15.

I go to Vani’s bar, the bar she set up with her fancy new boyfriend. Your mom offered me your sister’s bike when I left, but I didn’t want it because I didn’t want to get there quickly, that was the whole point. Besides, I was half-asleep and kind of numb and afraid of falling over. It’s freezing out, of course, but it does me good, right now it does me good. I walk quickly, hiding my face clear up to my nose in the high neck of your jacket. I put my hands in the pockets and find a bus ticket. It must be yours, it’s from nineteen ninety-six. A ticket from a trip to Trevelin. I get so depressed with these very short days, fourteen fucking hours of darkness, so much, so much night. With this much darkness you’d have to be Swedish or Canadian or something in order to get anything done, to want to do anything regardless, to feel like going out. All I want to do in this type of cold with this eternal nighttime is sleep or drink wine. Sleep and drink wine. But nothing else. Sleep during the day and drink wine at night. Or the other way around. That’s all I’d do. That and snuggling up with someone, of course, which pairs well with both wine and being in bed. Drinking, sleep, and procreation, on with the human race.

From the corner I see a lit-up sign for a beer brand with this orangish reflection on the sidewalk. There are a couple of bikes at the door. Anybody in Esquel who’s still awake—and alive—is here. I walk in, and the first thing that hits me is they’re playing the Police. The Police, can you believe that? I mean, come on. I unzip your jacket, and the warmth of the bar unfreezes my face. It feels hot, I must be bright red. The Police. I glance around quickly, but I don’t see him, don’t detect him, and there aren’t that many people after all. There is a group of kids playing pool in the back. They’re younger, I’d probably know who they were if they told me their last names, they must all be younger siblings of people I know, kids I stopped seeing when they were still in elementary school and that are now adults, the boys among them even casting meaningful looks in my direction. So funny. Then there are a few couples and several drunks falling asleep on their barstools. Based on that I assume they must have been here for a while. The bar’s not bad, is my impression. And there, serving as waitress and bartender, is Vanina. She’s happy to see me and she comes out from behind the bar and comes up to give me a hug. I think she must be a little drunk, she must take Sundays to relax, since they don’t open again until Thursday. She kind of crushes me with her hug and then says, almost shouting, as though the volume of the music required it, even though it’s really not that loud, but she more or less yells and enunciates very clearly how awesome it is I came, how she’s going to introduce me to her husband and that—here the level of expression in her face rises, while the volume goes down—she gesticulates, as though my hearing is impaired, he’s here, she says, and I say, who, who’s here. Julián, he’s in the bathroom. On his own, she says. I knew it, I knew this place was bad news/did not bode well, did I not? I didn’t even get to say if it was a big deal for me or not because she did it for me, investing the news with such significance that I couldn’t help but get nervous, very nervous. I have to go to the bathroom, my bathroom, the women’s restroom. I wrest my arm away from her and tell her I’ll be back, I’ll be right back, I tell her, and I torpedo towards the ladies’ room. Fortunately—this had not gone unnoticed by me when I came in, and hence my strategy—the different bathrooms are at opposite ends of the bar. I don’t want to be too scatological, I’ll just say my nerves had done their damage, although I wouldn’t want to blame it all on Julián, I was also coming up on the end of an incredibly long day, so I presume my body’s rather aggressive reaction just then was provoked by the whole thing. I thought I was going to faint, I thought I wasn’t going to overcome the bathroom/toilet incident. But I did, after a while, of course, and not before a worried Vanina came in to ask me if I was okay, if I needed anything, and I told her no, that everything was fine, that I guessed I had just eaten something that hadn’t agreed with me, and then I added the thing about the long day, kind of to distract her, saying, too, how—on top of everything—I’d also just gotten my period. Which is true, as if the rest were not enough, I got my period, despite the fact that it was about a week too soon, and I’m normally pretty regular. Or I used to be.

