Outside, as we sit in two plastic chairs, she’s going to tell me about Fabricio with a cigarette in her hand. La Negra isn’t a smoker. She smokes blonde rolling tobacco on special occasions, for short periods. She smoked when I met her. One cigarette could last her an eternity. She smoked it in deep concentration, taking pleasure from it but also, it seemed to me, as though consulting an oracle. That afternoon, after exhaling several mouthfuls of smoke, searching for the appropriate words, the proper tone, she’ll tell me that with Fabricio she has the chance to experience something new. That’s why she couldn’t make up her mind whether to tell me about him, because of the newness and fragility of this thing she didn’t know the name of, only that it isn’t a silly love, a romantic love. Since I don’t quite know what she means by that, she’ll be forced to explain. I look at her mouth, and she sees me looking at it. She’d put on red lipstick in the bathroom, but it doesn’t help at all. You can still tell where she was.
‘What you feel for me is romantic love,’ she’ll say, covering her lips with her cigarette hand. ‘It’s not mature love. It’s not real love.’
My vertigo will keep me from saying much. I can only ask her if she’s already made the decision to stay with this Fabricio, if there isn’t any chance she’ll change her mind.
He was grey. La Negra was going to be with a fat grey guy. I go from sitting in my chair to kneeling on the ground. Then I slide down until I’m like a bracket against the wall. Then I gather the last of my strength to cross the dining room, and I end up stretched out on Juan’s little bed.
I’m going to smoke more than I’ve ever smoked in my life during the weeks that follow, wondering what the fuck is happening. How can it be that I’ve lost her just when it seemed everything was miraculously falling into place? How can it be that after having lost her, my love for her doesn’t diminish, but actually intensifies to levels I never would have thought possible? What evil spell has made me fall in love with her for the second time right as she’s starting to go out with that fat arsehole?
I won’t set foot in her house again during the few remaining days of school. The boys’ holidays begin in the second half of December. She’ll bring them to stay with me until Christmas, but she won’t show up alone. She’s going to come in Fabricio’s truck with Fabricio, who’s going to stay in the driver’s seat with the engine running while I receive the kids in the doorway and she hands me a bag with their things. I’m going to call her several times while I’m with the boys, but La Negra isn’t going to pick up or answer my messages no matter how long I wait, lying on the bed with the phone on my chest, checking it every once in a while even though it hasn’t rung or vibrated. On Christmas Eve she’s going to send a very short text wishing us a merry Christmas and letting me know that she’ll come to collect them on the 27th. She’ll stay silent when I reply, almost immediately, that we owe ourselves one last conversation, so we can lay all our cards on the table.
Paco is going to find me crying several times when he wakes up. He’s going to ask me why I’m crying, then whether I’m crying for Mum. I’m going to tell him half the truth: that I’m crying for his mother and that he shouldn’t worry, that I’ll get over it.
I won’t want to get over it. My love may be a childish love, it may be pure possessiveness, but it’s untameable. It may be a bitter love, but it’s also very sweet. The heart brought back to life after so long. The heart beating, flooded with an objectless love. I’m going to tend that love to keep it from waning. I’m going to worry about the day when that love will scatter like sand over the rest of the objects in the world. I’m going to try to silence my mind, which will teem with images of La Negra and fat Fabricio. I’m going to try. In the worst one, I see her having an orgasm and telling the fat muppet: take it, take it. That’s what she used to say when she had an orgasm: take it. As if she were the one who was ejaculating. She must have said it to Yamila’s father, too, and she must be saying it to the fat guy now. I don’t think she inaugurated that habit with me. I never wanted to find out.
I’ll also have images of us in old age, back together again, humiliated by time. Images of the two of us sitting there, remembering the past, reflecting on the winding path of our relationship. When I think that La Negra is an idiot for not returning my messages or calls, when I think about stopping by the fat bastard’s house one day and beating the shit out of him in front of my kids, it’s going to seem like those thoughts are of a lesser quality than the feelings my heart produces – feelings full of radiant energy. I’m going to feel split in two, mind and heart: the heart joyful, given over to its favourite activity, capable of limitless feeling; the mind irritated and at war. I’m going to tell myself that I have to trust my heart and give it free reign. I’m going to talk to my mind so it will submit to my heart. I’m going to tell it: Mind, stay in your place; Mind, don’t be afraid.
Even though we don’t have sex anymore, Clara still visits me. Now that the boys are on holiday and I have them with me, she texts before coming over. She’ll come by at eleven at night, when Paco and Juan are already in bed. We go out back to smoke, sitting in the grass or on a couple of folding chairs. I tell her things I never told anyone about La Negra; I tell her about the jealousy that ate away at us, and she doesn’t judge me or console me. She just clicks her tongue at certain moments of my story. A couple of times she’s going to suggest that we sleep together, invoking the idea that one nail drives out another, and one of those times I accept. I let her suck me off there outside, under the stars. I look at her, and she’s beautiful and feels splendid. She smiles at me, showing me that sensual gap between her front teeth, but she only gets me to half-mast.
‘You’re too cerebral,’ she tells me after a while.
That night she stays over. Depressed by her presence in my bed, which is nothing but a symbol of La Negra’s absence, I end up kicking her out in the early morning.
She and Alejandro are the only ones I talk to about the matter. With Alejandro when he calls from Santa Teresa on New Year’s, which I’m going to spend at home. He’s going to ask me about the boys and how things are going with Mum and Dad, who say I’ve been very aggressive lately, and I’m going to tell him about La Negra, who has just moved in with the fat wanker, in Shangrilá of all places, and I’m going to talk to him about the mind and the heart. Ale is going to ask me to be more patient with our parents, and he’s going to say that the best thing that could have happened is for Brenda to find another guy, even if it doesn’t seem that way now.
‘Don’t forget about everything that happened,’ he’ll tell me. ‘Don’t forget how badly you ended it. Remember how hard it was for you to get back on your feet.’
Then he’ll tell me about the girls he’s been hooking up with – five, though the season hasn’t technically even started yet – and about a technique he’s developed, the technique of dick rays and pussy rays. The technique consists of looking at the girl with your eyes but also with your dick. You have to feel like you’ve got a ray coming out of your dick that goes into the girl’s pussy. It works. Even if the girl isn’t looking at you, even if she’s laying down sunbathing and looking in another direction, at some point she starts to feel it and she ends up turning toward you; and if the girl is into it, she starts sending you pussy rays. ‘Really, I learned the technique from the girls’, says Ale, ‘from feeling their pussy rays while I was lifeguarding at the beach. Once it’s established that there’s a back and forth between dick rays and pussy rays, all the work is done. You go over to her, you say hi how’s things, and you’re good for the night.’
‘Forget about Brenda,’ he told me. ‘And stop calling her La Negra. It’s too intimate, you’ll never be totally separated that way. And open a Facebook account, it’s perfect for hooking up. Facebook is perfect for dick rays.’
Our last phone conversation will be on 6th January, which Ale is going to take off work so he can visit the family. No one knows, of course, but it will be the last time Alejandro sets foot in our parents’ house. I’ll be the only one who doesn’t go – partly because of the heat, which means taking the kids on the bus will be absolute