LITMIR.BIZ

      My Nini had lived like a recluse in Toronto. At night she’d missed the weight of a masculine hand on her waist, but she had to survive and raise her son in a country where she’d always be a foreigner; there was no time for romantic dreams. The courage she’d armed herself with that night to get to the astronomer’s door vanished as soon as he opened it, looking sleepy and wearing pajamas. They looked at each other for half a minute, without knowing what to say—he wasn’t expecting her, and she hadn’t made a plan—until he invited her in. He was surprised how different she looked without the hat of her uniform, admiring her dark hair, her face with its uneven features, and her slightly crooked smile, which before he’d only been able to glimpse on the sly. She was surprised by the difference in size between them, less noticeable inside the car: on tiptoes her nose reached the middle of the giant’s chest. Immediately noticing the cataclysmic state of the tiny suite, she concluded that he seriously needed her.

      Paul Ditson II had spent most of his life studying the mysterious behavior of celestial bodies, but he knew very little about female ones and nothing of the vagaries of love. He’d never fallen in love, and his most recent relationship had been with a faculty colleague, an attractive Jewish woman in good shape for her age, with whom he got together twice a month and who always insisted on paying half the bill in restaurants. My Nini had only loved two men, her husband and a lover she’d torn out of her head and heart ten years before. Her husband had been a scatterbrained companion, absorbed in his work and political activities, who traveled nonstop and was always too distracted to pay any attention to her needs, and her other relationship had been cut short. Nidia Vidal and Paul Ditson II were both ready for the love that would unite them to the end.

      I heard my grandparents’ possibly fictionalized love story many times, and ended up memorizing it word for word, like a poem. I don’t know, of course, the details of what happened that night behind closed doors, but I can imagine them based on what I know about both of them. Did my Popo suspect, when he opened the door to this tiny Chilean woman, that he was at a crucial juncture and that the road he chose would determine his future? No, I’m sure, such tackiness would never have crossed his mind. And my Nini? I see her advancing like a somnambulist through the clothes thrown on the floor and the overflowing ashtrays, crossing the little living room, walking into the bedroom, and sitting down on the bed, because the armchair and all the other chairs were covered in papers and books. He would have knelt down beside her to embrace her, and they’d have stayed like that for a long time, trying to accommodate themselves to this sudden intimacy. Maybe she began to feel stifled in the heat, and he helped her to get out of her coat and boots; then they caressed each other hesitantly, recognizing each other, delving into their souls to make sure they weren’t mistaken. “You smell of tobacco and dessert. And you’re smooth and black like a seal,” my Nini told him. I heard that phrase many times.

      The last part of the legend I don’t have to invent, because they told me. With that first embrace, my Nini concluded that she’d known the astronomer in other lives and other times, that this was just a re-encounter and that their astral signs and tarot cards were aligned. “Thank goodness you’re a man, Paul. Imagine if in this reincarnation you’d come back as my mother,” she sighed, sitting on his lap. “Since I’m not your mother, why don’t we get married?” he answered.

      Two weeks later she arrived in California dragging her son, who had no desire to emigrate for a second time, with a three-month engagement visa, at the end of which she had to either get married or leave the country. They got married.