All My Goodbyes Read online

  That doña Carmen had once been a whore, in Almagro or in any other town, is a lie.

  Sitting in the university café in Heidelberg, opposite the main square, Alexander asked me why I’d worked in the bakery at the foot of the castle, and then as a glass-stacker in IKEA, and why indeed I was currently employed as an auto-parts sorter at the ABB factory, if in reality I was a biologist. Imagine traveling forty kilometers by bus every day! He said he could organize for me to give Spanish lessons, maybe help me find a scholarship, even get me a job at the chemical testing lab on campus. All of these things he said, stroking my knee under the table without looking at me, as though the movement were purely coincidental.

  What do I believe in, after all this? I believe in Alexander, in Kolya, in Julia. In a Turkish warrior. And I believe in him, of course. In the fact that I left home at twenty-three and returned ten years later, finally to fall in love with a man. I believe in those pilgrim years, when staying put was not an option, those years spent in a kind of conspiracy with habit and daily routine, despite myself, but always with a ticket under my arm, or perhaps up my dirty sleeve, always with a passage to somewhere else at the ready. I would always arrive with the intention of staying. And even then I wouldn’t stay. I don’t understand what the word for is for. Being useful is of no use to me.

  Athens airport has a great big staircase where the wind, Greek and dry, burns my face.

  In Heidelberg, Alexander tells me again about the campus laboratory just outside the city. I feign surprise, then reply that I am sulfur intolerant. But the idea was not new to me at all.

  “What about the laboratory?” one of my brothers asked me in Buenos Aires, when I told him I was leaving.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Away.”

  For some time they’d been planning to set up a clinical analysis and bacteriology lab in which my participation, they believed, was imperative. The project had been my father’s idea, obviously. It was his way of exorcising old age. They all practiced with zeal the alchemy of daily life: the kids, the wife, the job. Their dosages were always wrong, almost always badly timed. Maybe the laboratory, they told themselves.

  “You’re going for what,” my father had said without inflecting the question.

  I began with the practical reasons and followed up with the personal ones. I presented a solid defense: the possibility of finding a job in the sciences (although I didn’t want to), of pursuing further study (although I didn’t plan on studying either). I said nothing about saving money; he would never have believed me. What more could I do? I was young, I had concocted a few firm convictions. After my somewhat heated oration I fell silent.

  “You won’t be happy over there either,” my father decreed.

  He told me about his travels in China when my mother was still alive and I still wasn’t born, twenty-five, thirty years ago. His victory over me was frugal, half-smiling, like everything else about him.

  Exhausted by a long day at work, I fall asleep. But the travel bug never rests, and it lays traps for me day and night.

  One morning, at a little hotel in the Spanish town called Almagro, doña Carmen grew tired of me. A month and a half had passed since I’d left Buenos Aires, and I still thought I was on holiday.

  “Think about it, my girl: the sun, the beach!”

  She had a sister in Málaga, on the coast. At this time of year I could get a good deal on accommodations. I went, knowing full well that three weeks in doña Carmen’s hotel had not been long enough for the furniture, the old television set, to render themselves unfathomable to me. Given a little more time (it was all about time) things would have ended the way they so often did, in later years. The arrival—from dinner, say, or from the supermarket. The setting of the handbag on the floor. The glance around the room. What is that chest of drawers, that bed? What is that rug (if there was a rug)? What are those curtains? Suddenly the chair is archaic, there is no use for it. The bedroom is abandoned, the bathroom and its mirrors incomprehensible. How can it be abandoned, I wonder, if until so recently it was my very own room? How, if that blanket is mine, the towels freshly replaced just this morning? And yet, it has all become unfathomable to me. Did I really think I’d been living within these four walls this whole time? It was just an illusion. A lackluster magic trick, utterly profane. I exit the room, then walk back into it. What happens? The same thing: the ludicrous furniture, the mute door. I’m a fool, I tell myself, and I sit down. Perhaps I look out the window. I see the same old landscape. How did I get up every morning and look out that window at the same old landscape? That isn’t life, I tell myself, there must be something more.

  “And the neighbor up the hill? They had a fight over a water channel. Do you know anything about that? Did you ever hear anything about a death threat?”

  The policeman spat when he spoke. Meanwhile, I heard the ghosts of the wind circling in the vaulted roof of Madame Cupin’s house.

  “Once he came over on a horse and trampled the marigolds. But I never heard anything about a death threat.”

  “Do you still assert that you left the house that night because of the bugs?”

  “I do.”

  When I wake up I make a long calculation, with functions and algorithms. It happens every morning, and the result is always me. This is surprising.

