been able to chill and be alone together, after all that ruckus over his divorce, and that they’d like to spend some more time just like that, but that, yeah, she did figure she would start a family with him, that she saw him as the father of her children, and that actually, oh, and by the way, did I know about Julián? Here I make sure that my face doesn’t change. Julián, I say, what do you mean, I have no idea what you’re talking about, know what? And she gets this little twinkle in her eyes, that twinkle of getting to be the one to break the gruesome news to me. Oh, so, Julián’s got kids now, two of them, or, well, one with another on the way. My blood starts running cold, then the predictable/old pit in my stomach. But I keep feigning control. So weird, right? Julián as a dad? Who would have thought, says Vanina. Meanwhile I, bigger liar than ever before, say, what do you mean, I don’t think it’s weird at all, he’d probably be a great father, I don’t see why not, and then she unintentionally drives the dagger in deeper, works it in slow: well, you know, yeah, actually that was the surprising part about it, was that it was incredible seeing Julián with the little one, he takes him everywhere he goes, and that it’s kind of beautiful to see. I feel like I would like to die, or at least like I would like to kill this messenger. And yet the juiciest part is still to come, and I know that Vanina isn’t going to tell me, or that she isn’t going to say it of her own accord, she’ll wait until I ask her, let me want to know, let me demonstrate I want or that I need to know, so as not to gratuitously wound me, as though the damage weren’t done. Even though, based on the information I’ve provided her, about my boyfriend in Buenos Aires, plus the time that’s passed, plus my performance that I’m giving now, the amount that all this hurts me shouldn’t show. She doesn’t, cannot realize. She assumes, I think, that I love my life of a free agent in the city, believes that it’s a life I wouldn’t trade for anything, which I guess is what I have been trying to convey to her since her arrival, what I’ve led her to believe. And really anyone—even me on a good day—could easily confirm this, that I wouldn’t trade my simple, pleasant life in Buenos Aires. It’s just that right at this precise instant I’m not so sure. What if all the decisions I have made were bad ones, and I should have stayed with Julián? In which case those children, those kids, would be mine instead. Jesus. Kids with someone else. Which means he’s inextricably connected to another woman. Which brings us back to . . . Who’d he get married to? Oh, no, he didn’t, or, well, that now he had, that now he was indeed legally wedded, but that that was after, after the son was born. León. León, he’s apparently named, what a nice name, what a discreet name. Very Julián, he must have chosen it. Bound for all time to another person, another woman, deeply revolting, Jesus. No, the girl is younger, you wouldn’t know her, she’s from Trevelin, Welsh family, they had been going out but not for long, really, that the girl was just eighteen, that she’d been eighteen when she’d gotten pregnant, and that they’d decided they would keep it. She had wanted it although she’d just completed high school. Mariela, her name is Mariela. Now she’s twenty-one. And so yeah, León was born, and when he was a year and a half or so, they got married. That no, Vanina hadn’t gone to the wedding, that they’d invited very few people because they didn’t have any money, and because her family wasn’t too thrilled about the marriage, about Julián, or the fact that he’d knocked up their daughter prior to proposing. So they hadn’t made a big deal out of it. She’d stood at the altar with the baby in her arms.
Ah. Pain, the most profound/the lowest kind of pain. He’d just stayed with her? Since when is he capable of that level of love? Well, but I mean, it’s his kid, clearly nothing’s going to get in the way of that. His kid. So anyway, so here they were, he’d brought her down to live here, at his parents’ place, and for now she isn’t working, Susi’s helping her with León and with her pregnancy, and Julián is working with his dad, mostly with the truck, deliveries, traveling a lot.
