It occurs to me that I haven’t ever spoken a word of tenderness to her, either. Marcela confirms that I haven’t, up to this point, not a word.

I explain that if I don’t, it’s because I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing it. She can understand that and forgives me.

Nevertheless, so everything will be clear, she should know that at one point in the past I did say those words. I tell her I was once in love.

I was still a student, and she had a charm that was cloudless and pure. We were both seventeen, the age of loving well, and we loved each other elegantly.

Even so, I distanced myself from her, suddenly. It was my intention to go back some day but I neglected to tell her so.

I was far away and sent no word. Then I did go back to find her. She’d married someone else.

I withdrew even further to protect her from any feeling of remorse: If I erased myself, she would never come to realize that she had no faith in me.

I say that I can’t know whether things would have worked out with her because I believe, or at least now I believe, that you marry a certain person and then that person changes, and most often this new person no longer interests you, or not in the same way. Or you think you’re marrying someone, but you’re only marrying that person’s youth, and youth doesn’t last.

Marcela agrees, and I tell her that this person continues, for me, to be that other, original person because I’ve never seen her again. I remember her as she was at seventeen.

Marcela tells me that I still love her. I acknowledge that may be, but maintain that it would disturb me if she, in turn, were still to love me, since I am another person, and not a better one, either inside or out, than when I was seventeen.

But in any case, this is an inadequate conversation because it is melancholy, even if I’m making Marcela aware that, in general, everything you believe to be fundamentally good for yourself is not possible. And that goes, as well, for my relationship with her, which is fundamentally good yet nevertheless has a time limit, I don’t know what it is, though I’m sure she’s established it.

Marcela falls silent and since we’re very close to each other in the darkness our bodies knot together in passion and afterward I tell her that whatever she wants to do with me I’ll do, but again she doesn’t answer, which humiliates me.

•

It’s Friday, the third Friday of the month. But that doesn’t matter, I pay no attention.