What are Friends 4.. :D

Whole Chapter

I still feel the indefinable alchemy of our first meeting. He was seated beside me at a dinner for a visiting professor. Darkly handsome in a black velvet dinner jacket, I guessed him to be an elegant older man of thirty five.

“So you are the new kid on the block,” he said with a heavy spanish accent. 

“Yes, I feel quite uncomfortable being here. I don’t know anyone and they are all talking medicine,” I replied.

He smiled in a benevolent sort of way. “I’m Jairo Padilla, so now you know someone and we can talk about anything you wish.”  

I remember being amazed that a surgeon could know so much about art and literature. We talked only with each other and as the speeches began, we were aware that neither of us had touched our food.

Thirty years later, I picked him up from a medical conference being held in Tucson. He limped slightly and was dressed impeccably in a jacket much too warm for the climate and carrying his well worn leather pocket book.

“I remember you and Aaron were the only two men in the whole city of Moose Jaw who carried a purse,” I said.

He smiled that familiar grin and climbed into the car beside me.  

“Yes, I think your husband and I were a bit too exotic for Moose Jaw. Too different. But you moved on and I stayed,” he replied.

The sunset that night put us in a wonderful mood or it might have been the twenty five year old scotch that he brought as a gift. We sat out on the verandah as the heat lessened and our reminiscing warmed up.  

“When I went to Moose Jaw, I was twenty-four and so naïve. You were my role model, Jairo, with your house full of books and music. I still remember, when I was volunteering at the hospital, you would invite me to your office to listen to a new tape from Brazil or give me a book you thought I should read,” I said.

Jairo smiled his lazy smile. “You were such a little sponge.” 

“Remember when we belonged to the foreign film society? That was such an eye opener for me. I appreciated the discussions we had after, otherwise I wouldn’t have understood many of the films. I remember all the literature that you thought I should read. I was so impressed that your father knew Pablo Neruda. I never understood why someone, as cultured and sophisticated as you are, would chose to live a lifetime in a backwater town,” I said.

“I felt that I didn’t have many options. After the coup in Chile, I had to leave because my family was political and it was dangerous to stay. Canada let me in and gave me a work permit so that I could complete my residency. When I finished, the hospital offered me a teaching position. There weren’t many opportunities for me with my poor English. Even when you arrived ten years later, students were still complaining they couldn’t understand me. I’ll never forget hearing about the time you got into a hot argument with Dr. Ingles about that,” he said with a laugh.

“People can be such assholes. Ingles was telling everyone at the bar that his precious son was having problems in your class because he couldn’t understand you. I said the university was lucky to have someone so bright and cultured.”  I said, with a touch of heat in my voice.

“That’s what I always loved about you Alice, your passion and your sense of fairness.”

The lights from the city shone in the distance but the darkness enveloped us. The candles had long burnt out and we were indolent. We talked about the other people we had known and left behind.

“Why do you think we have kept contact all these years?” I asked

“Psychologically we need a vis-à-vis and there was always a strong attraction. Maybe because we weren’t lovers but always wondered if we could be.”