Love in the Darkness. The Story of a Modern Love.

by PEDRO HUGO GARCÍA PELÁEZ

  Or was it fate that played with them by bringing them together and now wanted to separate them at all costs?

  However, he sensed that Moyna must have an inner life similar to his own, even though now she was acting brave. People normally like being with people who have a similar inner life, and although Moyna hid it she must have had experiences similar to what Isaan was living through now, and although she concealed it she was now going faster than him.

  As one of Isaan’s classmates had said to him jokingly “Isaan you’re finished”, sometimes you’re up and sometimes your down, c’est la vie.

  In those moments the atomic bomb fell close to Isaan, so to speak, it was as if there had been a radical change in his whole environment, transforming it into a deserted land. Moyna was luckier and although, curiously, it could be said that an era had come to an end in a traumatic way, there was always the hope that the situation could be reversed.

  Isaan had lost the friendships of his old friends and had won enemies, with Moyna he was in nobody’s land. They went a while without seeing each other and then they met in a café by chance, close to the ice cream place where they first met, where Isaan went for breakfast with his friends once in a while when he didn’t want to go to school. Isaan was going to leave the café, where there were still echoes of those previous years, when he heard a piercing cry. It was Moyna who had shouted “Isaan”. He was astonished, she was as, if not more, good-looking; and he was in pieces. Isaan looked behind him, something which he rarely did, the voice was sweet but the circumstances had changed, now nothing was the same. They greeted each other and after just a few moments said goodbye, as if before they had been nothing, as if it was an irreversible process in which they found themselves now.

  Moyna knew what had happened with Isaan, one way or another others had told her, their ways parted so easily, as was the manner in which they had met.

  Yet Moyna was not humiliated by being in a better position, she was probably going through something similar.

  Isaan started to work in one of the family businesses which had the wind in its sails. However, he worked unloading the lorries that arrived with the goods and he was paid very little.

  He worked hard and people did not understand that someone with a rich father would work, the same chancers that would end up in a ditch did not understand it either.

  Isaan’s situation was a total disregard for everything, partly because him and his family had wealth.

  At the beginning there was a good atmosphere and Isaan even tried to improve his image with his father and his business partners by working. Who better than the owners son to handle the ins and outs that moved the least desired parts of the company’s work.

  He continued thinking about Moyna, but all of the previous images became blurry over time, at the same time as the view he had of his father and his partners deteriorated as he saw that they were only pursuing their own interests.

  While it is true that during Isaan’s time in the family business it progressed and was very profitable, Isaan began to lose interest in the job and to sabotage some of the things that he considered unjust.

  As the years went by Isaan had quite forgotten about Moyna. He also did not believe in the family business as he thought that they would not let him progress and he considered that this was an irreversible process that negatively affected his personal development.

  However, when a memory of Moyna returned to him fleetingly his conscience reproached him as if to say “Moyna will never be yours but you should not forget her”, something as senseless as life itself.

  Isaan was very bright and he started to study mathematics, skiving work as much as possible. Nobody in the department doubted that he was intelligent and although in the first years he understood little, as with all of his classmates, as the years went by he gained a problem-solving ability characteristic of an exceptional mind. Now he did not even remember Moyna, sometimes a memory of her passed through his mind so fleetingly that it was almost impossible to even classify the memory, but his conscience was not able to accept this and what his conscious demanded was as simple, or as difficult, as being separated, but without forgetting her.

  In the face of this heart-breaking outlook Isaan spent the day solving problems and teasing those from the Arts, who he considered to be inferior.

  In the faculty he had a good time and they allowed him to tease them, presumably because he was intelligent. In fact, he only had his intelligence to come through this with, his brain was his most valued possession.

  He was going to finish his studies, from which he had won some friendships for life, but which time looked to separate. Wherever he went he did not find anybody that occupied his thoughts as much as Moyna did. Then something happened which despite being unexpected wasn’t so much so for him, because to an extent his attitude had brought it about and it was something that he desired; the end of the family business where he worked.

  The good and the bad spells come and go and you have to be aware of when to pull out, even a mediocre poker player knows that.

  “You have to pull out while you are winning because when you’re losing it may be too late.”

  His father’s partner was a chancer, he spent all day on the phone believing himself to be indispensable, and the poor guy rather than indispensable was dispensable.

  He played the fool with Isaan, as if he were above Isaan, and the poor guy believed he was a winner even though he was a poor wretch. When the business closed, the motivation for which was losing an exclusive distribution of an important brand, in the following weeks he found himself without the important economic resources that the business has brought him. The smartass believed that good businesses last forever. Isaan’s father had pulled out in time, a timely withdrawal is a victory, but his partner was a neighbourhood guy that only worried about what might have been, and he did not even realise that Isaan’s father was already eighty years old.

