My Childhood Friend Waited Twenty Years for Me

Her name was Lucía, Lu. We shared a desk for the six years of primary school at the neighborhood school. She was freckled, short, with green eyes that seemed too big for her face and breasts that appeared before any other girl’s in the class. She loved me more than I was capable of loving her back, and that happens sometimes; it’s happened to me in other corners of my life too, not just with her.

I lost track of her when eighth grade ended and heard nothing from her for years. At the time I was living with a girl from the neighborhood who, on one of our first dates, had told me, without any filter and as if it were nothing, that she had slept with a female friend and the friend’s boyfriend and that it had ended in something even more tangled, with him on his knees and the two of them laughing. I told myself that story twenty times in my head before I kissed her for the first time.

We had been slogging along for several months with no enthusiasm when one ordinary morning I ran into Lu in the entrance hall of the building where I lived. She was with a man who turned out to be her husband, and she introduced him to me as Ricardo. She went red when she saw me and, with some hesitation, tossed off a half-baked invitation.

—One day you’ll have to come over for lunch, catch up —she said, without quite looking at me.

Ricardo nodded out of politeness, clapped his hands a couple of times in the air, and held out his hand. It was strange. We were no longer the two kids who held hands to go out to recess, neither physically nor in any other way. I forgot the invitation the very moment I closed the elevator door.

Months passed, maybe more. One afternoon my mother, with whom I was still living, said to me from the kitchen without looking up from the newspaper:

—Some Lucía called you. She left the number written down beside the landline.

I called that same night, more out of curiosity than anything else. She asked if I could come for lunch the next day. She was going to be alone, she said, and she asked me not to tell my mother anything, neither who she was nor that she had invited me. “Your mother must remember me from when we were little; I’d rather she didn’t find out about this.”

I showed up at her place with a bottle of red wine that cost twice what I usually spent in those days. When she opened the door, she quickly glanced at the landing before stepping aside.

—Come in, I’ve got nosy neighbors —she said softly, as if gossip were serious business.

The kitchen smelled of stew fresh off the stove. She offered me a beer before lunch.

—I’m not a good cook, fair warning —she laughed, blushing again.

She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, no makeup. On the inside she was still the Lu from school, but her face had learned things. It took us a while to get going. We talked about the neighborhood, dead teachers, classmates who had stayed in the village and those who had gone far away. The wine smoothed out everything that was polite in the conversation.

—We loved each other a lot, didn’t we, Iván? —she said after a while, looking at me over the rim of her glass.

—A lot —I lied.

I lied because by then she had already told me, with the loose tongue of her second glass, that she had married at nineteen, that Ricardo had been her only real boyfriend, and that for a couple of years she’d had this feeling of not really knowing why she was still there, washing dishes and making the bed for a man who fell asleep before she did every night.

We moved to the sofa with the third glass. Lu took off her shoes and sat with her legs tucked under her body. There was a long silence, the kind that fills itself in. Then she looked at me as if she were about to confess to a crime.

—A few months ago something happened —she said.

—Tell me.

—A customer at my parents’ bar had been coming on to me for months. A man from the neighborhood, wealthy, older than me. He invited me to his house. I hesitated a lot. But I went.

—You went.

—I went, Iván. And that night I served Ricardo and the kids dinner like nothing had happened. There you have it.

She said it with a mixture of pride and regret, probably expecting a word from me that would absolve her or condemn her. I gave her neither. I hugged her, and her body lingered for a second too long in my arms. Her green eyes went through me, calculating now, and I kissed her on the mouth.

She let me. She returned the kiss with her head tilted and her lips parted, but before my hands could go any further, she pulled back, gathered the glasses, and said something about coffee. I didn’t push it. There was no rush. That’s what I felt then, though I was wrong: there was rush, plenty of it, but the rush belonged to the calendar.

***

Years passed. Ten, twelve, fifteen. I married someone else, had two children, and a desk job that didn’t excite me but paid the mortgage. My wife would sometimes meet up with a college classmate she called her “special friend,” and I did my own thing without commitments, without names to remember the next morning. We had built ourselves a domestic cold war with a truce signed for the sake of the children and Christmases.

And then my father died. My mother was left alone in the apartment in the neighborhood and I started visiting her almost every Saturday. I’d go for a while, buy her bread, take her blood pressure, then I’d go for a walk and have a coffee on one of the old terraces that still held out against the franchise onslaught. It was on one of those terraces, smoking a cigarette while I waited for my coffee, that I saw her walk by.

It was her. Older, obviously, like me, with slightly wider hips and her hair cut to shoulder length. She was walking distractedly, talking to herself or going over some invisible list, and she passed so close to my table that I could smell her perfume. She didn’t see me.

