has a lot of things to consider, it’s all too sudden. When I tell her that I love her, she’s going to peer at me as if there were something to interpret. I won’t stop telling her, so she’ll see how sure I am. I’ll send her two or three messages a day: telling her about something nice I’m doing with the kids, or about something Paco did, something Juan said. Messages saying, You remember the time when this or that? and I’ll get more and more enthusiastic. Every day that La Negra takes to reflect speaks to the seriousness of our situation, how open our wounds are, and I’m going to respect her caution. I’m going to prepare, I’m going to remember our story, searching for keys and clues that will help us repair everything that’s broken. I’m going to regret, for starters, having relegated her to the role of a lover for all this time. I’m going to try to console myself with the idea that we’ve already gone through everything. What was left to us but to accept, once and for all, that life had put each of us in the other’s path? I’m going to thank heaven for the renewed assault of this feeling, the sudden, luminous, poetic course of my life. I’m going to think of the boys’ happiness; they’re so little that they’ll probably end up forgetting the couple of years when their parents were separated.
And one afternoon, burning with desire to see her, I’m going to go by without calling first, at the time when she usually comes home after collecting the boys from school, and I’m going to find out that she’s not there. Yamila will have picked up Paco and Juan and walked them home. It’s Yamila who will be making some pasta for lunch. Apparently, her mother has had to go to Montevideo on some urgent errands and it’s unclear when she’ll be back. While Yamila finishes cooking lunch, I’m going to go outside with Paco and Juan to watch them ride their bikes around the triangular plaza across from the house. It will be a sunny, spring-like day, and my impatience will start to grow. It’s almost time to go back to work and I don’t like the idea of the boys being alone with only their sister looking after them, and I can’t stop looking at my watch and staring at the end of the track where La Negra will have to appear after she gets off the bus.
Around that corner, eventually, comes a white pickup with its headlights on. At first I think it’s a police truck. Some metres before it reaches the fork at the little plaza, the truck stops and sits motionless for several seconds. I don’t know how I know, but La Negra is in that truck. I know that when she saw me in the street she asked the guy at the wheel to stop, and I know that she’s just spent the night with that guy. She’s explaining the situation to him; she’s explaining who I am. Then, the pickup, in no hurry, turns onto her street and stops at the driveway. I cross the plaza to watch her get out of the passenger side: she meets my eyes as I walk. I look into the truck’s open window, and I’m met by the stink of cigarettes and alcohol. Fabricio, a fat man with the look of a mechanic, introduces himself and shakes my hand, and then he says goodbye to La Negra. Talk later, he says.
At that moment, the boys will have dropped their bikes and come to greet their mother; they’ll trail behind her as she goes in the front door without paying them the slightest attention. I’ll wait for La Negra to come out of the bathroom while Yamila makes Paco and Juan eat.
Outside, as we sit in two plastic chairs, she’s going to tell me about Fabricio with a cigarette in her hand. La Negra isn’t a smoker. She smokes blonde rolling tobacco on special occasions, for short periods. She smoked when I met her. One cigarette could last her an eternity. She smoked it in deep concentration, taking pleasure from it but also, it seemed to me, as though consulting an oracle. That afternoon, after exhaling several mouthfuls of smoke, searching for the appropriate words, the proper tone, she’ll tell me that with Fabricio she has the chance to experience something new. That’s why she couldn’t make up her mind whether to tell me about him, because of the newness and fragility of this thing she didn’t know the name of, only that it isn’t a silly love, a romantic love. Since I don’t quite know what she means by that, she’ll be forced to explain. I look at her mouth, and she sees me looking at it. She’d put on red lipstick in the bathroom, but it doesn’t help at all. You can still tell where she was.
‘What you feel for me is romantic love,’ she’ll say, covering her lips with her cigarette hand. ‘It’s not mature love. It’s not real love.’
My vertigo will keep me from saying much. I can only ask her if she’s already made the decision to stay with this Fabricio, if there isn’t any chance she’ll change her mind.
He was grey. La Negra was going to be with a fat grey guy. I go from sitting in my chair to kneeling on the ground. Then I slide down until I’m like a bracket against the wall. Then I gather the last of my strength to cross the dining room, and I end up stretched out on Juan’s little bed.
I’m going to smoke more than I’ve ever smoked in my life during the weeks that follow, wondering what the fuck is happening. How can it be that I’ve lost her just when it seemed everything was miraculously falling into place? How can it be that after having lost her, my love for her doesn’t diminish, but actually intensifies to levels I never would have thought possible? What evil spell has made me fall in love with her for the second time right as she’s starting to go out with that fat arsehole?
I won’t set foot in her house again during the few remaining days of school. The boys’ holidays begin in the second half of December. She’ll bring them to stay with me until Christmas, but she won’t show up alone. She’s going to come in Fabricio’s truck with Fabricio, who’s going to stay in the driver’s seat with the engine running while I receive the kids in the doorway and she hands me a bag with their things. I’m going to call her several times while I’m with the boys, but La Negra isn’t going to pick up or answer my messages no matter how long I wait, lying on the bed with the phone on my chest, checking it every once in a while even though it hasn’t rung or vibrated. On Christmas Eve she’s going to send a very short text wishing us a merry Christmas and letting me know that she’ll come to collect them on the 27th. She’ll stay silent when I reply, almost immediately, that we owe ourselves one last conversation, so we can lay all our cards on the table.
Paco is going to find me crying several times when he wakes up. He’s going to ask me why I’m crying, then whether I’m crying for Mum. I’m going to tell him half the truth: that I’m crying for his mother and that he shouldn’t worry, that I’ll get over it.
I won’t want to get over it. My love may be a childish love, it may be pure possessiveness, but it’s untameable. It may be a bitter love, but it’s also very sweet. The heart brought back to life after so long. The heart beating, flooded with an objectless love. I’m going to tend that love to keep it from waning. I’m going to worry about the day when that love will scatter like sand over the rest of the objects in the world. I’m going to try to silence my mind, which will teem with images of La Negra and fat Fabricio. I’m going to try. In the worst one, I see her having an orgasm and telling the fat muppet: take it, take it. That’s what she used to say when she had an orgasm: take it. As if she were the one who was ejaculating. She must have said it to Yamila’s father, too, and she must be saying it to the fat guy now. I don’t think she inaugurated that habit with me. I never wanted to find out.
I’ll also have images of us in old age, back together again, humiliated by time. Images of the two of us sitting there, remembering the past, reflecting on the winding path of our relationship. When I think that La Negra is an idiot for not returning my messages or calls, when I think about stopping by the fat bastard’s house one day and beating the shit out of him in front of my kids, it’s going to seem like those thoughts are of a lesser quality than the feelings my heart produces – feelings full of radiant energy. I’m going to feel split in two, mind and heart: the heart joyful, given over to its favourite activity, capable of limitless feeling; the mind irritated and at war. I’m going to tell myself that I have to trust my heart and give it free reign. I’m going to talk to my mind so it will submit to my heart. I’m going to tell it: Mind, stay in your place; Mind, don’t be afraid.
Even though we don’t have sex