Vanina says she’ll bring me a pad or something, that she’ll check to see what she has in the office, that she definitely has something. She comes back with one of those ones with wings and superabsorbent or ultra-absorption gel or whatever, which is a serious abomination of an innovation because it doesn’t even have any cotton anymore, and that whole synthetic thing/material does nothing but collect odors. And the wings, what a terrible idea, I—whenever I have the bad luck to come across them—always cut them off. Not only did I never understand their function, but also I very quickly realized their obvious disadvantage: they lend themselves to spillage. So, when that happens, even though it’s true that your underwear remains immaculate, the stuff goes straight for your pants or your legs. All I say, obviously, to Vanina is thank you. It’s also not like I am in any position to reject her pad, regardless of how unfortunate I find it.

I splash some water on my face. Some girls come in, very excited, and one of them, the one that’s furthest gone, shouts to the other, a girl with curly hair, neither of them’s over fifteen, she says, did you see him, did you see him, and the other one says, he’s so gorgeous, it’s unbelievable, I just can’t even handle it, I’m dying, I’m the most in love with him, bitch I liked him first, okay we can share him, okay let’s share him, which is when I exit the bathroom, I leave. I assume I hardly need to add that I know who they’re talking about. I play it down in my head: I couldn’t care less about him. I want to not be able to care less about him. I’ve been going out with Manuel for two years, I think I’m in love with him, or I don’t know, I don’t even know if I care at this point, really, about being in love, I don’t know what it means; we get along well, we have a good relationship, we’re friends, we have a lot of laughs together, I don’t know, it’s nice. I can’t let myself be affected by some random thing and let it all have been for naught. There was a reason why I left, I remind myself, there was a reason why I left back then, if Julián and I had been in love I would have stayed, wouldn’t I have stayed? Just think of all the things I didn’t like about him. Just think of all the things I didn’t like about him: he was, well, he was selfish, temperamental, that was what it was, he was difficult and despotic, such a despot, always ended up having his way. I see him, he has his back to me, he’s seated at the bar with his back to me. He has his hat on. Vanina sees me coming, she’s talking to him, you can really see her with the light on her and everything. Standing beside her is a guy with a beard, must be her man, I can’t even remember now what she told me his name was, what the hell was his name? She sees me coming, and I see that she says something to him, she loves it, I see that she loves being present for this moment, I see her face full of pleasure, of malicious glee. Julián turns around, he’s wearing his gray hat and a very ugly T-shirt, it has like wolves on it, kind of heavy-metal style, like a Rata Blanca T-shirt. He spins around on his stool and let’s me approach him. He smiles. Oh, but he is so painfully reminiscent of himself. Hey, I say to him, stretching the ey part out, like clinging on to the y in it, while I’m walking up and in the first moment of the hug. He stays there seated on his barstool, so that the height difference makes it so that he practically wraps his legs around me, I mean, of course he doesn’t, he doesn’t wrap his legs around me, but I can feel the inside part, the pressure of the inside of his legs, of his thighs against my hips while he hugs me, and I smell his scent, and I start to feel, to really feel, like crying. That would be the hormones.

The hey is absolutely false, and its only purpose is to slightly conceal my perplexity and to make the moment, the meeting, less important. Accompanied by a couple of slaps on the back, my will to desolemnify, to make it lighter, is negated as soon as my nose makes contact again with his scent. Fuck me. It smells so much like Julián. Immediately after the first few seconds I want to get rid of him, get out of this, get away; I want to back away, and at the first minimal movement I make I feel that he has a pretty tight hold on me, I can’t go now, nor do I want to, and I relax and hug him and put my head on his shoulder, and he says, Hi, a very long hi, stretched out, sickly sweet, a hi like it’s been so long, and I, instead of crying or of leaving or of at least just saying nothing, I say, Jackass, you had kids with someone else, that’s not cool.

Juli laughs; “Every Breath You Take” comes on. And I just smell him. Just smell, nothing else.

I can’t stand for this to be this way, I can’t bear that he lucked out so that this moment, this encounter or reencounter, has gone so perfectly, that it has made him look so great, that the stars aligned and everything came together with such perfection. I can’t even blame him for it. For having the bad luck that that song was the one that played right at this moment, like our moment that Sunday night, set to Synchronicity, when I’d burst into tears, to have my crying on his shoulder now coincide with that song in particular, given how uneven that CD is, that is fate.

