corner we could go. Together. She's more the social type who wants instead to meet friends, old and new, as many as possible, to entertain stupid, empty gossip.
As for her, she did little of emotional and poetic value. She did a lot of the administration, paperwork, tax returns, etc. All this she did, which is important. But of what brought, not practicality, but beauty—besides everything related to our daughters—so for us Elena and Fabrice, she did close to nil. She could have. She is an artist. As a composer, she wrote about everything: her family, her daughters, her close friends, but also her not so-close friends, even random people, fictitious people, random things... She never wrote anything about me. That's fine. It's not the type of things that I want or need. It is just evidence that, in our relationship, she was the lukewarm one who did not feel the need to express something out of the ordinary. Oh, she did write a song "Te quiero normal", "I love you normally", of a love without passion, without excess... Maybe this was about me. That doesn't change my conclusions.
Every year since we were together, I was making a calendar with the most beautiful picture of her or the place I had brought her to—later also featuring things that mattered most to her, our children, her family—from the same month of the previous year. We had this running joke that when something was particularly beautiful, this could be "a calendar photo". On some edition, I was putting one photo for every day of the the month, for every month of the year. It was almost full; we had a life full of things. I have been doing this for decades, up until the month she decided she had enough of me, and of that.
She, on the contrary, did nothing of the sort. Oh no, wait. At the very beginning, in the first months of our relationship, she did a drawing of me, which she copied from a photo. Of me, and another one, of a dog, of my mother's Yorkshire terrier Onyx.
I was fine with that. It was enough for me that she was extraordinary on her own, for her own sake—which she was—I didn't need that she would manifest that for me, that she directs that towards me. What I wanted and needed, on the other hand, is the partnership, the loyalty, the belonging to a family. This feeling that it doesn't matter with whom, and how, but that you have someone upon whom you can rely, completely, entirely. Her of all people, she knows that the worst offense for me is betrayal. She must have strained herself a lot to get to the point where she would stab me in the back. I genuinely believe that she became mentally perturbed as a result of having to take this step.
She was and has been the only woman in my life. I had no other romantic bond to anybody before her, and very likely will not have any after. In fact the universe threw at me my mirror image weeks after Elena had decided to dump me, which made me feel elated in a way I hadn't felt since childhood. Only for me to realize that whatever awaits me, from now on, is not something that involves someone.
Elena was the woman of my life. There's nobody else. I think I am misogynistic now. Since I had lost both my father and mother in tragic, untimely circumstances, Elena also became the only person in my life. I have a brother but whose life, concerns, background and everything make alien to most of the existential issues I may have, and vice versa, and I have never put excessive trust in friendship, as indeed I never felt the type of unconditional bond I believe is needed to put such big meaning on such commonly used words. I believe the nuclear family is what one has most valuable. Elena fissioned that. I'm pretty much on my own.
She, on the other hand, always has kept close relations with various of what society call the "exes", of whom she had plenty. Once in Brazil, while we were playing with subterranean owls on the campus after work, she received a phone call on her mobile, of one of those exes. She started to speak with him, she explained where we were, what we were doing, how the owls were hiding in burrows, etc. I was waiting with a boiling rage, of this inconsiderate woman entertaining some even more inconsiderate jerk on the other side of the planet, in front of me, sharing this local private moment of us with him. I asked her to hung up. I had to insist that she does. When she did, we had a row. If someone keep track of those, by order of their intensity, this one is in the top five for sure.
I told her I didn't want to have this type of relation, neither with her and certainly not with these people, that they could not appear in our life at any moment, just because they used to do that before, and that she could not put me on hold the time it takes for them to get satisfied of their interaction, to fill an empty moment of their own, awaiting their next distraction with somebody else. I hate these people, who feel they are entitled to keep a string to any puppet they have shagged and can, whenever they're bored, summon them for some chit chat. I don't think this was excessive.
I don't even think it what excessive at the time, when I formulated all that in terms much more graphic and vivid. How I insulted them, together! What devastated me is that it was clear she was more hurt that I insulted him than her. I told her how crass must someone be to not even inquire if this is a good moment to talk, but assume that he is always welcome and invited, that this guy was more than a pig, he was a turd, and I didn't want her to drop a turd in beautiful and sacred places that were for us alone, at any moment's notice, when this guy would decide to show up.
