An Asymmetry Without Drama

Some relationships never become love stories and are difficult to tell for precisely that reason. They have no great scenes, declarations, or dramatic breaks. Everything happens in a cooler and more ambiguous realm: admiration, professional closeness, unspoken expectations, small gestures of loyalty, and then, gradually, disappointment, reproach, distance, and, finally, hostility.

I once knew a highly intelligent woman. She had been my student—an exceptional student in an exceptional year—and later became my colleague and collaborator. I will not give her name or specify exactly where we met, because I am not concerned here with her biography, but with the workings of a relationship that long remained beyond precise classification. She was one of those people who enter a group not through easy charm but through force of mind. She understood quickly, made connections, grasped nuances, asked good questions and, above all, had no wish to fall behind the others; on the contrary, she wanted to be first.

I admired her intelligence. At times it impressed me. Her powers of concentration and her intellectual ambition made her stand out in an environment dominated by self-assured men. Yet my admiration stopped at a point I could not get beyond: it did not turn into desire. Her presence was strong, her mind remarkable, her body beautiful. And still, something in me drew back. It was not a decision, a moral refusal, or contempt. It was simply the absence of that obscure summons without which closeness between a man and a woman remains suspended.

Intelligence That Fails to Kindle Desire

For a long time I believed that intelligence was one of the most powerful forms of seduction. And perhaps it is, but not always. Some kinds of intelligence give warmth, while others cut. Some minds attract you through their generosity, while others immediately put you on alert. Hers belonged more to the second category. I admired her, but I could not relax in her company.

In a research environment, this quality was valuable. She knew how to learn, follow an argument, compare, seek out sources, and make up for what she lacked. She wanted to understand not only what I knew, but how I had come to know it. This should, after all, have flattered me, and to some extent it did. Yet I sensed that her admiration was not merely intellectual. She watched me with a sustained and precise attention, too sensitive to what I did, said, or passed on to others not to betray something more.

Her intelligence, which I sincerely admired, also acted as a brake on me. I realized that a relationship with her would have been neither simple nor easy, but intensely monitored by her own lucidity. She was too suspicious not to turn daily life into a succession of interpretations and trials of intent. What attracted me intellectually wearied me emotionally before it was ever put to the test. My rejection was an instinct for self-preservation: I sensed that such closeness would have demanded too much energy and too many explanations. For me, passion needed a realm of trust in which I could finally rest.

I remember a small episode, wholly unintended, that confirmed this divide within me between admiration and desire. One evening, while passing through her neighborhood, I caught a glimpse of her through a lit window. The image stayed with me because of the contradiction it revealed: her body was indeed beautiful, almost perfect, and yet recognizing this kindled no desire in me. Her face, her expression, the way she carried herself in my presence did not belong to my private canon of beauty. It was as if admiration stopped at the edge of her body and could go no further.

Admiration That Calls for a Response

She was, very probably, in love with me. She had made no declaration, but no one around us had any doubt. She had first admired me as a teaching assistant on the Electronic Computers course, then transferred from her faculty to take up an assistantship in our department. She herself would have said that, thanks to me, she had fallen in love with computers. This new professional passion undoubtedly included an attachment to the man who had opened that world to her.

For a long time I chose to pretend that I did not know. It was my form of polite cowardice. If I did not name things, I could continue to behave naturally. I treated her like the others, acknowledged her merits, discussed her ideas, but avoided any gesture that might transform her admiration into a promise on my part.

Looking back, I am not sure that this strategy was right. Failing to reciprocate is not the same as offering clarity. Sometimes the silence of the one who does not love is more comfortable for him than for the one who hopes. I did not deliberately encourage her, but neither did I have the courage to end from the beginning an ambiguity that made me uncomfortable. I myself had fallen into such a trap in high school, when I was in love with a classmate who cared nothing for me but did not reject my courtship either.

In such situations there is also a vanity that is hard to confess. Being admired by an intelligent woman cannot leave you indifferent. It confirms an image you have of yourself and gives you the sense that what you have built intellectually possesses a power of attraction. Perhaps it was this very reassurance that made me tolerate the ambiguity for so long. I did not want to hurt her, but neither did I entirely relinquish the light her admiration cast upon me.

When Closeness Becomes Competition

During the early years we worked in the same areas of research. She sought to learn, to draw close to my research topics, and to understand what I had brought with me from a different intellectual background, that of mathematics. She clearly respected this background and perhaps felt a slight envy of it. I think she too would have liked to follow a more abstract, more mathematical path, freer in its theoretical constructions. She had chosen engineering and was now trying to make up for this through work and participation.

