11.

Today I dreamed that we were going on our high-school graduation trip and that in my hand luggage, in the outer pocket of my carry-on, there were two rats: one was real and the other fake. I just left them there. Maybe it was because I talked to Ramiro last night. Apparently the mouse isn’t gone yet, and there’s just no way that Mauro’s cat can be convinced to hunt it. It won’t even get close to the kitchen. I found this funny, Mr. Tough Cat. A cat fully domesticated and well-fed expected all of a sudden to have instincts it’s in no way capable of having honed. Meanwhile apparently it’s really made itself at home at our house, it spends the whole day sleeping, apparently it particularly likes the floor where my room is, the little steps and the chair from under the table. Ramiro talked about the cat like it was a person, which I really found funny, apparently they’ve bonded. He asked me about Dad. I told him, I told him about going over there for tea, about our kind of tricky hangout at home that afternoon, in Dad’s home, in our home, ex-home—whatever, there. Carmen was fortunately not there, I mean not for any real reason, I like her perfectly fine, it’s just easier to relax if it’s just Dad, even though relaxing, what is commonly known as relaxing, is not exactly what we did, either, in the end. The kids were there, our teenage half brothers. Delightful but demanding. Perpetually in motion. It’s incredible, you can tell Dad’s fully back now. And Lorenzo, such a teenager, can’t catch a break from those hormones, is my impression, you just can’t even imagine what an attitude he has. Not with me, obviously, in fact I felt like he was trying to form some sort of alliance with me while I was there, but with Dad he will not quit, it’s crazy. Facundo, no, Facu is huge, but he’s still like a kid, he must be five nine now, but he’s very childish, which of course is an explosive combo. He messes around all the damn time, sits on top of you and totally squashes you, he’s like a mammoth wanting attention all the time. He does a pretty good job of getting it, he’s very funny, plus he and Lorenzo have this routine going, of sorts. Lorenzo acts like he’s Facundo’s father and calls him snot-nosed all the time, Facu goes nuts, they spend the day kicking each other’s asses, it’s funny to watch, although I can’t even begin to describe to you how tiring it gets. I went in for tea and came out exhausted. I still have my adolescent-brother quota taken care of, I haven’t gone back to see them since that afternoon. I promised to tell Dad when I’d be leaving, he wanted to invite me over for a barbecue or something, so I guess I’ll see them then. Dad seemed good. Pretty relaxed. Or maybe just the contrast with his children/quasi-grandchildren. Clearly having the family keeps him sedated, as it were. And Carmen, she’s also very hyperactive. Apparently they now have other couple friends, something like a social life, like they go out to eat and stuff, make these social plans, and Dad wears these little shirts, and corduroy, very cool, a kind of more robust Woody Allen, Carmen’s clearly the one in charge of outfits. And he has fully given in to it. As though it were another life—in fact it is, it’s another life. It’s fine, I’m happy for him, it’s good. After tea and the interlude with the brothers we sat for a while in his study with the door closed, my ex-bedroom (so much ex right now, so much), and there we were able to have more of a real conversation. He told me about his new life, he laughed a little, at that, his new role, saying that sometimes when he’s tired he locks himself in his study and everybody knows not to bother him. That he has a really good relationship with the boys, that he’s enjoyed, that he’s enjoying fatherhood again a lot, the fact of living with these kids. That sometimes he regrets not being able to be more fully present when it was us, that he had so much going on back then, that what happened with Cora was really very hard on him, not just because of us, but because of him as well. I tried to avoid that subject, but on the other hand my brother and I are the only ones he can talk about it with, so I let him talk, let him go back to that, and I tried to make him understand, again, that we truly hadn’t ever wanted for anything, that I have the fondest memories of him as a father, that I have no resentments towards him, but it’s no use, he feels he has a sort of debt to us, and there’s no way to convince him that he doesn’t. But he was fine, it’s not like he got too worked up about it or anything. He told me he’d started writing again, that he’d been doing that and that he was happy with it, but he wasn’t discussing it with anyone because they mocked him, that Carmen didn’t get it, that she thought it was just some stupid thing that old men did, that they started calling him Neruda when they first got wind of it, just stuff like that, so now he only writes from within the confines of his study, he says, without showing it to anyone, but he’s happy, he says for now he doesn’t feel the need for readers. I asked him to show me something, told him I’d like to read something he’s written, see what he’s been working on, and he told me not yet, that he’s still revising, that maybe later on, that yeah, that he’d show me something, but he insisted—it was conditional upon this—I was not to give him any feedback, not to tell him what I thought. That he was embarrassed, and that in any case, once it was ready, once it was done, he didn’t have any intentions of altering it anyway, that it was all just what it was, that that would just be that. What about you? he said, he wanted to know what I’d been working on, if I was writing, and I said, very little, that I didn’t really have much time for writing, that between school and the boyfriend I had very little time left for myself. Though then that struck me as funny, the thing about time for myself, since all those things, boyfriend/school/work, were mine, were me, and it’s strange I would refer to them as things/activities taking me away—or at the very least distracting me—from myself. I stopped talking. I kept thinking about that. Time for myself, what could I have meant by that, what could I have been referring to, exactly, when I said time for myself?

The Counting Crows CD showed up. I mean, I guess it must have been there the whole time, but I just found it. It must have fallen behind something or whatever, because I’d already looked through your CD collection and hadn’t spotted it, and then suddenly, out of the blue, there it just was. Your mom must have been tidying up in here the other day, and then what do you know but I’m looking for something to listen to, and there I spot it, spot its yellow spine, just as though it always had been sitting there. I play “Round Here.” I can’t believe it, from all the way back then. I remember that woman from the video, walking with a suitcase, in a city at first and then on this esplanade, I remember that the best, that esplanade like a desert. I don’t remember exactly if that was where this girl was, I think so, she had this dress on, and then at some point she was falling someplace. Falling into water? I don’t fully remember, I do know the overall sense of it was of total desolation. She was devastated, she was a lunatic, you had to love her for it. Was there a guy there too? I don’t know why I feel like I remember a guy wearing a suit, I think it was a brown suit, but honestly I really couldn’t say if he was there or not, wearing a suit, in any case the song takes me back to this desolate sensation of a man in a brown suit in a vacant lot or on a salt flat, and he was so inadequate, uncomfortable, and out of place. I listened to it a few times in a row, Ali watching me cry like a moron, poor thing, until finally she came and sat on my lap. Then it got worse. I pet her very vehemently; at the third drop that plopped onto her back she decided to move on to a safer place. Her indifference did me good, it sort of snapped me out of my melancholy. You would have snapped at me if you had been here, told me that the Counting Crows are lame and that you’d stopped listening to them in nineteen ninety-five. Which is fine/fair. All I can say to that is that it’s easy to refuse to be sad when you’re only planning on living for such a short amount of time.