I told her that it was them or me, the rest of the world or me. She found it was unreasonable, that I was trying to isolate her, that I couldn't request that she puts a cross on her past like that. Say that to a therapist—Elena has always been craving therapists—and of course they'll tell you that indeed this is very bad, that you are dealing with a narcissistic pervert. So that's what I was for a while, I was a narcissistic pervert, who tried to isolate and control her.
To me, I am the judging thinking intuitive introvert, but to her, I was a psychic case. I told her that if she'd chose not to put a cross indeed on her sordid past—and the best adjective I could put there is "tumultuous"—she'd be putting at least a barrier in her present and to her future, that I'd never be fully hers if she had so much room for others. She insisted. I surrendered. I let her entertain all types of social relations, but as I had told her, almost by construction, she had less than the full of me from this time onward. It wasn't done in retaliation, it was a logical consequence.
Even though I took the dive from the highest post on my first free fall, when it was time to resurface from the water and jump again, I did that from lesser altitudes each time, her having removed the ladder to reach the apices.
I have recently met another INTJ (judging, thinking, intuitive introvert), by the way, who was female. I never met a female INTJ before. That has felt like a dream, something unreal. Maybe it was. In this dream of mine we were both painfully alone. As it was only me dreaming, thankfully, it was only one of us in pain.
One day in the streets, we met the girlfriend of this guy who had calle Elena in Brasilia, jogging. She was jogging to cope with the pain of the guy having an affair with another girl, a violinist who would later become the wife of another of their common friends. The sex must have been good because the affair had turned into a break-up and he had left the jogger for the other violinist. The sex must have been good for a while only, because after some time, he came back to the original girlfriend, and eventually married her. I don't respect that, and I insulted copiously those people to a point that strained a lot our relationship, because I don't forget anything, and I constantly came back to the exact words, the precise expressions, the detailed facts that this woman had shared, in her pain, in which I would spit.
Because it was so important for Elena to keep such valued connections, to treasure a friendship to someone who was, objectively, an horrible person, she came to hate me instead, the mirror rather than the hideous object reflecting on it. This loyalty that she kept, that she will keep for her entire life, that she couldn't give to the father of her children, but could to a deviant and corrupt individual, this loyalty that goes beyond friendship, beyond love, I see that as a monstrosity, a virtue gangrained by sin.
I have always avoided any type of relation with these people. She, on the other hand, strived to maximize them. She even had them over at our place, bring them to our home, but I kept the same distance from them then as the most stinky urinals in public restrooms. This got me the perfect image for the therapists of the secluded, antisocial and autistic "partner".
So, okay, I might not have been the perfect "partner" or "companion", especially by today's standards. But I wouldn't wish to either. I am who I am. Not a partner and not a companion. I didn't change. I was like this on day one. I don't mind crass people to exist but I am happier if I don't have to get in their proximity. On the very first days we met, in Maratea, she told me of the type of relationship she had with this "group" of friends and we actually had our first row—not one in the top five—but I told her how nauseating this all was to me. So she knew. She knew I was possessive, extreme, idealistic, uncompromising. But forgiving too and a hopeless optimist. So I embraced her for what she was anyway, for everything that is perpendicular in her from me, and I took the dive. It lasted twenty years.
It could have lasted forever as far as I am concerned. I didn't see any more difficulties six months ago than six hours after we met. She, on the other hand, has stretched herself to the snapping point. Is it her fault? Is it my fault? It is what it is. Things of those magnitudes cannot be revisited.
What will remain from all this? Our children, foremost, they are what carry on, and they are who touch and make the future regardless of the past. Elena chose our children's first names. Julia as a tribute to her father. We had agreed that if we would have a boy, we would name him after my father, although it is a name that is horrendous in Spanish. We had a second girl. Luz. She chose this name too, just because she liked it, with no special significance. To me, she is Luce, an old, now forgotten French name, that also means "light". It's too bright, too strong in French, so my ancestors used Lucette instead, little light, which also became obsolete. There have been some Lucette Laussy recorded. There is no Luce Laussy that I know of, in any genealogical tree. Only my Luce Laussy.
