Marco's voice reached Marisa like a faraway and unwelcome echo. Then his face came into focus, the rigid jaw and the crease on his forehead, a somber expression accentuated by the dimness around them. Light shifted. The flaming gold silently paled into a saturnine silver. Marco held Marisa by the shoulders and shook her. Indignation washed over her: now that he had concluded his session with Eliana, the hypocrite had the nerve of showing up to censure her. She rebuffed him.

"I hate you!"

While Marisa directed her transfixed eyes at Marco, he stroked her hair in a soothing gesture.

"Mari, it's me. You had a nightmare."

Visceral and disjointed, the scenes still paraded before her, and Marisa crossed the threshold to reality with a shudder. She sought Marco's hand.

"You're freezing. What did you dream?" He glanced at the open book on the bed. "Stop reading that. It's too violent."

The events of the day flowed back to her memory, one after another until the puzzle was complete. After lunch, she had strolled around the ship with Marco and the two of them finally succumbed to indolence, sprawling in bed with their books. She fell asleep amid the pages of A Clockwork Orange...

In her cold body she felt Robert's warmth adhering to her skin like a crust of mud. Still dizzy, Marisa sat upright supporting her back against the headboard. It was just a dream. As Freud postulated, a dream was the fulfillment of a wish. In her case, a bout of jealousy and retaliation against Eliana and Marco. Nothing else.

"Tell me your dream and you'll feel better," Marco insisted.

"We were at the swing party." She avoided his scrutiny and looked at the sky tinted with red through the glass door. "I'd rather not talk about it."

"I didn't think the invitation would upset you like that, otherwise I wouldn't suggest the party. I know you want to help our friends. Don't worry. They decided to forgo the party. I'll invite them for dinner, we can have a laugh and forget about it."

Marco reached for the intercom. Marisa detained him.

"No. We haven't been alone in a while and I want you all to myself."

Two concomitant truths struggled in that affirmation. She wished indeed to spend more time alone with Marco. She also wished to shun Robert and Eliana.

"You're insecure," said Marco. "I think what's been affecting you, besides the move to Canada, is your uncertainty regarding my marriage. Let's go to the balcony and I'll tell you all about Lorena. It's time to exorcise this ghost once and for all..." He paused, brows furrowed in a sudden realization. "You know, Mari, I dragged her ghost around by reflex. Sometimes we forget to recycle old habits. I won't allow this to harm our relationship anymore."

Marco's words exacerbated her remorse. She had been so absorbed in her issues with Eliana and Robert that she had forgotten about his unfinished story—the story of the man she loved. They sat on the balcony and Marco adopted the same absent tone upon resuming his account where he had left it.

"I had no idea how Lorena would react if she knew I loved her. I sensed she wasn't indifferent to me. But Lorena was too attached to her fiancé and didn't want to disappoint her family. She shared with me the wedding preparations, her future home, the flowers for the church, the bride dress. It killed me. One day, Lorena blurted out she had been indecisive from the start. The wedding was two months away. I gathered courage and confessed my feelings."

An odd sensation dominated Marisa. There she had it, Lorena at last revealed. Marco had never shown any picture of her—he'd disposed of them all. On an occasion Marisa asked him to describe Lorena, and he mentioned her green eyes and hair dyed blonde. Now, as she imagined her, Marisa saw Eliana. Listening to Marco talk about his love for that amalgam of past and present instilled in Marisa increasing discomfort, but she pressed on regardless, like the cutter sliding a razor blade on one thigh for relief.

"You mentioned Lorena didn't react well. What happened?"

"She slapped my face with all force and swore she would never speak to me again. She left the study group and withdrew. I didn't give up. I understood exactly what was behind her reaction."

"I don't. She sounds crazy."

"See, Lorena refused to admit she was attracted to me because it contradicted her fairytale, the flowery engagement, the wedding with the blessing of the family. When she rejected me, she was rejecting her own indecision. Little my little I closed in to win her friendship back. I was the accomplice and finally the man who seduced her." Marco shook his head as he gazed at the swirl of inflamed clouds on the horizon. "I wanted to destroy her relationship to ensure she wouldn't go back to Rafael. What I did was unethical."

"The important thing is you two loved each other. Or you wouldn't even be together. You did Lorena a favor because she was in doubt. Insisting in the marriage would be a mistake."

Marco accepted Marisa's comfort with a tender look. He massaged his neck and let his hand drop.

"I forced a situation instead of letting Lorena choose freely. Who am I to manipulate fate? I paid the price for my arrogance. Her father talked to me, made threats, Lorena had a horrible fight with her family and we rushed to marry so no one could separate us. We were only nineteen and embarked on an illusion. What starts on the wrong foot ends on the wrong foot, Mari. Lorena's family was inflexible, so inflexible as herself. They cut off the ties to punish her and she, in spite of not giving in, grew sadder. I didn't want to accept the relationship was not well."

