Heading for the cabin to change was nothing more than a pretext to hide his consternation and banish the memories. But the scene kept repeating in Marco's mind to ensnare him in the trap of an insidious doubt: what if...?
What if?
The scene replayed once again, the music came to the end—and Eliana so close to him, he no longer could tell whether in the Opal Lounge or on that narrow San Francisco stage. The next day, recovered from the flu, Marco congratulated himself for not making a pass at Eliana. If it were another woman, he wouldn't hesitate. Not her, though, whose friendship he treasured foremost. After that evening, though, their interaction took another path. It was the summer vacation, Eliana traveled to San Diego and there she met Robert. One night she called Marco to tell the news: she was in love. Although Eliana expressed remorse toward her boyfriend, her voice carried a tone of euphoria. Back to San Francisco, she broke up with him.
Eliana soon moved to San Diego and married Robert. From then on, the little Marco knew from her was through social media. Now he knew in first hand that Eliana was about to divorce.
If you're going to San Francisco... Marco wondered if he should have ignored the end of the song, surrendering to the sortilege. Maybe Eliana would have discarded her boyfriend and never left to San Diego. Would she still be the woman Marco had met in San Francisco, that one now suffocating inside an armor of refinement? Upon encountering her on the Aquamarine, Marco had a hard time recognizing Eliana. Underneath the armor, however, he detected vestiges of her old spontaneity.
What would happen if he had obeyed his impulse? Maybe today Eliana would still chatter while he washed, not behind the door but inside the shower box with him. Maybe the two would continue dwelling in the city, living together, raising a family, leading a different life.
And he would have never met Marisa.
Marisa who had caught him by surprise, who day after day seeped into his life, inside the classroom and outside it. Her smile sometimes radiant, sometimes with a hue of sadness, always disarming, awakening in him first curiosity, then a drive to comfort her that merged into desire . In spite of the difficult circumstances surrounding them in that beginning, with Marisa he had known peace.
As he thought of her, Marco searched for Marisa in his heart. All he found was mist. She had become a stranger with painfully familiar features and mannerisms. He didn't understand her anymore, and she gave him increasing disquiet and a bad aftertaste in his mouth. Sometimes she stared at him with the same eyes of Lorena.
Marco stood abruptly, undressed and stepped into the shower, hoping to wash that image off his body and memory. Nevertheless, amid the translucid curtain of water, Marisa continued to stare at him with those eyes. Her lids half-closed before she turned to the wall and received him inside her, a moan escaping from deep down her throat, but the voice wasn't hers nor hers was the smoky gaze she directed at him afterward.
He dried himself with vigorous movements, slipped into a faded jeans and a white T-shirt, went back to the bathroom to comb his damp hair. In the mirror, the impenetrable eyes of Marisa overlapped his reflection. They grew larger and larger until covering the glass surface. Their honey color turned greener until becoming the limpid eyes of Eliana.
Disturbed, Marco lowered his face and found the bottle of cologne on the sink. By an irony, he had restarted using that fragrance recently. It exhaled the fresh aroma of water, combining citric notes and an amber chord. The blue glass scintillated under the ceiling light when Marco opened it—festive like that evening, crystalline like the gaze entangled in his memory. It exhaled the fresh aroma of the bay, the evanescent texture of ocean foam on one's feet, the waves with their eternal chant, the taste of the Pacific wind.
It was the same cologne from the times of San Francisco.
Marco's hand moved on its own volition and stamped on his skin a drop of the past.
"As much as I reason it's best this way, I'd be lying if I said I won't feel the separation," Robert went on. "Eliana and I lived together for six years, shared joys and sorrows. There was a time when she was the closest person I had in the world. Despite our disagreements, I like her and I wish her happiness."
"I also wish Marco happiness."
She spoke without thinking, as though already saying goodbye to Marco. That lapse scared Marisa. Her body warmed by the sun, the dance and the alcohol lost its heat. The nocturne breeze gave her a shiver.
"Isn't it strange that the two of us are in the same situation? Literally on the same boat? Sometimes I ask myself if it wasn't fate that brought us here. Eliana and Marco met again. And I met you."
She fought the vertigo caused by his proximity. Robert held her chin and made her look at him.
"You're the woman I've always wanted."
"How can you be so sure?"
But a part of her ached to believe—with all her strength, with the force of a revelation.
"All it takes is a second to recognize a soulmate in the crowd, Marisa. And I know you recognized me too. We both have arrived at a crossroad in our relationships."
"Marco and I are in a transition, that's all." She became stubborn to compensate her lack of conviction, stumbling on another lapse: "But Marco is the only man I've ever loved and we completed... complete each other. It's true he had to work hard in Toronto and our relationship suffered. It will be different in Brazil."
"Do you believe Marco will have more time for you once he's managing his school? At best, he will work as much as he did in Canada. Probably more."