Luce has a strong character. She's the main victim of all this. Poor little thing. She's also the one who will, in the long term, benefit most from it and emerge stronger than if she had two responsible parents. I know it. She has the sort of pugnacity, of exaggeration that comes from me and which, in turn, comes from my paternal grandmother. Elena has no idea what she seeded in her, and how retribution will strike her from where she least expects it, from her own daughter, who is me but with all the cruelty, the animosity, the vengeance of someone who will become a woman. I will have to explain to Luce that although her mother didn't let me baptize her, she is catholic and must forgive. She will have to forgive something that she does not yet even know she resents.
I too, will have to forgive what Elena did. Out of selfishness, out of stupidity, out of weakness and mediocrity.
Our daughters are everything for both of us, although in different ways. I disagreed with the type of education Elena chose for our daughters. But I accepted—I resolved—that we'd still try her way, though, which means no authority, in particular no paternal authority, which she undermined systematically. She objected for instance on my insisting to kiss in the morning when you first meet again, and in the evening, when you'll be on your own for the night. I have kissed my mum and dad good-morning and goodbye every day of my life that I saw them. Every day, at all ages, until adulthood, until they died, not a single exception. This simple and little ritual has been one of the most holy and sacred bonds I had with them. I miss that since I lost my parents.
Elena, on the other hand, saw that as a sort of creepy, abusing and obscurantist relationship with children, who should always be the judge of if they want to kiss you, even if you're their parents, and do it when and if they want. I didn't insist on that, although I still think it's not only wrong, it's ignorant. I regret to have trusted her.
The only thing which I fought, against strong opposition, is that they must call me "papa" and not by my first name. Elena explained how they should be allowed the freedom to call me whatever they want, and that one shouldn't put constraints on anything that is not life threatening or dangerous. That's the only one thing which I did not surrender to.
I believe I have been too meek, too tolerant, too open to her view of the world, which is the view of the society around her, and inevitably leads to where she ended up: divorce, separation, personal freedom, etc.
Although I am convinced that I have been too meek, too tolerant, too open, this was still too much so that she could denounce me to social services, find a way that some stomach issue of Julia is the result of my toxic presence and have "professionals", "therapists" and the whole circus explain to me how it is important to value the singularities of everybody.
Elena was an artist, as I said. With that came all the fragility, the doubts, the shattered self-esteem of anybody who has an urge for expression which they do not control. She is easily flattered. People flattered her a lot and took advantage of her.
I was the greatest admirer of her Art but also her tougher critics. I often told her—and still think to this day—that she didn't understand what she was writing. I told her that because that's what I thought. She could formulate beautiful metaphors that said the opposite of what she is and what she thinks. When I asked her to explain what she meant, she had the most banal, vacuous and cliché description. When I told her what I think was meant by whatever part of her subconscious, of extraneous inspiration that came from beyond her, she'd say "well, yes, maybe, I don't know, not really". That's the type of relation we had. Well, she got enough of that. Who wouldn't? Fair enough.
Elena was very intelligent, but in a cold, analytical way, like a machine. She was a great Mathematician. She still is, she's not dead, but to me, as I said, she is in the past. When you give everything to someone, and they throw that away, there's nothing else left. She was very intelligent but with no subtlety, no nuance. I made her the scientist she is, I insisted that she carries on with her PhD, which she was abandoning when we met, to become a school teacher. She's always been a top student at school, often number one. But no charisma, no charm, she could see that she didn't know what to do with the tools she mastered better than anybody else. That's how she started to become everybody's girlfriend: any guy more or less playing the guitar was a genius to her, because he was doing something, while she was just mastering the theory but was faced with the blank page and the frustration of a genius who can't get started. The more brutal approach of the male who just jumps into it, happens what happens, comes with practical results, even if of poor quality. That's still better than nothing. One of her ex once explained to her how she was not using correctly the harmonies, from his superficial and intuitive experience of jamming with friends from the type of crass groups those people assemble to smoke weed and get girls, when she was in fact composing a complex polyharmonic song rooted in theoretical studies and concepts she had mastered from real profesional of modern composition.