Her intelligence did not work only upon ideas, but upon people as well. She noticed relationships, differences in influence, preferences, affinities, and vulnerabilities. I do not think this side of her arose from her relationship with me. She was naturally endowed with a lively intelligence and an inquisitive spirit. It was not enough for her to understand ideas; she also observed the people who produced them, the relations between them, their influence and rivalries. Intellectual curiosity and curiosity about people were part of the same structure of her character.

Looking back at her, I believe she lacked affection and tried to find it in everything she did. Without a family of her own, she sought more than collaboration and recognition in her professional relationships: she sought gratitude, attachment, and perhaps a form of love. She drew close to people she admired, supported outstanding students, and became emotionally involved in their success. Her generosity was not without expectations; she needed to feel that she mattered to those to whom she gave herself.

This need could make her generous and protective, but also vulnerable. When the expected gratitude or affection failed to come, devotion could turn into disappointment or a critical attitude. I do not think this was calculated, but rather the reaction of someone who invested more emotion in others than she allowed to show.

Over time, our intellectual closeness also became a kind of silent competition. She wanted to know what I knew, to understand what I told others, not to fall behind the discussions, the good students, or the topics emerging around me. This desire to take part was natural and professionally commendable. At times, however, I sensed that this was not only about participation, but also about the need to occupy a place, to be seen, validated, perhaps chosen. She supported the exceptional students—of whom we had no shortage—and sided with them in disputes with her colleagues whenever she had the opportunity.

Growing Apart

At some point she realized that there was not merely another woman in my life, but a serious relationship into which she could not insert herself. I do not think I told her directly. I was discreet, perhaps too discreet, but such things are felt. From that moment on, something changed. There was no quarrel, no scene, no declaration of disappointment. There was only a gradual withdrawal, a cooling, a shift in her professional loyalties toward other groups, other alliances, other centers of gravity.

Only then did I understand that unrequited love does not always fade cleanly. Sometimes it turns into criticism, at other times into distance or a cold form of retaliation, all the harder to discuss because it is never acknowledged as such. I do not know how harshly she judged me. I do not know whether, inwardly, she accused me of indifference, blindness, or selfishness. I know only that our former closeness never returned, and her admiration became a muted criticism of everything I did.

Institutions and Their Petty Judgments

In 1994, a few years after I left for Italy, I tried to return to the department. My request for reinstatement had been accepted, but at my former rank of lecturer, while my assistants had meanwhile become professors. The head of the department then proposed that a professorship be created for me in the new staffing plan, for which I would apply. Its progress stopped at the very beginning, however: the Faculty Council voted against it. I later learned that the negative votes had not come from colleagues in Automation, as I had initially suspected, but from our own department.

I never found out whether she had played any part in that vote. I did know, however, that at the time she wielded considerable influence in the department. She had been the Party secretary, and the Revolution had abolished the position but not the relationships, authority, and habits of wielding influence built around it. I imagined then that the opposition might have originated with her or been encouraged by her. I had no evidence and did not want to ask her. In any case, she would have replied that it was not true. On the other hand, if the vote had angered her, she should have said something to me, if only in memory of the years in which we had worked together.

Perhaps I projected more onto her than was really there. Perhaps she had played no part at all. The suspicion therefore remained mine alone, and I cannot help recording it. At that moment I felt that an unfulfilled affection could return, years later, in the form of a cold judgment. In institutions, as in private lives, the past never dies completely. It circulates through opinions, votes, reservations, and silences, through the way a person is welcomed or rejected. After twenty years of work in the department, that was my colleagues' response. Perhaps they felt betrayed when I decided to flee to Italy. Others had done so before me, but they did not receive the same reward I did.

What Remains

I learned later that she had died far too young, of a relentless illness. The news disturbed me more than I would have expected. After so many years of working together, I had cared deeply for her, though not in the way she would have wanted. Death has a way of clearing away resentment and leaving behind only the essential questions. What had I meant to her? What had she meant to me? How much of her later coldness had come from a wounded love? How much of my silence had been delicacy, and how much convenience?

I do not know. I know only that, for me, she remains the example of a closeness that never found its proper register. She regarded me from a place where her admiration mingled with desire. I regarded her from a place where respect and admiration stopped short of desire. Between those two gazes, a long relationship took shape—useful, sometimes fruitful, at other times unsettling, but never truly clear.

If in other stories I suffered because I was not chosen, here I discovered the opposite difficulty: that of being chosen by someone whom I could not choose in turn. It is a quiet form of guilt. It is invisible, creates no great scenes, and does not easily find its way into memoirs. Yet it remains somewhere, like an unpaid debt to a woman whose intelligence I admired and to whom, perhaps, I did not know how to respond with sufficient clarity.