Blue Flowers

by Carola Saavedra

  I could tell you about all that preparation, the dress, the perfume, the movie I didn’t watch and everything that didn’t happen afterward. Yes, because it wasn’t only the movie. It wasn’t just the movie, that small revenge, infantile and foolish, but everything that came afterward, that moment that never should have existed. So I’m telling you that contrary to what you might be imagining, I didn’t go out afterward. No, I didn’t go out or walk from bar to bar, along the streets, through the darkest places in the city. No, I didn’t offer myself up, ready and perfumed, a new smile, an invitation. No, I didn’t wrap myself around other bodies, didn’t smell other perfumes, didn’t kiss other mouths, nor did I bring my face close to another face, to the roughness of another face. This is how it was. I didn’t run down the stairs, or dance, or sing or shout that none of it mattered, I didn’t smile at other lips, or approach other men, or feel desire, or allow others to desire me, obedient, happy, no, I didn’t run my fingers over another skin, the tips of my fingers, nor the softness of my skin over another skin, I did none of this. I didn’t dance all night, the day dawning in other mouths, no, I didn’t wake up in other beds, or in my own bed with sheets wrapping around other bodies, rumpled sheets, no, I didn’t condemn you, nor did I turn my back on you and smile, among other lives, other breaths, no, I didn’t feel the weight of another body, of another hand, or a different rhythm of breathing on the back of my neck, no, I didn’t cry or suffer in other arms, I didn’t open my body to other eyes, other revelations, nor did I undress nervously in the middle of the living room or beside another bed, no, I didn’t take off my red dress, or any item of clothing that you liked, just for you, for someone else, didn’t untie my hair the way you preferred it, for someone else, or feel the caress of other words in my ear, no, I did none of this. I didn’t run down the stairs, or through any dark corner of the city, I didn’t smile at the first stranger, didn’t offer myself up with my gaze alight or walk listlessly in the opposite direction, no, I didn’t allow other hands on my skin, which you said was so soft, other hands and another voice talking about the softness of my skin and the curtain of my hair, no other voice wrapping itself around mine, another caress, no, I did none of this, all the small revenges I might have taken, and writing to you now, and making you smile or suffer. But no. I did none of this. I just closed my eyes and sat here.

  So why all this? you might be thinking. This laying out of what I did not do, this inventory of revenges aborted. A very subtle kind of punishment? A declaration of love? I don’t know, maybe just a declaration of weakness to make you smile or suffer, or maybe a way of wanting you, of reaching you, to establish a link between us, an impossible link, which I set up only because I’m here, because there’s this distance between what I write and what you read, because it’s been days since I’ve washed, since I’ve combed my hair, since I’ve left the house.

  A.

  II

  The mirror reflected the image of a man who was still young, in spite of some early wrinkles and hair and a beard that were turning white unexpectedly fast, and a three-year-old girl sitting on a stool. His daughter, he reminded himself, which was the way his thoughts tended to go lately when the girl was at home, his weekend thoughts since the separation. Standing in front of the mirror he was trying with an unpracticed hand to comb the girl’s long, curly red hair. From time to time she would complain, but on the whole she allowed herself to be combed, with a serious expression on her face, slightly smug, as though she felt sorry for her father, as though she understood the massive effort required to comb the hair of a three-year-old girl. Though this did not signify any clemency, any forgiveness, and nor did it mean she was inclined to make his job any easier. On the contrary, she stayed just where she was, unmoving, posing like a princess faced with a lowly subject. He felt incapable; something about her intimidated him. He had felt that way ever since the beginning, when she was just a dislocated baby placed into his arms in the maternity ward.

  He held the baby for the first time one day after the birth; as his ex-wife liked to recall, he was the only man who’d managed to take twenty-four hours to get to the hospital, which was only ten minutes away from home. He had never been able to explain what had happened. The truth was, he couldn’t remember; he couldn’t remember, he had told his wife. She hadn’t said as much, but it was clear she would never forgive him. And she never did. Women can be terribly resentful, that was his conclusion. He arranged the curls as best he could on the girl’s shoulders.

  “All set, Manuela, now we’ve just got to wait for your mother.”

  “Dad!”

  The girl held up a pink hair clip toward her father’s reflection in the mirror.

  “You forgot.”

  Right, he’d forgotten. He took the clip, examined how it worked. He pulled a lock of hair and arranged it in such a way that it wouldn’t fall into her face.

  “Yeah, you’re right, it’s good now. You’re even more beautiful than before,” he said, forcing a smile, trying to start a conversation.

  The girl showed no trace of any response; she jumped down from the stool and went off to play in her room. A princess, he thought. Haughty and arrogant. He’d talk to his ex-wife as soon as she arrived; she was spoiling the girl.

  His ex-wife arrived with two rings of the doorbell announcing that it was her, one of those things that never changes. He got up off the sofa and went to open the door. She came in as though, instead of just her, there were a whole army entering the apartment, a crowd behind her, her perfume spreading through the rooms; every space felt immediately occupied by her. She kissed him on both cheeks.

  “Hi, Marcos—you okay?”

