Moonlighting

My husband is impatient for some things, he also has a certain depth in his sense of responsibility for the protection of his family that makes him adopt some attitudes that seek to denote control of situations (although he can be completely lost at times).

My husband is a great connoisseur and lover of Caribbean music, he has stood out all his life for being a great Salsa dancer and particularly of what is known as Salsa Brava, a genre product of a cultural symbiosis that was born in New York in the forties and that flooded all America with joy.

My husband and I are very different, in general we don't like the same things and we both have very different attitudes towards the things we like. I like classical music, boleros and above all I love drama and the high notes that, in musical matters, only opera can offer.

Forgive me for this tedious introduction, it is necessary to understand the true story:

Forty-five minutes from our main house we have a little beach house, our house called Casa Azul. There we spend many weekends, just the two of us or with friends, without internet, playing games, reading and listening to music. From there, a ten minute bus ride away is a fishing village, Santa Fe, where we get our food. It is a relaxed place, with a beautiful beach full of pelicans and plenty of places to drink beer. That Saturday the place caught us a little more than we had planned. It is not convenient for us to stay in Santa Fe after five in the afternoon because six in the evening is the time when the buses stop running. Also, the walk down to the beach from our house has no lighting. And, additionally, we had left the house without light bulbs on.

At five o'clock in the afternoon my husband and I were sitting on the bus, waiting for the bus to fill up with passengers so that the driver could decide to start the route. The first fifteen minutes passed and the bus was only half full. A certain uneasiness was felt among the passengers, the insistent comments, some very funny and others less sympathetic, began to become an opinion.

"Driver, are we leaving today or tomorrow?"
"Chauffeur, will you give us dinner?"
"Chauffeur, if you are not going to leave, give me back my ticket and I'll figure out how to leave!"

The most radical opinions found a place in my husband who began to raise the idea of getting off the bus and walking. I am not a great walker (he is) and I began to argue everything that could be argued: that ten minutes on the bus is not ten minutes walking, that night would fall, that I did not like walking on the road, that I was wearing very delicate sandals, that surely in a few moments the driver would decide to start....

My husband definitely exerts an influence on me because when he took me by the hand, put his arms around my shoulders and told me with such confidence that we would get home very quickly, I put aside all the arguments. "All right, let's go," I told him, securing my broad hat.

As we passed the driver my husband kept looking him in the eye, that simple gesture made a difference.

We walked up the small hill leading from the bus platform to the road, we hadn't walked five minutes when the bus passed us, we waved him to stop but he just stared at my husband and... continued driving.

From the road we could see the sea. The colors of the sky were fading. In fifteen minutes -it was the month of June- the sun would set and the relaxing presence of the sea would disappear. My husband, with his good, firm shoes, was walking at a pace that only people who have grown up in big cities achieve, so I was lagging behind. In those first minutes my husband waited for me and took the opportunity to remind me that he was always telling me that I should wear better shoes.

At six o'clock, half an hour's walk later, another bus sped past us. I knew it was the last bus and that I now had no choice but to walk in the dark, on the narrow road, the five or six kilometers that separated me from my peaceful home. At this point I began to feel an intense rage.

I imagine my husband guessed my discomfort because he no longer stopped for me to catch up. He timed himself as fast as my ineffective footwear would allow but kept about ten meters away.

From time to time I imprecated him by asking him in a complaining tone if he had any idea where we were and how far we had walked. "Of course I know, of course I do, my love," he would say, in an intonation I can't quite describe. I understood that he was giving a "diplomatic" answer.

When it was already dark the dogs began to bark at us from the isolated closed houses. We had been walking for an hour, he in front and I behind. He with his sure step and I with my awkward gait. The barking of a dog sounded very close to me, instinct made me change my pace. At that moment the delicate leather strap of my right sandal broke. From then on I began to drag my right foot and, of course, to walk slower. Fate placed before me a piece of dry branch that I picked up with defensive intentions.

In the silhouette that formed of him in the shadows, his backpack stood out on his straight back. As the days passed I realized that my silhouette must have been much less sober. A female figure, wearing a broad hat, carrying a wooden stick in her hand and shuffling her feet as she mumbled down a dark road.

The rage did not leave me. In my mind I went over the times when he made me walk in the wrong direction, when he insisted on pretending to dominate the situation and ended up wasting time... I really don't know if I made it all the way muttering out loud until, at last, at eight o'clock at night we arrived home. As we approached, he quickened his pace and I could see, quickly, how the lights of the house were turned on.

As I walked through the door I let go of my sandals, told him I would never listen to him again, went down to the beach and went into the sea, I was determined to stay as far away from him as possible. He is not a good swimmer, I am. He is afraid of the sea at night, I am not. From the water I saw him moving around the kitchen.

My "bad self" said to me:

"What does your husband imagine, he thinks that with a dinner you are going to forget that horrible two-hour walk on a dark road."

He also kept repeating to me insistently that it was all because of his impatience and stubbornness.

I was agreeing with my "bad self," of course!

Suddenly the glow of the moon began to illuminate the house. Rage had made me forget that it was the night of the full moon and that we had bought a wine to celebrate. The contemplation of the moonrise was joined, over the murmur of the sea, by listening to the first chords of the first aria of Mozart's Magic Flute. The music came from my house. In that first aria of the opera the handsome Tamino is rescued by three ladies from the evil Queen of the Night, who end up giving Tamino the magic flute, the powerful instrument that is able to change the mood of the people who hear it.

The Magic Flute is my favorite piece of music. That piece is able to reset my mind.

"He knows, he is manipulating you" said my "bad self".

I knew it was true when it began to play, out of order, the aria where the Papageno birdman sings with his Papagena and they dream of many little Papagenos.

"He's going to make it" I thought, without my "bad self" saying anything.

Hearing Papageno's tender duet with Papagena I gave up, but stayed in the water.

Then sounded my favorite aria of that opera and of all the other operas in the world: The vengeance of hell boils in my heart. In that aria The Queen of the Night expresses a deep desire for revenge. The content of that aria represents the conflict between patriarchy and matriarchy, between nature and civilization and the ineffable relationship between mother and daughter. Most connoisseurs agree that it is, musically speaking and in terms of performance, the most difficult aria to interpret. The dramatic content is terrible. The mother asks her daughter to kill her own father. I hear the beginning of that aria every time my phone rings. It has been, always, my cell phone ringer.

I put my ears in the water, opened my arms and legs, began to float on my back and breathed while listening. Magic happened. The rage was gone, in me there was only a deep joy, a sense of peace and harmony. If I turned my back to the house and the full moon I could look at a sky full of stars.

I could have stayed like this for a long time if my husband hadn't played Beethoven's Moonlight.

How well the notes of a piano, the smell of freshly cooked fish and the promise of a glass of wine combine in the marine atmosphere! When I went up to the balcony, my husband who had been watching me all the time from there, was waiting for me with a glass poured.

He didn't say "I'm sorry" but I knew he had already apologized profusely.