RED 2: A Trick of Mirrors [#Wattys2017]

31. Eclipse

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.