In science, she was similarly abandoned and lost. I gave her more interesting problems than the stupid numerical calculations she was doing, and the motivation to solve them, which she did. That worked all right. We were a team, a good one. We did things together that will, in time, make a difference. We needed each other for that. I wrote her thesis, I wrote even those papers where she is the only author. She contributed a lot, most of what we did together would not have been possible without her, she did much of the theory, sometimes most of the theory, not only the calculations but also the formalism. She had a few brilliant and crucial insights which I'd definitely never have had. But she did not have the corresponding vision, and zero ambition, zero interest in pushing something through. And the same shallow understanding of her math than of her poetry. All the interpretation, all the conceptual understanding, all the terminology came from me. Most, if not all of the things on which she got a lead, remain unpublished.
She actually had little interest for science, just immense abilities. Brute, rough abilities. But that is not enough. It probably is not even the most important. What interested her very much is music, composition. She also had great talent, although also needed guidance, but at least not from me, from her friends, some of them with real competencies. Not enough that she'll become famous, though.
I always thought she might get recognized as a composer, in time. Some of the things she was doing was very good; some of the texts were real poetry, not so much the music, which was cute, but the composition was of the highest caliber. Like Brel or Brassens. But she was not well supported into the right direction by her friends.
Even with music, in fact, what she did that had most impact came from me, such as her adaptation in Spanish of HK's Danser Encore. She thought it was stupid. Everybody else was either against, or missed completely the point. I explained to her the beauty of art as revolt, the international dimension, the symbolism of music, songs and dancing against political oppression, etc. I explained to her the timing, the depth and beauty in the original. I remember telling her: do it and it'll spread like fire. I even suggested some bits of the text myself.
Although she didn't want to, she still got somehow interested and eventually let herself be convinced, as she used to, and she took the translation as a challenge. She told me that my suggestions were rubbish, that they were not in sync with the song, that the tonality was off with the harmony, and instead of my obvious, but wrong, "nosotros, queremos seguir bailando", she came up with "La intención, es que sigamos con nuestra canción".
In one day, she had produced a little masterpiece. It was performed in Madrid and many other places worldwide, it was adapted by many others. I was very moved with the version by Pablo Peregalli or the one by Leo Folkolor. It was fantastic to see music spread like fire indeed. It even made the news in France. It brought her the thousands of subscribers she has on her YouTube channel. Left completely on her own, she wrote instead on flirting in bars and how she wanted to be called MILF in pathetic songs of becoming an old woman. Such a waste of talent...
Still, some of her songs are truly beautiful, such as A la vuelta de la esquina. A true masterpiece. So much waste, overall.
A few days before she announced to me that she wanted a divorce, I had written a short piece on my Blog about how the Artists see the people around them. This, she did well, seeing beauty in others. Even of people she did not know, like Ruth. The superficial beauty, she could bath in it. But she wasn't someone who could often go into the depth of things. One reason, I believe, is the flock of idiots she insisted to keep remain associated with. We met enough talented and interesting people, so that she decides to stick to a bunch of, often disgusting, imbeciles. And her constant need to get their approval, which they would give anyway because they just don't care about anything.
She wouldn't get my approval so easily. Another strain on our relationship. People quickly get tired of truth and want sympathy instead.
Especially since she also had this fake, artificial sentimentalism of leftist people who think they are good people, but who, in reality, are selfish and entitled. In Wolverhampton, she hated so much being in contact with the poverty, the social cases we had there, she had an epidermic reaction to the place and its atmosphere of people struggling, being poor and crass. To me, it was fine. I come from the common people. And when you come from humble origins, you can always return there, it's not something that you leave when you acquire wealth and comfort.
