Falling in Love

Authors’ (not author’s, since there is more than one of us) note: 

Readers might miss not having characters with names in this story. However, if we keep the two persons involved anonymous, we might better see the light of commonality shining through them, toward us. (Is that too dead metaphorish? We’re kind of new at this writing thing, to be honest.)

So just relax and pretend the two people below are you and me, or you and somebody else, or even your parents. At the end, please be advised that you may submit comments and questions. We know this is an odd story. Maybe we can clarify something.

***

They met while she was in summer language school. That’s when minds and bodies are free. People open up to one another, we all know that. Hey, it’s a good thing.

She had applied to the course overseas on a whim, because she was curious like that, curious about other countries, languages, art, everything. She liked to keep opening the pages of new books, so to say, exploring, learning, being surprised. She just wanted to keep discovering new things the rest of her life. It was hard to restrain her, to dissuade her, when a whim came her way.

If she wanted to put her long hair in braids and wrap them around her head, she did it. Some people laughed at her. She just enjoyed trying to change her appearance once in a while. It wasn’t like she was getting plastic surgery, which seemed to be all right to do. 

She had a lovely figure but was adverse to advertising it. She wore loose-fitting clothing because - well, it was comfortable.

He wore his jet black hair on the longish side. He probably knew it matched his eyes. He had a nice figure, but not as nice as hers. They saw each other outside of class, and one day she realized he wasn’t taking any summer courses because those were all for foreigners. She was a foreigner; he was a local.

She was in her early twenties, or, maybe a couple of years younger or older, when he walked up to her, quietly. He seemed to talk to her without words when he asked her about Ware Commons. 

“Ware Commons?”

It sounded like a made-up query, a joke. Nobody walks up to a stranger and asks a completely obvious question about The French Lieutenant’s Woman out of the blue. And he did it with such a British accent. They weren’t from France or Britain and were in Galicia, which was but wasn’t part of Spain. Yes, it was a screwy question.

She hadn’t known any answer to the off-the-wall question he had just asked her, but she managed to offer the most obvious one. Ware might have been a person’s name, one of the founding fathers, so to speak. Or it might have been the place where vendors brought their merchandise - their wares - to sell on market days. 

Oh, she didn’t really know, had never really thought about it. She said so, carefully, so as not to make him uncomfortable. It had been a shock to hear someone speaking English with that perfect accent, in another country. It had made her wonder how he had gotten all the sounds just right.

He had also identified her as an English speaker. (Some of the languages spoken by the foreign students were German, Dutch, Finnish, Arabic, Russian, even Bulgarian and Polish.) She might have known Swedish, couldn’t she?

She took his question seriously, however, and gave it a bit more thought. Maybe he really did want to know. She ought not be so suspicious, but she wasn’t in her own country, after all. 

It was also a coincidence that he had asked her about a novel she had read. She had tried to avoid reading in English as much as possible so she could improve her other languages, all of which needed improvement, we should note.

In the end, he hadn’t seemed so terribly interested in the significance of the square’s name, so the conversation topic shifted and ended. Still, she had looked into his eyes far too deeply by the time they each went their own ways. Until the next time. Outside of class. With no other students nearby. A coincidence.

She was taking a course in the Galician language. We forgot to mention that when we started. He was not. He already spoke it. He was a frequent customer at the little café near the old building where the classes were held. Maybe he hung out there hoping to find unsuspecting foreigners on whom to try out his impeccable English. It wasn’t actually impeccable, but maybe he wanted to convince himself.

If this last part sounds repetitive, sounds like we already said it, it does. We are telling the story the way she was thinking it, imagining it. Obsessing about it, in a word. At this point, she hadn’t figured anything out. She didn’t have a clue.

They crossed paths a few more times, maybe by accident, maybe not. They always had café con leite. For sure he wasn’t keeping track of how many times they shared a coffee break, and she had lost count. There was ultimately no reason to keep track of something like that unless one knows it has been torture or pleasure. She certainly didn’t know, but torture was more likely. There was a reason for this, or reasons:

A couple of times he gave her cultural lessons, because she really didn’t have a clue about where she was. At least he thought that was the case and he might have been right. Locals have a sense of pride in being home-grown. Foreigners were just passing through, not worth paying any attention to. 

He was right in a sense, although there was no need to be arrogant about it. She might be studying the language, but she definitely had yet to out it into its context of thousands of years. Its context of time and land, its flavors of octopus, potatoes, chestnuts, and grelos, the greens so often poorly translated as turnip leaves. Greens that nobody ever ate in her country, in the States.

Yet she was interested in the differences, liked being near small fields. It reminded her of gardening with her father. She liked the history of food, how seeds, plants, and roots traveled from continent to continent. She was very interested in learning more about the place where she was now studying. He had to give her credit for that.

One day, after they had actually shared a coffee, something new happened. He acted like he had been looking for her rather than spotting her by happenstance. Then, coffees on the wooden bar in front of them, he said he would like her to meet his friend Dores. She had who had just lost her partner of about ten years. Her partner had been his closest friend. He had been studying medicine, like Dores, and had had leukemia. So young, so sad. She could see his face turn somber and Dores look down. The wound was still very painful.