  I bade farewell to doña Carmen with the promise that I would pass through Almagro again on my way back to Madrid. I knew I wouldn’t, but I would have liked to in some other future that wasn’t my own. When I said goodbye and embraced her thick body, warmed by the La Mancha sun, I understood that it would be the last time. She no longer mattered to me. With that same embrace, doña Carmen had dissolved into nothing. Yes, I would stay with her sister. We’d see each other again soon, soon. I was hardly paying attention. I went to Málaga without closing my eyes once, taking in every centimeter of the passing landscape. That same day I managed to find doña Carmen’s sister’s guesthouse. I examined the front porch and decided it was impossible; I wandered a few blocks to the right and another few to the left, as though I knew where I was headed, and on a corner I would certainly have described as dull I found another hotel. It had two stars; this seemed like a lot. I spent two days coming and going at the appropriate times, towel tucked beneath my arm. Upon arriving at my destination I would half-unfold it and search for a patch of shade. But that would never work, not in a place like this. Those who believed otherwise were profoundly mistaken. It was impossible to remain in Málaga, let alone live in Málaga. To be in Málaga was to be mistaken down to one’s bones—gravely, feverishly mistaken. I would sit down as best I could at the beach, without fully unfolding my towel, as I’ve already mentioned, in a patch of shade if I could find one, and keenly study the improbability of everything. Those umbrellas? Absolutely not. That coast? It was impossible to remain seated; if I stood up, it took everything I had not to break into a run. But where would I go? The Mediterranean, that ancient sea, was a dumb song.

  I got to my feet and went to the water. There was a ball floating on the waves and two boys running back and forth along the sand, neither daring to go in and retrieve it. They watched spellbound as the tide drew it in and out.

  They asked me for help and I told them there was no way I was going into the sea to rescue their horrible ball.

  That last bit is a lie. Nobody ever asked me anything.

  “Any family members you know of?”

  “One brother. He lives in Chile. He’s an architect.”

  “And what is your opinion of him?”

  “No opinion. He’s tall. He writes poems in a little book.”

  Shortly afterward, the next day in fact, I met Stefan. I had gone to the beach and was forced to sit on the sand to get some sun. I saw him from afar, walking with a certain nonchalance. A dog was following him. I later discovered that the dog wasn’t his, although he walked as if it belonged to him, shoulders pressed forward, back heavy, exuding that radiant resignation particular to m
en walking with their dogs. They passed a few meters from me and stopped a little further along. There was a red car. Stefan seemed to be arguing with someone inside, someone hidden by the reflection coloring the windscreen. At the risk of humiliating myself in front of both him and his dog, I stood up as if to walk over and alert them to my presence. My sudden stroke of curiosity was ridiculous, but still I continued all the way to the asphalt. I glanced emphatically at them again, but they didn’t even turn around, nor did I walk over to meet them. Instead I deliberately crossed to the other side of the street. All I could think was that I was wrong: wrong to leave, wrong to stay. Because my head was so vacant I thought about things a lot, applying a degree of patience and detail that stirred no pride in me. So I ended up at Málaga train station and bought a ticket back to Madrid. From there, I thought, I would return to Buenos Aires and put an end to this farcical vacation. I had left for the sake of leaving, nothing more. And it was the same thing now, I told myself as I paid for the ticket: I hoped Madrid would soon become untenable, boring in her brilliance, with that brilliant boredom only cities can evoke. It was enough to detest the people there mildly, so long as I had nothing: if there were ties, I would untie them; if there were agreements, I would disclaim them. Then would come the triumphant moment, when the suitcases are packed and I haul them onto the final carriage, close the final door.

  The entire expedition out of Buenos Aires would be rendered inoffensive, a round-the-world trip in Hispanic miniature. And my father would have his small victory, seeing me back home, and I would happily let him have it, because he was old and that was a secret neither of us dared to reveal. But that’s not how it happened. That same night, with my suitcases packed and my hotel bill settled, I saw Stefan again. This time, instead of a dog, he was accompanied by a little boy. He came into the bar where I was eating dinner, took a look around and selected a table outside. I tried not to insist, with my eyes or with my thoughts, concentrating instead on the fish I had just been served and on the usual inane reflections of the traveler, such as the cost of the next day’s travels, where I was going to sleep in Madrid, whether there was still a metro ticket floating around in one of my pockets. I was trying to distract myself, because he was in Málaga and I, to all intents and purposes, had already left Málaga. The meal tasted of nothing in particular; I finished it without any real satisfaction, mistakenly believing that I might as well have eaten nothing at all. The amenities, the furnishings, the paintings inside the bar all seemed offensive to me, nothing less than a slap in the face. Even the waiters, the other diners, they were all wrong, every leg, every hoisting of fork to mouth was wrong.

  “Where’s the dog?” I asked him.

  Stefan lifted his gaze from his plate and hesitated for a moment, sizing me up. It took him only a second to approve of my attire and frame. He smiled splendidly, clearly pleased.

  “The dog from today? You’re right, there was a dog following me around all day, but it’s not mine. Is it yours?”

  “No.”

  “Please, sit down. This is my son Andrei. Do you like children?”

  He stretched out the word children. I didn’t reply.