In contrast, her family had this constant artificial pretension of also coming from poverty, of having suffered misery, when they were only coming from the modest, but comfortable, backgrounds of the bulk of the population at the time. Truth is, they have alway had the spirit and way of thinking of the bourgeois, like aristocrats who had lost their fortune, but not their appetite for comfort and who never had to withdraw from what is alien to real misery: food, a roof, enough money to keep you warm. It always put a smile on my face how they could never stop congratulating themselves with how miserable they were, say, because they were spending holidays camping by a lake because they sometimes couldn't afford to travel farther than that. They had no idea what poverty is. To start with, poor people don't constantly proclaim their status as a trophy like this. They either don't know or they are ashamed of it.
They never heard me, not once, tell them about what real poverty is, which I have seen and touched. It looks nothing like camping tents and holidays with a car in the countryside. It doesn't involve visiting other countries in Europe, even going in South America—but still complaining that you are poor because your better-off family had to pay for the plane ticket—it doesn't involve the beach, it does not involve a rich collection of pictures of fast family dinners and games and hiking. Also, poor people don't waste food, poor people never throw away food. Wasting food is as sacrilegious to someone who was once hungry and angry about it, as the defilement of something sacred. But go explain that to people who have no notion of anything sacred. Elena lacked completely this social understanding, she was raised in a fake, artificial and entitled world of completely mistaken people, who think poverty is about not having a lot of money.
Politically, her family is the archetypal progressist, feminist, anti-clerical, "woke" Spanish entity with a hatred, literal hatred, for everything from the opposite political spectrum. Because I'm French, in their naive picture of the world, they saw me as similarly inclined, the product of the masonic revolution that guillotined the king and made a laic republic. I mention masonry because her father, probably a freemason, spat on the grave of Franco when they brought me, a few days after we had met, to the Valle de los Caidos. In response to that, I crossed myself. I did it without him noticing. I thought it was strange, to spit not only in a church, but on a grave and, most of all, in front of me. I also found it strange that they would bring me to such a place, if they had such an aversion for it.
I have no such hatred based on ideological convictions. I hold the opposite view that when a criminal, even a monster, is victim of an unjust wrongdoing, he is swapping roles and makes his oppressor the monster and them the angel. He gets justification for what he did. You see, justice and truth is not a linear thing, there is no temporal order. So if you spit on Franco's grave, he's pretty much justified in having you put in jail for a couple of days, not so much because you were caught practicing satanic games in a loge with skulls snatched from the cemetery, but because you're the type of people who can spit on a grave.
I don't even have hatred for people who soil something beautiful and intimate to me, like this guy who called Elena in Brazil. I just have the gagging reflex when you want to shove shit into my face. But I wouldn't make special efforts to personally interact with the guy to torment him. I'd avoid him, on the opposite, and all the better if he can find peace on his side. I want no business with him, that's all. I'd certainly not spit on his grave.
I had cordial relations with her family. I was particularly fond of her mum, also an artist, although not a very good one, maybe because, furthermore, she was expressing herself in this modern, abstract style which I don't like very much. But the mother was eccentric, which I liked. She was also a good person, one of the most loving persons I know. She's a perfect grandma for Julia and Luz. But bath such a person in ideology, and you can channel her love into hate, you can transform her into a raging hysteric. While she is very affectionate with those around her, although she is a good neighbour, she is friendly to passer-bys in the street, etc, she's also the most hateful person I know of random people she never met, say, that she sees on TV, just because they are from the right political spectrum or related to the church. Not even famous people. Show her a priest from a village interviewed on TV and she goes ballistic. Another thing which I found peculiar. She had this decerebrated, animal political hate you find in 1984's minute of hate. Still, I liked her very much.
Elena was intelligent enough to not be very much affected by that, to go beyond that. Elena wasn't like that, at least on the surface and at least in the beginning. It seems that she might, actually, have been deeply traumatized and get to the point where, eventually, this took the better of her and she finally, in her old age, succumbed to the temptation of rejecting, of vomiting what, younger, she had adored, but that was constantly, since a child, explained was the root of all evil: someone not thinking exactly like her.
