The Four Corners of my Past Read online

  I think about it now with the perspective the years have given me, and I understand that the day I agreed with Quim, any precaution would have been little. But I think of the young girl I was, and I think it terribly unfair that in a time when my desire was mostly centered in the discovery of sex and relationships with the masculine gender, I had to watch my back. I should have been a free spirit, to do and meet with whomever I wanted and instead “the right thing to do” would have been to cancel the date to save myself from potential harm. I was taught to protect myself way too early, when I actuality should have been dedicated to enjoying my youth while others were taught not to do any harm. Which is why I try not to be so unfair with the Elena from twenty years ago and understand that deep down I was using my freedom in the right way, without it inviting someone to hurt, rape or kill me.

  Twelve noon seemed like the right time for the meeting because if, in the end it turned out that there was no chemistry between us, we could end the date with coffee and if on the contrary, the company lived up to expectations, we would have the entire Sunday to enjoy it.

  - Until Sunday. Bona nit. – Quim said goodbye.

  We were still on Wednesday and in the days that passed until the meeting in the neutral city, we did not speak again.

  Approaching the day, I parked the car in front of the gardens of Dehesa, near the Onyar River. I crossed de Sant Feliu Bridge until entering the old neighborhood, where the statue of a lioness reminded me of the first time, I had visited Girona. It was on a school trip, with a snack in the backpack and dirty shoes, as always. I don’t know the reason of the visit, but I do know what I said to my mother when she asked me at home once if I had liked the city.

  - A lot mother – I said – I’ll be back!

  - How are you so certain? – She asked as she untied the knots of my tousled hair.

  - Because I’ve kissed the lioness’s butt. – I answered.

  “You may only return to Girona if you have kissed the butt of the lioness”. That saying came true for me and on that sunny morning on the month of November in which I met up with her again, I thanked her for the return ticket she gave me when life was lived without thinking, without suffering and without fear of loving.

  The terraces of the bars on the ancient part of the city where overflowing. The cold had not yet arrived, and people had come out to the streets hoping that that wasn’t the last Sunday without rain of the year. You could hear the rumors of conversations, the laughs, the kids running through the tables. The bells hadn’t announced twelve o’clock, but they were getting ready for it, it was just a matter of minutes, a few minutes. I tied the buttons of my jacket while going up the cobbled slope and I noticed the balcony full of flowers that presided the entrance arch that leads to the cathedral. Living in a place like this, has to make you a better person, by force, I thought, - surrounded by such beauty – and at the end of that phrase I had gotten to our meeting place. There it was, imposing, on its ninety staircases divided into three precise groups of thirty and their respective landings, the Cathedral of Santa María de Girona. I have returned after that day and it still impresses me.

  I looked around, without expecting someone with a bouquet of flowers, a red tie or a book in his hand, looking for just one familiar expression that told me that that face, that hair, that body and those brown eyes where Quim’s, the guy that was hiding behind Miuq. I didn’t see that, but the bells kept going without granting him the delay.

  I decided to wait for him in front of the main façade and observe whoever entered that small square that was already my visual territory, from any of the four corners that would welcome him. Two in front of me, one on my right and the other one on my left. By this last one, when I was still studying the situation, the four tables of the terrace next to me, the flags on the balconies, the three parked cars, the kid going up and down the stairs before an imminent fall, in that moment, when the ringing of the bells had confirmed his delay and the kid hadn’t already left his milk teeth on the game, I saw him. He was wearing a red sweatshirt, ripped cowboy pants and mountain boots. He walked looking straight ahead, with his hands on his pockets, as if everything surrounding him was only decoration, as if nothing could touch him. I knew immediately that that was him, even if that was the first time I saw him and his description, <> wasn’t the unmistakable clue that could define him.

  I watched him while he came closer to the stairs of the cathedral. He hadn’t see me yet, he didn’t have to recognize in me either, the girl behind Elenh, of that Elena without H. My date came closer every time to the center of the stairs of the cathedral and I was looking at him from the privileged spot in which my early arrival placed me. In front of him, expectantly, I could have walked away, run away if I’d wanted to, to Quim, I would only be another girl walking down the streets of the city on a sunny Sunday, but I didn’t.

  On that November morning I was unknown to the reasons for which one night, I accepted to make conversation with a stranger through the screen of my computer. I guess at twenty-two years old one does not think about the why of things, one just simply lets go, without thinking of the consequences or the motives that drive us to do what we do. There is always a why. I think about it now and I believe that Elena, the one who saw change in the little world she was living in when she entered the university she felt lonely. That loneliness that comes when you are not alone. An incomprehensible loneliness, surrounded by people, parties, chores... a loneliness that hurts because it has no justification. I used to have a wonderful life, no economical, academic or health related problems. I had a really great relationship with my mother, with my “forever” friends and with the new friends that came when I stretched the boundaries of my neighborhood. My life flew between classes, study hours, parties, cafes in the port... I didn´t have time for loneliness, but I felt it. Deep inside, from my bones to my smile, sadder every time, less of a smile.

