Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 853 & 854, September/October 2012

He saw her again after — what, three or four years? It was her all right, unmistakable with her cinnamon-colored skin and features that reminded him of the native princess in a marvelous mural by Diego Rivera that he once saw in a magazine. She was about to enter the building that he had just left a moment before. She was wearing a pair of sheer white slacks and a lilac-hued blouse cinched at the waist. Then her unforgettable profile got lost in the crowd going in and out of the revolving doors.

He resolved to follow her and speak to her this time, although he had only caught occasional glimpses of her over the course of his life. He had seen her for the first time when he was already married and she was quite young. He saw her riding a bicycle along the paths in a park and, struck from afar by her radiant adolescent beauty, stopped to look at her, putting off some task that he doesn’t even remember, to wait among the trees for her as she reappeared, riding toward him on her girl’s bicycle. As she crossed his path a second time, she gave him a smile that was full of mysteries and prophecies. Unable to follow the girl, he decided to preserve her image in his memory.

He saw her again a year or two later. By then he had corrected the mistake of his first marriage with a no-fault divorce that cost him the apartment he had paid for on the installment plan and the secondhand car they had used to handle the distance between their brand-new home and their jobs. They had no children. Fortunately, their relationship had come apart before they seriously considered bringing children into the world. He was drinking an espresso and meditating bitterly on the fleeting nature of what people call love, which at that stage, with his disastrous marriage weighing on his shoulders, seemed like some kind of polite lie or magical spell whose purpose was to ease the despair, boredom, and monotony that followed the brief delight of infatuation, which took a wrong turn when they decided to spend their lives together, when he saw her through the window of the café walking along the sidewalk. He recognized her immediately. She was one of those women you don’t easily forget; her movements were feline, confident, and vaguely threatening, and she was fully aware of the men gazing at her, but remained in command of her own carefully crafted solitude. He paid for the coffee and ran after the woman who, simply by reappearing before his eyes, produced an emotion in him that he didn’t expect to feel anymore, but there it was once again. As he followed her from a safe distance, he realized that she was no longer the young girl of a couple of years ago, but a full-grown woman who carried herself proudly, with a spring in her step, in complete control of who she was. He imagined her with a boyfriend or a lover, and when she stopped to look in a store window, he slowed down and looked at her, waiting for her to notice him. She responded with a slight but radiant smile, and he kept walking past her, thinking that it wasn’t worth the trouble of getting involved with such a splendid girl while the splinters of his broken marriage were still digging into his flesh and, well, because he still had some hope of getting back together with the woman who had been his wife.

Many years passed, and he forgot about the woman he had seen a couple of times so long ago. He traveled overseas on business and managed to grow quite bored with Amsterdam, although as a consolation he became a fan of cold beer and solitary walks, which gave him the opportunity to admire all the young blond women with the whitest-white, velvety-smooth skin that they showed off with such determination while strolling around the tulip-filled parks, their shadows stretching off to infinity in the late-afternoon splendor that reminded him of the golden polish on an antique and princely set of silver dinnerware.

He returned to his native land and got married again, and this marriage lasted long enough to produce two children who transformed his home life into a peaceful, all-encompassing haven: placid, maybe a bit monotonous, true, but that was the trade-off for stability. Any marital disagreements they had were barely noticeable as they dropped the kids off at a day-care center that was run like a tiny sovereign state for children. It consumed a good part of the couple’s budget, but they felt it was worth it for the good of the children, who were attended on like demanding little monarchs. His wife worked very long hours and rose up through the ranks to an important managerial position, from which she toppled when Pedro, one of their little ones, died at the day-care center due to an unexplained respiratory failure that the specialists attributed to a congenital condition. There was nothing they could do about it. The child was destined to pass away suddenly and unexpectedly. His mother found it impossible to continue her career, as if quitting her job was the price she had to pay to protect her surviving child. It was an irrational decision, made so abruptly that it muddied their relationship to the point that, without knowing exactly how it happened, it led to their separation. He felt bad for her, since she had abandoned her dreams of success and had lost him as well due to the sudden death of their little one. It wasn’t fair. But who ever said life was fair?