The Four Corners of my Past Read online

  Quim lived alone in an old house for which he paid fifteen thousand pesetas a month. The rent had a symbolic price, for the agreement between the owner and Quim was that he would restore it bit by bit, month to month. He would also fix the field surrounding it and build a little personal garden. If at the end of five years of signing the agreement, one had passed already, he didn’t comply with his part, he would have to leave. If on the contrary, he had done of that house a habitable one, the owner would give him every facility so that he could buy it.

  When I stopped the engine of the car, at the end of the road, over the dry land, Luna, a brown haired dog came out to greet me. I had barely opened the door, when she put her paws over my legs and with her snout, she pushed my arm inviting me to come out. I petted her back, in an attempt to tell her I had gotten the message and I saw, through the rearview mirror, how in the entrance door, under the lights and the shadows of an illuminated house, Quim was waiting.

  - You made it – he smiled.

  The chimney was on, I felt the smell as soon as I walked in. Luna was done being interested by the novelty of my presence and she went to the heat of the fire leaving the two of us in the intimacy of the first few instants. The room was completely restructured, with red tiles on the floor, two ample sofas in front of the television and a gorgeous piece of dark wood furniture. From the kitchen came a smell that awakened my appetite.

  - I have prepared lamb, my specialty – he said while he opened the oven door letting me see how the meat was browned together with the potatoes and the red peppers.

  - It looks great – I confessed.

  - Would you like to accompany dinner with a bottle of red wine? – He asked.

  He was calm, relaxed. You could tell he was comfortable, that he played at home and that made him feel save. He handled himself very well in his host position and immediately took out two glasses to toast.

  - To us.

  I liked the way that us sounded. It was the first time he talked about him and me like an us and even though I knew it wasn’t more than a simple toast, it wasn’t a declaration of love, I thought I could get used to that word.

  - It’s good right? – He asked me after having watered his lips with the wine – a friend of mine makes it. The other day he gave me a box and the truth is, I like it a lot.

  - I don’t really understand much about wines, I confess, but I like the taste. It’s not too strong, not too sweet.

  - We’ll have dinner in ten minutes. Let me show you the rest of the house.

  The table was set. We went to the second floor and I felt the cold and the lack of electricity right away. During the last year he dedicated to restructure the bottom floor – for it is where I spend most of my time -. The main room was in the largest room, with a double bed, two little nightstands and a view hanger. I checked that his wardrobe consisted of two jeans, one tracksuit, three sweatshirts, a work uniform and a dozen T-shirts folded over a little chest of drawers under the window. He had the bathroom in front and next to it a room in which he kept all his work materials.

  - Someday, that room will be for my little sister.

  You had to put a lot of imagination into that mess of paint, woods, plastics and dust to picture a teenager living in it but having seen the work he’d done with the living room and the kitchen, there was hope.

  We ate dinner without hurry, enjoying all the flavors and aromas. Our light came from only one yellow light bulb, with the crackle of the flames as our only melody. We talked about the past and the future, of how we imagined ourselves in a few years. Of how time ran faster every year and we felt old without having turned thirty years old. Our lives and our circumstances were completely different, but we shared the illusion for certain things, our taste for silence, calmness and life lived our own way. We didn’t want to be a part of a society that we did not understand and in our own way we created a little community of two inhabitants in the planet of his house.

  - How did you break it? – I asked him.

  Each time he smiled, an imperfect denture starred his gesture. He had a broken tooth. An incisor with the slanted corner. It didn’t make him look bad, on the contrary, it broke with the childish beauty of his face, his fine hands and his delicate skin. It was like a symbol, a witness of an imperfect life.

  - In the field. I fell while playing when I was little, and I never got it fixed.

  - You’re fine like that – I blushed.

  Dawn caught us off guard, as well as sleepiness, cuddled under the blanket of his couch. It was seven in the morning and the routine we would have liked to avoid came out of an alarm clock that marked seven o’clock.

  - I have to go to work.

  - And I have to go to the university.

  We gave each other a strong hug, as if our bodies didn’t want to live alone and we kissed knowing that good bye was just a way of announcing another return, which would arrive impatiently, with the hurry of lost moments, the memory of an instant that lasts.

  That’s the way we lived the thirty days of a month in which nothing was like before, where new sensations were an already walked path, a place in which the security of a morning by his side, made every fear go away. We lived dedicated to our newly built world, to the word us that was more beautiful breathed than pronounced. A word that didn’t need to be written, only looked at, pampered, taken care of.

  We were waking up with the dew bathing the land of our future, the electronic heat warming our dreams of the second floor and a chimney that illuminated a growing love reserved for a privileged companion whose name was Luna, as beautiful as the moon, as happy as the sun.

  We explored our secrets, even those that hurt. We caressed scars, tasted someone else’s tears, we felt the laughter of a happy memory. We traveled through the unlived years, we met the members of a family that we would someday have by our side, and we asked to life that the desires, as they were, like that, serene and radiant, would be granted. We enjoyed every minute without saving distances, undoing suitcases, inventing flavors. We were happy, I was happy. So happy that I did not hesitate.

