Red wine, white couch
I don’t know exactly how, but I had already seen all that scene happening before: she going down the stairs wearing her highest heels, that black dress, wet hair, crazy bracelets on her arms, the finest jewelry she had, dressing herself to set me on fire, saying, only in her mind, but also through her eyes, something like that Brazilian song we would listen during long nights together: “I want to see what you do when you notice I can do very well without you”. What a beautiful woman, that woman I have been married to since my twenties and now, three decades later, is going down not only the stairs, but also to another life, one where another person is waiting to see her heels, her dress, her hair and arms and thinking about what a beautiful woman she is. Nothing out of our plans. We discovered we love each other a long time ago and, at the same moment, we knew we suddenly could be passionate for someone else. It could happen to us, of course. All these years I spent afternoons and nights with girls, a lot of them, and, in spite, I never thought I would be more than some hours with them — on the contrary, I usually came back home to see my real woman, my wife since my youth, waiting for me to end one more day. Our signal was the wine. Not only the wine: its fiery red, almost brown, invading the pure white of our couch. When one of us decided to do it, to throw wine on that couch, so all the thing had happened — she or me firing in passion for another one and the definitive end of us as that strange couple. And I had seen that scene before too, her glass taking its direction to the couch in a slow pace, the wine (I bought in Portugal) anxious to catch that virgin white, a kind of red-white, sad scene happening first as a fear and then as a fact. And so she took her glass, looked at me with her also red eyes and confirmed I was getting the whole thing. So she closed the door and left the room making her heels stomp the rocks of the street. In the silence of the night, minutes after she got her way to somewhere, I looked around and noticed the first scene I hadn’t seen before during all that time: the stained white couch in the middle of room, poor couch, singing in a shy voice: “I want to see what you do…”.