‘These are some little pyjamas I bought the other day, one pair for each of them. They can choose later,’ she says. Then she takes out some educational toys and some mugs for their morning cocoa. ‘I was going to take them to buy trainers today before lunch, but…’
Taking the large bag from her hands, La Negra puts the smaller ones back inside and hugs her one last time.
Juan runs to the truck as soon as we’re out the door. Paco, though he starts off a second later, gets there before his brother. Wrapping her arm around my neck, La Negra tells me she cares about me a lot and she asks me to be strong, very strong. I want her to call me as soon as they get home so I can be sure they’ve got there all right, but she doesn’t want to. How hard can it be? I ask her.
It’s only five blocks, I need to calm down, there’s no reason to think anything will happen to them. She’s right. There’s no reason for anything to happen to them, I tell her, but no one is ever free. There’s never any certainty about anything.
‘So you want me to call you?’ she asks me.
For her to call me when they get home, that’s all I’m asking. But she doesn’t know if they’re going straight home. Maybe she’ll take them somewhere else first. Maybe they’ll go and play on the swings for a while. The sun is nice. She asks me: ‘You really want to wait who knows for how long to find out if we made it home safe and sound?’
Go straight home, I tell her. Don’t go out, today of all days.
‘I have to go straight home, I have to call you, what else?’ she says, before shouting to the boys not to jump in the truck bed; they’d climbed into it without our noticing.
She doesn’t have to call me. She can go wherever she wants. She’s a free woman in a free country. Don’t call me, I tell her. Don’t let me manage your life. It’s not that I’m nervous. I want to control you. No, I know what I want. It’s something much sadder. I want my phone to ring, and I want it, for once, to be you.
‘I don’t know if you’re being serious or not,’ she says.
So don’t call me, because I won’t answer, I tell her. I haven’t even got the words out before she shakes her head, takes two steps away, and then flashes me the exact same smile as she used to during our first days together, when she’d go with me to the bus stop early in the morning. She wouldn’t wait for me to get on the bus. She’d turn to go as soon as the 6.30 Raincoop came around the corner, and she’d say bye-bye over her shoulder, smiling as she lifted her little skirt just a bit to flash me her panties all up in her arse, so I wouldn’t forget what was waiting for me at home.
During the whole first year of our separation I never touched another woman. I wanted to keep them as far away from me as possible. I couldn’t even look them in the eyes. I wasn’t attracted to La Negra anymore. More than that – she disgusted me. And since she wasn’t sleeping with anyone either, her body turned sad. She had a beautiful arse, but she started to lose it. I remember one time when I saw her from the window of a bus. It was almost noon and there she was, walking along the road dressed in white, on her way to pick up Paco and Juan from school. White trousers, white blouse, white leather boots, her hair straightened. The neighbourhood tart. She hadn’t worn enough clothes, and her arms were crossed to keep herself warm. The trousers, which had once hugged the roundness of her buttocks, were now pinched and gathered. That’s what you get for being a bitch. Hija de puta, I thought.
She was always dressed up when I went by her house to collect or drop off the boys. Sometimes that made me feel good, and other times it made me look down on her. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to seduce me or show some dignity, and I wasn’t interested in finding out. On Wednesdays I’d take the kids to school; on Fridays after school we’d all have lunch together at her house. We wanted the boys to see their mother and father sharing moments without friction, and we gave it our very best.
One of those afternoons after we’d eaten, La Negra handed me a mate and my fingers brushed against hers. I guess they always brushed hers, but that time I felt it. I felt the softness of her skin on my fingers. Starting then, we began to see each other during the school day. Some Saturdays she’d come to my house and we’d have dinner with the boys. The boys didn’t know she’d stay over. So they wouldn’t harbour false hopes, she’d get up at seven on Sunday and left before they woke up. We agreed that we weren’t getting back together. We wanted each other; it was about indulging ourselves every once in a while, but we both had the freedom to be with anyone we wanted.
The sex with La Negra brought my testosterone back, and in a few months I was seeing Clara, a neighbour I’d run into at the bakery and the bus stop and who I’d previously only greeted with a hello or goodbye. On my way to the laundrette I’d go past her house, a little bungalow with a pitched roof and a bare front garden. On weekends I’d see her drinking mate there with some guy or a couple of girlfriends, listening to loud music, Extremoduro, La Polla Records, La Chancha Francisca. She had a broad waist that spilled over her trousers, which she didn’t worry about hiding, and she had a beautiful face. To my astonishment she knew who I was, and she held me in high regard. She was twenty-nine and still needed to take a couple of exams to finish her literature degree from the Artigas Teachers Institute, and she’d been teaching for several years. She read a lot of Latin American literature, and she knew authors I’d never even heard of. Vargas Llosa and the Onetti who wrote long novels were her absolute idols. She was always re-reading them. In fact, she had moods when the only books she could only stand to read were A Brief Life or Conversation in The Cathedral. It had been a long time – over ten years – since I’d gone out with someone who had her own library.
When I stopped writing at twenty-four, I’d also left behind all of my literary relationships. La Negra didn’t read, except for the occasional advanced self-help book (Deepak Chopra, Louise Hay) or some treatise on Chinese medicine, which was her line of work. She had a contempt for bookish people that suited me perfectly. Early on, she’d taken an interest in my books. She’d found them in the little library in my bedroom one of the first times she’d stayed over. She was leafing through them, sitting on the bed. I took them out of her hands. I forbade her to read them. They didn’t represent me anymore. I was ashamed of them. I didn’t even know why I kept them. They were a product of my depression. They’re an affront to life, I think I even told her, and what we had between us was pure life. She was the first woman I was going to live with, and she was a mother, and I was in love, I felt positive for the first time in a long time.
In our first encounters she told me practically her entire love life. She’d started having sex very young, at thirteen, like it was a kind of game. In her family there was never a lot of fuss about bodies. Her father used to walk around the house in the buff like it was nothing. She’d always dated much older guys. She’d had two miscarriages, at sixteen and twenty-three, and she’d been in love with two men at the same time; they’d all lived together in Pajas Blancas. One of them had left on the verge of going crazy, and with the one who stayed, the one she’d soon have to leave, she’d had Yamila. I didn’t ask for details about any of that. I didn’t ask if the three of them slept together or if they took turns, and she didn’t tell me. It was a boundary she set in her own story, to protect me, and it was for my own protection that I didn’t cross it. I didn’t have so much to tell, just that I’d debuted with a toothless whore in a brothel in Lautaro, in the south of Chile, on a trip I’d taken with the basketball team when I was seventeen. Before that, at fifteen, I’d sucked on my first little girlfriend’s tits. Afterwards, I hadn’t been able to sleep all night, and the next day I’d apologised for having disrespected her: this image summed up how pathetic my adolescence had been. Later, when I was older, I’d had two important girlfriends, but more than anything I’d dedicated myself to sex for pleasure, once I’d got past the dark initial phase of excess. La Negra didn’t ask me what that excess had involved, and I didn’t explain. My nocturnal, cocaine-fuelled excursions in Montevideo seemed too distant, and not simply because they were far in the past. Even at the time, they had already seemed far away. While they were happening, it was as if they were happening to someone else, and I’d never