Love goes on forever

“Love goes on forever” is the principle Abdel Khader Khan draws from a painful episode with Rinaldo: love, he insists, cannot be tested like honesty or loyalty, and does not necessarily end when trust fails or affection turns to hatred. The expression gives lasting force to a love that survived betrayal, flight, and a later encounter in which Khader chose not to make himself known.

Meaning and Form

In Khader’s account, Rinaldo tried to test his honesty by allowing him to discover where a large sum of cash was kept. Khader succumbed to the temptation, took the money, and ran away, although he says that he loved Rinaldo. The account holds these facts together rather than treating the theft as proof that love was absent: Khader admits the betrayal while rejecting the idea that a test can determine whether love is real.

The expression sharpens that distinction. Honesty and loyalty, Khader says, can be tested; love cannot. His repeated insistence that love goes on forever makes duration—not flawless conduct or unbroken trust—the defining claim. He locates love in a part of the self that does not die, extending the phrase beyond the immediate failure between the two men.

Rinaldo and the Return to Genova

Khader later encountered Rinaldo again in Genova, almost fifteen years after running away. He saw him sitting with other men of his age as they watched two elderly men play chess. Rinaldo was more than sixty; he wore a grey cardigan and black velvet scarf, and his face appeared hollow and discoloured. Khader noticed him coughing violently into a white handkerchief.

Khader did not approach. He walked past with his gaze averted and even adopted a stooping walk so Rinaldo would not recognize him; only at the last moment did he glance back. The reunion therefore gives the expression an unresolved, concrete consequence: love had endured in Khader’s telling, but it did not bring confession, reconciliation, or renewed contact. The phrase names persistence, not repair.