This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

J — Jealousy

Jealousy kills love but not desire. This is the true punishment of passion betrayed. We despise the woman who broke the pact of love, but continue to desire her because her betrayal was evidence of her own passions. For jealousy to exist, the romantic relationship cannot end with indifference. The lover who abandons us must have the intelligence to insult us, debase us, assault us savagely so that we cannot forget her in resignation. So that we continue desiring her with jealousy, the perverted name we give to our erotic will.

Norman Mailer describes jealousy as a kind of museum full of pictures that the jealous man guards like a curator. To me, jealousy is like a life within the life we normally live. We can take a plane, return to our home city or one we do not know, call our friends and sometimes even forgive our enemies, but during all that time we are living another life, a life that obeys its own laws, that is separate from us even though it lives within us. That life inside our life is jealousy and it manifests itself physically. As the popular Mexican expression goes, nos hace circo la barriga, that is, it makes the stomach churn. A ferocious, bitter wave of bile that churns, rising and falling from the heart to the stomach and then from the stomach to a crippled, useless member that has suddenly been rendered a casualty of war. It makes you want to hang a medal around the poor penis. And after that, a funeral wreath. The crescendo of jealousy, however, neither celebrates nor stops for very long in any one part of the body. Like a poisonous liquid it courses through the body, not to destroy it but to plague it, squeezing tightly so that its most vile juices rise up to the head and affix themselves, like the hard, green scales of a snake, upon our tongue, our breath, our gaze. .

Jealousy makes us feel expelled from life, as if a loved one has died. Of course, when someone dies, we are allowed to exhibit the pain we feel. The pain of jealousy, however, must be concealed, dark and venomous, to avoid pity and ridicule. Exposed jealousy exposes us to the laughter of others. It is a journey back to adolescence, that blighted age when everything we do in the public sphere — walking, talking, looking — can be the object of someone else’s laughter. Both adolescence and jealousy separate us from life and prevent us from truly living.