The Italian teacher

Then the owner let me know, through one of his managers, that from now on he would only pay me to make my program on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, but not on Thursdays. Years ago, due to the crisis that whipped the channel, he asked me to stop airing on Fridays, paying me since then twenty percent less. Now, in retaliation for not interviewing her friend, she would not pay me on Thursdays, again lowering twenty percent my fees.

It seemed good news not to introduce myself on television on Thursdays. However, I had no courage to tell my wife that the owner had fired me not only on Fridays, but now also on Thursdays. It seemed pathetic to tell him that I was going so badly in the program that I would only work on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, winning forty percent less than they paid me before the pandemic. I had no courage to recognize before her the size of my failure. I did not find the words to tell him that the owner had asked me to stay at home on Thursdays, because he repeated one of my programs and was exonerated to pay me that day.

I decided then that I would not tell my wife and on Thursdays I would continue to leave the house at the customary time to, apparently, go to the channel. I decided that I would lie to him, pretending to work on Thursdays, when he didn’t. I do not know if I did it for fear of her, or for fear that I would see me as an old -year -old old man who now worked for three days a week and surely would soon be left without employment. The truth is that I decided that on Thursday I would leave home at half past six in the afternoon, the time of always, and return to eleven o’clock at night, simulating to have done the program.

I played in my favor that my wife did not see the program. He stopped seeing it years ago. He told me that I was bored that I was talking about politics and that political news was a poison he preferred to do without. I did not take it as a grievance. It seemed better not to see me. I thought that if I saw myself by obligation I would stop loving me, or if I saw myself preaching about the thick political issues would stop appreciating myself as a writer.

Then be fired on Thursdays, I became an actor, a simulator. The same as the three preceding days, on Thursdays I gave me a shower, wore suit and tie, ate a snack and left home, as if I was in a hurry, when it began to get dark. I carried the program’s notebooks, the makeup case and the coffee thermos in my leather bags, in addition to cans with food cats on the channel.

As soon as I left the house on Thursdays driving the eight -cylinder black truck, I was going to the television studio located in the city’s suburbs, well far from the island where I live, but to a hotel on the beach, just ten minutes by car from my home. My mother has an apartment in that hotel. I have the keys of that property. I frequently visit it to pay the accounts and keep everything in order, up to date. When I had that convenient shelter, I decided that there I would hide every Thursday from half past six in the afternoon to eleven o’clock at night, so that my wife thought I was on the channel, doing the program, and I would not catch me going around the island on which we live.

Every Thursday, after half past six in the afternoon, I parked the truck in the underground parking of the hotel, I went discreetly through the elevator to the fifth floor, entered my mother’s suite and made me comfortable. I didn’t call anyone, nor wrote emails, nor asked for food. I did what I usually do during the day, wherever I find me: I read a number of newspapers in English and Spanish and obsessively informed me of the things of politics and the power that have passionate me so much as a child. Then, at nine o’clock at night, at which time I used to start the program, I sat at the dining room table and started talking alone, as if it were on television. Interestingly, the body asked me to talk about politics, as I would have done in the studio, in front of a robotic chamber, without a cameraman guiding it. That way maybe I felt that they hadn’t thrown me on Thursdays. He did not speak in front of a camera, but ran about politics, and the monologue extended for long minutes, and had the advantage that he should not interrupt him for commercial pauses. Then I discovered that, even if they did not pay me on Thursdays, even if it was not welcome that night on the channel, I needed to continue talking about politics, as I had sermonned on Wednesdays, Tuesdays and Mondays on the television. I am lost, I thought. I am a scheduled automaton to talk about politics, I told myself. I do not speak because others are paying attention to me: I speak because, in doing so, I feel alive and I find myself. Then on Thursdays he did the program no longer on the channel, but in the hotel suite, and no longer for an imaginary audience, but for myself.

Until a completely unexpected accident occurred. Last Thursday, at eleven o’clock at night, I left my mother’s apartment and pressed the hotel elevator button to descend to the underground garage where the truck had parked. I entered the elevator. I was alone. Suddenly, while the elevator stopped on the second floor. The doors opened and suddenly saw my wife already her Italian teacher, getting into the elevator, looking at me incredulous, paralyzed. I knew the Italian teacher because sometimes I came home to teach my wife. Pass, go down, I told them, trying to act normally, like a good man. My wife did not ask me what the hell I was doing alone in that elevator. I didn’t ask what she was doing at eleven o’clock at that hotel with her Italian teacher. A terrible silence was installed, the silence announcing the storm, the silence that foreshadows the catastrophe. The elevator stopped at the reception. My wife and his Italian teacher went down. My truck is in the parking lot, I told my wife. See you at home, I added. She looked at me embarrassing, embarrassed, caught in missing. I looked at her embarrased, ashamed, caught in missing.

Arriving at the house, my wife and I feed the dog and cats, sitting on the kitchen floor. Then I confessed that they had fired me from the program on Thursdays and that is why I hid those nights in my mother’s suite, because I was ashamed to tell him that I no longer worked on Fridays and not on Thursdays either. She was surprised that she would not have had the frankness of telling her the truth. I told him that the truth humiliated me and that’s why I had lied to him. He asked me if I met someone in my mother’s suite. I told him no, that I was left alone and talked about politics as on television.

Then she confessed to me that every Thursday I went to the island’s hotel with her Italian teacher because they were lovers. Apparently, the knowledge of the Italian language had awakened the curiosity of also knowing the language of his Italian teacher. I remained silent. I didn’t shout, I didn’t insult her, I didn’t make a scene. I understand, I said, these things happen. After all, we have been together for fifteen years, it is normal for you to want to be with someone else. He asked me if he would leave her. I told him no. He asked me if we would divorce. I told him no. He asked me if I still loved her. I told him yes.

But that night I tried to make love with her and I couldn’t because I saw the Italian teacher all the time.