VALENTINES DAY: FIONA MCCANN's story of a love affair spanning two continents, missed opportunities, bad timing, a lost letter . . . and a wedding
SO. A MAN WALKS into a bar. I know, I know – it starts like a hackneyed joke. Bear with me. He walks into a bar, takes a seat and orders a drink. From me.
That was my first encounter with the American, whose shy smile and big, dark eyes had my fellow bartenders weak at the knees. He would come into our Buenos Aires bar in the late afternoon, before the hordes of drunken ex-pats and post-office Argentines. He was, he told one smitten colleague who had the good fortune to work the early shift, in Argentina for six months, looking for work as a freelance journalist. Someone told him my day job was journalism too, and one day he delivered a note to the bar, asking if we could meet to talk about our mutual profession. It wasn’t a come-on, he assured me; he had a girlfriend Stateside and was planning to return to her once his six-month stint was up.
So we became just good friends, meeting up in the mornings to pore over the papers for leads, swap journalistic contacts and talk about story ideas. Mainly we just drank milky coffee and talked about everything else.
His girlfriend came to visit. She was pretty and warm and I liked her immediately, even as I recognised that the sinking feeling in their presence was a little more than disappointment – and a little closer to heartbreak – than I’d bargained for. The American was not for romancing.
His girlfriend left and he stayed, and our daily conversations returned, skating along the outskirts of the friend zone. It was a dangerous game in the Latin heat to find someone who speaks your language in both the literal and metaphorical sense, with whom to while away siesta time talking old loves and literature. And the air cracked one day when, over coffee and sticky medialunas – sweet half-moon croissants that dissolve in the cup on dipping – he told me that he couldn’t accept my social invitation for that evening because of the fear that he was falling. For me. Me!
My stomach flipped and my blood sang and my heart swelled and sank all in an instant. I was elated! I was distraught. Here, finally, was the guy, the half orange, as the Argentines call the one we’d call, well, The One. Here he was and I’d met him too late. The promise smacked down by the impossibility of it all made me wretched. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, he had to walk into mine.
So he left, to go back to his American life and leave me languishing in the Buenos Aires heat. He whooshed off in a yellow taxi cab one morning, dressed in a new green suit – but not before, in those final exquisite moments of imminent separation, he told me he loved me and promised to come back.
Alas, I am not a woman known for patience, and the American, it transpires, is not a man celebrated for speedy action. We resolved not to make contact until he addressed things with his girlfriend, but as the weeks passed and I heard nothing, I began to doubt those hazy moments, pre-taxi whoosh. And as the silence grew long, interrupted by vague and occasional emails that made his return recede ever farther into a future unclear, I started to listen to those who told me that dreams of his return, white steed optional, were unrealistic. I needed to move on.
So I went to a party one night and met Pablo (yes, that really was his name), and in that moment resolved in a fit of feminist ire that I was not holding my life back no more for no man. I wrote to the American, telling him I’d met someone else – hoping, if I was honest, that this revelation would spur him from his slow silences and spirit him to my side to fight to keep me. I didn’t hear back.
Almost a year later, Pablo and I were having breakfast together when my former landlady called saying a letter had arrived to my old address. It was from the American, postmarked the day after I’d written that last email and arriving in my mailbox 10 months too late. Saying he was a jackass to have let me go. Saying he had broken up with his girlfriend. Saying he still loved me. Saying all the things that would have mattered if the notorious Argentine postal system had not intervened. By the time I read the words for which I would once have thrown my whole life in the air, Pablo and I were together and the American, with his green suit and his wide-eyed laugh and the cafe con leches on sticky Buenos Aires mornings, was too far in the past. Se le escapó el tren. The train had departed.
Still, we managed to salvage the friendship where it had all begun, and over the years the American and I continued to correspond. When Pablo and I broke up, he was there on the end of a long-distance telephone line to remind me of all the other pezes in el mar. When his new girlfriend high-tailed it in a jealous fit, I was the one assuring him he was better off without her.
Thus three years of treasured emails and the growing suspicion that he’d always be the one that got away passed. Back in Ireland, I called him one day for his birthday, politely inquiring about his latest girlfriend. “We broke up,” he told me, before asking after my new boyfriend. “We broke up too.” A pause, while it registered that for the first time since we had met all those years previously, we both had a free spot on our dance card. He broke the silence. “How about I come visit?”
So he did. On the night of my birthday, three years after he had whizzed out of my life in a Buenos Aires taxi cab, he strolled into a Dublin pub in the same green suit, with the same wide eyes and the same heart-flipping smile and caused the same chemical explosion under my skin. A man walks into a bar. And this time, reader, I married him.