  “Hi, Marcos”—he’d never get used to his ex-wife calling him that, someone who for so long had called him “my sweet,” “my love.” She sounded so distracted now, so uninterested—“Oh, hi, Marcos”—he’d lived with the woman for years, they’d had a child together, a house, a joint account, a life, and one day all of it stopped existing and she became just a perfumed stranger who walked through the door and said, as she might say to anybody, “Hi, Marcos.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  His ex-wife paid no attention to his answer, she was looking severely over the disorder of the apartment, the moving crates scattered around the living room, the few pieces of furniture that he’d bought, a parched plant he always forgot to water.

  “Why don’t you clean up this mess? It’s been more than a month since you moved.”

  He gave a distracted reply, as though her advice were aimed at someone else:

  “I will, I’m going to tidy up, as soon as I get a bit of time.”

  “Everyone’s got time, you’ve just got to want to do it.”

  He pretended not to have heard. She smiled and changed the subject.

  “And what about Manu, where’s she?”

  His ex-wife loved calling the girl Manu. They’d argued about this countless times; they’d chosen Manuela, so why would you then call her Manu, Lulu, Bilu, or whatever else? What a ridiculous compulsion of her mother’s to ruin the lovely name, Manuela, by calling the girl by some nickname or other.

  “Manuela’s in her bedroom.”

  “Manu, darling!”

  The girl came running to her mother, it was like they’d been parted for centuries, separated against their will. And now right before his eyes, they celebrated their reunion, so fervently longed for by them both.

  “How are you, my love? Tell Mommy.”

  And he just stood there, in the doorway, watching that moment. The two of them embracing, the girl with an affection, a passion, she would never show him. And he just stood there, imagining himself as an ogre or something.

  “Want a drink?”

  “No, thanks, I don’t have time. We still have to go by my mother’s.”

  “Yes, of course, your mother. How’s she doing?”

  “She’s fine, t
hough her arthritis is still a problem, as you know.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “And what about the two of you? How was the weekend? Did she eat properly?”

  The girl looked tired in her mother’s arms, her arms around her mother’s neck, as though she’d had a long wait, had been through an ordeal.

  “It was great, Manuela drew several versions of Felipe, then we went out for a pizza. This morning we played a little game on the computer.”

  His ex-wife put the girl down on the floor.

  “Go on, sweetheart, go get your teddy, we’ve got to go to Grandma’s.”

  The girl obeyed at once, he noticed. In two minutes she was back with the pink teddy bear. The girl held her mother’s hand.

  This was the woman he had met when she was still very young. Both of them had trained as architects. She was now an interior designer, a famous interior designer who was booked to work on the most sought-after houses in the city. A dynamic woman, always had been; well connected, always had been. As for him, he was neither dynamic nor well connected. He’d never ended up working in architecture. Life had taken its own course. But he had things pretty good, he had no cause to complain. He handed over the backpack with the girl’s things.

  “Thank you. Well, we’ll head off, you understand, my mother’s waiting.”

  “Of course.”

  “Manu, love, give your dad a kiss.”

  The girl hesitated, but at her mother’s insistent stare she approached him. He crouched down for her to press her mouth quickly to his cheek.

  “You ought to shave,” his ex-wife remarked as she said goodbye.

  “I will,” he said automatically.

  And there he stood with the door open, as they waited for the elevator. Mother and daughter, and later they would be meeting the grandmother. A kind of female clan, with a matriarchal lineage, a bond that united them and made them mysterious, inaccessible—he just stood there, forever excluded from their pact. He remembered a photograph his ex-wife had put on the coffee table in the living room, the three of them, grandmother, mother and daughter: the grandmother, a very elegant woman sitting in an armchair, her granddaughter on her lap, her daughter crouching down to be at their height. He would often sit in the living room and look at that photo. His mother-in-law, with whom he had a relationship that was polite though dry, his wife, who was increasingly a stranger, and his daughter, this girl who was so very distant. He looked at the two of them in the hallway, both silent; maybe those few minutes’ wait was making them uncomfortable. He felt uncomfortable, too. And when the elevator arrived, at last they could say goodbye.

  “Bye, Marcos.”

  “Bye.” He could barely hear his own voice.

  As he closed the door, he felt both relief and sadness. It was almost as though his wife, his daughter and that whole line of women had ceased to exist. And he realized that he had longed all day for that moment, when the door closed and he was at last alone at home. Finally the time and the space he needed. The letter. The thought that had not manifested itself—buried by the presence of his daughter and by everything that presence signified—but which had somehow been with him, discreet, asleep but insistent, the whole day.

