The Unstable Order of Things – Chapter 7: “SPECTATOR”

Half the year arrived too quickly—much faster than it does when one’s mind is occupied. There is so much more to tell. So much that time itself seemed to vanish—magical and terrifying, almost as magical and terrifying as the gradual improvement of my mood.

I returned to rehearsals. My comeback was inevitable. I had always known that, sooner or later, I would return. It was less obvious to my classmates, who stared at me in frank astonishment the day I pushed open the theater door. Later, upon reflection, I concluded that those expressions were not surprise at all; their faces radiated resentment, indifference. Why were you gone so long? one of them asked a few days later, when I had settled back into the group. Martínez was completely unhinged. She wanted to set us all free.

For several weeks I harbored a deep hatred for Martínez, and she knew it. I wished she would come to me with explanations, or simply say something. But she looked at me too, and that was her answer. Though I often felt like crying, like standing up and leaving again, I held her gaze as she walked the length of the classroom. We loved each other. Genuinely. We still do, in our own way, though something broke during those days. Why did you make them all hate me? Why did you let everything fall on my shoulders when it didn’t have to? Why am I the one to blame now—for feeling unwell, for wanting to be absent, for wanting to disappear for a few days, an hour? What, exactly, makes me guilty?

Between the sweet premonitions of the days and the warm rays of sunlight I would sit and drink in at noon on the steps, life—and everything happening within it—felt like a kind of temporary deception. I would suddenly find myself anguished, wondering when the smallest misstep would arrive to ruin my world again. And so I lived perpetually on guard, as though I were forever bracing my arms before my face to soften a punch that was slow in coming but certain to land.

After dinner at Lili’s duplex, Joaquín returned to the residence with me that same night. His unintentional brazenness had crossed a line and was venturing further still, borderless. All he did was kiss her on the lips and trace her cheek with a finger. He wandered through the duplex with his backpack open, stuffing inside everything that was his, leaving far behind—abandoned—the heart that folded in upon itself as she watched him go, uncertain whether she would ever see him return.

It was true. She needed him.

I felt wretched, as I have said. I felt it was my fault. I thought of her sorrow, imagined her heart collapsing inward until it disappeared, pictured her crying against the door. I suffered her suffering until, one day and without warning, all the reasons that led me to believe that by June my trampled, clouded spirit would climb—without exaggeration—to heaven’s very gates returned in full.

The wad of socks vanished from the hole in the wall, and the knocks against the drywall resumed. He, he, he. What changed your mind? What happened? For weeks he had left me to my fate—which, it is worth noting, was not kind. I had to survive his unconscious absence, wonder whether I had imagined him, go mad anticipating his return. And then he, he, he would sound again, waking me in the middle of the night, convincing me I was in the midst of a beautiful dream that slowly became real as I roused. I would sit up in bed, waiting—praying even—that he would rise and come to my room, persuading myself that he had not abandoned me as he had her.

Our time began to weave itself together. Neither of us spoke of the knocks, of the whispered words through the hole. Tacitly we had decided it was a secret we would hide even from ourselves. But we began seeing each other more often, arranging our schedules. Five o’clock: afternoon snack at the low table in the living room. Absence was considered disrespect. White toast with watermelon jam and black coffee, no sugar. Mate later, enough to die of the acidity. Watching Duro de Domar on television, seated on the floor. Fighting over the least filthy pillow. Turning up the volume and hiding the remote. Cursing the heater into life. Every Wednesday we would “cut the week in half,” dine on pizza at ten, chase everyone from the kitchen. Patricio and Néstor joined us. Then someone else. Around midnight or one, after two six-packs of Quilmes, we would play chinchón for money.

It was strange to be with him—to be allowed inside his bubble, which from the outside did not seem so guarded—and stranger still that I agreed to enter. Yet we did not notice. I had to grow accustomed to everything: the new, the unknown. To listening to Kings of Leon in my room and, two hours later, having him seize my hand and pull me to dance to a blasting cuarteto song from some neighboring room. To his hand in mine, nothing more. To his palm on my shoulder, his finger pressing lightly against my chest, his hand ruffling my hair.

I remember what I would have told him. I remember because I can still feel it all, as if not a second had passed, as if the patches of skin he touched had fallen under a spell from which, though I did not yet know it, I would never free myself. A single thought was enough—his hand adjusting my glasses, the scent lingering in my room when he forgot his jacket and remaining even after he took it back—to make me feel younger and more alive than in the best moments I once believed I had known.

Like the day he came to watch me rehearse without even asking, and then did so again. Hidden behind the last row of seats, his applause mingled with that of our classmates at the end of each act. “Lili, look, Joaquín came to see you,” her friends would say. She would blush inside that bubble of enamored pride in which she forced herself to believe her boyfriend still loved her—if he had ever loved her at all. She would perform as if electrified, searching for him in the audience while kissing me onstage, and he would applaud and wave shyly to her from afar, though it was I whom his bright gaze dazzled.

