I don’t really remember how it ended up on our schedule. We always sit and watch TV together for a while before we go to bed, sipping wine, but for the past six months we had spent the greater part of that time looking through guide books about Argentina. We both agreed that Mendoza seemed like it would be nice, so I guess at some point it just came to seem obvious that we would go.
There was a time, back when my husband was married to his former wife, now deceased, when his company sent him to work in Buenos Aires. Apparently he ran a factory there. Listening to him talk about that period in his life, I always pictured myself sitting next to him, watching some extravagant tango show put on just for tourists, as if we were on our honeymoon. I wanted to do that. But when I considered it – well, I was thirty-five and he was sixty, and we were both so lazy that we found it a real bother just leaving the house, so there wasn’t much chance of it happening.
We had started in Buenos Aires but, worn out by the lively hustle and bustle, we decided to stay a bit longer in that peaceful town near the mountains, and to take a leisurely walk every day while we were there.
We were staying in an old hotel at the edge of a big park. The outside of the hotel was gorgeous, but our room was so plain it was like staying in a dormitory. The window was kind of rickety and didn’t close all the way, so it got chilly at night. Outside the window you saw the thin branches of these trees, a whole bunch of them, shaking their leaves as if they were cold. And if you leaned out over the sill, way off in the distance you could see a mountain capped with snow. The air was startlingly cool, and every time I stuck my head out, my cheeks would flush.
Yes – a unique, very cold wind blew through that town.
When we went out walking at dusk, the chilly wind and the beautiful air, the lethargy of the people going this way and that, everything seemed so faint and fleeting that you could almost feel it in your bones. It occurred to me that this atmosphere might be what people call heaven. I’d heard that, a long time ago, a colossal earthquake had left the town buried, and somehow, when I looked around, that seemed to make sense. Everything looked so insubstantial, as if it had all been built from shadows of things in the real town, which had vanished.
Neither of us ever actually put the feeling into words, but we both liked the town a lot. More than anything, we enjoyed the loneliness. It felt so good it made you shiver. Our life in Tokyo was so totally lacking in energy that we had always felt overwhelmed by the surrounding city. Of course, we were still human, and like all humans we went through our daily routines, and every so often we argued or went out and met up with friends or laughed or got kind of wild – yet right from the start there was something strangely quiet about our life together. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve enjoyed the sort of lonely feeling where it seems like your body is curling into itself, and I’ve always loved the stillness of early evening, and the way the sky in autumn seems so high, and walking the streets at night, all alone. And my husband carries the scent of that loneliness. That was one of the reasons I married him.
In Mendoza we rose early every morning, bundled ourselves in several layers of clothes, and then went out to take a leisurely stroll through the park. We would walk slowly to a certain lively street and get a cup of hot chocolate and some bread, always at the same café. My husband is skinny but he eats a whole lot, so it was fun just to sit and watch him. After that we would just go on sitting there, letting our minds wander, and when the afternoon rolled around we would make our way back through town to the hotel and take a nap. That was how we passed our days, for the most part.
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