opinion


Conversations with a stalker
Love can be a tragedy, and a stalker who opens his heart to Victor Paul Borg is proof of that

When I spotted him late one night in a bar he was sitting on a stool by the counter, while his poodle sat on its haunches on the adjacent stool. Both of them had hair falling in their eyes, but while the dog sat erect and attentive, his eyes flickering, Clive (name changed to protect privacy) sat hunched, sipping his beer delicately, and his dark eyes had the flinching squeeze of someone who’s suffered for a long, long time. His beard was long and pointed, and his tousled hair fell on his shoulder in a bun; a lost hippy in a time warp who had learned decadence and cultural diversity in Berlin. He flicked his head to acknowledge my presence and with his fingers he raked the curly fringe out of his eyes. I could see he is attractive. ‘I must be about 15 years older than you, and I can give you one piece of important advice then do what the hell you want,’ he warned. ‘At your age [twenty-nine] you should learn not to love.’

He had loved four women in his life, and he still loved all four of them because those feelings, running so deep, can’t ever die. But it was his last love that had done him in. Five years ago they were planning a life together, which involved selling inherited property in Malta and moving into a house – their nest – he was buying in Germany when she called him one fine day when she was on holiday and told him it was all over. He had spent much of his adult life scavenging antiques, and when the phone clicked death he tore through his house and trashed everything in a moment of rage. Leaving the house in that shattered state, he packed some bags and moved back to his mother’s, at first crashing on the sofa and eventually moving into his childhood bedroom. If he couldn’t have her he couldn’t care about having anything else in life, and he could be a mother’s child again.

So now he drifts with a haunted look and a shuffle in his gait, and since that eventful day five years ago, bless the universe if he’s done a whole day of work. What he has done is chase her unrelentlessly – otherwise known as stalking, that ugly condition now punishable by law in most countries, a condition that traps forever both the stalker and the stalked. When she left him, he started calling her every day, trying to talk his sense into her, and when she started cutting the telephone conversations short, he started writing her a letter every day. ‘I have kept a copy of every letter,’ he said, ‘and I have a whole shelf stacked with letters.’ After some time she changed her telephone number, so he called her at work, then she changed that too, and he tracked her new home number. More obsessive telephone calls, more crushing letters. She moved house. He found out her new address and the barrage of telephone calls and letters kept its unforgiving momentum. Nothing discourages the demon of obsession; in fact, repetitive rejection can make someone more meticulous and more manic.

But I can understand Clive’s condition because to some degree we’re all neurotic. We all have demons, we all have addictions, we all have closely guarded secrets that are the prognosis of madness. When lovers dump us, our heads threaten to implode. How many times have you shuffled furtively through a diary? How many times have you snooped on telephone conversations or e-mails? How many times have you studied lists of telephone numbers dialled to find out patterns and repetitive numbers that suggest a secret lover? How many times have you, on the way to work or the supermarket, taken a detour so you can walk or drive past an ex-lover’s house and take a hopeful, nostalgic peek at that lover’s bedroom? I can understand because the line that divides sanity from insanity is a grey area, because at any time we can snap. Mental health is fragile, but insanity (if it is deviancy, if it is defection from normal, linear thinking patterns established by the autocracy of the majority) can be fruitful sometimes: it can produce brilliant artists, successful politicians, fanciful philosophers. The more passionate you are the more addicted and obsessive you’re likely to be – and I could detect Clive’s emotional lust like an aura of hot energy. I can understand because there were many nights after a lover had departed forever when I slept on the sofa because I felt too lonely to sleep in my bed. There were times when I entertained the idea of plunging a knife in my stomach. There were many more times when I stood at the edge of a cliff and felt the urge to let my body go limp so I would tumble – and fly for a short moment – into the freedom of oblivion, and the urge was so strong that when I turned away from the abyss my legs were shaking. I can understand because I cry and laugh simultaneously.

But Clive is not mad because he can diagnose his condition. He knows that his chase is futile, his life is wasting in the pit of hope, and he is destroying his life and his ex-girlfriend’s life. Clive is intelligent enough to look at his situation from an outside perspective, and like any person who spends most of his time alone, he floats about conversing with himself. He’s got many voices, whom he bandies about like a pro ventriloquist, and beyond the voice that mentors his obsession, there is the voice of reason that suggests that life is about probabilities and possibilities, not absolutes, and not even love is an absolute. Or is he tragic and fatalistic in his belief that love for one particular person, once a lifetime, can’t ever be smothered or replaced? Perhaps his tragedy is that he loves completely and forever.

Although I can understand, I will never be a stalker because I am unfaithful. I love soon and I love deeply, and that means I have loved many women, but in my worldview each lover is only as good as the next one. I would find a substitute, replace one drug with another, and I put this antidote across to Clive.

He shook his head emphatically. He is the victim here, he said, look at what mess she’s got him into. He is the victim of unfair circumstances, and the love pact she defected from can be severed but can’t ever be redeemed. He admitted that he has burdened her with the stress of fear, kidnapped her freedom, possessed her like a demon, but perhaps he believes that their broken love is a terrible mistake of outside forces, an injustice cast upon them: they are both innocent victims. Or perhaps he continues to carve out his obsession to plough ahead with a clear sense of purpose, so he can have a high-minded goal in life – such are the insular delusions we concoct. What else would he do with his gushing passionate energy?

In the middle of the night we wandered through dark streets, drunk but our voices hushed. ‘Now she has moved house again,’ he told me. ‘Tomorrow I’ll find out her new address, and she can’t understand how I can track her down each time.’ He didn’t tell me how either. The air had a tinge of drying hay and the lingering warm sweetness of sun. The poodle followed behind, ever faithful, the mute witness, untroubled because it only recognises the hand that feeds it and the hand that pats it; it lives the moment, not the past and neither the future, which is the human disease of obstacles and obsessions. Clive lifted the poodle in his arms and spoke to it in his kind, soft voice. He said of the dog: "People don’t believe me when I tell them the dog is my father but I can recognise my father when I see him, don’t I? When I die I want to be reborn into a dog – this kind of dog."

Victor Paul Borg is a freelance writer based in London and can be contacted at victor@borg.tf. His column appears here weekly.