The Four Corners of my Past Read online

  Even though I wanted to ignore it, to struggle to forget it, if I wished with all my heart to ignore the gratuitous suffering Quim caused me, I couldn’t. An alarm was sounding inside me, a distrust that was coming from the past.

  I only wanted to live that day as a gift, without looking back, without thinking of the future, without remembering or dreaming. To breathe every moment andlet myself go. I was only twenty-three years old, I had earned the right to make a mistake if I wanted to and pick myself back up.

  The sun was setting over the mountains. I knew that was the time to leave, but I didn’t want to be caught by nightfall in his house if I stayed and it was better to return to mine while the light of day illuminated the highway, but I begged for the sun to hide soon so I’d be surprised by an anticipated darkness, the trap of my return home.

  We made up conversations to cheat time and any excuse was good to steal the watch the minutes we wanted to ourselves alone. We were “us” again and we didn’t want to get rid of that word. He showed me the improvements he had made to the house, the orange room his little sister helped him paint, the almost grown orchard that surrounded the garden.

  - I’m going to buy some chickens too.

  Quim, his house, life in the countryside, Luna... they represented everything I wanted at that age. It was easy to dream by his side, with the complicity of his stubborn words, his rough accent and his childish look. His hands were almost virginal, unknowing of the earthly work that was not just his profession, but also his passion or more, his way of communicating. He was a wild animal in the skin of a lamb, kindness translated into apathy, into a sentimental handicap hidden under key, hidden between sweet glances, awkward gestures and a tormented, subtle and irresistible beauty. Quim was an indelible mark, a hard drug with sweet taste and a persistent hangover.

  - Are you staying for dinner?

  It was the worst of all the questions. I should have left, start the engine and leave that dream for the nights of insomnia, but I didn’t.

  - I don’t know...- I answered looking at the clock on my right hand – it’s almost nine... - how to end that phrase?

  - Come on, I’ll put a couple of pizzas in the oven, take out a few beers and we’ll have dinner here.

  Thank you Quim for writing the end.

  Sitting on the couch, face to face, with an empty chimney and Luna searching for her hole. With dirty dishes over the table and breadcrumbs on the floor, I decided that the moment had arrived. We needed to talk. To pronounce the unpronounceable, to uncover the ghost that had been chasing us the entire day.

  - Quim...

  He must have seen how the expression on my face changed. I had a harder gesture, a crude look. He understood the moment had come and he didn’t let me ask the question. He went ahead and started with the explanation I had been waiting for six months.

  - Elena, about what happened in January – I knew that moment needed to come, that no wound would be closed without explanations, but I was afraid to break the calmness, the silent reconstruction that we had started that same morning on the garden of his house. I was afraid that the excuses, if there were any, the justifications, believable or not, would break the spell of that summer day – I want to apologize – he concluded.

  Quim told me that during the Christmas holidays he had suffered a kind of depression. He began to get drunk, to sleep in the sofa and to let the house be filled with dust and garbage until one morning, his friend Manu, after a week without answering the calls, pounded on the door on his search for answers and when he saw him sunk and defeated, he put him in the bathtub, washed him and emptied all the bottles of rum and whiskey down the kitchen sink. Quim didn’t know where the reaction had come from, or what was it exactly that provoked that depression, but he felt the need to get away from everything and everybody, to isolate himself, to rewrite himself.

  - What hurt me the most of all was losing you, because you were the best thing that has happened to me in the last few years. You are so special that next to you, I feel small, gray. – his voice was shaking, crying. The feeling of guilt that was bigger than him and was crushing him – you did not deserve what I did to you Elena but I pushed you away, like I pushed my parents away, my sisters and my friends. I could have trusted you, asked you for help... - he moved his body closer to mine, giving himself a little truce, a breath – but I didn’t. I burned my pain with alcohol, with a lot of alcohol. It has taken me several months to recover, I have gotten in shape, I started to exercise, to recover little by little my social life and I’ve thought a million times of call you. But what to say? After how bad I behaved with you... I had no right to call you!

  I decided to believe him, same way my dentist decided to believe her ex-fiancé, and I kissed him.

  It was a salty kiss, of sea water, of regret, of hope. We forgave the damage produced, we licked our wounds and body to body we started to pick ourselves up again, stronger than before, better. There was nothing that made me think that this time everything would turn out fine, but I thought about it. I thought it because I chose to believe him, because again I saw the way he was looking at me, because I needed to believe that the world was a good place to live in, that the pain he caused me was not unjustified or free, that to grow, not in height, but in soul, was a cruel process. I needed to believe that loving was not dangerous and that Antonio Gala wasn’t lying he said that <>, because I had lost I January and I didn’t want to lose again in June.

  That night of incipient summer and mid darkness, Quim and I didn’t promise anything to each other because kisses spoke for the two of us and the next morning, disheveled, tired and happy, we said goodbye with the caresses of the first love and the rush of reencounter.

  - Until Friday Elena.

  - Until Friday Quim.