Later it turned out the foreigner from the States and the friend who had died had the same birthday. That unnerved him, for some reason, and she thought he was so kind, caring. Maybe he was. Maybe he was. He seemed to care deeply about his family and friends. She liked that in a person, really liked it.

It had turned out pretty quickly that his friend’s lonely partner, Dores, was not too interested in meeting the foreigner. They could not find very much in common to link a friendship to, plus the summer course would eventually be over. Dores was still mourning and unavailable emotionally to anybody.

That was when he noticed that she was sad as well, and surreptitiously he took Dores’ place. He began asking her to go for coffee. Once he even invited her for an evening stroll and they had a nice wine in a dark, cave-like mesón on a very side street in the university city. It was becoming obvious that that not all foreigners were the same.

She began to find out a few things about him as well. Like the fact that he hated her country, but he didn’t hate her. He went into great detail about why the place she was from was so despicable, and insisted on giving lots of examples. Endless examples. Abundant examples. She wanted to find a hole in the ground to crawl into and pull in over her. She actually became ashamed of her place of origin, wanted to apologize. He was right. 

And there were his eyes. They told her so. Why had she never seen all the lies her teachers had taught her? And the things she was not supposed to know?

He lectured her on leftist politics, obviously. He didn’t cite just one source. The bases of his arguments were vast tracts of political philosophy. She couldn’t begin to keep up with his dissertations, and maybe never really tried. She thought he must be the most intelligent person she had ever met, male or female.

It was often all right that she tuned out with his political topics (ravings, some would say), because there was his telephone voice. By now he would sometimes call her, to set up a time and a place to meet. A few personal comments would trickle into the conversation. The political discussions were still endless, though, by comparison. She was definitely a bit bored when she didn’t know the details of politicians’ misbehavior, but he had those pretty eyes. 

She listened a lot, and learned. There was little English in their conversations by then. She did teach him the verb “to bolt,” however, in the sense of leaving an establishment without paying. He thought it was a funny expression and they laughed. They never bolted, though, even if she thought he seemed to like the idea. She would never ever do anything like that. Maybe Protestants were harder on thieves than Catholics were.

She was uncertain what was going on with her, because she was beginning to dread having to return to her country. She wanted to learn more about Galicia. She had always been attracted to archaeology. That was the main reason. If you are away for ten weeks, you spend at least one surviving, another surviving homesickness, a few having a great time, and a couple dreading the good-byes.

He did not know that back in Maine there was a person, a woman, to whom she had felt unexpectedly drawn. Maybe it was simply because the other woman and she had both been through some rough patches recently and they were both good listeners. He would never have thought to ask if she had any attachments.

The communication with the other woman was not a relationship. She knew it would only ever be a good friendship, but she did wonder if the woman in Maine thought about her at all. We are often drawn to someone we can never really know. We are also very often lacking in a strong shoulder. She needed someone, but it was hard to find a person you could trust, no matter what the country.

In fact, that seemed to be the story of her life. She trusted very few people, and even those she did trust had let her down. She kept thinking it was her fault. A shoulder to lean on would always have been nice, though.

She was realistic and patient. She never forgot, not for a moment, that she was only visiting the country and would return in a few weeks to her place of employment. It wasn’t her profession, but it helped meet college expenses. She would return to work and to college with a new language under her belt and memories of an entire long summer strolling through perfect streets with cobblestones. 

She was beginning to think her place of origin was indeed inferior, because cobblestone streets were a rarity back there. People took them for granted here in Galicia, but they also held their centuries in high esteem. People were quite put out when they saw a taxi or a delivery van driving over those centuries, threatening to put a crack in a couple. It was amazing to see people place so much importance on the places they walked.

It was beautiful.

She was more interested in her career at this point, anyway. She was certain her life was going to go in many directions, and this had been just one of them. She had learned a lot of galego and could converse decently in the language. She had bought a few books to take back to Maine and knew she would read them. One of the first things she’d learned is reading Rosalía de Castro was essential; there were others as well. Galicians didn’t have just one Bible, they had several, and everyone had read them.

He was still dark, serious, wedded to his politics. She was fine with that. After all, she was leaving.

Then, one night, near the end of everything (as she told herself), they stood at the far end of a café counter, an old chestnut one like they used to have, and he got more serious. She said nothing. She had nothing to say. Then he said it all:

“I think I am falling in love with you.” No tone, no expression.

She was smart and did not say what did you say? She just let him say it. Then she reached over and kissed him on the cheek. He said what he said and she did what she did. At that moment. There is no more story.

Well, no more story, but maybe there’s an epilogue.

Epilogue:

At that very moment they did not know where they were going. They did not know how long the voyage would be. They did not think. If they had thought, they would have both walked away from his “I love you” and would have left it hanging in the empty air that had once been something, perhaps.

At that very moment she did not know the orbit her love, her consuming desire would enter. She thought he would always be a part of that orbit, and maybe he is. That was incorrect, but what matters now is the Galicia beyond him, beyond the endless political rants, beyond anything else that might have happened. She remembers him, but no longer loves him. He remembers her, but no longer loves her, either. 

She, however, has something better. She knows who her true love is. She knows it is Galicia, male or female, that’s not the point. This is something beyond. She is in love, and this time it’s for real.