by Andrés Barba
MARATHON
HE LIKED RUNNING the way a little kid likes gazing up at the sky—irrationally, with no thought of stopping. He’d always liked it, and couldn’t imagine that he might one day stop, just as he couldn’t imagine that anyone might stop being someone’s brother or sister, or one day change mothers. Running was the most intimate of acts, a realm not even Diana or his university friends could enter, and yet it was one of his few absolute essentials. Twice a week, three times if possible, he performed the slow ritual of the running shoes, the T-shirt, with the confidence of someone effortlessly coaxing pleasure from an old lover at precisely the right moment. And for the past three months—the time since the wedding—it had held even greater appeal, because now the park closest to home was far bigger, and thus offered a greater variety of possible routes. He discovered this with the excitement of a child playing for the first time with a long-coveted toy and holding back, as though to draw out the pleasure of the encounter, savor it to the point of exhaustion.
Diana didn’t understand, or if she did, she hated it now that they were married. The week after their wedding she’d tried insisting several times that he let her go with him, and though he tried every excuse to dissuade her (she’d get too tired, she’d hate it, she’d complain the whole time) there came an evening when finally he had to give in. It was, from the start, as if he were against Diana entering this realm, as if he wanted it for himself alone. He knowingly took her on the hardest route and made zero effort to adapt to her pace. After ten minutes she asked him to slow down. After fifteen she gave up and went home. And although pleased by the effort she’d made (it was patently obvious, and therefore flattering, that Diana had pushed herself to the limit in her attempt to keep up with him), he was put off by her weakness, her lack of stamina. Plus, why was Diana so set, now that they were married, on taking part in things she’d shown no interest in over the course of their eight-year courtship? That day, he felt justified in his one-time resolution never to marry, even regretted having done it, having capitulated to Diana’s family and their concerns.
“You did that on purpose,” she said when he got back, an hour later.
“Did what?”
“Tried to wear me out, you did it on purpose.”
“I did not,” he lied. Diana was being ridiculous, and looked ugly, which she perhaps never had until that moment. Though she’d already showered and had been home for a while, resting, her cheeks were still flushed from the effort. Her breasts looked too small, or too insubstantial somehow—a part of Diana that hadn’t changed now struck him not as unpleasant but insipid, utterly lacking in appeal. The fact that her breasts, of all things, were the focal point of his disgust left him confused, because he’d often thought they were one of the sweetest, loveliest parts of her body.
“I know you too well,” she insisted. “You did it to tire me out, at least have the balls to admit it.”
“Think what you want, but it’s not true.”
He walked into the bathroom to shower and locked the door. He’d never locked the bathroom door on Diana before but he did it then, because suddenly the possibility of her coming in as he was washing up bothered him. And though she didn’t try, he still felt safer this way, and also pleased with himself for making it clear that his runs belonged to an altogether private realm. There was no reason for this to be a problem, he thought, no reason for her to get upset; all couples, no matter how happy, need their own breathing space. Accepting as much wasn’t an admission of defeat, it was just reality. That’s what he told her, speaking the words in the same tone in which he’d thought them in the shower, and at first, judging by Diana’s expression as she listened, he thought that deep down she got it, and knew that he was right. She did not, however, stay up with him to watch the movie being shown on TV that night. She said her head was killing her and that she wanted to go to bed.
A translator. She was a translator. Not like him, with an active job in probate law at a local firm, but a translator. If at least she did literary translation—short stories or poems—maybe her life would be saved from absurdity, but Diana’s translations were almost always industrial machinery manuals, kitchen appliance instructions, directions for the assembly of tents. How could anyone be happy with that? It was odd, actually, that he’d never thought about it until now. Seeing her asleep in bed when he left in the morning, phoning at lunch to discover that she wasn’t even up yet, coming home after work to find her at the computer was starting to give him the impression that she was part of the furniture—her long black hair, slippers, thrown-together outfits worn for comfort—and there was this feeling that sometimes rose up in his throat, strangling him, something like tedium.
They’d known each other for eight years, but maybe they didn’t know each other. At first he’d liked Diana’s almost undetectable vulnerability, her eyes. They kissed two weeks after meeting and made love for the first time a month after that, in a hostel room whose cost they split, a room whose dinginess struck him as a bit sad when she confessed, afterward, that she’d been a virgin.
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to scare you off, and because I wanted you to be the one,” Diana had said, and he didn’t know whether to hold her or scream, to say he loved her or grab his clothes and run.
“I love you,” he said.
Their first three years were like those of so many other couples who’d recently graduated from university. They shared the same group of friends, they had parties to attend. Every summer they went to the beach (she liked the south) and at Christmas, maybe skiing. They were reasonably happy, a garden-variety sort of happy—no tragedies, no drama. Sometimes, stopped in the car at a red light, they kissed; they held hands at dinners. Sometimes they were used as the example of a perfect couple.
The fourth year, Diana went to England to teach Spanish. He told her (they’d argued a lot, in the preceding months) that they’d probably break up then, she shouldn’t even think of it as tragic, she would probably meet someone else and so would he. But they kept calling each other. For a few months, he dated a girl named Marina whose haircut reminded him of Diana and who he eventually broke up with, out of sheer boredom. Diana wrote him long letters that said absolutely nothing and yet served as a reminder of her uncomplicated presence, of the near-certainty that this woman’s entire life was devoted to his happiness. When she returned, he went to pick her up at the airport, and they kissed like it was the first time.
“I love you,” Diana said, and he thought then that it would be unfair to ask for anything more of life.
