– since I’d gone out with someone who had her own library.
When I stopped writing at twenty-four, I’d also left behind all of my literary relationships. La Negra didn’t read, except for the occasional advanced self-help book (Deepak Chopra, Louise Hay) or some treatise on Chinese medicine, which was her line of work. She had a contempt for bookish people that suited me perfectly. Early on, she’d taken an interest in my books. She’d found them in the little library in my bedroom one of the first times she’d stayed over. She was leafing through them, sitting on the bed. I took them out of her hands. I forbade her to read them. They didn’t represent me anymore. I was ashamed of them. I didn’t even know why I kept them. They were a product of my depression. They’re an affront to life, I think I even told her, and what we had between us was pure life. She was the first woman I was going to live with, and she was a mother, and I was in love, I felt positive for the first time in a long time.
In our first encounters she told me practically her entire love life. She’d started having sex very young, at thirteen, like it was a kind of game. In her family there was never a lot of fuss about bodies. Her father used to walk around the house in the buff like it was nothing. She’d always dated much older guys. She’d had two miscarriages, at sixteen and twenty-three, and she’d been in love with two men at the same time; they’d all lived together in Pajas Blancas. One of them had left on the verge of going crazy, and with the one who stayed, the one she’d soon have to leave, she’d had Yamila. I didn’t ask for details about any of that. I didn’t ask if the three of them slept together or if they took turns, and she didn’t tell me. It was a boundary she set in her own story, to protect me, and it was for my own protection that I didn’t cross it. I didn’t have so much to tell, just that I’d debuted with a toothless whore in a brothel in Lautaro, in the south of Chile, on a trip I’d taken with the basketball team when I was seventeen. Before that, at fifteen, I’d sucked on my first little girlfriend’s tits. Afterwards, I hadn’t been able to sleep all night, and the next day I’d apologised for having disrespected her: this image summed up how pathetic my adolescence had been. Later, when I was older, I’d had two important girlfriends, but more than anything I’d dedicated myself to sex for pleasure, once I’d got past the dark initial phase of excess. La Negra didn’t ask me what that excess had involved, and I didn’t explain. My nocturnal, cocaine-fuelled excursions in Montevideo seemed too distant, and not simply because they were far in the past. Even at the time, they had already seemed far away. While they were happening, it was as if they were happening to someone else, and I’d never felt the need to share them with anyone. I also didn’t tell La Negra about any of that because it revealed a sexuality that was sad and turbulent and superficial compared to hers.
It was only four years later, during the final period of our living together, when I’d found myself with the urge to take up writing again. I’d stay in the living room after dinner with a notebook, my tobacco and a thermos full of tea. It didn’t take long for La Negra to start complaining. She didn’t like it when I stayed up writing. To my utter shock, the reason – when I asked for one – was that sometimes Yamila got up at night to go to the bathroom. La Negra didn’t want me to be there, didn’t want me to see her daughter half asleep, in her underwear. Yamila was thirteen years old then. She was developing quickly, but she was still a child. I asked La Negra what she was afraid of. What did she think I was capable of doing to her daughter? She didn’t reply with words. She looked at me with hatred and shame. I wasn’t willing to stop writing, and again writing saved me, this time springing me from the cage of a relationship that had been collapsing for ages.
When I told La Negra I’d met someone, she didn’t get upset. All she did was suggest I hold off on introducing her to the kids until I was one hundred per cent sure it was something serious. As it happened, I never did introduce them, though I considered it. A little surprised at herself, Clara went on the pill. She’d gone some time without a stable relationship and without any intention of having one. We didn’t make any long-term plans, but we saw each other a lot. Clara would have liked to meet the boys, and I thought it could have a soothing effect on them; sometimes they worried because they thought I was lonely.
‘Do you have fun when you’re home alone?’ they’d ask me.
During the first phase we’d slept together practically every night, at her house or mine. Wednesday morning, when we were both free, we’d walk to the estuary. Later on, when I was with La Negra – sometimes the very same day – I felt spacious, overflowing, unattainable. The more I fucked, the more I felt like fucking. I developed the shoulders of a gym rat. Now that I was on a roll, I also reclaimed the night. I returned to downtown Montevideo, to certain bars where friends had told me that my reputation had gained me a cult following. People remarked on how good I looked and asked me what my secret was. I told them the truth: sex, a lot of sex, and they laughed as if I’d cracked a joke.
Then, at the beginning of last December, just two months before Alejandro died, like an idiot I fell in love with La Negra all over again. All my desire, suddenly and exclusively, came to focus on her. The feeling was so strong that it forced me to end my relationship with Clara. Clara is going to look at me in utter surprise when I tell her what’s happening to me. She’d had feelings for other people during all our time together, too, but it hadn’t made her want to break things off with me. That’s how couples work. For the first time in the past ten, almost eleven months, I sensed that Clara secretly hoped our relationship would work out. Something told me that by leaving her, I was closing the door to normalcy forever. Mornings with her were nice. Sex, coffee, reading the newspaper. When she saw there was nothing I could do to change my feelings, she swallowed her sadness. Somehow she always knew she stood to lose – after all, La Negra was the mother of my children.
‘After all, she’s the mother of my soul,’ I would correct her, as if there was even the slightest possibility she would understand me.
The feeling will take me completely by surprise. It will gestate over four, five days and then attack me, leaving me utterly perplexed. One of the mornings when I go by early to take the boys to school, while we have breakfast and help them get dressed, La Negra won’t draw out the moment when we hand off the mate in a caress. Then she’s going to freeze when I brush her hip as she waits for the bread to toast. Then, when I tell her that after I drop the kids off at school I’ll come back for a little visit with her, she’ll reply that we’d better leave it for another time, today she’s got some terrible premenstrual cramps. I’ll call her later that same day to see how she is and to wish her good night.
The next day I’ll send her a message telling her how much I miss her body and that I’ve had several ideas for our next encounter, a message she won’t answer until the next morning. Thursday or Friday morning I again suggest a visit, but she’s bleeding oceans and it’s not like it was at the beginning; she doesn’t let me touch her when she’s on her period. On Saturday I invite her to come over at night, but Yamila (fifteen) is planning a party at the house with her school friends and La Negra has to be there. The next time I take Paco and Juan to school it will once again be impossible for us to meet: she has an appointment at the social security offices at ten. In each of her negatives I’ll perceive a kind of deep-rooted regret, and I’m going to assume that La Negra is developing feelings for me, that she’d like to get back together and it hurts to have to share me with Clara, only she doesn’t know how to tell me.
I will have already talked to Clara the morning when I catch La Negra in the kitchen and tell her how I feel. When I tell her I want to get back together, she will stiffen. I don’t care how hard it’s going to be to patch things up and forgive each other completely, I’ll tell her. I’m willing to talk for as many hours as we need to talk and to cover every possible point. She’s going to look at me suspiciously. It’s going to seem too radical to her. Love is radical, I’ll reply.
‘You broke up with Clara without knowing what was going on with me?’
I couldn’t be with her anymore. Whether or not our