  If I could speak with her now, with the Elena I was, I would tell her that the feeling was a part of the evolution she was living. I had to accept changes as part of my personal growth. What was happening to me was merely a way of coping with the fact that I was leaving behind the Elena of funny hairdos to become the adult Elena that I would come to be one day. I was not alone, but I needed to be, that was the only way I had to ask myself questions that only I could have the answer to. The sadness I was feeling was only the goodbye to an era I was leaving behind, a little mourning at the doors of maturity. I didn’t need stich ups for that feeling, no band-aids, only time and honesty, the one I should always have with myself.

  In front of the stairs of the Cathedral of Girona, I didn’t think about all of that, I only thought of Quim, which wasn’t more than an excuse to not think about it, to not accept that my world was changing, that I was changing. That’s why when I could leave, forget the sleepless nights in front of the computer, the Sunday date in front of the stairs of the cathedral, forget Quim and get over my fears, I didn’t. I accepted the adventure I was about to live like the eraser of my loneliness and I stayed in the same place, waiting for him to turn, for his distraction to meet my stare and when he did, he saw me smile at him, with my yellow jacket, black pants and brown shoes. Most definitely dirty shoes.

  We recognize each other. He was handsome, very handsome. More than I had fantasized.

  - Sorry for being late – he said before kissing my cheek – I had a hard time finding a parking space for my van.

  I didn’t know him, but I knew well enough to see he was nervous, that he felt out of place, as if this were the first time meeting a stranger and felt quicksands under his feet. Which tranquilized me. He was shy, quiet on a first impression, helpless looking, like a puppy lost in the middle of the city. I felt comfortable with him.

  - Do you know Girona? – I asked. That might be a stupid question, I know, he was from Bescanó, only eight kilometers from the city, but that didn’t mean he spent any time in it. For what he had told me, he felt be
tter surrounded by nature than people and even though he could find a million reasons to go to Girona, he could find as many others not to.

  - Yes, I studied here for two years, I know it pretty well. – He answered with a rough Catalan accent.

  - Well then, you are the guide.

  I had failed in my prognostic but that stupid question served to make talk, break the ice and start walking. Something is something. A start.

  The shyness didn’t last long, the time to walk through the Jewish neighborhood, talk about the first thing that came into our heads and sit on the only empty table of the many terraces that invaded the sidewalks of the city.

  None of us seemed to care about time while we shared a coffee under the noon sun. Words came out of our mouths sounding better than the sound of the keyboard. The looks weren’t imaginary anymore and the complicity grew in the time computers vanished in our memories and left space for contact, the touch of clumsy hands that found each other accidentally, but not really.

  Quim was a particular young man; odd, unusual, different from the ordinary. I didn’t take long to discover that, he wasn’t hiding either. He was kind and introverted, with a big private world inside him, few of words and gentle in his eyes. His eyes expressed all of which he seemed unable to speak, not for lack of courage or vocabulary, more for the warmth in his stare, so uniquely his and unaccompanied. He was a lonely guy who used his brown eyes, clear and deep, like a window to the world. Only those who could understand them would enter in them, no fear, no parachute. He spoke little, smoke a lot and when he laughed, he laughed out laugh. He filled the space and I was feeling a bit closer, more inside.

  The more I spent by his side, the more I wanted to know him, I wanted to make my own sound track out of his Catalan accent. To look at him on that noon of November, was like staring at the sea. With its indomitable waves and its infinite endlessness.

  With time forgotten and the certainty that our date would not end with coffee, we sat and ate at a Basque restaurant and by six in the afternoon, when for the first time since the twelve bell rings we landed in the reality of the day we realized that the table talk had been gone on for too long and we understood why we were the only two costumers in that wooden restaurant, with clean plates and new faces behind the counter. But we still didn’t want to go our separate ways, in spite of the dim light of the afternoon and the cold early winter nights. So, we sat on the terrace of an Irish pub, under the old arches that run along the street of the city. We shared a beer and a hot tea until nine thirty at night, the time at which our first date ended.

  - It’s been lovely meeting you, Elena – he said before saying goodbye by my car.

  - I really liked meeting you too Quim – I answered-. It´s been a precious Sunday.

  It was true, I had enjoyed that Sunday unlike any other before. It’s not that Quim was my first date, at the age of twenty-two I’d had my things and I had been infatuated by different classmates, but it was the first time that I felt the complicity of the smiles, the reflection of someone else’s eyes on my skin. For the first time I felt a desire that went beyond a stolen kiss, a drunken caress or some pants lost under the bed. It was a deeper sort of desire, a passion that didn’t speak from sex but from the heart. I needed to fill a space and Quim opened horizons that I didn’t know yet. I found myself immersed in a sea of unknown feelings that dragged me without knowing where I was going. It was something bigger than I’d ever known, something better.

  - We’ll talk later – he said after coming very close with his lips to my mouth. He didn’t kiss me, he barely scrapped me, but that gesture was enough to feel my feet elevate from the ground and the anchor that was holding me to the ground evaporated.

  - We´ll talk later – I answered almost in a whisper.