That moment, of course, is completed, over and done with, doesn’t exist for anything except itself, it has no past, no future. I can’t believe I’m here. I could and would prefer to die right now. “Every Breath You Take” is playing, there are a lot of parts of my body making contact with his, I start to relax, leaving/resting my weight against those points of contact, transmitting everything to him, my weight, inhaling his scent, there’s something of everything there, it’s him, and at the same time there are a couple of new textures, something child related, he has a bit of a child-related scent about him, vomit, or something else, and a food scent, a little bit of a food scent too. Resting against my hair, on the left side of my head, there’s the right side of the brim of his hat, of his gray hat. We are in silence, and he follows the rhythm of the song with his right leg, against mine, and he moves mine too. He said nothing in response to my reproach, what could he have said, he just let me cry, which was the best he could do, the only thing he could do. I keep crying, but now I just can’t believe this moment, I don’t understand if I’m experiencing absolute fortune or absolute misfortune. I don’t know. I want it not to end, for it to never end, for it to kill me but kill me suspended there, on him, get inside his wolf shirt, his ugly wolf T-shirt, and have them tear me apart, first tear my clothes off, so that I look sexier being dead, and then me, my flesh, with their teeth, the parts of my body, I want them to devour me, rip me to shreds, to devour me completely and then sleep afterwards, full under the moon, but I don’t want any hunter ever to come and open up their stomachs and put stones inside them to replace my parts because I will already be rent into a thousand pieces, because in any case no one could put me back together.

“King of Pain” comes on and the shift in the rhythm disrupts the moment. I return to the bar, I return to Esquel, and I find, much to my great disappointment, that I am whole, completely whole, exactly as I came in, at least in appearance. He looks at me, but not in my eyes, he looks at my body, he says, that jacket isn’t yours, I tell him no, that in fact it’s yours, and he adds that my boobs have gotten bigger. I laugh, I laugh a lot, it’s true, it’s true that they got bigger in the last few years, especially last year, and I think it’s funny that he’s noticed, not only that, but also that he has the tact to point it out to me, as he does in this moment. It goes without saying then that I’m going to wait awhile to take off your jacket, as observed as I feel, intimidated as I am. Yes, I tell him, I don’t know what happened to me, the good life, he says, the good life, I say, and then, you’re looking handsome, I say to him, that too, I say that too.

We have a beer. For a while I had forgotten where we were, and I’m going to keep doing it over the course of our stay in Vanina’s pleasant bar, which kind of makes me feel like I’m in Texas, because of how pathetic it is, how grating, how fluorescent. Because of my jacket, because of the drunkenness, because of Manuel, because of the absence of prospects, because of how enchanting he is, because it’s unreal. It makes me feel like I’m in Esquel, then, what am I saying Texas for, what am I doing, why am I trying to sound all sophisticated. Vanina introduces me to her husband, husband or boyfriend, I don’t know, she calls him my husband, but I think they didn’t actually get married. Omar comes across as pretty nice, she got herself a pearl of a fellow, a real man with a real smoker’s voice. She’s excited, you can tell, to be present at this moment and to be not only witness to it but also instrument of the encounter, of the reencounter. Every so often our eyes meet, she’s circulating, and everything in her face suggests impishness, complicity. It makes me uncomfortable, it makes me a little uncomfortable that she is, that she assumes she is, or that she wants to establish herself as being, complicit, I mean, and that she—furthermore—assumes that it’s so important to me to be sharing this moment with Julián. So that every time she smiles at me with that impish smile I look at her with no expression, neutral, conveying something like what a nice bar you have here, or how neat that I was able to come by and meet your dude/husband, something like that, something along those lines.

