Arturo Fontaine - La Vida Doble

That night, back in my own room, I fell asleep with Diana Ross’s voice in my ears. I thought about Rodrigo’s sweet eyes, and I felt them next to me. It was a hot night, and every so often I woke to the buzz of mosquitoes flying over my sun-browned skin.

The next day I didn’t see him on the beach. I was with his friends, but I didn’t dare ask about him. I searched for him as though sleepwalking. Nothing. He’d disappeared. The next day, same thing. And so on. I was eaten up by longing. I slept badly. Then I would spend the day yawning, and the yawns turned to sighs on my lips. On the fourth day, let’s see. . Yes, I think it was the afternoon of the fourth day, I spotted him playing paddleball. I slowly brought my sun umbrella closer. While I walked over the sand I could look right at him through my dark sunglasses without disguising it. I untied my beach wrap from around my waist and carefully spread it out over the sand; I got my Nivea sunscreen from my bag and began rubbing it over my legs. I took my time. Was he watching me? I lay on my back with my straw hat over my face.

I didn’t wait long. I heard a footstep, very close by; a dusting of sand and someone took off my hat. His chin, his nose, inches from mine, his disconcerting smile. Calmly, I got up, tied the wrap around my waist, and reached out my arm to take the paddle he was offering me, smiling, his face all full of sun. I noticed the white mark left by his sunglasses, his dripping hair, his eyelashes caked with sea salt. His hand. . the paddle was still in his big hand with its big fingers. If it was God who made them, he shaped them with a lot of love, I felt. It was a hand, I felt, that would be able to hold a just-hatched chick and lift it without frightening it. I like men’s hands. Reach out and touch somebody’s hand. . The ball went flying and there I was, awkward, terrible, of course. And him, agile and well timed, stretching and jumping along the shore of wet sand to hit the ball gently within my reach. We played for a long time. When, sweaty and exhausted, we dunked ourselves in El Quisco’s freezing water, the sun was setting. Afterward we shivered with cold, together on my wrap watching the last reflections of light on the horizon, the beach almost empty, and we laughed and kissed with lips that were salty and trembling from the cold.

We went into his house hugging and laughing, and he put on Diana Ross again: You see, my love is alive. . We danced entwined, shivering in our soaked bathing suits, and no embrace was enough to satisfy us.

And it’s the force of that thigh between my legs, I don’t know, shivers going down my spine. His “gluteous” form through the wet bathing suit, I don’t know, my rough breathing and the sighs that escape me and that I try to hide. His kisses on my neck, his hands on my back, pressing me against him, and me sustaining the pressure, and the threat of that insistent mass that was unmistakable to me now. Ain’t no river wide enough / To keep me from you. . I felt a tug at my back, and in no hurry, gently, he unclasped the top of my bikini, which fell to the floorboards like the skin of a lifeless fish. I put my arms around him. I didn’t dare let him look at me. Shame intermingled with desire made my lips tremble. I felt flushed spots burning on my cheeks. He held me tight, my breasts against his firm body, and now I could tell he was breathing hard too, and that disarmed me.

He moved away from me and held me by the waist, he put one knee on the floor and let his eyes move over my breasts. He stayed there a moment, kneeling, motionless, looking at me. For a few seconds I knew what it felt like to be a goddess. His lips moved a little, almost imperceptibly. I sunk my hands into his hair. When I saw that yes, it was true, a tear was sliding down his cheek, I pulled his head closer and he let me, I held it against my stomach. I felt the tip of his tongue in my belly button and we burst out laughing.

I never loved anyone again the way I loved Rodrigo. You only love that way once. I felt him next to me all day. Everything that happened to me happened only so I could tell him about it later. I fell asleep imagining his eyes upon me. He liked me, he thought I was pretty, he cared about me. And I felt I was, then, a beautiful woman. I looked at myself in the mirror and I liked how I looked. When I got dressed up, people thought I was gorgeous. I knew it. I felt the way men looked at me. And I liked that they looked, of course, but far and away what I liked the most was for Rodrigo to look at me. The mere idea of kissing another man someday made me nauseous. I was so sure that no one and nothing would ever come between us. . He used to steal flowers for me, jumping over garden walls. More than once he was charged by a boxer or Doberman when he went into someone’s yard like a thief to cut the first red camellia of that winter or the first flowering white almond branch of spring. “My love,” I wrote him on a restaurant napkin or a sky blue card that I paid too much for at the bookstore or on a simple sheet of notebook paper. “My love”. . Mon amour, and those two words had urgency, intimacy, an incomprehensible ardor: Je t’aime. Anything more was unnecessary. Je t’aime. To be able to say “my love” to Rodrigo and for it to be the truth, that I was, for him, “my love,” was a flight, a state of suspension, a miracle of fire. Nothing bad mattered as long as the two of us loved each other as we loved each other, as long as we could love each other a little more every day. That kind of love doesn’t happen twice.

But little by little, in some imperceptible way, my romance was transformed by his demands for rough sex, for surrender, passion and punishment, possession and loss, by incomprehension. And Rodrigo ran when he found out I was pregnant. This was when we had been together almost three years: he had fallen in love with someone else.

This is the raw truth, and I repeat it, trying to convince myself: Rodrigo wants to leave me for her. But he doesn’t acknowledge it. He needs it to be my fault. He needs me to believe it in order to truly believe it himself. He has to persuade me that I was the one who ruined everything. Not him. And so he makes up stories.

And this was the same man who in El Quisco, kneeling down with tears in his eyes, gazed at my goddess breasts while I melted for him. . Who would have thought he would abandon me like that? It’s my own fault. Me, who got pregnant and didn’t want an abortion and sacrificed his future, of course, Rodrigo’s, no less. And on top of that, my own and ours together. I made him into a victim. That was it. Rodrigo didn’t want to be tied down. No. That was the point. And the other? And me? In the morning my eyes were so vacant and my face so dead, that the people I met may not even have seen me. It wasn’t, then, that he’d stopped loving me. It was that he couldn’t love me anymore and was suffering by attempting the impossible. I smashed the vessel. He felt sorry for himself. And I was three months pregnant. I had wounded him permanently. It was beyond repair. He had the right to go on being young, he told me. That’s what he told me. And he split. And I was split in two.

I stopped seeing the few high-school girlfriends I still met up with on occasional afternoons. I was ashamed to tell them. A friend from university materialized, Rafa, with his big belly, his candid laugh and friendly gaze, and he took me with him to a demonstration. I walked along beside him, jostled and confused and with that ridiculous ball where another being, an abusive invader, was growing at my body’s expense. I felt lost in the mass of workers with their overpowering smell, and I repeated to myself that a hand on the plow was worth as much as a hand on the pen. Then, one of those days I felt myself suddenly caught up in something big, an enormous collective body; we sang together and I was part of the hope harbored by those who suffered, the poor of the earth. The men and women who were Rafa’s friends accepted me. I met Teruca during that time, and we became inseparable. She had a three-year-old son: Francisco. A chubby boy with enormous eyes, mild and dark. She was studying history. She had a long, black braid that hung down to her waist, and she was thin with very small breasts. Her wide, full-lipped smile could win you over completely.