  I didn’t stop thinking about him in each one of the kilometers from the high way I went through that night and that separated our date from my house. I was smiling, I couldn’t stop it. When I got to my room, I turned the computer on with my shoes still on, eager to find Quim at the place where it all began. While the screen was slowly turning on in the minutes that felt eternal, my feet were dancing to a nervous rhythm, bumping each other, in an impatient jingle that seemed endless. I refused to give that date for finished, I wanted to know more about him, share my routine with his, be part of his mountains and make a space for him in my city. I wished that the computer was just another tool, not the wall separating us. That the sleepless nights of chatting were just the beginning of an encounter of flesh and bone in which you don’t write kisses, you give them.

  When I saw his name appear, like every night during the past weeks, to the right on the screen of my computer, I knew the sea current I had gotten lost in that afternoon, was also dragging him. Quim had waited for my return to the place where it all started, a world online that had nothing resembling the day before. Our conversations had filled up with memories, with desire... we had seen each other at last, we had discovered the sound of words, the eyes hiding behind the glow of a screen, the pauses in the silences, but we refused to let distance write the end of a precious autumn Sunday.

  At six thirty in the morning, the alarm that woke me every Monday to go to the university went off and I understood that time had lost its meaning, that the hours were not as such, nor the minutes existed. Dawn broke with my bed made, my jacket hung over the back of my chair and my eyes on the computer. Quim had entered in me in such a way that I stopped the needles, the chronometers, the strings of the clock. He came in to stay and live in me, with his pauses, his eternal seconds, his voice.

  That day, Monday, I lived without living, wishing to see him again, to recognize his figure in the distance with the certainty that it wasn’t just another shadow. It was him, in between a million habitants, between thousands of love stories, crossed messages in the internal net but so exposed which is called internet. To enter his look, in the micro world that hid behind it and live in him. With no more responsibilities in which to get lost in, let go, with the rush of my twenty-two years, the typical unconsciousness of age. So young was I, that I didn’t want to wait until five in the afternoon, with the student obligations met, I wrote him.

  - Shall we have dinner together?

  If I have always lacked something, it’s been patience. Years have taught me that time is a great counselor, a rush and mistakes soother, but at twenty-two, one day is a whole life and a love, the first one, can be crazy, douchebag and blind, but above all is fast.

  Many years ago, a friend, used to the celerity of my life, in which one day seemed like twenty years and a love, the love of my life, said to me:

  - Elena, patience is elegant.

  I didn’t get it then, and I don’t get it now. If elegance and patience go hand in hand, they do it far from me, hidden, avoiding to stump in my way.

  I have always wanted everything for the day before yesterday. I’ve jumped instead of walked, I have wanted to reach my destiny without stopping to see the landscape, with the rush of fulfilling the objective, the eagerness to start a new road. I have waited for answers even before I’ve made the question. Even before knowing what I wanted to hear, and I have seen myself crying over a deception that wasn’t. It would have been enough, just a little time, to realize about my own mistakes. So, entertained I was in accumulating memories that I forgot my glasses and I believed that a distorted image, is a real one.

  How many ridiculous patience and elegance would have saved me from, if like my friend said, they really do go hand in hand. Only one of them would have been enough, to save me from a bad experience. Fortunately, speed does not discriminate and in the same way it brings me pain, it gives me forgetfulness.

  The afternoon in which I proposed to Quim if we should have dinner together, merely twenty hours after saying our goodbyes in Girona the night before, he accepted my proposal and I, in the darkness of a November sunset, got into my car to undertake, almost in full, the route of a Sunday morning in which nothing was as expected, it
was better. Its highway, its three tolls, the illuminated gas stations, the ups and downs of a road splashed with tunnels, a musical station that searched for its signal, a trip that abandoned the nerves of the previous day in the gutter but picked up the desire as an adventure companion.

  The car’s clock marked twenty hours and nine minutes when a white sign, narrow and rectangular, announced my entry to Bescanó and I remembered the last message Quim had written to me before turning the car’s engine on.

  - When you get to town, you’ll see a roundabout. Get out on the last exit to the left and keep going straight for about five minutes. You will see and old abandoned house to your left and then a curve. To the right there will appear three containers on the corner of a little road. Go in. Go slowly because there are a lot of stones and some holes. When you get to the end, you will have two choices, either you turn right or left. Choose the first option and in front of you, you will find a single house with the light on. That’s mine.

  When I spoke to my mother about Quim and confessed to her that the day before I met him I went to his house, she called me <>. I surely was, although I keep defending that my excess of trust doesn’t give anybody the right to do me any harm. I felt I knew Quim, that the long talks on the sleepless nights were enough to assume that he was not a stranger, he was just Quim and I trusted him. I thought about it and being fair with myself, I still think about it even though you can never completely know anyone enough. If we let fear take over us and quit that which we truly desire, that’s when we make sure that there’s pain. The pain of not having lived. That’s why, if I could go back, to my twenty-two-year-old self and Quim would invite me to his house on our second date, I would say yes. Because no one called him reckless for trusting me, he would never be the victim and I refuse to be one, reckless or not.