19

I CALLED HIM, I said we’ve gotta see each other, it’s been months, there are decisions that need to be made, I had a dream, your things are packed. We got coffee looking at each other with a seemingly irreversible hatred. He said let’s get a divorce. I said OK. He said there’s something I want to tell you, let’s get a drink. We left the café and went into a store, he bought the liquor, we started drinking, we went for a walk, we talked about friends, filed a few complaints, and then he said he’d met someone. I asked her name and then came the quiet that warns of the greatest danger. Everything to do with names. Then we recalled important episodes and organized our memories, selecting them with the certainty of something ending, of something that only has this last moment to be narrated: how we met, the scandal, the escape, the trip, the landscapes, trying to avoid the most painful episodes. Memory made the liquor go down with sadness. To wrap up he said something like I tried, and I found that so sweet I hugged him, and he grabbed my ass, he squeezed my butt, and it still felt hot from the blows it had received in the dream. He let me go and said no more. We cried a little and walked back to the café that was now closed; our cars were there, together, lit by a streetlamp, an image that again unleashed my tears. He wanted to get in mine, and I said better not, and I also said what if we wait to get divorced? What I really wanted to say was let’s not get divorced. But it was too late, and the pain from the certainty of that mistiming bore into me. It wounded me, but I hid it like the stolen fox the boy hides under his clothes and cannot confess to, even though it’s shredding his flesh. And while the concealment took hold of the pain, or the pain was strangled in its teeth, I said you need to get your things, they’re packed up in the shed. He said OK, I’ll borrow my buddy El Piojo’s truck tomorrow, and then he turned around, got in his white Beetle, and drove off.

Strangely, when I got in the car, sobbing buckets and blowing yellow snot bubbles, I couldn’t start it. I’d left the lights on, and the battery had died. I felt an enormous tiredness, a tiredness accumulated over years, and it felt like that tiredness came from the duration: all the time spent with this man who was now leaving in an instant, the paradox filled me with panic, so I stopped thinking. I called my insurance company, and the tow truck came. Not only had the battery died, but something else had happened to the car that neither of us understood. The driver handed me his handkerchief and said it isn’t that bad. He towed the car, and I called a taxi that dropped me off at home.