Ayelén and Luciano wondered When did the decline begin? and subsequent breakup of the couple.
They came to terms with their five-year romance. They had liked each other, they had loved each other, they had accompanied each other. If so many couples couldn’t explain what brought them together, or the secret of permanence through the decades, Ayelén and Luciano asked themselves the opposite question: What went wrong?
It was the Chernobyl catastrophe without human error.
He had been the love of their respective lives. One afternoon, upon returning from the beach, drowsiness began. Instead of giving up, as they did after swimming, washing off the sand and sea salt, Luciano went down to reception to complain that the air conditioning wasn’t working properly.
Maybe that was true, but with the sea breeze coming in and out of the curtains, with the darkness of the evening and the relative coolness of the room, it was enough.
Luciano returned to the room with a kind and useless response from the doorman; Ayelén had left him a handwritten message: “I went out for a walk, I’ll be right back.”
“I’ll be right back”, was the phrase that Luciano, jokingly, would have chosen for his tombstone. She had told Ayelén about it on their first date, and it had made her laugh until she choked on her Dry Martini. If for every joke an accident were to occur, Luciano noted, the best thing would be to maintain a permanent and solemn dialogue, preferably on some relevant topic. Ayelén laughed again and kissed him. They continued laughing until that fateful sunset in Mar del Tuyú, upon returning from the beach.
The struggles may have been because Luciano risked too much capital on agricultural experiments instead of continuing to bet on the security of profitable crops; or because Ayelén did not pay sufficient attention to Lucian’s interest in the theory of the beginning of the world.
Luciano was an agronomist trained with the most effective technologies. Ayelén, anthropologist and owner of a clutch sales company, inherited from her father.
It was much more practical. But they complemented each other in their differences. Those little arguments, those little incompatibilities, brought them together fatally like electrons and protons, incapable of remaining separated for more than twenty-four hours. Each lived in his own home, but the days passed together. If they slept in each other’s beds, they texted each other. But never photos: they hadn’t taken one as a couple until that unfortunate evening.
Of the path announced in the handwritten message, Ayelén came back different. For the first time for Luciano, anything but inexplicable. I knew this spontaneous form of indifference because I had experienced it with a previous girlfriend.
Certain seeds did not thrive in this or that soil, certain climates did not favor or harvest crops, so relationships between men and women received the blessing of the sun or the condemnation of drought, without arguments or consolation.
But that return of Ayelén, with another look, with another tone, or his own departure to ask for air conditioning, instead of taking advantage of every last second between sunset and night – when he liked it best -, they forced him to ask if something was wrong. He didn’t know what to answer.
That It was the last chance to love each other and they didn’t take advantage of it..
After the deplorable weeks of misunderstandings and gasps that followed until the breakup, they failed not even once to recover the spell that had united them. The end was announced with the precision of a deity’s command. It wasn’t enough.
They shouldn’t even have said goodbye. They stopped seeing each other. They stopped calling each other. They separated like two enemy armies that get tired of fighting: they don’t need to sign an armistice or agree on conditions, just move away from the front for an indefinite period of time, probably forever. But this doesn’t even need to be clarified.
Although he had no intention of reviving the enchantment, Luciano was determined to find an answer. Why did that love end?
He never stopped searching for new wonders in the underground humus of the camp, nor did he resign himself to the fact that that sacred delight would end like a summer rain. He put all the time he spent with Ayelén under the microscope of his reflection, without excluding the imagination.
He resorted to endless readings, films, stories told by those who know. He used the coordinates of his own science, those of Ayelén. He became interested in the rudiments of selling pocket squares. But none of his intellectual expeditions brought him closer to knowledge. Until another afternoon, at the end of a superficial relationship, in circumstances in which he could talk about Ayelén to a woman next to him, he summarized:
-We were so happy that before returning to the room we took a photo. We had never taken a photo before.
-Have you never taken a selfie before? -asked the girl-.
– No photo. No selfies. We asked a lady who was passing by.
-AND?
-We didn’t have a cell phone, we were leaving the sea. The lady was so kind that she took the photo of her with her cell phone and sent it to Ayelén’s cell phone. That It was the last time we smiled together.
“He stole their souls,” the girl said.
Luciano moved away a few centimeters, looked into her eyes: she was a little more beautiful, or interesting, than he had thought that night. He didn’t speak, but he urged her to continue.
-There are people who can steal your soul with a photo. Some tribes have always known this. They never took a photo: they take a photo and it’s all over. You weren’t kind, madam. It didn’t even happen by chance.
The empirical evidence was irrefutable.
-What are you doing? -Luciano finally asked his companion-.
“I’m a greengrocer,” he said.
“I, an agricultural engineer,” Luciano explained.
Yes, yes – Carina smiled (Luciano remembered her name) -. You already told me.
The breeze in Buenos Aires wasn’t like the sea breeze, but on that occasion I wouldn’t have gone down to ask for air conditioning.
Source: Clarin
