Adultery(59)
After a while I manage to relax a little. I’ve figured out a few pieces of my inner puzzle. One of them is the reason why this hatred comes and goes, like the buses at this stop. I may have lost the thing that’s most important to me in life: my family. I’ve been defeated in the battle to find happiness, and this not only humiliates me, it keeps me from seeing the way forward.
And my husband? I need to have a frank conversation with him tonight and confess everything. I feel like this will set me free, even if I have to suffer the consequences. I’m tired of lying—to him, to my boss, to myself.
I just don’t want to think about this now. More than anything else, it’s jealousy that eats away at my thoughts. I can’t get up from this bus stop because it’s as though there are chains attached to my body. They are heavy and difficult to haul around.
You mean she likes hearing stories about his infidelities while she’s in bed with her husband and doing the same things he did with me? I should have realized he had other women when he took the condom from the nightstand. I should have known I was just one more by the way he took me. Many times I left that damn hotel feeling that way, telling myself I wouldn’t see him again—all the while aware that this was just another one of my lies and that if he called, I would always be ready, whenever and wherever he wanted.
Yes, I knew all that. And yet I tried to convince myself I was only looking for sex and some adventure. But it wasn’t true. Today I realize that yes, I was in love, despite having denied it on all my sleepless nights and empty days. Madly in love.
I don’t know what to do. I guess—in fact, I’m sure—that all married people always have a secret crush. It’s forbidden, and flirting with the forbidden is what makes life interesting. But few people take it further; only one in seven, according to the article I read in the newspaper. And I think only one in a hundred is capable of getting confused enough to be carried away by the fantasy, like I did. For most, it’s nothing more than a fling, something you know from the beginning won’t last long. A little thrill to make sex more erotic and hear “I love you” shouted out at the moment of orgasm. Nothing more.
And what if it had been my husband who’d found a mistress? How would I have reacted? It would have been extreme. I would have said that life is unfair, that I’m worthless, and I’m getting old. I’d have screamed bloody murder, I’d have cried nonstop from jealousy, which would have actually been envy—he can, and I can’t. I’d have left, slamming the door behind me, and taken the children to my parents’ house. Two or three months later I would have regretted it and tried to find some excuse to go back, imagining he would want the same. After four months, I would be terrified by the possibility of having to start all over again. After five months, I would have found a way to ask to come back “for the children,” but it would be too late: he would be living with his mistress, a much younger woman, pretty and full of energy, who had begun to make his life fun again.
The phone rings. My boss asks after my son. I say I’m at a bus stop and can’t hear well, but that everything’s fine and soon I’ll be at the paper.
A terrified person can never see reality, preferring to hide in their fantasies. I can’t go on like this for more than an hour. I have to pull myself together. My job is waiting, and it might help me.
I leave the bus stop and start walking back to my car. I look at the dead leaves on the ground. In Paris, they’d have already been swept up, I think. But we’re in Geneva, a much wealthier city, and they’re still there.
These leaves were once part of a tree, a tree that has now gone to ground to prepare for a season of rest. Did the tree have any consideration for the green cloak that covered it, fed it, and enabled it to breathe? No. Did it think of the insects who lived there and helped pollinate its flowers and keep nature alive? No. The tree just thought about itself; some things, like leaves and insects, are discarded as needed.
I’m like one of those leaves on the city ground, who lived thinking it would be everlasting and died without knowing exactly why; who loved the sun and the moon and who watched those buses and rattling streetcars go by for a long time, and yet no one ever had the courtesy to let her know that winter existed. They lived it up, until one day they began to turn yellow and the tree bid them farewell.
It didn’t say “see you later” but “good-bye,” knowing the leaves would never be back. And it asked the wind for help loosening them from their branches and carrying them far away. The tree knows it can grow only if it rests. And if it grows, it will be respected. And can produce even more beautiful flowers.