When Elena decided she didn't love me anymore, it was so absurd to me, I even thought I could rely on her family to bring her back to her sense, to take some time to relativize, to make a more clear assessment. It was a stupid decision. It still is. It's also one that is damaging for our children, who should be the most protected ones. If Julia and Luz had sensible and responsible grandparents, they would have explained that to her mum.
But I had, instead, become overnight and officially, one of the evil entities from the TV, and not in the TV, in the lives of their daughter and granddaughters. The white heterosexual oppressive male with toxic views: on socialism, on the European Union, on vaccines, on the war against Ukraine, on transgenderism. Not even that I have strong views on those. I would not embrace fully the cause, I would not go and demonstrate in the streets, I would dare challenge their narratives. Never mind the decades spent together, in close proximity, they found it completely natural to hate and despise me in full bloom, in full display. They are so fake people that they would say that no, they don't harbor bad feelings about me. I remember Elena's mum on one of the few occasions I saw her after that: the icy, cold hate against me; me who never rebuked her.
I wonder how much weight Elena's parents actually had in their daughter deciding that a marriage was not a good thing anymore. They are anti-marriage, anti-family, of course. A divorce for them is the culmination of the emancipation, of the liberation of the oppressed woman. The father is a convinced anarchist and feminist. Although, of course, he finds the conveniences of having this at home for himself not something open to debate. He does nothing at home, doesn't cook, doesn't clean, doesn't participate to any of the chores, he spends the best of his time looking at sport on TV, drinking beer and pontifying on how women are slaves of the patriarchal society.
He wrote me a long letter of insults on how I have been an absent father who should bow down and disappear from the life of people who don't want me anymore. The cheek of some people! They have decided, just like this, that I am an incarnation of what is wrong in the modern society. I should forgive them too, they are more stupid than anything else. They have raised their two children in the love of foreign cultures, finding that Spanish culture is, of course, nationalistic and Franquist. But when those children had to leave Spain to live their life with their partners, elsewhere, that led to lots of torments. They have to be international cosmopolitans, but in Spain. The brother is in Netherlands, in a culture completely alien to him, but somehow, me, who gave up my career so that Elena could live in her culture, with her food, her language, her friends and family, I am the problem.
It might be. All things considered, I'm probably a conflicting and disrupting element in society, in their society, this society of transgenderism and hatred of diverging political opinions, of lies and fabrications, of delusion, of good intentions doomed to be frustrated by their intrinsic stupidity, of exacerbated feminism where there is no gender. But I think it says more about society than about myself. I'm what I am, what I've always been. If that is so bad now, it was even worse twenty years ago. I'm not responsible of people wanting now completely different things.
The way I see it, Elena was someone who once wanted to warm herself up from her tepid life, full of therapists. She was intelligent enough to understand that the model she was given was rotten, full of hate. She got close to me that she saw as a stove on the point of explosion, and she felt the burn. She enjoyed the intensity at first, but she eventually evaporated in the process. When all the dreamy aspirations, the fantasy, the taste for exploration and adventure were gone, what was left of her is the normal, conventional, conformist, expected and ultimately flat, completely flat person. Who now rejects what she wanted so much before. At least she will give the satisfaction to the people around her that she got rid of me, that they knew all along, that, finally, good riddance to him. Fair enough. I won't miss them either.
I'll miss what Elena has taken back, what she gave but thought was still hers, because she could remove it, so she never gave anything in the first place. This attitude, this type of lukewarm, insecure, uncertain people, I don't respect. The betrayal, as I said, I despise to a point, not of pure rage, but of rageful sadness.
My main grief is disappointment. It is, actually, like the food that she threw away in such copious proportion, it is the waste, the total, complete, utter waste of her decisions, that pains me. We built something in a couple of decades, and overnight she decides to destroy everything.
I tried to minimize the waste, to be constructive in destruction, to save what could be saved. But I feel that, since she is, underneath, like her mother, a good person—deep down she's always been a good person—she knows, she senses more than she knows—like those poem lines she can write without knowing what they mean—she senses that she did something terrible, sacrilegious, horrible, that she wronged me in a way that I neither deserve nor will ever fully recover from. She stabbed me in the back, she lied, manipulated, hid information, fabricated some, convinced herself of the whole thing, and who knows what else to achieve... what, finally? To get rid of me. Who was asking her nothing. Who was accepting everything. Who resigned my Chair in a dream job so that we could come back to Spain, who sold our our assets in France, in Germany, to bring everything back to Spain. At which point, within months, she realizes she wants a divorce.
