I met her at the Faculty of Letters.
He had blond hair, heavy and serious.
Wore
jeans
and some riding boots that no one could buy in those years because they were so expensive.
It had a luxurious look and a kind of warmth, as if it were dipped in a drop of amber.
She was late to an incomprehensible class, and when one of the students raised her hand and started talking about Saussure — I had no idea who Saussure was — I looked at her and she looked at me and we made “Help!” Gestures.
We began to look for each other like dogs that are needed: neither of us knew very well what she was doing at that Faculty.
I went because I was lost, because there was nothing I could study to make a living from writing, and I was also enchanted by the Greek classes taught by a teacher like Miguel de Unamuno.
She did not know who Miguel de Unamuno was.
The daughter of a patrician caste, she had gone to the best schools, spoke all languages.
He said "Oui" with a sigh of fainting that drove me crazy.
He lived with his father in an area of the city of Buenos Aires where there are only apartments of inhuman price.
He did not like being there: he hated the neighbors and every time he passed his father the air grew tense with rancor like a tangle of ropes.
We started studying together.
He would come to my house, 30 square meters, an old television, a balcony where I was anesthetized by the pain of wanting to live and not knowing how.
She was alone and had no vocation except to deny her class.
He didn't want to receive money from his father and he never had a peso, so he sold clothes, life insurance.
That made me desperate because I saw, as in a mirror of misery, what awaited me: an unfocused existence, working on anything and writing in my spare time.
Shortly after he left the Faculty.
I continued for a while yet.
At some point, he started smoking because he wanted to lose weight, and had he never tried a cigarette, he switched to one pack a day.
He did those things: it was an excess, a madness.
One day he told me that he had found the solution to all his problems: he was going to do
escort
, half a prostitute.
One winter night I accompanied her to a posh bar to explore terrain.
She was wearing a copper colored dress, her back was bare, she was beautiful.
We were the end of the world and it was the eighties: it was like being crazy or suffering some kind of disturbance.
She was talking on the phone with her mother, who lived in another country, from my house: she challenged her, she said “Mom, you have to drink less”.
Sometimes when she hung up she would cry in a beautiful way.
As if that waterfall of misfortune bathed her in a holy light.
One day she started dating a handsome guy, nice people, and she got pregnant.
I asked him what he was going to do.
She told me she didn't know, so I invited her to my hometown.
To my sad house back then.
We had brought a bottle of champagne from Buenos Aires.
One night we went to the lagoon.
We walk to the jetty, we sit at the end.
I had never done that: I had only been there to fish.
We drank champagne while I explained how live shrimp is incarnated, how a fish breaks its head when it comes out of water.
Then he told me that he was going to have his son.
I felt a blurry despair.
I thought, “So this is how it ends.
This is how you abandon me ”.
But I didn't say anything.
Then he got married.
I went to her wedding dressed in black.
I rode a horror train to the party site, got off at the wrong station, walked an hour in the sun, danced a lot.
From the return I only remember the back seat of a car, blurred trees.
At some point I saw her for the last time.
I don't remember when.
Today was a smooth, horrible day.
On my windowsill there was a dead dove, a metaphor for this cannibalistic time.
I started thinking about that past and I told myself that because of things like that (being able to travel dressed for a party on a scary train, deciding to have a birth on a fish-smelling jetty, having friends like her), that A time full of unease and bewilderment, of loneliness and emptiness, of days fastened to the cliff of despair, it could seem like a beautiful time, a better life than this.
It was not.