When the flame burns out
I didn't know my upstairs neighbors, I'd never seen them. But I knew their habits intimately. After so many years of living downstairs, I could already see the signs that a new crisis in their relationship was approaching: at first the woman's walking became heavier; her sleep became shorter; and she started cleaning the house before dawn. I could hear the furniture being dragged back and forth, without it ever finding its ideal place. Everyday chores seemed to become an unbearable burden for her, being done mechanically and without attention. A thousand objects would fall out of her hands and their impact on the floor would startle me. In those periods, the crisis of the upstairs couple became as palpable and sinister as a giant soap bubble wandering through the air, whose bursting is inevitable. Until one day, in the early hours of the morning, I finally heard "Shut up or I'll kill you!". After the crisis, a new cycle of calm followed.
But that Tuesday things were different. Lying in bed next to me, my husband tossed and turned in his sleep, distressed by the dispute in the neighboring apartment. "Strange, because our problems never seem to affect his sleep," I thought as I lay still in bed so that he wouldn't notice I was awake. But as well as amazement, I felt that his bout of insomnia was awakening in me a wave of admiration. I was finally able to identify in him a trace of sympathy for a suffering human being. Just like him, always so restrained!
That night, like every other night when the couple quarrelled, I watched tense and mute as the two argued. In the end, the neighbor was silenced by her husband, subjected to sex like a punishment. But that time, when the frantic rhythm of the springs in the couple's bed began, my husband gave up trying to catch up on sleep and got up to make breakfast. At first light, he left the house silently, like a bandit on the run. When I heard the door being carefully closed, I plunged my face into the damp pillow, muttering half-heartedly, "There are days when I wish we were like the couple upstairs!". "What do you mean?" I asked myself, suddenly raising my face as I realized the absurdity of what I had said. After a few moments analyzing the situation, I realized that although their life seemed like hell, at least it had its ups and downs. Whereas our life was like a barren plain...
We both belonged to that group of domesticated souls, incapable of giving vent to our feelings. In situations of conflict, we remain silent and walk away from each other with grace. We've been dancing this Pas de Deux for years, getting further and further apart. We hardly see each other anymore. When he comes home, I'm already asleep. When I complain, he doesn't listen. When he gets excited, I turn away, indifferent. Over time, we ended up joining the select group of couples who never fight. "How envious!" say our closest friends, but they know nothing: in our case, the absence of fights is not a sign of affinity between us, but of cowardice. Fear of facing up to the failure of our relationship.
The morning after the couple's quarrel, I got out of bed in a gloomy mood. These fights between the couple upstairs always give me an emotional hangover. On days like these, I usually calm my nerves by ironing our clothes. The bigger the pile of clothes to iron, the greater the sedative effect. The back and forth motion of the iron, the sound of the steam coming out under pressure, the heat emanating from the clothes: all this together gives me the effect of a meditation session. At the end, while I was putting our freshly ironed clothes away in the closet, I realized that my husband's favorite clothes had disappeared. All of them. All at once. All that was left were some old pajamas, some out-of-date jeans and the dress shirt I had given him last Christmas and which he had never worn. I found this strange, as he rarely takes the trouble to take his own clothes to the cleaners.
At lunchtime, he reappeared, punctual as always. He was in a good mood. He said that my food was delicious and that I was an excellent housewife. " What could have eaten him?" I wondered, open-mouthed, as he paid me compliments. Shortly before returning to work, he told me that he had to make a trip to São Paulo. A business trip, two or three days long. I wasn't sure. He left carrying a small suitcase. As he walked through the door, he kissed me on the forehead and I, moved by this rare gesture of affection, decided to wait for the elevator to arrive and watch him go. I felt the hope of a rapprochement being reborn in me. After all, it's always worth fighting to keep the flame of a marriage of so many years burning, isn't it?
The elevator took a little longer than usual. He went up to the last I didn't know my upstairs neighbors, I'd never seen them. But I knew their habits intimately. After so many years of living downstairs, I could already see the signs that a new crisis in their relationship was approaching: at first the woman's walking became heavier; her sleep became shorter; and she started cleaning the house before dawn. I could hear the furniture being dragged back and forth, without it ever finding its ideal place. Everyday chores seemed to become an unbearable burden for her, being done mechanically and without attention. A thousand objects would fall out of her hands and their impact on the floor would startle me. In those periods, the crisis of the upstairs couple became as palpable and sinister as a giant soap bubble wandering through the air, whose bursting is inevitable. Until one day, in the early hours of the morning, I finally heard "Shut up or I'll kill you!". After the crisis, a new cycle of calm followed.
But that Tuesday things were different. Lying in bed next to me, my husband tossed and turned in his sleep, distressed by the dispute in the neighboring apartment. "Strange, because our problems never seem to affect his sleep," I thought as I lay still in bed so that he wouldn't notice I was awake. But as well as amazement, I felt that his bout of insomnia was awakening in me a wave of admiration. I was finally able to identify in him a trace of sympathy for a suffering human being. Just like him, always so restrained!