  Mi plane to Mahón, was leaving the next morning. I had organized a trip to Menorca to visit some friends who had just opened up a bar on the beach and I couldn’t postpone it, they were waiting for me. Again, a trip separated us, but this time, the wait would be short, on Thursday evening I’d be back in Barcelona and on Friday I would return to Bescanó to spend the weekend with Quim. That’s what we talked about when we said goodbye and that is what I thought it would happen.

  Throughout my life, I have made many trips and almost all have been at the wrong time. The need to book air tickets in advance and my craze for living every minute with the greatest intensity, have made my plans to run over me and that what one day seemed the best option, barely two weeks later prevented me from making an even more appetizing plan. Actually, I don’t know of the trips have condemned me or saved me, of what I am sure is that they have never left me indifferent.

  Menorca was and still is one of my favorite destinies. To lose myself, to find me, to cleanse me and above all, to breath. I had a room reserved in the house of a friend of friends, the typical favor with which everybody, even intermediaries, come out winning. Silvia, the proprietor of the first floor of a little house in the middle of Mahón, lived with Yan, her eight-year-old son. She was working as a waitress to pay for the unending expenses of a single mother and the three thousand pesetas a night that I would pay for her guest room, no tax, no bill and no commitement, it wasn’t gold but it wasn’t a negligible amount either. We would share the bathroom, the hallway and if I wanted dinner, it was enough to notify before six o’clock.

  My friends were at Son Bou, twenty kilometers from the capitol and it would not be until the next day, on Tuesday, when I would come by to say hello and see the place they had mounted. I had the entire afternoon free to walk around the city, enjoy its lights, its streets and its sea.

  - I am sitting watching the lights of the harbor reflected in the water, the Mediterranean is so beautiful that I think it’s stupid that it can separate us. Same sea, different landscape. Bona nit Quim.

  - Enjoy Menorca Elena. You are privileged, there is no prettier island in the whole world. Especially if you are on it. Bona nit.


  The next day I woke up early, the light of the sun came in from the window and invited me to come out of bed.

  - Bon dia Quim. I’m going to the beach – I wrote – I’m leaving my phone in the room, we’ll talk when I get back. Have a nice day.

  I went out wearing shorts, a tiny black T-shirt, the bikini, a towel and a few coins in my pocket. I picked up my hair using the rubber Quim lent me in his house, the one that since we said farewell had been on my left wrist. I had coffee with milk and a ham and tomato sandwich for breakfast on a terrace while watching people go by. I had decided not to bring music or books, to focus on myself and the landscape.

  The wind was not blowing that morning, at least not among the narrow city streets. The palm trees that protected the monument of a cabaret singer, hid their shadows between the windows still closed. Bicycles rattled among the stones, letting their selves fall down the avenues, dodging boys and girls who, free of school obligations, savagely approached the parks, shouting and laughing, letting go of the hands of their tired mothers, and the day hadn’t done anything more than start. Summer had not done anything but to start. I imagined their desire – that September would arrive soon – and I rejected it – let September never come -.

  At ten o’clock I picked up the bus that would take me to Son Bou and before eleven in the morning I was presuming my friends from the beach. They had mounted a beautiful place with big crystal windows and several spaces divided with clear wood lamins that broke the white walls. We knew each other from the first temporary jobs we took to pay for university and even though they had left Barcelona to travel the whole world, we never lost contact. They had worked in a fish market in Norway, in the kitchen of an hotel south of Ireland, I a pirate ship that sank inexplicably in the tranquil waters of Cerdeña and the last time I saw them, they were walking barefooted over the cement of the city, with their feet black and their hair full of salt. I used to call them my errant princes because once, I received a letter from India, they had climbed on the back of an elephant that said <>. Nobody ever made a better statement to me, and that among all the existing ways of loving, we loved each other in every way but not in any way. Ours was a feeling reclining in another dimension, where neither heart nor touch had ever been invited.

  I arrived at Son Bou to collect a promise made from a faraway sea and ended up using their salt to cicatrize my wounds. It was beautiful to be there, being part of their dream. There are other’s joys that can heal you more than your own.

  The happiness of reunion was overwhelmed by insatiable tourists who demanded their turn and I, proud friend, gave my chair and occupied another discreet place. I knew that my friends were not destined to always occupy the same place and that today was Menorca and tomorrow it will be seen, but it was so nice to have them near...

  - Guys, I’ll let you work. I’ll go take a bath.

  They said goodbye with a wink from the bottom of the bar.

  There weren’t many people on the beach, to be Menorca and summer, of course. Right away I found a place to extend my towel on the sand. The landscape was gorgeous but I needed to reunite myself with my sea. I folded my pants, took my t-shirt off and went to the shore.

  - The rubber – I thought – I was wearing my hair even tighter and I didn’t want it to get wet. It was silly, but since that Sunday morning in which Quim lent me that rubber in front of the bathroom mirror to pick my hair up, I felt as if that little elastic fabric was a part of him, as if by having it over my skin I could feel his arm, to believe that he still existed, that what we lived on Saturday had actually happened, that it wasn’t a dream. That Quim was real. I didn’t want to ruin the rubber with sea salt, I wanted to protect it as if that way I was protecting him, me, us.