One afternoon, after staying late to arrange the first costume pieces and turn off the lights, I was making my way down the aisle when, from the corner of my eye, I noticed movement behind the half-drawn burgundy curtain. I froze.

“Hello?” My voice trembled. No answer.

Three seconds later, it moved again. Terrified, I hurried toward the exit. Just as I was about to close the door, a shout from inside stopped me.

“You scared me,” he laughed from the stage, doubled over. A single yellow spotlight illuminated his face.

“Oh, you idiot,” I said from the threshold, my hands still trembling on the knob.

“Did you think I was a ghost? The Phantom of the Opera?” he teased.

I stepped back inside, approached the stage. My heart pounded—fear and adrenaline intertwined.

“How did you get in here? How long have you been waiting?”

“Relax, officer,” he said, sitting at the edge beside me. “I stayed after rehearsal to talk to you. You took forever. When everyone left, I thought I’d scare you.”

“As if this place weren’t creepy enough. I almost had a heart attack. What’s so important that you waited an hour?”

“Want to get something to eat?”

I had no time to think. On June thirteenth, 2006—sunny and impossibly windy—I went to lunch with him. We sat on the sidewalk of a dilapidated place near Parque Brujas, before the grass was trimmed short and before cafés multiplied. The cook took our order, apron stained with oil. We each ordered the set menu: a milanesa, a sad green-edged slice of lemon, fries, and a large bottle of Seven Up. The warm wind swept leaves against our sneakers. He asked for bread and made himself a sandwich. It was two in the afternoon; we were alone except for dried pigeon droppings on the table and the hum of cars along Ambrosio Olmos. And his gaze. And mine—mine that had never looked at anyone like that before. Mine that had never been returned with such peace, such happiness.

That was the day I understood there was no turning back. I tried to feign an effortless calm while feeling ridiculous for forcing it. Dizzy. Unmoored. As though I were in a lucid dream from which I might wake at any second. Yet I did not want to wake. I had fallen in love with him the way birds fall into spring—instinctively, for survival.

We walked back to the residence. He wanted to take a bus; I begged to walk. I did not want the moment to end. So we returned at a slow pace, kicking pebbles, speaking of everything and nothing, listening to each other in silence.

When we parted, reality struck. I knew I would suffer withdrawal without addiction, drunkenness without drink. I spent the following days anticipating, remembering Lili, convincing myself I would survive, that I would forget after he left—though I knew it was untrue. I even wished he would change his mind. That he would tell me he needed distance. I would have accepted it. We would have pretended that being together had not felt like drowning.

But none of that happened. Events unfolded as they must in the unstable order of things. Days passed swiftly, like linked hours forming a velvet chain that tangled around my head, my stomach, my throat, and eventually suffocated me. I was outside my body, bound to it, forced to be it, watching it. And yet my steps grew lighter, my thoughts kinder, the ground less harsh when I stumbled.

At night, however, something shifted. Loneliness hovered like an apparition in the corner of the room. The silence of those winter nights was heavy, solid, pressing against my chest. The stillness before a storm.

It no longer surprised me to find myself in the hallway at dawn, under the pretense of refilling my water bottle, standing before his door—the door that shared my threshold, and was therefore partly mine. I would linger there, fearless of being seen, wondering what I would find if I opened it. Whether I should knock. Or slip inside unannounced, as he once had with me.

“I think I like him,” I confessed to Néstor that week. I do not know why I told him. The words had been waiting for escape.

We were sitting on the small field bench, the match nearly over. Joaquín stood in the goal, distant in the fog.

“I think I don’t just like him,” I corrected myself.

“Are you sure?” Néstor asked. “That’s not a small thing to say.”

“If I didn’t believe there was some remote possibility, would I have told you?”

He slung an arm around my neck and tousled my hair.

“You’re dramatic, Elías,” he said. “But if he hurts you, we’ll beat him up. Though we can’t even fight on our own.”

“Don’t tell Patricio,” I pleaded.

We spoke of other things afterward, as though I had not just laid myself bare. It was from that day I clung to his trust. Years later, I would regret losing it.

I hate myself when I remember. I hate most of this story—the choices I made and those I did not, the moments I let slip, how poorly I treated them. I miss Néstor. I miss Patricio. I will always miss them, even if doing so resurrects what followed. I remember and feel again as I did that day on the field: vulnerable and transparent, having handed him every weapon to destroy me—and watching him choose instead to protect my heart.

We live on memories, and become them. Back then, I had no idea how much my life would change because of them. I had no idea that, with the passing years, they would be the ones to sustain me—enough to quiet that eternal solitude that once haunted me like an apparition…

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–Continue reading in its original Spanish language at fictograma.com–