At first Juli and I don’t talk about us. After the question I asked him and once I had calmed down and stopped crying, we started drinking beer, and he asked me about you, I mean, about your family, about your parents; he said he saw them from time to time but that he didn’t really know much, that he thought they were doing fine, that they had put their lives back together, but who knows, that was just what it seemed like from the outside. And then I tell him about my impressions of these last few days, and I find myself obligated to think, I mean, to do a sort of summing up, to report my observations on how I thought your parents were doing, how they seemed, and I tell him, I tell him about the ceremony and your mom’s little notes and your sister’s frugality, she’s kind of a bitch, Julián says, and I tell him no, that I didn’t think so, that I understand her and that everybody does what they can and takes it how they can, and that Valeria is like that, a pragmatic lady, and thank god, that thank god she is, because she was able to keep going, make a life for herself, leave your house and everything and that besides all that she’s a really cool chick, as harsh as she might be. So that no, that they don’t seem depressed at all to me, that they’re handling it well, actually, because it’s also not like they don’t mention you, maybe your dad mentioned you a little less, but that’s his style, he’s someone who talks little but that nevertheless strikes me as very communicative, with gestures, with stuff. Then Juli started asking me about my dad, and we burst out laughing talking about that new look of his, he’s been seeing him around, he says that it’s been ages since he’s looked that good, that he really struck gold with the girl, and we talk about Carmen. She’s kind of hot, the swine says, but it’s true, it’s true she’s hot, I’m happy for my dad. Everything turned out great, didn’t it? he says, and I hear the bitterness in his voice, and I realize that now I don’t want to ask, that I don’t want to know, that I don’t want him to tell me, that I want this moment to be ours, and for there to be no freckly blonds or brats or complications with pregnancies or, especially, fatherly love. I want to talk about things I know, not attend the becoming of someone else, of the other. By this point in the encounter we are both a bit tipsy, and I’m already sweating. I still have your jacket on and decide to conquer my shyness. I take it off and hand it to Vanina, who’s already standing there on the other side of the bar ready to receive it as though tonight existed only for us, a supporting character, as though we were her only guests, which we probably are, which is not good for us. Then Julián takes up the assault again. Seriously, they’re bigger, girl. Yeah, well, a lot of time has passed, I say, and before I can even finish my sentence he asks if I have a boyfriend. I tell him, I tell him about Manuel, and his face is transformed, it seems to really bother him, and I can’t believe it, I can’t believe that he has the nerve to make a scene, to be jealous. I immediately realize that he doesn’t want to know any more, and not because I’ve said much, in fact it doesn’t really interest me either, for him to know, I’m not dying to talk to him, to argue with him, about my relationship with Manuel. He looks like a kid having a tantrum, he looks conflicted, wounded, like a child, and he cuts me off, saying, I have kids, you know? Ah, straight for the heart, a rhetorical question. But he knows, he knows that I know, but that was how everything started. Clever, on the ball, malicious, he always was, all of that. Yeah, I know, I say, refusing him my eyes, I know he’s turned mean now, I understand that he feels hurt, which is why I don’t get upset, his irritation doesn’t upset me, but I stop looking at him, I would rather not look at him, I drink my beer and look at the glass. I get rid of the foam that’s stuck to the inside of the glass, turn around, and suck on my finger. He says, let’s go, I feel like going, I say okay without looking at him, assenting and licking my lip. I ask for my jacket back, Vanina says the drinks are on the house, she’s pleased, I don’t know if it’s because we came or that we’re leaving together, probably a little bit of both. We leave her a good tip, Julián puts on his sheepskin coat, and we walk out. He walks behind me with one hand on my back. I don’t understand his impunity, but I endorse it, that is more than clear. I try to walk faster to get out of it, but I can’t quite pull it off.

I didn’t want to put on my clothes today, I wanted to wear somebody else’s clothing, something else. I have a lot of daydreams, fine, and I don’t know if they’re good. I don’t know if they’re good for me, that’d be more like it. Now I’m a little sad, basically sad, and that makes me sleepy. I should write, I’m still excited and nervous, but right now I kind of feel like it would be hard. I have to get over it, I have to get over it, I have to get over it.