Chapter 8 Sentimental Archaeology
Sentimental Archaeology
It was four in the morning and I was still in shock. Lying in my now cold bath, I let my thoughts travel back and forth between Gabriela’s phone call and the long, profound email I had received.
All too often, things don’t turn out as we expect.
I thought there’d be a fuss about the broken vase, but no, there was no fuss.
What had been broken, at least for the time being, was our relationship.
I imagined that my question to the man who sang in Atlantean would be met with silence or a couple of brief lines: instead, I’d received a letter I would read and reread several times in the coming days.
The world is unpredictable, but wise people maintain that everything happens when it has to happen. That’s the most worrying thing of all. I didn’t understand why, after eight years together, Gabriela should have sunk our personal Atlantis.
Trying to ignore that fact that I was freezing in the cold water, I went back over our relationship, doing my best to understand how we’d got to this point. A point where she wasn’t coming home after a business trip that was supposed to last two weeks at the most.
Our beginnings had been strange and moving.
I’d first met Gabriela when she was a little girl, and then we found each other again after we’d both turned thirty-five.
After some months of dithering, we started going out together.
Two and a half decades of not knowing anything about the other person gives you plenty to talk about.
After a period of mad lovemaking, the phase of sentimental archaeology begins.
You both feel obliged to look back over old relationships and explain why they failed.
This can be boring, especially in the early days, when you just want to go and make love again.
But it’s good conversation fodder when you’re walking in the park, dining out or lazing in bed after a night of passion.
There’s something quite titillating in discovering what led your partner to other bedmates who are so different from you.
It’s also a good thing to find out what went wrong in previous relationships so you can avoid making the same mistakes.
You want the love you’re building now to last forever.
In this early phase, I didn’t have much to say for myself, because my loves had been more platonic than real. By the time I was thirty they weren’t even platonic. I’d turned the whole world into a hostile place and withdrawn into my shell like a snail.
Gabriela had told me about three of her relationships that she thought were important. I imagined the rest were just messing around. She didn’t offer too many details; she seemed set on wiping out the past as if it was something shameful to be buried very deep.
It was especially difficult for her to talk about the years she’d spent in Japan, where she’d worked as an English teacher. She lived in Osaka and, when she wasn’t with her students, she stayed in her rented room and read anthologies of short stories in English.
Something big must have happened to her there and led to her sudden decision to come back.
She never wanted to tell me what it was.
No way. She wouldn’t talk about it. To go back to sentimental archaeology, when this phase of establishing all the old stories comes to an end, the real challenge begins.
The couple can no longer call on past miseries.
Now there’s only the present, which unfolds, generally without much fanfare, one day after another.
Instead of turning her on by telling her how you once hid between two cars and did it with a girl from your class, you talk about your day at work.
In the beginning it’s fun, because she doesn’t know the actors in the little show performed, day in day out, in the theater of work.
But when one has sat through the same story a hundred or a thousand times, it starts to get wearing.
The problems are always the same, and the advice you can give your partner is always the same.
This is the point when the fascination that fuels the fire of love starts to die.