‘Thanks for the outing.’
But Maya didn’t say anything. She walked in and took off her wet clothes as she went, skirting around the furniture without turning on any lights, voluntarily blind. I followed her, or followed her shadow, and realized that she wanted me to follow her. The world was blue and black, made not of figures but of outlines; one of them was Maya’s silhouette. In my memory it was her hand that reached for mine, not the other way around, and then Maya said these words: I’m tired of sleeping alone. I think she also said something simple and very understandable: Tonight I don’t want to be so alone. I don’t remember having walked to Maya’s bed, but I see myself perfectly sitting on the edge of it, beside a bedside table with three drawers. Maya turned down the sheets and her spectral silhouette stood out against the wall, in front of the mirror on the wardrobe, and it seemed like she was looking in the mirror and as she did so her reflection was looking at me. While I was attending to this parallel reality, that fleeting scene that elapsed in my absence, I got into her bed, and I didn’t resist when Maya got in beside me and her hands undid my clothes, her hands tainted by the sun acted as naturally and deftly as my own hands. She kissed me and I felt her breath at once fresh and fatigued, an end-of-the-day breath, and I thought (a ridiculous thought and also indemonstrable) that this woman hadn’t kissed anyone for a long time. And then she stopped kissing me. Maya touched me futilely, took me futilely in her mouth, her futile tongue ran over my body without a sound, and then her resigned mouth returned to my mouth and only then did I realize she was naked. In the semi-darkness her nipples were a violet tone, a dark violet like the red scuba divers see at the bottom of the sea. Have you been underwater in the sea, Maya? I asked her or think I asked her. Way down deep in the sea, deep enough for colours to change? She lay down beside me, face up, and at that moment I was overcome by the absurd idea that Maya was cold. Are you cold? I asked. But she didn’t answer. Do you want me to go? She didn’t answer this question either, but it was a pointless question, because Maya didn’t want to be alone and she’d already settled that. I didn’t want to be alone at that moment either: Maya’s company had become indispensable to me, just as the disappearance of her sadness had become urgent. I thought how the two of us were alone in this room and in this house, but alone with a shared solitude, each of us alone with our own pain deep in our flesh but mitigating it at the same time by the strange arts of nakedness. And then Maya did something that only one person in the world had ever done before: her hand rested on my belly and found my scar and caressed it as if she were painting with one finger, as if she’d dipped her finger in tempera and were trying to make a strange and symmetrical design on my skin. I kissed her, in order to close my eyes more than to kiss her, and then my hand moved over her breasts and Maya took it in hers, took my hand in hers and put it between her legs and my hand touched her smooth straight hair, and then her soft inner thighs, and then her sex. My fingers under her fingers penetrated her and her body tensed and her legs opened like wings. I’m tired of sleeping alone, she’d told me, this woman who was now looking at me with wide-open eyes in the darkness of her room, wrinkling her brow like someone who’s on the verge of understanding something.
Maya Fritts did not sleep alone that night, I wouldn’t have let her. I don’t know when her well-being began to matter so much to me, I don’t know when I began to regret that there could be no possible life together for us, that our common past did not necessarily imply a common future. We’d had the same life and nevertheless had very different lives, or at least I did, a life with people who were waiting for me on the other side of the Cordillera, four hours from Las Acacias, 2,600 metres above sea level. . In the darkness of the bedroom I thought of that, although thinking in the darkness is not advisable: things seem bigger or more serious in the darkness, illnesses more destructive, the presence of evil closer, indifference more intense, solitude more profound. That’s why we like to have someone to sleep with, and that’s why I wouldn’t have left her alone that night for anything in the world. I could have got dressed and left in silence, carrying my shoes and leaving the doors ajar, like a thief. But I didn’t: I saw her fall into a deep sleep, undoubtedly because she was so tired both from all the driving and from all the emotions. Remembering tires a person out, this is something they don’t teach us, exercising one’s memory is an exhausting activity, it drains our energy and wears down our muscles. So I watched Maya sleep on her side, facing me, and I watched her hand slide under her pillow once she was asleep and hug it or cling to it, and it happened again: I saw her as she’d been as a girl. I didn’t have the slightest doubt that this gesture contained or embodied the little girl she’d once been, and I loved her in some imprecise and absurd way. And then I fell asleep too.
When I woke up, it was still dark. I didn’t know how much time had passed. I hadn’t been woken by the light, or the sounds of the tropical dawn, rather by the distant murmur of voices. I followed the sounds to the living room and was not surprised to find her as I did, sitting on the sofa with her head in her hands and a recording playing from her tiny stereo. I didn’t have to hear more than a few seconds, only a couple of those phrases spoken by strangers in English had to reach me to recognize the recording, for deep down I’d never stopped hearing that dialogue that spoke of weather conditions and then of work and of how many hours pilots could fly before they were obliged to rest, deep down I recognized it as if I’d heard it yesterday. ‘Well, let’s see,’ said the first officer just as he’d done some time ago, in Consu’s house. ‘We’ve got 136 miles to the VOR, and 32,000 feet to lose, and slow down to boot so we might as well get started.’ And the captain said, ‘Bogotá, American nine six five request descent.’ And Operations said, ‘Go ahead, American nine six five, this is Cali ops.’ And the captain said, ‘All right, Cali. We will be there in just about twenty-five minutes from now.’ And I thought, just as I’d thought before: No you won’t. You won’t be there in twenty-five minutes. You’ll be dead, and that will change my life.
Maya didn’t look at me when I sat down beside her, but she lifted her face as if she’d been waiting for me, and on her cheeks I saw the trail of her tears and I stupidly wanted to protect her from what was going to happen at the end of the tape. They’d be parking at gate two and landing on runway zero one, the plane’s headlights were on because there was a lot of visual traffic in the area, and I sat beside Maya on the sofa and put my arm around her back and hugged her and held her close to me, and the two of us sank into the sofa like a couple of old insomniacs, that’s what we were, an old married couple who can’t sleep and meet like ghosts in the early hours to share their insomnia. ‘I’m going to talk to the people,’ said the voice, and then, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain. We have begun our descent.’ And then I felt her sob. ‘There goes my mom,’ she said. I thought she wouldn’t say anything else. ‘She’s going to be killed,’ she said then, ‘she’s going to leave me all alone. And I can’t do anything, Antonio. Why did she have to be on that flight? Why didn’t she get a direct flight? How much bad luck can one person have?’ and I held her, what else could I do but hold her tight, I couldn’t change what had happened or stop the flow of time on the tape, time that advanced towards what had already happened, towards the definitive. ‘I’d like to wish everyone a very, very happy holiday and a healthy and prosperous 1996,’ the captain said from the tape. ‘Thank you for flying with us.’