She comes back carrying coffee on a tray, and as she sets it down on the table, she sees the dirty diaper and looks away with an expression of annoyance and weariness. “I forgot the sugar, I don’t know where my head is.” She takes away the diaper, the pacifier, and the blender, and I hear her say something to the little boy, who has stopped crying, and she appears again, smiling with a look of “Sorry!” and brushing a lock of hair from her eyes. Then, as if in a painting, I see her as she was five years ago, as precisely as the clear view you get after you clean a cloudy pane of glass, and I think she looks a lot like someone I know, although it takes a while to realize whom: the woman in the travel agency, the Olympia my friend Juan and I are so crazy about. The same foreshortening as she lifts the hair from her face, the same chestnut hair, the large mouth, the line of her chin and jaw, the glint in her light-colored eyes.
Just as when I was so much in love with her, I can’t concentrate on what she’s telling me, I’m too absorbed in the fantasy of love, of the contemplative, paralyzing, adolescent passion that reaches its tortuous culmination in impossibility, that nourishes the desire for powerlessness, for the suffering and cowardice of literature. “I left medical school when I got pregnant, you remember? I tried to go back when my daughter was a little older, but then I got pregnant again, and now I’m thinking about entering nursing school. It doesn’t take as long, I can handle the assignments, and I’m pretty sure it will be easy to find a job. Imagine, with my experience they could make me head of Maternity.”
She gets up because the boy has started crying again, very loud, and when she comes back, he is in her arms. His face is red, and his eyes shine with fever. Suddenly I’m jealous, looking at the boy, recognizing his father’s features, the man I begged her to leave and come away with me. From the next room the girl calls to her, because something has fallen to the floor with a crash. As she leaves the room again, I observe her from the rear. Her face is the same, but her body has filled out, she has lost that sinuous line I loved so much when she was twenty. When she handed me my coffee I noted, furtively, that her breasts are larger and heavier now, the breasts of a woman who has had two children, and nursed them, and not taken very good care of herself afterward. I remember her tight-fitting jeans and her soft shirts buttoned low, blouses with a liquid, silky touch that felt like her skin the few times I dared caress her. I invited her out for dinner one night in early summer, and she came downstairs wearing sandals and a dress of a fine plaid material with her hair caught back in a pony-tail and two curls at her cheeks, so sexy and desirable that it was a torment not to grab her.
“But don’t go, tell me something about yourself, you haven’t said a word, you haven’t changed a bit in that regard.” The boy isn’t crying now, and I can hear the television again in the next room. She sits down across from me and asks me to tell her about my life these days, and I notice, with a glowing coal of satisfaction, that she’s combed her hair and dashed on some lipstick. “I heard that you got married too, to your old sweetheart.” “Like you,” I find the courage to say, and for a moment we are truly ourselves and the void between us is a narrow void, we crossed it only once a long time ago but it never entirely closed. We smile, shaking our heads politely, acknowledging the objective vulgarity of real life. “At least you did something, finished your degree. I remember how much you liked art history, how excited you were about it, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, Picasso, Bosch, Velázquez, Giotto. I still have the postcard you sent me from Florence.”
And a lot of good that did. I remember that card, the exact moment I wrote you sitting on the steps of Santa Maria del Fiore; how I loved you. I explain to her that I found a temporary job as an administrative assistant, and that the next year I took the competitive exams, “although I don’t plan to stay in that office forever. As soon as I can I’ll go back and work on my thesis in earnest, or I’ll start taking my exams to teach at an institute.” “That’s what Victor is doing, he’s studying for exams for the post office. We’ll see if he has as much luck as you.” Victor. She says that name so casually. If she’d stayed with me, she’d be saying my name as easily as my wife does; maybe she’d have some loving nickname for me.
The telephone rings at the far end of the room. She speaks in a low voice, not looking at me, telling someone that she will take the child to the doctor, although she thinks his temperature has stopped going up. “Ciao,” she says, “come soon.” What am I doing here? A ghost, a visitor, not even an intruder. Ciao, come soon. People say words without stopping to think what they mean; entire lives fit in the simplest phrase, and a personal insult can hide in a polite formula of courtesy: “What a shame you didn’t run into Victor, he would have enjoyed seeing you.”
This time when I get up, she doesn’t ask me to stay. I notice the smell of domestic life in the hallway, which she doesn’t: the funk of a sick child, kitchen odors, a whiff of sheets and bodies, of a not very well ventilated apartment, these are made up of the everyday events of her life, her real life, which for me is as foreign as this large, disorderly, somber house. There must be a particular smell to the small apartment I bought through a government program, and it must be similar: stale milk and talcum powder. She walks me to the door, holding her son in her arms again. He is red-faced and bawling, his chin wet with slobber. She gives me two kisses, one on each cheek, not touching the skin, barely stirring the air between us. “Will you be in Madrid long? Why don’t you come see us if you’re going to be here awhile?” Perhaps she says that to eliminate any hint of our old relationship. This isn’t the woman who loved me and was ready to live with me; now she speaks in a plural that includes her husband, offering me the kind of matrimonial friendship that is the worst offense to an ex-lover. “I don’t think I’ll have time, I’m going back tonight and I still have things to do.”
THE REST OF THE DAY I walked around Madrid, weary and bored. I chose a restaurant to eat in, after much looking and hesitation. The minute I went in, I realized I’d made a bad choice, but a waiter in a dirty red jacket was already coming toward me and I didn’t have the courage to leave, so I ate a fillet that smelled slightly spoiled. In a large bookstore on the Gran Vía I got dizzy looking at titles and ended up buying a novel I wasn’t interested in and have never read. I went to a movie, and it was dark when I came out, but I still had several hours to kill before the train left. I called home with a touch of guilt, although I’d been gone less than three days. The minute my wife picked up the phone, I knew there was a problem. Our son had woken up that night with a new cough, and choking, and she’d taken him straight to the emergency room, where they said he had laryngitis.
A few minutes before the express pulled out, I saw a young woman running along the platform. It had occurred to me, as I waited, that she might come to say good-bye, that that was why she’d asked me what time the train left. Five years before, that other time, I’d waited till the last moment on this same platform, watching the clock and the faces of the people pushing through the glass doors. I’d looked for her when I arrived at dawn and again that night — on the same train I’d come on — and she hadn’t been there either time. Subconsciously, I’d repeated the wait, not because I thought it was likely she would come, not even that I wanted her to, but out of a sentimental inertia.