I paid in a hurry and followed her from half a block behind, not really knowing what I’d do if she turned around. When she stopped, I saw it was the same doorway from so many years before. I quickened my pace and caught up with her just as she put the key in the lock.

—Lucía?

She turned, startled, then surprised, and finally, after an eternal second, she smiled a full smile.

—Iván! My God, you look exactly the same!

—Liar.

—Well, almost.

We hugged in the doorway, for several seconds in which time stood outside waiting its turn. When we parted, she invited me up.

The apartment was as I remembered it, but the photos on the sideboard were no longer of children. The children were adults, one dressed in military uniform, the other at a graduation ceremony in a cap and gown. The walls had yellowed and the ceiling lamp was the same as ever.

—Will you eat with me? Ricardo gets back late from the workshop, he won’t be home before nine —she said, setting her bag on the table.

I offered to take her to a restaurant on the promenade, a new one people were talking about in the neighborhood.

—No, no. Better here. Quieter. If you don’t mind, I’m going to change, I’ve just come from the doctor and my blouse is weird.

She came back in five minutes wearing a dark blue sleeveless dress, no bra, and bare feet. She brought to the table everything in the fridge and uncorked a bottle someone had brought her long ago and she had never been brave enough to open.

Wine, once again, loosened our tongues. I told her about my wife, my children, and, once we reached that point, about my own affairs too. Lu bit her lip when she heard me, the same way she had bitten it that afternoon on the sofa fifteen years before.

—So many nights I’ve dreamed of sleeping with you, Iván… —she said, and laughed with teenage embarrassment—. It’s so hot in here, isn’t it?

It was hot and it wasn’t hot. It was March. She turned her face toward the window with that expression people wear when they have something on the tip of their tongue and don’t dare say it. She made as if to get up for more wine. I stopped her by the wrist, pulled her back into the chair, and kissed her.

—Iván… —she said on a sigh—. I’m so embarrassed, God.

I said nothing else. I looked into her eyes.

—Take off your clothes, Lucía.

She stood up slowly, as if the order belonged to another time, and positioned herself in the middle of the living room with her back to me. She took the dress off over her head, pulled down her panties, and let them fall onto the rug. Her back was narrower than I remembered, with a small scar above her right shoulder blade and a large mole on her side. She didn’t turn around.

I approached without touching her.

—Let’s go to the shower.

She led me to the bathroom naked, without looking back, and there she did turn around. I asked her not to cover herself. She didn’t. The water was running hot, and we stayed like that for a while, saying nothing, looking at each other as if we were twenty years younger and there was still time to make mistakes or get it right.

—Let’s go to bed —she said afterward, handing me the towel.

In bed she was clumsy and voracious in equal measure, inexperienced or very out of practice, I couldn’t tell which. She kissed me all over my body, stopping in places no one stops unless they’re starving for something old, and then came back up to my mouth with a new smile.

—Put it in slowly. I want to feel it going in.

I fucked her with both hands supporting her ass, very slowly. She was wet in a way that left no room for doubt. Her moans were thin, cut through with sighs that seemed to laugh at themselves. I sucked her nipples while I drove into her, first restrained, then without restraint. Her eyes were closed and she was moving her head from side to side, as if telling a ghost no.

—Come inside me, Iván. I want to feel your heat for once.

I came inside her and she gave a long moan, clutching the back of my neck, not letting me out.

—Don’t pull out. Kiss me. Give me all the kisses you saved up for twenty years.

I kissed her until our mouths dried out. Then I lay down beside her, staring at a crack in the ceiling that drew a pretty decent map of Italy. Lu had her head on my shoulder and was breathing slowly, as if she had fallen asleep without warning.

—Are you coming back? —she asked after a while, without opening her eyes.

—I don’t know.

—Better that way.

I got dressed in silence. Before leaving the bedroom, I picked up from the living room floor the panties she had taken off in the middle of the rug and slipped them into my trouser pocket without thinking, like someone taking a stone from the beach.

I went down in the elevator with a still heart and a loaded pocket. When the lobby door opened, I ran straight into Ricardo, who was getting back earlier than expected. He didn’t recognize me. He was wearing overalls stained with grease and smelled of a closed workshop.

—Good morning —I said.

—Morning —he answered, not looking at me.

I stepped out into the street, patting my pocket to check that the panties were still there, and walked to the bus stop thinking about the map of Italy on the ceiling and whether it would be worth calling her again. I decided it wouldn’t. I decided it would. I decided, above all, not to decide anything until the following Saturday.