Page 216 of Two Marlboros

I shrugged because I was completely in his hands, since I was not able to move in that city. I told him it was fine, and he loaded the suitcases into the trunk, and I was taken aback because with that puny physique he had, he had lifted all that weight without batting an eye. He made me sit in the back seats on the left side, and the steering wheel on the other side almost made me gasp. The first feeling I had was that there was something wrong, to an extent that caused a malfunction in my brain - not that it was difficult, given the tension in my body; but when he sat in the driver’s seat, that feeling of strangeness increased, and it seemed to me that I suddenly saw the world through a looking glass.

He asked me to confirm the address, and I showed him the text again; he started the car and we drove off. We left behind the pretty Brighton station, the rows of trees, the pub, and it almost felt as if we were leaving a place I had now befriended to go and discover more of its façades. As I moved away from those elements that had impressed me so much, I felt a sense of squeezing that was making its way especially to my stomach, and suddenly a vague taste of sugar-free orange mixed with the acidity of cherry tomatoes came up again. In retrospect, eating before a big event had been a bad choice.

We threaded into a two-way street, and I was petrified when he took the left lane. After a frozen moment, however, I remembered that we were in the United Kingdom and that theman driving was not a crazed killer going the wrong way. He looked at me for a moment from the mirror and I wondered how many times a day he witnessed such scenes. The next moment I wondered how Alan didn’t go crazy driving every time he went back to his parents.

“So,” suddenly said the taxi driver, who had pressed a lot on thes, “where are you from?”

I smiled because he was one of those people who wanted to make conversation, even though I had more of an urge to crawl into a coffin and disappear underground. But eventually I resigned myself.

“From New York.”

“Oh!” he replied in amazement. “An American boy! And what brings you to Brighton?”

A giggle escaped me because the way he pronounced the “r” in such a pronounced way really made me laugh. I tried to distract myself by looking out the window, watching Brighton take on more and more of the connotations of a normal small town as we left downtown.

“I’m going to visit someone. I mean, it’s a surprise really.”

“Oh!” he exclaimed again. “A romantic surprise?”

I rubbed my eyes in an attempt not to laugh at all those words that exaggerated his speech defect, even though they basically made him funny.

“Well, I hope so. Let’s say I’m on my way to find out.”

“Oh!” he exclaimed for the third time, and I began to think it was one of his traits. “You know, American boy, I once did something crazy for love too! It was 1973...”

...and he started with the tale of the great love he had chased, how she had rejected him in front of the whole family, the winning strategies he had put in place to change her mind, the marriage proposal on the Eiffel Tower, the lavish wedding, thenews that she was expecting his first child. The story of his life minute by minute, in short.

I, meanwhile, looked out the window at the landscapes that trip proposed, moaning in assent at the moments when he questioned the unfortunateAmerican boy- that is, me - to see if he followed. We passed by a long tree-lined avenue that was no longer pretty, but I was struck by the red-brick apartment buildings, an aesthetic trait they didn’t seem to know how to give up in that city.

Having finished the tree-lined avenue, we passed a church - “It’s St. John’s!” - and I found in the single-family dwellings the architectural style I had fallen in love with at the station. There really was a lot of greenery around, between parks and trees, a taste of nature in the wild that I had always missed in a city like New York. I wondered what had prompted Alan to leave that earthly paradise, since I wanted to spend the rest of my life there as well.

At one point we left the main road, which we had been traveling up to that point, and turned onto a side street, and I felt my heart begin to beat faster. I looked at my watch and, with a quick calculation, realized that we were about three-quarters of the way there - and I hadn’t even prepared a speech. What the heck was I going to say to Alan? Come on, I could manage to come up with something less mundane than a simple “hello.”

“We’ll be there in five minutes, American boy.”

“Okay,” I could only reply, because the other words died in my throat.

Silence fell in the cab, and I realized only after a couple of minutes that he had finished with the interminable tale of his troubled love affair. An affair that was boring to death but had actually served as a background to distract my thoughts, which instead at that moment resurfaced overbearingly like a weight on my chest. My breath shortened and it felt like my heart reallywanted to explode. Even his pronounced “r” could no longer relax me.

“How much longer?”

“A little, American boy, a little.”

“‘A little’, ok, but how much?”

I had begun to move my foot, just as I had done on the plane, but if it had been elation then, it was pure agitation at that moment. What if he had sent me away, telling me it was too late for that?

“Do you see the curving road there?”

I leaned out a little and saw what he was pointing at.

“There,” he continued, “your love is back there.”

I thought that more than my love, back there was my death, for yes, I was dying of agitation and wringing, and I cursed myself for that stupid idea I had had of going all the way there to see him again. I could have waited for his return after the holidays, but no, I had wanted to make that blatant gesture without any guarantee that it would end as I had planned. A pair of hands began clapping in my head, and I tried to make them stand still, for all I needed wasn’t for my brain to clap at me but to help me.

The car went around the infamous curve, and I felt that I would not be able to utter another word. We threaded into a road with no background, and that was the unmistakable sign that the end of the journey was near. We passed a handful of red-brick two-floor cottages, then the cab stopped.

My eyes widened but not with wonder, so much as with dread, as they scanned the elegant two-floors building that must have been Alan’s home. There was a tile driveway leading to the white front door surrounded by two large windows on either side, plus those upstairs that I imagined were rooms. To the side, to the right, was a clearing for parking, occupied by a couple of cars.

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