When you’re in love, there’s no way out

by David Benjamin 

 

“… The Italian novelist Federico Moccia appears to have been the catalyst for turning the custom into a romantic gesture after his popular book, I Want You, which was made into a 2012 movie, featured a scene of two love interests attaching a padlock on the Ponte Vecchio Bridge in Florence…”

— Eduardo Medina, New York Times

 

PARIS — Picture, if you will, a springtime in Paris … chestnuts in blossom, songbirds atwitter, just-hitched newlyweds agape at the towering eiffels and sun-dappled limestone. The male of the two love interests bursts upon his mate, who has been leaning over a bridge rail as the Seine glides lazily below. 

“Look what I just got, honey” he enthuses, holding up a small brass padlock and key in metallic colors that evoke—in the mind’s eye of his consort—burlesque pasties and mylar birthday balloons.

“What’s that thing?” she asks, backing away and suspiciously perusing her alleged gift.

He explains that it’s a “lovelock,” attachable to a bridge, a railing, a turnbuckle, almost any iron rod or tumescence in Gay Paree. She wonders :What’s the point of hanging a cheap padlock out in the open where neither of them have anything to lock up and no actual container in which to lock it.

“Oh no, honey,” says he. “This is the symbol of our undying union. It’s our wedding vows all over again!” He explains that they can write their names indelibly on the surface of the lock, snap it shut, throw the key into the river and leave it behind in Paris, hanging off a protruding screw or rust-crusted eyehole, to signify to all humankind their eternal, laminated, full-metal devotion. 

The woman, who has noticed that her guy calling her “honey” instead of saying her name is beginning to grate on her nerves, allows him to perform the padlock ritual. She lets him kiss her to seal the moment, and then leads him away hurriedly, lest some passerby associate with her the inscription, “Kyle & Amber, Forever more!” 

The attachment of “lovelocks” to public buildings, bridges, churches, monuments, Holocaust memorials, celebrity gravestones and a host of other vulnerable protrusions in famous places has become a wildly popular tourist tic and an innovative form of vandalism. It is the 21st-century analog to pulling out your pocket knife and carving a “Tom Loves Becky” valentine into the bark of a beech tree. But, of course, nobody (except Gibbs) carries a knife anymore, or possesses the wherewithal to distinguish a beech from a tamarack, and everyone is conditioned to buying ready-made, mass-market tchotchkes offered in a rainbow of “designer colors.”

The lovelock is the ur-tchotchke of the moment, notwithstanding the public-works issues it has spawned and the disturbing implications of its symbolism.  

Urban officials from Paris and Florence to New York and San Francisco have struggled with padlocks springing up and spreading like sentimental acne over the surfaces of their cityscapes. In Paris, the gracefully unembellished iron span of the Pont des Arts became so laden with lovelocks—as many as a hundred thousand—that the chain-link mesh on, which the glittery shackles had accumulated, collapsed. The same fate afflicted the Pont de l’Archevêché behind the nave of Notre Dame. City workers were dispatched to remove the sagging mesh, destroying every lovelock. To foil the next wave of the lovelock lovelorn, the city installed, between the stanchions, sheets of plexiglass impervious to the depredations of romantic visigoths. 

Meanwhile, back in America, in the Grand Canyon—and, presumably, other national parks—Park Service rangers have taken to carrying bolt-cutters, with which they summarily terminate the hardened-boron declarations of undying bondage between Bob and Carol, Ted and Alice, Lenny and Squiggy. Quoth one snip-slinging ranger, “Love is strong, but it’s not as strong as our bolt-cutters.”

Besides the unsightliness of lovelocks, which—from a distance—evoke the barnacles on the hull of a humpback whale, or a fungal infestation on a dying tree, they suggest a symbolism more carceral than connubial. 

Every jail, prison, slave galley, chain gang and concentration camp is ankle-deep in padlocks.

A padlock, for example, secured the door of the dungeon where the Count of Monte Cristo languished. for years in darkness, covered in filth, with only sadists and vermin to keep him company He was so desperate to flee the locks that held him in durance vile that he clawed through walls, squirmed through crawlspaces and ruined his nails.

A padlock, for a more mundane example, adorns your typical storage unit, wherein the once-loved but long-forgotten detritus of a lifetime gathers dust and nourishes mildew ’til death—or departure—leaves it to be haggled over and carried off by scavengers, ragpickers and auctioneers. 

Speaking of the padlocks of Paris, in Eugene Sue’s classic novel, Les Mystéres de Paris, a villain called the Schoolmaster is imprisoned on a dank ramp between two doors, one leading upward into a filthy cellar, the other adjacent to the Seine, which half-floods the bleak prison. The wretched inmate is trapped in a lockup that seems as inescapable and eternal as the marriage of Kyle and Amber. He’s damaged, sodden, freezing, blind to the world, his only company the brunette rats who spread the Black Death and killed a third of the population of Europe.

And then, there’s No Exit, in which Parisian locksmith Jean-Paul Sartre depicted Hell as a room full of people—none of them loving or capable of love—with no way out. Were Sartre writing in today’s Paris, he might have been tempted to add to this nightmare a seeming, tantalizing escape, through a padlocked door…

… foiled by the knowledge, among the damned, that some idiot had kissed the nearest bride and thrown the key into the river.