KAREN
J.
GREENBERG
81
And she would answer, "There's too much in the way. I can't get
through it." Nevertheless, because she loved him, she often let him con–
vince her to buy one of the antiques being sold in the marketplace. Over
the ten years they had been together the window ledges and the kitchen
in her apartment had become filled with memorabilia from as far back
as the nineteenth century. Each time, Carla would protest, but Alvaro
would convince her that acceptance of the tidbits of the Argentine past
would help heal her.
On this one day, the one she thought would be their last, he had tried
to convince her to buy an armoire for him to keep his things in, instead
of always sharing hers. Carla had screamed at him, "No. You are not
moving anything like that into my home. You understand? You want to
have a wardrobe of your own, it has to be in a place that is ours. You're
greedy." And then Carla, surprising herself, had added, "The children
are grown and gone. Decide!" And with that, she had returned home
and waited for his call.
It
came the very next day. He promised her he
would leave Luce. Three months later, he did. That was eight weeks
before the stroke.
"When did I last see him?" Carla repeated the doctor's question for
her own benefit, bringing her back to the table and a second cortado.
She looked towards the river and pretended to be counting the time that
had passed since her last encounter with Alvaro, though she knew pre–
cisely. It had been forty-three days. Since then, she had spoken to him
on the phone twice, the two times out of dozens when she knew he was
calling her and she had resisted answering.
"Carla, I miss you ."
"I miss you too, Alvaro."
"I need to see you. Terribly. I need to feel you near me. To see your
eyes."
"Between the hours of noon and one, right? When Luce is away from
the sanatorium, at lunch? Or on Tuesdays when you're not in physical
therapy." Carla had hated herself for the bitterness in her voice. As a
young woman, before she married, she used to have a formal theory
about the deterioration of relationships. "First," she would tell her best
friend, Alicia, "you start having a conversation with yourself
behind
the
conversation that you both hear. That's the beginning of the end. Then,
you start to say what you are thinking. That is even worse. You hate the
meanness that pours out of you. Then, you turn sweet, completely
absent from the event that is happening before you."
She wished Alicia were still alive, so that she could tell her that the
paradigm did not work for an injured or ill party, that instead the stages