  On December twentieth, we said goodbye on the door of his house until next year. For the first time, Norfolk turned into a faraway destiny, the enemy pulling me apart from the place I thought I belonged to. From Bescanó, from Quim. I would have wished not to go on that trip or at least postpone it, but I knew that the option of spending the fifteen days of Holidays in Barcelona, was out of the question. Never, during my twenty-two years of age was the trip to England every December twenty-first discussed, it simply arrived, and it was assumed.

  - I’ll call you as soon as I land – I promised.

  - I’m going to miss you.

  - Happy Christmas Quim! We’ll have dinner soon, it’s really cold and the rain doesn’t stop. I think about you, about the chimney, about Luna. I miss you.

  The table is set on the main room. Grandma Helen had taken out the porcelain tableware, the champaign glasses and the Christmas table top. Four big knitted socks hung form the chimney and seven white candles decorated the main entrance. The table baroquely decorated with pineapples, golden bells, jars of jam and crackers. Grandfather in front of me, with blushed cheeks and a ripped red jersey with a brown reindeer in the middle of his chest, it was all so British. Mother and grandmother were fighting in the kitchen, as always and I was waiting for news from Quim. I had not heard from him for more than twenty-four hours and I was beginning to worry. Maybe something happened to him, maybe at the cottage I didn’t have reception. The fog was low, and it was not the first time it happened, but the phones seemed to work perfectly. It was odd, everything was going so well between us. It was an incipient relationship, but we were both sure that we wanted to keep going, that it was beautiful what we had begun to build and when we said goodbye, we only wished for Christmas to go by fast and that January 6th would come soon, the day of the reencounter.

  During those twenty-four hours that went by without any news from Quim, I cheked the phon
e every hour. I would carry it everywhere with me, I didn’t want to miss his message or a phone call, his voice. Before his silence, I replayed our goodbye several times, I analized every one of his gestures, the ocnversations... I analized one by one the words we spoke to each other trying to discover a hint, a clue that could explain why Quim had gone silent. But nothing, I couldn’t find any reason that made me understand his silence. – I’m missing something – I thought, but I didn’t know what it was.

  Twenty-four hours can be few hours to miss someone, but they are an eternity when you are waiting for a text message that won’t come, when you start to think that maybe it never will.

  - Are you ok sweetheart?

  My grandfather always called me that, sweet heart.

  - Yes, grandpa. Waiting for a text message, that’s all.

  - From someone important? – He asked already knowing the answer.

  I told him about Quim, of everything we had lived together during the last month, of my desire to show him Norfolk and the cottage, of sharing next Christmas together and adding one more sock under my second chimney. He was my first love and to think about a shared future, was the best way I knew how to dream.

  - So, next year there’ll be five of us? – He smiled – Let’s toast!

  I had never spoken to my grandfather about matters of my heart. He was my confident, I could tell him everything, but until that day, now one had been that important to me. I still hadn’t met the boy who deserved my grandfather’s effort to memorize his name. (My grandfather had a terrible memory for names. He couldn’t even remember the name of his own dog, he called them all Dog).

  - Quim. – He repeated with difficulty.

  Both Helens showed up in the room by the time my grandfather and I were finishing up our first champaign glass and we smiled a naughty smile for the shared secret. The big family table soon ran out of space, invaded by smoked salmon, turkey, baked vegetables, cabbage, cranberry sauce and onion soup. The carols played over and over again in a circular and monotonous repetition as the glass of the windows became more and more blurred.

  The night didn’t extend too long, the British schedule admitted twelve o’clock as a single curfew and my mother and I shared the bed in the guestroom. One of the things I liked most about Christmas in Norfolk was exactly that, sleeping with her just as I did when I was little, touching the tips of our cold feet and feeling her hand next to mine. It didn’t matter that the bed was a bit too small now, we kept insisting grandma not to separate us, that she would not substitute that nest for two small cots, impersonal and unknown.

  - You are in no age for sleeping together – she would protest.

  But the three of us knew that if it weren’t for the straight and conservative education great-grandmother Helen gave her, she herself would make a nest between us, to the warmth of the family history.

  There had been two days of cold and Christmas routines and I still hadn’t heard anything from Quim. He didn’t respond to any of my messages and his phone was always turned off. I thought about calling someone to make sure he was alright, but we lived our thirty days of love isolated from the world and I didn’t know who I could contact. Days passed, I kept calling repetitively and the answer machine would answer me the same thing – the number you are trying to call is either turned off or out of service reach-. I was beginning to worry. I didn’t know what was going on and thinking about the worst thing started to turn into the best option when Norfolk was getting ready for Christmas Eve.

  - Hello Elena, It’s Manu. Quim left his phone at my house yesterday, when I see him, I’ll tell him to give you a call.

