This journal has converted itself from a daily affair into a weekly. I always expected that I would end this diary as abruptly as I started it a year and 4 months ago. It appears I was wrong. I continue to write occasionally even though my former obsession of writing daily without fail has become absurd to me.
<Sofia & I went to a cattle show Saturday morning.> It was the Costarican national livestock exhibition, and took place in a facility behind Bonanza Restaurant near the Herradura Inn hotel at the crossroads where the San Antonio {de Belén} - Heredia road crosses the divided highway between San Jose and Alajuela. <My passion to evaluate cattle & talk about cattle was reawakened, and I bored poor Sofia with the relative merits of animals we saw.> I’m only interested in dairy cattle, other breeds of cattle and other species don’t interest me as much. <Sofia says she could be happy on a dairy farm.> I guess I could be too if I’d let myself. Not yet though. I’m not ready to resign myself to that life yet!
<I struck Sofia a brutal emotional jab Friday night, half unwittingly.> I arrived home first and put myself to straightening up the kitchen & warming beans & rice for supper. <I knew Sofia had class until 5 on Fridays, and she’d left a note explaining that the striking resemblance our apartment bore to a rat’s abode was due to the fact that she had spent the entire morning typing an assignment for “Human Relations” (& washing 2 pairs of my jeans, I was out of clean jeans), and had not had time for anything.>
What happened was that when she arrived & found me in the middle of household tasks, she began to tell me all about her day, like a traditional husband boring the wife with office chit-chat. I suggested she could help out by setting the table. She began to do so. She looked over what was on the stove (rice, beans, empanadas and milk for hot chocolate) and said abruptly, “You could have cooked up eggs.” Without 2 seconds hesitation I replied, just as abruptly, “Why don’t you go to the devil, huh?” I had intended only to play the frustrated, overworked wife to her dissatisfied husband, being more than a bit amused by the turnabout, but she took it directly to heart and went to the farthest corner of the apartment (which is located in the shower of the bathroom) to cry.
I didn’t realize she was seriously wounded, assuming it a playful maneuver, her leaving the room. I sat down to eat at least part of my supper, since it was at optimum eating temperature and would surely be cold by the time I returned from making love to atone for my imaginary crime.
<When I went into the bedroom and did not find Sofia lying in ambush there, I realized something was amiss.> I found her huddled against the wall of the shower trying to look small & not wanting me to see that she was really crying. She sent me to eat, claiming lack of hunger, but was not above telling the story from her angle in which she was ‘just about to fry up the eggs’ when she “suggested” that I “could” have made eggs, and I turned on her in mad rage and fairly screamed that she ought to embark immediately for Satin’s domain. Who ever said marriage was a piece of cake?
No comments:
Post a Comment