  He went into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee. He returned to the living room, put the cup down on the table, picked up the blue envelope he had left there that morning, slightly hidden under electricity and gas bills. This time he had opened the envelope right away while still in the elevator, without the reluctance he had felt the previous day. Something was propelling him forward, impatience, curiosity. He looked at the letter carefully, the same handwriting, the same name, his address. In place of the sender’s name, just an initial. The fountain pen. That rounded handwriting. The envelope opened easily, opened in a kind of desperate longing. He noticed now that this time it didn’t have a stamp, a detail he hadn’t spotted that morning; it caught his breath for a few moments, the idea that she might be there, so close. That she might have dropped off the letter herself. He went over to the window, as though expecting to see her. Her quick, careful steps. Perhaps a shadow coming into the building, the long black hair, the red dress, her back naked, the envelope between her fingers. The address she believed to be her lover’s but that was now his, the apartment where he lived now, the moving crates still scattered around the living room, the view from the window. Could it be that, at some point, she had leaned right where he was leaning now on the windowsill, her eyes on the same sight he was looking at, the same landscape? He thought, Is that how it was?

  JANUARY 21

  My darling,

  I ended up returning the movie without watching it. I went by the rental place and returned it, not making a big scene. Why am I telling you this? I don’t know, perhaps to please you, to redeem myself. To redeem myself for some unexpected mistake, something that might happen by accident, those things that are impossible to control. And at the same time for things that had always been planned, the worst crimes, the worst plots. To confess something, not even just to please you; I would do anything to please you. However, even if I’m spending my days thinking about everything I say to you and about the effect of my words, will anything change? Will I in any way be a part of your life, or just the contrary, will we move further apart? Because it’s always possible to be further apart. Could there be some limit, a border to halt the process of distancing? Could there be a maximum distance between us, or is it something that continues to expand, uninterrupted, as time passes? At first, absence is everything that absence means: pain, joy and, who knows, even fatigue, then only a name, an image, then one day not even that, just a suspicion, an empty space.

  And once more I wonder what you might be asking yourself, what’s this whole thing for, after all? Maybe you ask this with each letter. Without really understanding the reason for these interrogations and memories and strategies. Why all this going round and round? You sit there, on the sofa, in the armchair, holding this letter and you’re irritated at my lack of concision. So I will be clear. I will answer you, without any circumlocutions this time, without repetitions, simply and without a big scene, which is the way the most extraordinary things really happen, important things: I’m writing for you to read me. Simple as that. For you to read me and turn back to me again, for you to read my words and think that there is something surprisingly beautiful inside me, something you hadn’t seen, something we’d never noticed. And so, to be even clearer—is that possible?—for you to read me and love me. Why not? Someone else reading these letters might love me, don’t you think? Even if loving isn’t as easy as all that—you’re probably thinking, Love isn’t as easy as all that. When you’re no longer in love, after love has appeared and lived and died and turned into something like a plant or any other organic matter, you think, Love isn’t some organic matter; love is something else. It won’t turn into a seed, you say, that’s not all organic matter is, gardening, working the soil, love isn’t a seed to turn into a plant and water and all those silly things that people like to think when they’re happy, this happiness that’s silly in the way all happinesses are, that makes us think it’s possible to recover the unrecoverable. You say all this now, as you read this letter, or maybe you’ve already said it or thought it about the previous letter, but I go on and I argue, insisting again, that there is something surprisingly beautiful inside me.

  I was thinking about this yesterday, about love, about this insistence on love, as though love could save us from everything, as though love could save us from hate, from madness and even desire. Whoever came up with that idea? Love can’t even save us from love.

  What can be said, then, about sadness, about indifference, and that inevitable moment when love ends? That moment we think will never come. And how are we to know when love ends? Will there be a moment, a dividing line, a revelation, an internal alarm clock that goes off, then right when we wake up, we say, sleepily, Ri
ght, it’s over. We get up, we get dressed, take our bag or suitcase and leave. Outside, the morning light of another day, people on the buses going to work, children in uniform, coffee with milk at the bakeries, all so everyday, so normal. How can it all be so normal, while inside an apartment, in a bedroom, in a bed, is love that has just ended.

  Or does love start ending right from the beginning, from the first kiss, the first look, the sense that something is being worn down, dissolving away. And however many kisses and gazes, and all the happy, foolish words we can invent, there’s always a lurking something that troubles us. Something that, at the precise moment when it starts, also sets in motion the inevitable process of extinction.

  Why all this? All these words about love, that can only be obvious and foolish, it’s true. My answer is that it’s just a way for me to get closer. To get closer, carefully, to what really matters. Why do stories end without ever revealing what happens afterward, what happens after the story ends? Isn’t that where the most important thing is, aren’t we missing something?

  At what point might we draw the line that separated us? You could even argue that we were separated from the start. But I’d rather not. I’d rather there be an event, an act, a moment when we got up and said, Right, it’s over. And what if it wasn’t us, that plural that includes us both in a single act, in drawn-out synchronized gestures, and what if it wasn’t us, but only you, who one day woke up, got out of bed and said, as though you’d heard an internal alarm clock only you could hear, the ringing of an alarm clock only you could hear, said, Right, it’s over. This single fact would be the beginning of countless little movements, which I would have no way of following, as I lay there, out of sync, thinking about the previous night and about everything that had happened and the way that you suddenly, without looking at me, without saying a single word, got up and put your clothes on and left. How was it possible that, from one moment to the next, you could wake up, get out of bed and leave. How could it be so simple? I couldn’t understand, and just went on lying there.