And to rationalize that, she entered into a loop of denial that I find particularly despicable. She withdrew our chidren from home, for instance. Yesterday, on Christmas Eve, she refused that I'd take them with me to spend the week we had agreed on split-time of holidays, to spend this family time with my brother in France, where we spent various Christmases. I didn't want to be alone with my girls here in a big empty house, but wanted us to still be in an extended family, one that did not repudiate me on a flim, with a Christmas tree, other children, songs, gifts, etc. She decided that it was not okay, that they spend more than two days with their dad, so she refused that. I could only see them under quarantine, at the random points in time when it would suit her, without even a forewarning.
I refused that. The other thing that I will have refused in twenty years: that my children call me by my first name, and that her mother gets to decide of what I do with them, when she is not there anymore, because she, herself, decided to leave us. I refused that she can humiliate me, treat me like a criminal, a retard, just to suit her narrative that she destroyed all that we did, not because she's weak and easily convinced and brainwashed by her surroundings, but because everything is my fault. Fair enough. But what, exactly? What is everything? What is so bad? She couldn't even articulate it. She told me "I don't want this anymore". With not a single rational reason to back this up.
So after twenty years of Elena, on this Christmas Day of 2025, alone with my disappointment and my disgust, while she is with our children, her selfishness and the entitlement of this glorious socialist family who hates half of their country and two-third of the planet, I am entering a legal dispute, so that we break in two all that we built together, so that she, like her exes, can be put completely aside. We'll all lose, and a lot. I'll lose more because I hate waste, while she can rationalize everything, she can brainwash herself into any lubie, she can sell her doubts to flatteries and get lulled into the conviction that everything she does is good, is brilliant, is right, that every sacrifice is a tribute to human rights and feminism.
But, when it's not a judge in some Spanish court, but God, who will ask us to respond for what we did, we'll have to step on the scales, each on our side of it. I won't be afraid to go, because I'll accept the retribution for everything bad that I did, I'll answer for what I deserve, but I know that all the wrong that I will have done, and which will be revealed to me then, was done with a pure heart, a clean soul and the conviction to have done what is right. I know that I will have tried, at the price of all the compromises, all the concessions, all the renunciations. I'm not sure she will be able to step on the scale with the same peace of mind.
Si tu arrives à la porte
Qu'elle te fera passer
En esquivant l'effort
De ton dernier baiser
Dis-lui que je la méprise
Qu'elle me dégoûte à pleurer
Dis-lui qu'elle me soit soumise
Dis-lui qu'elle peut m'accorder
Le pardon qui nous éternise
Je l'ai pas volé.
On this day that feels more like Easter than the nativity to me, may God have mercy and guide me on the path He wants me to take. I remember praying once that I please be guided to the path of righteousness in a world that becomes increasingly biblical and criminal—with Gaza, the war spreading in Europe, poverty raging everything...—at the same time as my private life was becoming increasingly settled: with a house, permanent positions for us both, good incomes... good food on our plates and fine wine, as children were being slaughtered. Security and stability for me while humanity was en route to face chaos. Something was trying me. I knew I'd have to answer for why I went on with this farce, how I could digest my food and sleep in my big house. I prayed for an indication of what I should do. I never imagined this would come in having me to raise to that trial alone, but if that is what it is, if this is the answer to my prayers, then so be it!
I've always believed in providence, that things happen for a reason, everything, even, especially the worse things. Of course everything could be coincidences. It could also be a coincidence that I meet again the love of my childhood when I went through everything in life and lost everything, and find everything again, but just out of reach, a virtual image behind a veil that separates me from another reality.
But it could all be part of a greater plan. I accept everything that is coming for me. Chance or destiny alike. Chaos or salvation. So try me God! You are, after all, just born today! So am I. Maybe.