The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [45]
Or was she? What did Diego have to do with that glimpse? Unlike Alfonso, he wasn’t rich or upper class, though he had friends in those circles. He’d grown up outside the city of Buenos Aires. He was smart and liked to play the maverick, the outsider, hiding that he was actually quite conventional at heart. He certainly didn’t want to marry—he had a whole long anti-marriage discourse—though surely, eventually, he would marry, still reluctantly, a much younger wife, and have a few children. But that was a long way off, ten years or so. By then, Isolde would be too old to have children. No, this choice of hers was not coherent with any of her plans. Only it didn’t feel like a choice, but a compulsion. Isolde felt that she would do anything for those moments when Diego looked at her with warmth, like that day on the grassy slope, kissed her as he had. These days, when she woke in the morning, facing another day when he wouldn’t write or call, the loneliness stretched out. She felt that she loved him. Without a doubt, he had disrupted her system. Granted that the stability of Isolde’s system was probably a bit wobblier than most.
An old man came into the locutorio with some papers in his hand that needed to be typed out. He asked for help using the computer. A young woman was screaming on the phone, really screaming at her father. This was clear because she kept saying, “Papa!” She came out of the cubicle, her face streaming with tears. The guy at the cash register watched her, curious, deadpan. It began raining outside, that kind of Buenos Aires rain that made the whole sky turn dark. You’d think it was nighttime when it was only noon. Isolde looked up. Had the day passed already? It wouldn’t be the first time that she’d spent six hours here. But no, it was only noon.
She checked the cultural pages of the Argentine newspapers online, browsed some opera websites. What if he never wrote her again, disappeared entirely? She pictured a blank world, desolate, without him.
In that moment, Diego replied. “Sure, we can meet,” he said, as if it were entirely casual, something that happened every day. He proposed another downtown bar, again near the Plaza San Martín. Yes, Isolde thought, then we can go back and lie on the grass. That patch of grass had become enchanted ground in her mind.
She hurriedly left the locutorio and went home, so as to figure out what to wear. Until she had decided, it would be impossible to go on with the rest of her day.
“I like that idea, it’s a Kafka idea, that there’s been a misunderstanding and that misunderstanding is going to ruin your life,” Diego said. They were sitting in the window of the bar, facing the street.
Isolde was wearing a peach-colored blouse, which the waitress had admired. There were certain days like this when people were always admiring and commenting on her clothes, as a way to articulate what was in fact a larger impression, of sunniness, freshness.
Now she furrowed her brow. “What do you mean, there’s been a misunderstanding?”
Diego shook his head. “Just that, there’s been a misunderstanding. There’s always a misunderstanding.”
But then he was kissing her again, those deep tongue kisses that someone else might have found disgusting, but she loved.
“Can we go somewhere?” He lived with his parents and she wasn’t allowed to have people at her apartment. Though she had decided that, if it was the only option, today she would break the rule.
He laughed at her eagerness. “Okay, okay. Take it easy. Finish your drink.”
Diego’s hair had grown longer. On the one hand, he looked shaggier than ever. On the other, he had a white leather bag, utterly unnecessary fingerless gloves, all these dandyish accoutrements. He’d stopped smoking all the time like before because it was making him sick and now just had the coveted few. Once outside, he lit a cigarette.
He led her down the street just a few blocks away to a hotel transitorio, or telo. Isolde had heard about these places—they were everywhere throughout the city—where you