  The guy believed that Isaan’s father loved him like a son, and that he would still be working for him when he was ninety years old. How could he be such an idiot?

  In these circumstances, days before the business closed, it occurred to the employee, who must have believed himself to be a financial magician, to buy a house for a million euros. Even his wife couldn’t stand him when he didn’t have money. His wife asked for half of both of their assets, which effectively was half of the house, for which they had paid a million euros and which with the crisis had dropped all of a sudden to five hundred thousand. His wife even appeared on a TV programme ‘Save Me’ offering herself as a model to appear on the front page of ‘Playboy’, she even said on television that she would not sleep with anyone for money, which lets you envision her moral habits. She was a halfwit that had been lucky, just for the fact that Isaan’s father took her husband on as a partner. She appeared on ‘Save Me’ because she played paddel with Kiko Killovers a collaborator of ’Save me’, like the new rich girl that she wanted to appear to be.

  The situation of this family became so chaotic from morning to night that the business partners daughters even believed that their father was the boss and not an employee, and they could not go back to the private school where their friends were.

  Then Isaan thought that with his actions he could come to handle processes as irreversible as these, where there was a story like Cinderella’s, but this time in the real world and close to him.

  Isaan had more than two brain cells and it was not logical that the owner of the business, that is to say his father, could continue with the same rhythm at ninety as at fifty.

  The employee was mediocre, in fact Isaan’s father took them on like that, half illiterate, in order to have them dominated. To think that the life of the business was eternal could only fit in the head of someone very mediocre.

  Besides, Isaan had power. He had moved lots of ins and outs of Madrilenian society and he had lots of hidden interests of which it was in his interest to be on top of, especially with a fathe
r that was quite important, even though he did not even have a relationship with him.

  Then something happened that changed things for him, his dear mother died. She had been his only support in this hell, what’s more he finished his degree in mathematics, which is something that is very proud of. His main cause of pride was his intelligence, it was his dearest possession, he was not even interested in having too many possessions.

  His mother died in such a distinct date as Easter week, and as a gift she left a million euros to each of her children.

  Isaan decided to live life, even though he knew that this was an irreversible process in terms of the money he spent happily, it was not a reversible process, and it would not return to his current account.

  He lived very well now, he was rich and his elderly father, who he did not see now, was much richer which would yield him a succulent inheritance in the future.

  In fact there were some troubles with his father and even trials because Isaan had expected to receive more money for some concepts that were clear to him.

  Isaan had forgotten about Moyna a few years ago, but one day he got out of bed, a light turned on, and he remembered her. His brain would not allow him to forget her, although now he had no idea where she might be. He looked for her on Facebook and found her after a few hours searching, although he noticed strange things, she lived in Kathmandu and the photos she put up were blurry.

  He thought that if there had not been internet he would not have found her. In the passing of time between when they wrote to each other online Isaan wrote his first mathematics book, another light had turned on again.

  Three months on from that virtual relationship he managed to get a date with her… Moyna looked gaunt, to put it one way. She was now how Isaan had been when the bomb exploded in his head when he was seventeen. She was no longer the attractive girl of his dreams and Isaan had a totally mathematical mind, far from the magical parties in the summers of their adolescence.

  It was February in Kathmandu and cold, at first the encounter was very emotional. They both went to eat in a residential district but they got bored and went out to the terrace, drank wine, and smoked calmly, she smoked rolling tobacco and him his usual cigarettes. Upon saying goodbye they shared an emotional hug.

  The next day he suggested they go to a hotel to enjoy a thermal bath but she did not want to.

  Something had happened the next day that had also happened in their first meetings, after a beautiful encounter Moyna went back to giving him a cold look, maybe something said to her that she should not go with Isaan even though she continued remembering him, similar to what had happened to Isaan but twenty years later. He called her and she didn’t answer. After wandering aimlessly through the streets of Kathmandu he found her in a park with her son, now it was night-time and there was a big full moon. She fled from him until she disappeared. Although they had greeted one another it was only out of courtesy, Isaan left more broken than happy, thinking cynically, “Happiness is the last person that you find by the light of the Moon.”

  The process of his relationship seemed totally irreversible. Isaan tried to redirect the situation but it didn’t work. His mind was focused on mathematics and she did not have the image that she used to, perhaps something spurred on, who knows why or by who.

  He understood very well what a reversible process was in physics, he had been very good in the subject where it was taught. A reversible process is something that can slowly return to its original situation; a bomb that makes a building explode is not a reversible process because the building would not spontaneously reconstruct itself, but in life if we go reconstructing our errors to just the opposite way we can return to a prior situation that we longed for, he thought.

  Moyna’s cold look in the last encounter came back to unleash fury in the world of the gods of Isaan.

  Isaan kept going forward even though he could not get her out of his head.

