was only four years later, during the final period of our living together, when I’d found myself with the urge to take up writing again. I’d stay in the living room after dinner with a notebook, my tobacco and a thermos full of tea. It didn’t take long for La Negra to start complaining. She didn’t like it when I stayed up writing. To my utter shock, the reason – when I asked for one – was that sometimes Yamila got up at night to go to the bathroom. La Negra didn’t want me to be there, didn’t want me to see her daughter half asleep, in her underwear. Yamila was thirteen years old then. She was developing quickly, but she was still a child. I asked La Negra what she was afraid of. What did she think I was capable of doing to her daughter? She didn’t reply with words. She looked at me with hatred and shame. I wasn’t willing to stop writing, and again writing saved me, this time springing me from the cage of a relationship that had been collapsing for ages.
When I told La Negra I’d met someone, she didn’t get upset. All she did was suggest I hold off on introducing her to the kids until I was one hundred per cent sure it was something serious. As it happened, I never did introduce them, though I considered it. A little surprised at herself, Clara went on the pill. She’d gone some time without a stable relationship and without any intention of having one. We didn’t make any long-term plans, but we saw each other a lot. Clara would have liked to meet the boys, and I thought it could have a soothing effect on them; sometimes they worried because they thought I was lonely.
‘Do you have fun when you’re home alone?’ they’d ask me.
During the first phase we’d slept together practically every night, at her house or mine. Wednesday morning, when we were both free, we’d walk to the estuary. Later on, when I was with La Negra – sometimes the very same day – I felt spacious, overflowing, unattainable. The more I fucked, the more I felt like fucking. I developed the shoulders of a gym rat. Now that I was on a roll, I also reclaimed the night. I returned to downtown Montevideo, to certain bars where friends had told me that my reputation had gained me a cult following. People remarked on how good I looked and asked me what my secret was. I told them the truth: sex, a lot of sex, and they laughed as if I’d cracked a joke.
Then, at the beginning of last December, just two months before Alejandro died, like an idiot I fell in love with La Negra all over again. All my desire, suddenly and exclusively, came to focus on her. The feeling was so strong that it forced me to end my relationship with Clara. Clara is going to look at me in utter surprise when I tell her what’s happening to me. She’d had feelings for other people during all our time together, too, but it hadn’t made her want to break things off with me. That’s how couples work. For the first time in the past ten, almost eleven months, I sensed that Clara secretly hoped our relationship would work out. Something told me that by leaving her, I was closing the door to normalcy forever. Mornings with her were nice. Sex, coffee, reading the newspaper. When she saw there was nothing I could do to change my feelings, she swallowed her sadness. Somehow she always knew she stood to lose – after all, La Negra was the mother of my children.
‘After all, she’s the mother of my soul,’ I would correct her, as if there was even the slightest possibility she would understand me.
The feeling will take me completely by surprise. It will gestate over four, five days and then attack me, leaving me utterly perplexed. One of the mornings when I go by early to take the boys to school, while we have breakfast and help them get dressed, La Negra won’t draw out the moment when we hand off the mate in a caress. Then she’s going to freeze when I brush her hip as she waits for the bread to toast. Then, when I tell her that after I drop the kids off at school I’ll come back for a little visit with her, she’ll reply that we’d better leave it for another time, today she’s got some terrible premenstrual cramps. I’ll call her later that same day to see how she is and to wish her good night.
The next day I’ll send her a message telling her how much I miss her body and that I’ve had several ideas for our next encounter, a message she won’t answer until the next morning. Thursday or Friday morning I again suggest a visit, but she’s bleeding oceans and it’s not like it was at the beginning; she doesn’t let me touch her when she’s on her period. On Saturday I invite her to come over at night, but Yamila (fifteen) is planning a party at the house with her school friends and La Negra has to be there. The next time I take Paco and Juan to school it will once again be impossible for us to meet: she has an appointment at the social security offices at ten. In each of her negatives I’ll perceive a kind of deep-rooted regret, and I’m going to assume that La Negra is developing feelings for me, that she’d like to get back together and it hurts to have to share me with Clara, only she doesn’t know how to tell me.
I will have already talked to Clara the morning when I catch La Negra in the kitchen and tell her how I feel. When I tell her I want to get back together, she will stiffen. I don’t care how hard it’s going to be to patch things up and forgive each other completely, I’ll tell her. I’m willing to talk for as many hours as we need to talk and to cover every possible point. She’s going to look at me suspiciously. It’s going to seem too radical to her. Love is radical, I’ll reply.
‘You broke up with Clara without knowing what was going on with me?’
I couldn’t be with her anymore. Whether or not our relationship works, I don’t want to touch another woman. I couldn’t.
I’m going to insist. She’ll ask for time. She needs to look inside herself, she has a lot of things to consider, it’s all too sudden. When I tell her that I love her, she’s going to peer at me as if there were something to interpret. I won’t stop telling her, so she’ll see how sure I am. I’ll send her two or three messages a day: telling her about something nice I’m doing with the kids, or about something Paco did, something Juan said. Messages saying, You remember the time when this or that? and I’ll get more and more enthusiastic. Every day that La Negra takes to reflect speaks to the seriousness of our situation, how open our wounds are, and I’m going to respect her caution. I’m going to prepare, I’m going to remember our story, searching for keys and clues that will help us repair everything that’s broken. I’m going to regret, for starters, having relegated her to the role of a lover for all this time. I’m going to try to console myself with the idea that we’ve already gone through everything. What was left to us but to accept, once and for all, that life had put each of us in the other’s path? I’m going to thank heaven for the renewed assault of this feeling, the sudden, luminous, poetic course of my life. I’m going to think of the boys’ happiness; they’re so little that they’ll probably end up forgetting the couple of years when their parents were separated.
And one afternoon, burning with desire to see her, I’m going to go by without calling first, at the time when she usually comes home after collecting the boys from school, and I’m going to find out that she’s not there. Yamila will have picked up Paco and Juan and walked them home. It’s Yamila who will be making some pasta for lunch. Apparently, her mother has had to go to Montevideo on some urgent errands and it’s unclear when she’ll be back. While Yamila finishes cooking lunch, I’m going to go outside with Paco and Juan to watch them ride their bikes around the triangular plaza across from the house. It will be a sunny, spring-like day, and my impatience will start to grow. It’s almost time to go back to work and I don’t like the idea of the boys being alone with only their sister looking after them, and I can’t stop looking at my watch and staring at the end of the track where La Negra will have to appear after she gets off the bus.
Around that corner, eventually, comes a white pickup with its headlights on. At first I think it’s a police truck. Some metres before it reaches the fork at the little plaza, the truck stops and sits motionless for several seconds. I don’t know how I know, but La Negra is in that truck. I know that when she saw me in the street she asked the guy at the wheel to stop, and I know that she’s just spent the night with that guy. She’s explaining the situation to him; she’s explaining who I am. Then, the pickup, in no hurry, turns onto her street and stops at the driveway. I cross the plaza to watch her get out of the passenger side: she meets my eyes as I walk. I look into the truck’s open window, and I’m met by the stink of cigarettes and alcohol. Fabricio, a fat man with the look of a mechanic, introduces himself and shakes my hand, and then