A reader asked me, just after reading Elsa, mi querido amor tóxico, that she found it somewhat implausible that Guillermo should insist on loving Elsa despite being scorned by her time and again. That after each new rebuff he suffered, he decided to lash out with more dedication and patience, hoping that his offensives to win her approval would end up bearing fruit.
I questioned myself for a moment, thanks to your review, whether I had forgotten to mention something in the novel that would justify the behaviour of the main character and narrator. But I came to the conclusion - as the creator of it - that of course it lacks things (besides the fact that everything written by me is horrible in my eyes, once published). But leaving that aside, it's true that many people can't understand how some people are capable of loving those who mistreat them physically or psychologically. How can they beg for love from those who know they don't give a damn about their own? Why seek validation from those who don't deserve it?
I believe that love (or rather falling in love as a narcotic state) is often irrational. It is almost always based on the idea of a non-practical, ethereal, novelistic romance that does not - at least at first - pursue life as a couple, marriage, family, or joint retirement. If we can explain our crush by objective reasoning, it is possible that it is "simply" an extended affection developed in response to the virtues we value in our lover or suitor.
I try to describe Elsa through her eyes, to make the reader feel (although the challenge is greater if a woman reads it) how Guillemo is intoxicated by Elsa's youth, the age difference between them, her spontaneity, her intelligence, her eroticism and many other characteristics of her personality. Guillemo is a victim of all this and gives himself up to the delight of reliving an already consumed stage of his life (his twenties, post-adolescence) and which, like all of us who have gone through it, we well know will never return.
¿Has sido víctima de un amor no correspondido durante un largo tiempo?
SÍ
NO
Guillemo explains in the novel:
No matter how much I think about it, nothing I would have done would have done any good. The only thing that consoles me, as horrible and selfish as it sounds, is that being the way he is, he won't be able to love anyone else. It is sad. Even cruel to say, but true at the same time. It doesn't matter how many men she knows and how many of them love her as I did. Because first she won't understand; she won't empathise with a feeling so alien to her. And secondly because love is not enough. Love is not enough. We believe that love is valued by the lover and that the lover, by effect or defect of his own greatness, will put us in superior conditions. Love is a generous and unconditional feeling that the selfish person disdains, because love by itself is not seductive by nature. We are not always as attracted or in love with the one who loves us as with the one who rejects us. This has been true all our lives, it is pure science. The brain desires what it cannot have or what it is denied. It is a primal instinct. We may have all the food in the world at our fingertips, but if there is a cake in the fridge that we have been forbidden to eat, we will do the impossible to get it, and we will reject the rest of the available food without remorse.
I want to make it clear that, of course, the fact of loving someone is not and should not be a guarantee of anything. It is neither reprehensible nor reprehensible that the person we are pining for does not feel the same way. Our one-sided love should not be demanded back from anyone. Everyone has the right to love the one he or she loves or not to love him or her back. The opposite is called harassment and/or abuse. The context in which this is discussed is in the context of relationships with people with whom we start a love relationship and who suddenly cut us off without understanding why.
In Guillermo's case, his love is irresponsibly poured into a toxic container. The recipient is a psychopath, a sociopath, a narcissist who knows nothing about love. A predator who perfectly detects the shortcomings of her victims, be they affective, self-esteem, sexual or of any other kind, and who is capable of becoming a perfect specimen of what they yearn for. And in a way, they should not be reproached for this either, on the basis that nothing is eternal. Not even healthy love is, for it too sometimes fails. It is absurd to cry foul when the psychopath terminates the contract without warning, deflating the revolt of the abandoned, concluding a transaction from which they too got something in return: ego, sex, adventure, power, etc. For as painful as it is to admit, the fact that many accept such relationships is due to the fact that, for better or worse, up until the moment they recklessly accepted the terms of the relationship, not objectively questioning the "advantages" offered by the sociopath on duty, no one had offered them anything of equal intensity or dimension.
The answer to the question in the title of the post is "yes". Some people are capable of loving someone who systematically despises them. The difference between the way of taking the expiration of these "unsigned contracts" between an empathic person and a psychopath, is that the latter knows about limitations and is more aware -even if they don't understand love as we do (or so we think)-, that even the effects of that love as an opiate narcotic whose recommended dose we are ALL willing to exceed when it comes to us, is as perishable as life itself. They know that there is nothing reprehensible in consuming it until the climax is reached and they are capable of abandoning it afterwards without explanation, because morality is an obstacle that only the empathic enjoy stumbling over again and again and again...