  I stepped back with my bare feet over the sand and saved the purple colored rubber in the pocket of my shorts. Under the towel.

  It was a peaceful, long bath, in which I enjoyed my body, the lightness of the waves, the taste of salt on my lips. The sun was burning my hair, which moved to the same rhythm of the sea, underneath soft, turquese water. Life gives us many pleasures and that was one of them. I wasn’t in a hurry, nobody was waiting for me, nothing was keeping me from taking my time, manage it to my liking, controle my freedom. What a nice sensation! The sea and my like two lovers, no witnesses, dedicated to pleasure.

  I was there for a long time. My fingers got wrinkled, my skin widened, and when I came back to the towel I abandoned who knows how long ago, I brushed my hair and took out the shorts from their hiding place to get Quim’s rubber back but it wasn’t there anymore. It was gone. I searched for it in the sand, in the folds of my trousers, underneath every towel surrounding me. I looked for it in places I knew I wasn’t going to find it. I removed every obstabcle, every grain of sand but I didn’t find it. What was left of Quim had gone missing, just like him. It was like a premonition, his way of saying goodbye. I knew in that instant that Quim would never respond to my last text, that when I got back to the room I rented, my phone would still be over the bed, but I wouldn’t find his answer. I knew it and it didn’t hurt.

  There would be no more absences, no more excuses, no more tears. Nothing I had to understand. Quim did not disappear; he was actually never there. The reencounter was his goodbye, my goodbye, the farewell that I, at least, deserved. I had tried, I was at peace.

  I came back to my sea, to what heals every all wounds. It was itchy, yes... it burned, yes... but everything that itches, it heals.

  I went walking back to Mahón, with the saltpeter tattooed on my skin. It still hurt but pain only shows one thing, that we are alive. The contrary is to die, in death or alive. I walked so I could say goodbye to him, to mourn in silence, in the tranquility of a landscape with success guaranteed, in an island in which nothing can go wrong. We need to say goodbye to things, to people, to mourn so we can forget them. Ignoring the problems is never an option, overcoming them is.

  I walked the twenty kilometers that separate Son Bou from Mahón without shedding a single tear, without screaming, without hating, redecorating my heart, changing the feelings around, creating a new home in which my illusions could lived.

  When I arrived to the room, at night, my phone confirmed what I already knew, but life kept going, more beautiful, wiser, more lived. I went back to Barcelona with a new scar, a war memory, a love mark.

  I didn’t hear from him ever again and I didn’t look for him either.

  Quim was my first heartbreak. A life lesson. Him, without wanting, taught me that I am not to blame for the decisions others make, that what other people do is exclusively their responsibility and that I have the right to live and love my way, without any one telling me what to feel. He taught me that to get excited and trust, is not a mistake. It doesn’t matter if things turn out right or wrong. It is not our objective the end of the road, but the way. He taught me that my heart is strong, that it has the virtu to love and to forgive. That resentment hinders and that in time, what really matters, is having lived. Thanks to Quim, I learned that Antonio Gala was right, that the one who loves always wins and that on that summer, at twenty-three years old, I had won.

  Actually, Quim was not my first heartbreak. Quim was, my first LOVE.

  When I saw him, on the morning of my fortieth birthday, it was hard for me to recognize him. I saw a man walking towards me looking at the ground, as if the city didn’t have much to offer him, as if life was incapable of surprising him.there had been seventeen years since Quim and I said goodbye at the door of his house in Bescanó and if I wasn’t the same Elena as before, then he did not look at all the same to the young twenty-six year old man I fell in love with. He was an older, gray version of himself.

  I am the kind of people who believe in Karma, that every cause has an effect. I like to think that if at forty years old I was at the best moment in my life, it was
because I deserved it. Nothing is free, nothing comes out free. Living is a bottom race where the winner is not the one who arrives first to the finish line, but the one who enjoyed the race the most. To arrive at the end and not having anyone to share the victory with, is worse than to give up before the first obstacle.

  I can’t say that Quim’s aspect was a consequence of the mistakes of his past, it would not be fair on my part to judge someone over a punctual fact. He made a decision, he chose a path and I made mine. It was fine that way. We were both free to choose. I chose to love him and he chose to disappear. But either karma had played a bad move on him or life had treated him very badly.

  Nothing about him would have called for my attention if not because when he went pass next to me I felt an odor, a sensation, a distant memory coming back to me, as if that sad looking man, had had the ability to transport me to a place where I hadn’t gone back in years.

  It was just one second. We crossed paths in front of a closed blind of a shop that hadn’t opened its doors yet. The city was slowly waking up, without the hurries of a normal Tuesday. The street was narrow and Quim was close enough to ignore him. I stared at him. He must have been more than forty-five years old, almost fifty I thougth. He was thin, small. He walked with his hands in his pockets and his back inclined, in an almost imperceptible gesture of submission. As if nothing could touch him anymore, hurt him.

  It was just one second. The time it lasted with his eyes on mine. Just one second a needed to remember our first date in front of the stair case of the Girona Cathedral, the chimney smell of his house in Bescanó, 1999 christmas in Norkolf, Menorca, a war scar, a love scar.