That had already occurred to Marisa. Likewise, it occurred to her that she and Marco hadn't spent much time together when they decided to live under the same roof. Their relationship had been brief before the breakup, and the move to Toronto happened shortly after reconciliation. When they started a joint life, they didn't really know each other. And still today, to which extent did she know Marco? That man who claimed to love her, yet always sought the company of another woman, had become a stranger. Maybe the distance between them was inevitable, even predestined.
Marisa, nonetheless, resisted decreeing the end. Not yet. Not in that night populated with vampires and shadows.
"I agree it will be difficult in the beginning, Robert. Later everything will fall into place."
"Or will it? Marco is obviously passionate about his work. That's not gonna change. It's stronger than him. I've met many men like that."
"You're mistaken. When Marco and I started dating, he would do anything to be with me."
"The beginning of love is an illusion that transforms you into another being: a being living and breathing the illusion. Life's contingencies are the reality." Robert paused and added softly: "Don't illude yourself. With Marco, you'll always come in second."
Marco searched his pocket for the onboard card. On the bottom of it, he felt the letter. His hand vacillated. In a flash it came to his memory Marisa's voice telling him she had put something in his pocket, right before Eliana and Robert arrived at the cabin. He barely registered her words and had totally forgotten about it. He pulled out the white envelope with the blue and golden logo of the ship, recognizing Marisa's handwriting in his name. That fusion of the two, Mars and Venus entwined in his name and her handwriting, invested the word with a unique character. The underlining of the name reinforced for better and worse the sum of joys and anguishes, individual and shared, composing their story from the unguarded first day in the classroom to the presence of Marisa in his bed with her body bristled by the rain falling outside, to her absence that afternoon onboard the ship.
This name on the envelope—this name in itself held a plot with an imminent denouement, for the way it was unfolding, the story wouldn't have a backbone to go on. For a never-ending moment Marco held the letter, conjecturing what Marisa had written to him.
An explanation? Reprimands? Or perhaps she intended to put an end to the relationship. For the past months Marisa had been gradually withdrawing, each day an infinitesimal retraction. And today her behavior was even odder. In the morning, he had detected something in Marisa, either a trace of affection or convert guilt for having rejected him the previous night. As the day elapsed, though, she had distanced herself once again. In the solarium she acted naturally, but he knew her well enough to sense her thoughts weren't there. Marisa could barely wait to leave. On her own. And that's what she did.
She likely preferred to be with Zoe. Her supposed jealousy of Eliana wasn't but a symptom of possessiveness — he had learned long ago that jealousy wasn't a synonym for love. At certain moments, it was true that tenderness surfaced in Marisa. For friendship or by force of habit. Or worse, for pity. It was quite possible that the return to Brazil inspired her self-confidence and the decision to follow her path alone: soon she would be among her own kind and wouldn't need him. Now she had somewhere to go and, apparently, she was already getting ready to sever ties.
Marco had gone through that once. In the current situation, maybe it was best this way.
He opened the envelope. He read the letter three times. In the first Marco was disconcerted. In the second, he couldn't prevent his heart from beating painfully hard. In the third, a wave of remorse engulfed him for he identified in that letter his own conduct: just like Marisa, he had become lost and hadn't been able to understand. The obligations at school and the necessity to consolidate his reputation had occupied him in such a way that he had turned blind to her loneliness. The irony was he felt responsible for having taken Marisa to Toronto and strived to make sure she wouldn't lack anything. He didn't want to fail her and, in his zeal, precisely for that reason, he had.
Later, upon encountering Eliana, he wished to comfort her at all costs to prevent that she went through what he had. He relieved his own pain and couldn't stand to witness it in a friend. But another motivation, this one cunning, also compelled him: he sought in Eliana the warmth he no longer felt in Marisa. It was his actions that had dragged the relationship with Marisa to the brink of a precipice. Not rarely there was dissonance between a manifested wish and a hidden one, Marco pondered. One could manifest the refusal to love and deep inside yearn for it. Or conversely manifest the yearning for love and deep inside refuse it. In the intricate balance between emotion and reason, layer beneath layer beneath layer down to the last, was fear. The eternal fear bearing a thousand faces, the annihilating enemy, the ally in disguise imposing reflection. One spent one's entire life fighting it, fleeing it, confronting it, negotiating with it.
With a definite gesture, Marco closed the cabin door behind him, striding through the corridor and speeding down the stairs. On the landing of Deck 6, instead of proceeding to the Opal Lounge, he descended one more level and advanced to the stores on Deck 5. Marco didn't know for sure what he was looking for—he would know once he found it.
To his disappointment, though, all shops were closed. All of them, except for one. Marco was already moving toward the stairs when, as he turned a corner, he noticed the lit-up window. There he found what he sought.
______________________________
Ah, there are many readers quite upset with the recent developments...
Anyone has any idea what Marco found?