The years following seemed like a slow, inexorable road to matrimony. He saw them differently now, though he realized how valuable Diana’s presence had been at that time. He’d begun working in the probate division at the law firm and found it hard not to lose his sense of humor after long sessions in which, too often for his liking, he had to keep relatives of the deceased from tearing each other to shreds. It was, with rare exception, as though death brought out the worst in people, reduced them to settling affairs in the most vicious of ways. Telling Diana stories after work provided such relief that she became necessary for his survival, because no matter how often he did, she always wore an expression of utter shock, of incredulity, and her incredulity served not to absolve the others but to save him, placing him in a higher order than the one in which he was forced to live.
Two months after she got her translator job they married. He’d always found weddings a bit sad, and his own was no exception.
“This is just a formality,” he’d told Diana three days before the ceremony, but in truth her dress weighed on him like a white death. It wasn’t a formality, or a costly performance that entailed the banqueting of people they—more or less—cared about, but love, crashing into his awareness like some terrible white elephant in the form of a wedding dress, a balding man who claimed to represent God, Diana’s mother smiling for the camera, Diana’s friends saying, “She’s a first-class product, so you better ma
ke it last” and making other jokes, all of them drunk on his dime (“Throw the flowers already, Diana!”), the altar boy dressed in white, the priest dressed in white, Diana’s brother in that horrible white hat, and him, there, in the middle of it all, pretending not to be on edge. He asked Diana if they could leave after the cake, because to stay any longer would have meant throwing in the towel, declaring defeat in the face of a ritual of forced happiness, saying yes to his mother, who sometimes couldn’t conceal the sadness that living alone was going to bring her and quickly wiped away a tear so her mascara wouldn’t run, saying yes to the waiters already handing out cigars and matchboxes unoriginally personalized with their names, yes to pictures (“A little more, right there; now put your arm around your wife!”), to the guests. When they got to the apartment—which back then was almost devoid of furniture—they made love in the least fearful and wretched way they could, and he thought he understood why Diana sometimes froze when on the verge of being naked: because she was afraid, blinded by the responsibility, because her body, a woman’s body (like a marathon route disappearing in the distance) was sometimes a frightening panorama to contemplate.
Running was the great liberation. Particularly in the days following the wedding because not only was it an escape from Diana’s presence, which suddenly irritated him, but also from his own mood swings. If anyone had asked, he wouldn’t have known how to articulate what it was he thought about on his runs. More than the technical aspects of his exertion (how much energy to conserve for the steepest inclines, when to do his sprints, whether he could keep from hitting the wall at twenty miles), the act of running was inward, self-contained, its own erotic world of perfectly conditioned machinery. He might have said, for instance, that nobody who doesn’t run could understand the satisfaction of controlling one’s own fatigue, or that there were moments in which he didn’t feel his body belonged to him in the same way as other people did (so much a part of them that they could never see themselves as separate from it) but instead felt as if he took leave of it, as if he were aware of each of his muscles, controlled each one absolutely and yet did so from elsewhere, somehow, as though only in the act of running did his body stop being him and became something he possessed.
The park had a life of its own, too, and he formed a part of it. A life silently established in the invisible relationships between all the runners. Like a spider’s web, it skipped from one to the next, in the form of jealousies, provocations, challenges, propositions; measuring up the next guy was not simply a matter of inspection, it was knowing whether you could beat him without having to run alongside him, it was passing him on the steepest incline without letting the tiniest bit of effort show on your face and then perhaps waiting for him to catch up so you could do it again; it was comparing running shoes, legs, sweat, all without ever letting it be noticed, without speaking it.
He might not have seen the guy in a green T-shirt the very first day, but once he started following him it was as if the guy had been there all along. And he realized, almost with pleasure, that he was the only person who could outpace him. This man was thinner and had an asymmetrical rough-hewn beauty about him, even in the way he ran, pumping his arms too high in the stride, and seemed oblivious to his presence. More than a thin, redheaded runner, he was part of the park made visible, and mobile, something whose life didn’t extend beyond the trees, which is why when they first met (he turned out to work at the greengrocer’s next to his house) it took a minute to recognize him.
“You run, don’t you?” the man said, grabbing the bunch of asparagus he’d asked for. “I’ve seen you lots of times, in the park.”
Initially he felt the sort of uneasiness you might get watching a panther in a cage, an incredible force of strength confined in a strange setting.
“Yeah,” he replied. “I’ve seen you, too. You’re pretty good.”
“Thanks, so are you.”
His name was Ernesto, and the only reason he didn’t tell Diana that they’d met, even arranged to run together three days later, was because ever since the day she’d tried to accompany him, all talk of runs had been tacitly suppressed, like the presence of an inexorable lover.
This is what happened one night: he’d just brushed his teeth when he saw Diana in the mirror, getting undressed. Always the same display of intimacy, undoing two or three buttons and then tugging her shirt over her head almost scornfully, the way a little girl takes off a frilly dress; always the same annoyance at picking her pants up off the floor after removing them each day, draping them over the back of a chair like a pair of disembodied legs. Diana’s life resided in those displays, the repeated rituals, the gestures, but suddenly it was as if she were a stranger to him, and he, in turn, unknown to her. The fact that they’d been married only three months made the whole thing not ironic but sad. How could they do anything but hate each other, he thought, how could two people not end up hating one another, in a home where they had to turn sideways and press into the wall just to pass in the hallway, in a kitchen where more than two was a crowd, in a bed in which to sleep without touching was a miracle. He needed air, space—that was why he ran.
Her orderliness made matters worse. The first time he saw the apartment bare, its walls papered—they later decided to paint them white—it seemed bigger, and more impersonal. In the two months following the wedding, Diana had felt an almost physical need to fill the space. Not a week went by that she didn’t make some purchase or change something around.