Ayelén and Luciano wondered
when
the couple's decline and subsequent breakup had begun.
They did the math on their five-year romance.
They had liked each other, loved each other, accompanied each other.
If so many couples could not explain what had brought them together, or the secret of permanence through the decades, Ayelén and Luciano asked themselves the opposite question: what went wrong?
It was the Chernobyl catastrophe without human error.
He had been the love of their respective lives.
One afternoon, upon returning from the beach, the drowsiness began.
Instead of surrendering, as they did after bathing, washing off the sand and sea salt, Luciano went down to reception to complain that the air conditioning was not working properly.
Perhaps it was true, but because of the sea breeze that blew through the ins and outs of the blind, with the evening gloom and the respective coolness of the room, it was enough.
Luciano returned to the room with a kind and useless response from the concierge;
Ayelén had left him a handwritten message: “I went out for a walk, I'll be right back.”
“I'll be right back,” was the phrase Luciano joked he would choose for his own tombstone.
He had mentioned it to Ayelén on their first date, and he had made her laugh until she choked on her Dry Martini.
If for every joke that mishap would occur, Luciano noted, the best thing would be to maintain a permanent solemn dialogue, preferably on some relevant topic.
Ayelén laughed again and kissed him.
They continued laughing until that fateful sunset in Mar del Tuyú, upon returning from the beach.
The fights could be because Luciano risked too much capital in agricultural experiments instead of continuing to bet on the security of profitable crops;
or because Ayelén did not pay enough attention to Luciano's interest in the theory of the beginning of the world.
Luciano was an agronomist trained with the most effective technologies.
Ayelén, anthropologist and owner of a business selling clutches, inherited from her father.
She was much more practical.
But
they complemented each other in their differences
.
Those small arguments, those minor incompatibilities, fatally reunited them as electrons and protons, unable to remain separated for more than twenty-four hours.
Each one lived in her house, but they spent the days together.
If they slept in their respective beds, they texted each other.
But never photos: they had not taken one as a couple until that unfortunate evening.
From the walk announced in the handwritten message,
Ayelén returned different
.
For the first time for Luciano, far from an inexplicable way.
She knew that spontaneous form of indifference because she had experienced it with a previous girlfriend.
Certain seeds did not thrive in this or that terrain, certain climates did not encourage or harvest crops, thus the relationships between man and woman received the blessing of the sun or the condemnation of drought, without argument or consolation.
But that return of Ayelén, with another look, with another tone, or his own departure to ask about the air conditioning, instead of taking advantage of every last second between sunset and night - when they liked it the most -, forced him to ask him if something was wrong.
She didn't know what to answer.
That
was the last opportunity to love each other, and they didn't take advantage of it
.
After the regrettable weeks of misunderstandings and death rattles that followed until the breakup, they were not once able to recover the spell that had united them.
The end was announced with the precision of a divinity's command.
That wasn't enough.
They shouldn't even have said goodbye
.
They stopped seeing each other.
They stopped calling each other.
They separated like two enemy armies that get tired of fighting: they do not need to sign an armistice or agree on conditions, just move away from the front for an indefinite period of time, probably forever.
But that doesn't even need to be clarified.
Although he did not intend to revive the charm, Luciano was determined to find an answer.
Why had that love ended?
He never stopped searching for new wonders in the underground humus of the field, nor did he resign himself to the fact that that sacred delight would end like a summer rain.
He put the entire time he lived with Ayelén under the microscope of his reflection, and did not discard the imagination.
He resorted to endless readings, movies, stories told by those who know.
He used the coordinates of his own science, those of Ayelén.
He became interested in the rudiments of selling clutches.
But none of his intellectual expeditions brought him closer to knowledge.
Until another afternoon, at the end of a superficial relationship, in circumstances in which he could talk about Ayelén to a woman next to him, he recapitulated:
-We were so happy, before returning to the room, we took a photo.
We had never taken a photo before.
-Have you never taken a selfie before?
-asked the girl-.
- No photo.
No selfie.
We asked a lady passing by.
-AND?
-We didn't have a cell phone, we were leaving the sea.
The lady was so kind that she took the photo of her with her own cell phone and sent it to Ayelén's cell phone.
That
was the last time we smiled together
.
"He stole their souls," said the girl.
Luciano moved away a few centimeters, looked into her eyes - she was a little more beautiful, or interesting, than he had thought that night.
He didn't talk about her, but he urged her to continue.
-There are people who can steal your soul with a photo.
Certain tribes always knew this.
They never took a photo: they take a photo and it's all over.
She was not kind, the lady.
It didn't even happen by chance.
The empirical evidence was irrefutable.
-What do you do?
-Luciano finally asked his companion.
"I'm a greengrocer," she said.
"I, an agronomist engineer," Luciano explained.
Yes, yes - Carina smiled (Luciano remembered her name) -.
You already told me.
The Buenos Aires breeze was not like that of the sea, but on that occasion I would not go down and ask for air conditioning.