"I get your difficulties. What I don't get is how..." Marisa digested what Marco had just exposed. "If you two were fine before your marriage, why the relationship deteriorated? You went against everything and everyone to be together. It's a proof of love, Marco."

"Things change. And that also applies to love. Especially to love. I cheated on my girlfriend and she cheated on her fiancé. From the beginning, our marriage was marked by mistrust and the possibility of betrayal. We didn't have the maturity to deal with it."

He and Lorena had lied once. What prevented them from lying again? The fact that her family detested Marco and severed all ties aggravated the problem. He started teaching classes and she found an office job. Life was tough. They argued over jealousy, money, frustration. In the second year Lorena got pregnant and Marco reckoned that child would erase their bitterness and also help her reconnected with the family. None of that happened.

Lorena wasn't aware of her condition and took a strong antidepressant. She quit it too late. Lorena blamed herself for the miscarriage. Then she blamed Marco. Said she took the medication because of him. He longed for another child, she refused. Never again Lorena wanted to be pregnant. If she lost another baby she wouldn't withstand the grief. They spend the next five years destroying each other. There were periods of intense affection and companionship too, wonderful and fleeting periods that made it hard for them to recognize the time to separate was due. Marco felt responsible for Lorena, and she clung to him because she had nowhere to go. That was not love. And yet Marco couldn't acknowledge the end.

One day she encountered her ex-fiancé in a café. They had a chat, met again and it didn't take long for them to reestablish their relationship. Marco faced the truth upon coming home unannounced. Lorena had forgotten her phone in the living room, a beep, a message from Rafael. Marco confronted her. She burst into tears and stormed out saying she needed to think. She was afraid of leaving Marco and making another mistake.

He waited for her return—alone with the world crumbled at his feet, words suffocated in his throat, the chest empty, the chest full of an anxiety that paralyzed him and in a paradox wouldn't allow him to be still. Marco stood up, wandered around the apartment, sat down again, neared the bottle of whiskey and backed off with the certainty that the alcohol would make him sick, and then he sat down and stood up once more. Anxiety came hand in hand with a terror weighting in him as if he inexorably sank into that horrible emptiness-fullness in his chest. He felt in his heart this time was different, this time it was all over.

"Lorena trusted me because I understood her and had never abandoned her, but the perspective of a comfortable life with Rafael was tempting." Here, he gave a weary sigh before proceeding. "She divorced me to marry Rafael. They had two children. This is what hurts the most. She didn't want to have kids with me. The child Lorena lost was a little girl. She was going to be called Jade. We chose that name because it symbolizes life and renewal."

Marco's eyes glistened and Marisa realized they were welled. She held him in silence and they remained for a moment united by a bond that didn't require words.

When they parted, he said: "Memory is treacherous. It overstates the good and the bad alike. I wonder if things were really that beautiful in the beginning or that ugly in the end. I think they were what they were meant to be. That's a part of my story, of who I am. I can't erase it. What I can do is regard the past as a fact and not a burden. As a learning curve. In Sartre's wisdom, the only power of the past lies in the future."

"I read that phrase on a website." Her face brightened at the recollection. "It was right after we met. I researched Sartre quotes to impress you."

"You did that?"

"Yeah. But that quote puzzled me."

"It's from his book Being and Nothingness. It means the past in itself is neutral, Mari. Its sole power is conferred by us when we get attached to ghosts from the past that contaminate our future."

She became pensive, mouth ajar without forming a sound, eyes absorbed in the fugitive thread of an idea until she seized it. Her gaze returned to Marco.

"Life has an irony of its own. It's full of symmetries. You lived a trick of mirrors, Marco."

"Meaning?"

"You betrayed and was betrayed."

"I've never been unfaithful before I met Lorena."

All the more reason for life to place him in the condition of betrayed, Marisa reiterated. What was the trick of mirrors? It was life pushing him into a musical chairs game: one day hurting so to learn not to judge those who hurt, the next being hurt so to learn the extent of the pain and hence not inflict it again.

"I've been cheated on once, Marco, and would never cheat because I know how I felt. It's an act of cowardice and selfishness to betray the trust of a partner knowing the suffering that brings."

As soon as Marisa uttered those words, the scenes from the dream haunted her. Marco, oblivious to her consternation, replied: "Exactly. That's why now I don't tolerate betrayal."

Night had arrived. While the sky slumbered over the sea, they still discerned on the horizon a golden spot waning and stealing away the remains of the day. Above it, a bright dot oscillated. It was Venus.

__________________________________

Soooo... that's it. Or is it?

Any idea of what's gonna happen next?