That night, like every other night when the couple quarrelled, I watched tense and mute as the two argued. In the end, the neighbor was silenced by her husband, subjected to sex like a punishment. But that time, when the frantic rhythm of the springs in the couple's bed began, my husband gave up trying to catch up on sleep and got up to make breakfast. At first light, he left the house silently, like a bandit on the run. When I heard the door being carefully closed, I plunged my face into the damp pillow, muttering half-heartedly, "There are days when I wish we were like the couple upstairs!". "What do you mean?" I asked myself, suddenly raising my face as I realized the absurdity of what I had said. After a few moments analyzing the situation, I realized that although their life seemed like hell, at least it had its ups and downs. Whereas our life was like a barren plain...
We both belonged to that group of domesticated souls, incapable of giving vent to our feelings. In situations of conflict, we remain silent and walk away from each other with grace. We've been dancing this Pas de Deux for years, getting further and further apart. We hardly see each other anymore. When he comes home, I'm already asleep. When I complain, he doesn't listen. When he gets excited, I turn away, indifferent. Over time, we ended up joining the select group of couples who never fight. "How envious!" say our closest friends, but they know nothing: in our case, the absence of fights is not a sign of affinity between us, but of cowardice. Fear of facing up to the failure of our relationship.
The morning after the couple's quarrel, I got out of bed in a gloomy mood. These fights between the couple upstairs always give me an emotional hangover. On days like these, I usually calm my nerves by ironing our clothes. The bigger the pile of clothes to iron, the greater the sedative effect. The back and forth motion of the iron, the sound of the steam coming out under pressure, the heat emanating from the clothes: all this together gives me the effect of a meditation session. At the end, while I was putting our freshly ironed clothes away in the closet, I realized that my husband's favorite clothes had disappeared. All of them. All at once. All that was left were some old pajamas, some out-of-date jeans and the dress shirt I had given him last Christmas and which he had never worn. I found this strange, as he rarely takes the trouble to take his own clothes to the cleaners.
At lunchtime, he reappeared, punctual as always. He was in a good mood. He said that my food was delicious and that I was an excellent housewife. " What could have eaten him?" I wondered, open-mouthed, as he paid me compliments. Shortly before returning to work, he told me that he had to make a trip to São Paulo. A business trip, two or three days long. I wasn't sure. He left carrying a small suitcase. As he walked through the door, he kissed me on the forehead and I, moved by this rare gesture of affection, decided to wait for the elevator to arrive and watch him go. I felt the hope of a rapprochement being reborn in me. After all, it's always worth fighting to keep the flame of a marriage of so many years burning, isn't it?
The elevator took a little longer than usual. It went up to the top floor of the building, and then stopped briefly on the floor above ours so that our neighbor could board. We heard the wheels of a suitcase catching on the rail of the elevator door and preventing it from closing. When the elevator door opened on our floor, we saw a beautiful blonde woman, whose eyes wandered between me and my husband before she decided to greet him. "What's up, João Cláudio?" she said. He stammered an inaudible reply and entered the elevator with his head down. "Oh, how shy my husband is! He should at least greet our neighbor with good manners!", I thought as I admired the scene with a tender gaze. It was then that I realized something was strange. "Who is she?" I thought. When he realized that I was preventing the elevator door from closing, waiting for clarification, my husband looked at me in alarm and replied, "This is Sueli, our upstairs neighbor." "Ahhh!" I replied, releasing the elevator doors. As the doors closed, I gave this suffering soul from upstairs a brief, complicit smile. A question of sorority, if you know what I mean.
Three days later, while I was diligently cleaning the windows in the living room, preparing the apartment for my husband's return from his long-awaited trip, I heard a scream coming from the first floor. I peeked my head over the windowsill and saw a group of neighbors huddled around a person lying on the floor. While some were shouting for help, others were giving cardiac massage. I dropped everything I was doing and hurried to the building's courtyard. "What happened?" I asked a neighbor I've known for a long time, as I followed the efforts of the building manager, who is a SAMU nurse, in rescuing an extremely injured middle-aged man. "He jumped from the tenth floor," she replied. "From the tenth floor?" I replied in a high-pitched voice, my interest suddenly heightened. "Yes. He's Marcos, your upstairs neighbor. It must have been an act of desperation. It seems he was abandoned by his wife, who ran off with another guy". I ran out of there in tears. The others looked at me without understanding.
When I got home, I had a fit. "João Cláudio, you coward son of a bitch!" I shouted at the top of my voice. I opened the bedroom window and threw through it all his clothes and shoes that were still in the closet. They were followed by his collection of beer cans, wedding photos, a thousand shaving tools, perfumes and winter clothes wrapped in mothballs, forgotten on the top shelf of the closet. "That's absurd, you could at least give these clothes to the flood victims," shouted a neighbor from the condominium across the street, before closing the window and turning her attention to the Korean series she was watching.
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