  Bearing in mind both of their actions there was something that seemed clear, as if both of them should not live together but without forgetting each other, something like a modern love. That each should live their own life but with an affectionate ray of light that would make it more bearable.

  Now Isaan only had to worry about managing the money that he had and would have, but after the last cold look from Moyna he had a bad patch in the markets that almost ruined him. Economic security is not everything.

  You have to be an idiot to believe in something that only depends on probabilities, in fact Moyna thought that, she knew very well that probabilities are not certainties and that whoever thinks they know the truth one hundred per cent doesn’t know what they are talking about. Besides, Moyna’s father was also a Mathematician and gave probability classes, perhaps that made her distance herself from certainties.

  Isaan continued with his book that was being read more and more and helped people to feel better physically. It was a book between exercise and theory, something like the mantra of books, he laughed when he thought this. Obviously they were not going to give him the Nobel Prize for it but it was a good book.

  Ultimately Isaan and Moyna tolerated each other, but they did not tolerate being close, it was like having each other without having each other.

  Isaan went to Marrakech, tired of this situation. It was a place to meditate about new books and play poker. To play poker is to take decisions quickly not slowly, to have savings to deal with the bad times, to use your head and to imagine the unimaginable to win hands, and he did win them.

  In essence it was to be smart, in fact he was now very smart and lived at the expense of the casino and his winnings even allowed him to save.

  He was like this for a full year, winning and living like a Duke, after a year he decided to pull out, what happened to his father’s partner was not going to happen to him, that slacker who believed that the good turns were eternal.

  In this situation he met Admad, a hotelier in Marrakech who suggested Isaan invest in a hotel business. Isaan was tired of the life that he lead in the casinos and seeing that he could continue playing sporadically on journeys, in some casino in any part of the world, he realised that with everything that he had learnt in the family business, and if he corrected the errors and even compensated them with totally opposing decisions, then the business would work better. This started to happen, the business improved bit by bit and Isaan became a businessman.

  That the business worked was the best way that there was for Isaan to get his head straight, which was something that was worrying Admad. Between these changes of ways Isaan realised that it was four years since he had seen Moyna and he decided to go to Kathmandu, he plotted a situation where a buyer would meet her to offer her money for some jewellery that she had.

  She lived far removed from any really urban environments and the buyer met her close to a forest of paradisiacal palm trees. Suddenly Isaan and Admad appeared, despite the fact that it was clearly a ploy she did not look on it badly and Isaan even met her second son.

  Even though the situation could be considered tense a priori at that meeting the fury of the gods ceased when they met and in fact the following months were unusually calm. Isaan’s business worked, the distribution of a family heritage was closer and his life was more stable. Isaan realised immediately that they had reverted the situation. However it may be, that meeting, which could be considered as very amateur, had changed the situation.

  At that time Moyna was with a waste of a man, a friend from when she was twenty years old. That man, who had no profession and was no benefit, tried to live from the bait that Moyna gave him.

  This pathetic man saw Isaan in that meeting, he looked at him moodily and quickly realised that he could not compete with Isaan. Not long after that meeting Isaan and Moyna went off the map.

  It was odd how the world that the gods manipulated had accepted that meeting and fostered that both of their lives would improve.

  It was also laughable that they were now older and had seen each oth
er such few times in this life.

  The relationship with his business partner was unbeatable, Isaan loved him, and something that he would not forget is that he helped him to find his soul mate.

  Although Admad and Isaan were a bit homophobic it could be said that they were in love.

  There were women sometimes, poker in some new casino in some city that they went to on a journey, a business, in fact the virtual relationship with Moyna was accepted and well looked upon by the gods that ruled their destiny and their dreams.

  Isaan woke up one day and realised that he was closer to turning fifty than forty, Moyna was in a similar situation. Isaan also realised that three months had passed since their truce, after a life in which they had declared a mental war since adolescence.

  Going over his life Isaan recognised that he had already had an original idea and managed to establish a relation between physics and the human body, just before his first reunion with Moyna.

  Perhaps it was an idea linked to his past as a defence, perhaps it came from reading other physics authors, or perhaps something that Moyna had inspired.

  The matter is that sports and physics had always been intertwined in his life, like that joke about Einstein and his wife on their wedding night, when upon seeing him she says “What a physique!”

  It was not a new physics formula but rather it was engineering applied to the human body, but that earned him respect. Isaan knew that in this life they could take everything from you apart from the copyright of an idea, and that opened quite a lot of doors for him. Nonetheless Moyna did not enter into mathematical issues even though they interested her. However she was an excellent mother and although sometimes she put up a hard front she was a typical romantic from a book and underneath she had the ancestral idea that women have to be mothers when they grow up. Likewise, Moyna had nothing; although she had her children these could be taken from her, as they took the life of a destitute person in any settlement in Columbia or Ecuador, and that made her vulnerable.