  He offered me something to drink and we were more than friendly with one another, there behind our wine glasses. First we had the obligatory conversation about Málaga, our respective places of origin, whether seaside or mountains, both of us making subtle signs, never letting our sentences stray too close to intimacy. That’s what the night was for. With the excuse of stretching our legs we set off for a stroll. The little boy, who was walking between us, insisted on grabbing my skirt and flicking it. I didn’t find this amusing. After a while we stopped to look at the sky and the stars. Because the little boy loved to look at the sky, according to Stefan. But the kid thought he’d seen a lizard and started to run around in circles, repeating the same two or three words like a sad little bird. His father paid scant attention to him, casting the occasional monosyllable in his direction, random words of approval, until the kid whirled away again beyond the shrubs. When he circled back past us he pointed at me.

  “Are you cold?” he asked.

  Stefan was standing behind me now, with his arms around me. I replied, with strange solemnity, that I was. When the kid left again, Stefan began to murmur the names of the stars he knew. I told him which ones I preferred, this one, that one, as if discussing products on a supermarket shelf, pretending I’d never until that moment examined the sky the astronomers had invented. It was cheap romanticism, by anyone’s standards. We both knew that. The monotonous melody of myself traced slow circles in my head. I think I might have lied a little, passing myself off as a young doña Carmen. The kid came past one last time and clung to his father’s trousers, said he missed his mama.

  “It’s late,” Stefan said, and loosened his embrace.

  I accompanied them to the hotel at a brisk pace, and bid them farewell at the door without so much as a kiss, thinking about how I would never see either of them again. I abhorred the thought of my body touching the bed, I would have done anything to fall asleep on my feet. Turns out I was wrong about never seeing them again.

  As if from a tall staircase, I fell into introspection.

  I leave because I cannot stay, or I leave so that I cannot stay. The kind of quandary Alexander would have delighted in, chatting there in the café, seated with or without our hands entwined under the table, having granted each other a night of sex the evening before. I don’t believe it, I’m certain of it: he was in love with me from the very beginning. He wasn’t joking when he told me to stay—at least until the following year, when he’d have finished his degree, so we could make plans together, either there in Heidelberg or in some other corner of the globe. Alexander was German but not overly so, he wasn’t tremendously German or European, and yet he had that cheerful way of preparing for the future because he believed it belonged to him, although it’s also true that he was constantly and tactlessly suspicious of his own freedom.

  I try cheerfulness. Then I lie.

  “Don’t stay here on your own. Go and sleep in town,” the policemen recommended that night. The fat one with the crew cut offered me one of his thick hands to shake when he left. But I didn’t listen to them. I decided to stay in Madame Cupin’s house full of ghosts. Once I was alone the sadness engulfed me. I couldn’t even eat a bowl of soup or a piece of bread. Lying down to sleep on the canopy bed felt like sacrilege, but I did it anyway, trying not to think about what had just happened here at the Del Monje farm. The pill the neighbors had given me began to take effect around midnight, and when I closed my eyes I felt them falling from the roof, down toward the bed, onto my face and legs, felt them crawling between the sheets: the little caramel-colored insects Marco had promised.

  Sometimes Alexander would go away to “think a little.”

  “Think about what?” I’d ask. He would just stroke my hand in reply, finding no amusing words to embellish his withdrawal. I wouldn’t see him for several days. We had our rituals: in the city of Heidelberg there was a number of specified places where we would meet and pretend to be surprised. He was going away, he told me, to think. About what? I wondered. I confused his withdrawal with introspection, and other emotional trinkets like doubt and sentimentality. I told him I’d rather classify spare auto parts and package ball bearings, or bread, into boxes and crates, than sit in front of some German or Swiss mountain to “think.” When he returned, neither the same nor renewed, he never told me where he’d been. And to me this seemed like a mystery from another world—the fact that someone could leave their home and come back to that same home a few days later, back to the same café packed with haggard students to drink the same coffee, with me. On those afternoons I’d talk to him about everything: my father, the laboratory we didn’t build together, my time in Madrid with the artists, doña Carmen, each and every whim that had led me to the place I was in now. I think I changed Stefan’s name, in case they knew each other. I don’t just believe it, I�
�m certain of it. I remember, I know. What else is there?

  I told doña Carmen about my father and the family laboratory while we scoured (as she used to put it) the patio of the Almagro hotel. Then I told Alexander, in Heidelberg, about my father and doña Carmen, and about Stefan in Málaga, while we drank watery coffee at the university. I told Julia, in Berlin, about my odd jobs and love affairs as we stood around in the kitchen not eating dinner, nibbling on bread like a pair of sleepy birds, leaning first on one leg then the other. But with Marco, ten years later, when I returned to Argentina and spent a year on the Del Monje farm, I never spoke of any of this, and he never asked. There was no need—perhaps because the intimation of love between us was sufficient.

  It was late. We didn’t even attempt to lower the canoe into the water. There was too much wind and too little sun. We watched the way the light swept the far side of the lake, flowing toward the peak of the mountain, until all it touched were the gases of an especially clear and benevolent atmosphere. I rested my head against the grass and thought I could hear the sound of the Earth moving, slowly turning its back on the day. But Marco had sat down close by, and the certainty of his presence engulfed me.