  The morning of the thirty-one of December, that was the response I got on my first call of the day and then I understood that I didn’t understand anything, that maybe I’d never understand anything. Manu, the friend who had given the six wine bottles to Quim, had just informed me, surely not knowing the consequences of his words, that Quim was alright, that at least he was alive. That his phone was working, that so was mine, that there was nothing that stopped him from calling me, nothing was stopping him from answering me, write me, to stop the anguish that had taken over me.

  Quim’s call never came. Not even that same day, nor the next ones. Not even when I returned to Barcelona and got tired of calling, of waiting, of crying. It didn’t come when my grandfather suffered for me, for my lack of love, for the burnt illusion in his chimney next to the woolen socks. He didn’t call when my mother stop sleeping to caress my hair, when my grandmother locked herself in the kitchen cooking her best recipes. He didn’t call when the two Helens in my life buried the life hatchet for me. He didn’t call when I returned home, and everything reminded me of him. He didn’t call, ever. He preferred to leave my wound open, my pain oxygenated, my heart in doubt. He chose silence and condemned me to hundreds of unanswered questions. He chose the worst way, that of cowardice and left me helpless in the face of my own doubts.

  Tired of crying, of not finding answers, of calling a number that wouldn’t answer, depriving me of such a basic necessity as that of knowing his motives, the reasons for which he one day decided to forget and not give me the right of response. Tired of suffering over a ghost, on a February day I erased his number from the addresses in my phone, but before I did, I wrote it in a piece of paper with blue ink, folded it four times and hid it in a place I knew I could find it in the future; my memory box. I wanted to close a chapter but couldn’t resist to leave a window open. My feelings for Quim were so big, that I refused to let him go completely. I felt it wasn’t fair, that story like ours couldn’t be forgotten just like that.

  I needed to release myself from the pain but not from him. I wanted to stop suffering but not loving him. I had been so happy by his side that I clung to memories, ignoring that a person who does not show his face, is a coward and cruel. That if Quim ever loved me the way he decided to vanish disaccredited him completely and that a person who makes you suffer once, will do it for ever, I wanted to stay with the good things, it’s a happier way of living, but I did not learn the lesson Quim was giving me.

  It’s been almost twenty years and only few occasions in which I have remembered Quim during this time. There are places: Bescanó, Girona... that remind me of him. Names: Quim, Luna... that when I hear them, referring to other people, have made me relive like little flashes of light, the love of my twenty-two years of age. Small images, innocuous, painless, that had passed in front of me reminding me the way. Small lessons learned, memories that now seem tender and I look with sweetness to the Elena that I was.

  Last week, casually, I thought about him. As every year, at the beginning of the month of May, I visited my dentist for an oral hygiene. I have inherited a very bad gingival health from my mother and for my own good, I have to be very strict with the visits I make to my dentist. A female dentist.

  Since a year ago, Beatriz, a new addition to the clinic I usually attend to, takes care of my “little problem”. A blonde young woman, thin, with small hands and sweet voice. Despite of her thirty-one years, Beatriz looks like a girl. She works behind garnet glasses that combine with a uniform of the same color and transmits the illusion of the first jobs, the moment in which the world of work gives you an opportunity and you receive the reward for so many hours of study. She’s been working in the clinical for a short time, but she seems to have adapted well, at least that was my impression the first time I saw her, the day she told me that she was organizing her wedding to the one who had been her partner for the last six years. Of course, on that day, she didn’t imagine that our appointment, one year later, would announce the end of all her plans.

  - Good morning Elena. Nice to see you again. How are you?

  - Fine, thank you – I answered – sleepy – it was eight in the morning – but alright. And you?

  It was one of those questions that you don’t really expect an answer or at least nothing beyond an <>. That would have sufficed. Not to her.

  - Wel
l... - she said showing me a pair of sad eyes behind those myopic glasses – I don’t know if I told you I was getting married – I nodded with my head as the automatic chair reclined leaving me in a helpless position – Well, as it turns out, my fiance disappeared last month. Just like that – she said snapping her fingers – he vanished.

  - I am so sorry – I confessed. I felt uncomfortable at that statement, I didn’t know how to comfort the girl, not even if that was the role that belonged to me.

  - And he left to Mexico with another woman – she finished off.

  I didn’t ask her how she was feeling, because I could guess the answer and I decided that to skip that could help her forget the suffering she had been withstanding these last few weeks. I remembered how I felt when Quim simply stopped calling. The worst is not accepting that the person you love stops being a part of your life, the worst part is not knowing why. To think that you don’t deserve that, that it isn’t fair, that you have behaved correctly, that you have earned at least the right know, of understanding why the other person one day simply decides to disappear.

  Doubt doesn’t even allow you to hate, get angry, call and shout. The doubt leaves you an emptiness and walks away.

  - How’s my mouth? – I asked. In the end, that was a dentist’s office and I was laying on a chair, with an enormous lamp shining on my opened mouth.

  - Not so good, to tell the truth – I got scared – just imagine, I’ve had to cancel the entire wedding on my own.