Gabriela and Osvaldo smile and caress their hands on the table discreetly with their little fingers, as if they were teenagers. They will soon celebrate forty years of lovers. I ask them how they plan to celebrate. “As always,” they respond. And as always, it’s spending two hours in a hotel.
They are both married and have grown children. They say they are happy with their partnersbut they understand that this clandestine relationship brings them something that their marriages do not: a free zone where you can open up without shame. “It stopped being just sex a while ago,” says Gabriela. “It works like therapy,” says Osvaldo, who goes to real therapy but never mentioned Gabriela’s existence in his life to his psychologist.
The frequency of meetings has varied over time. When they were young, they saw each other only once a year, like the protagonists of a seventies movie. First, because neither of them took the other too seriously and, second, because they were afraid of dynamiting the families they were setting up.
Today, they have one appointment a month. They love secrecy. That she appears on his cell phone as “Gabriel (club)” and that he, on hers, as “Olga (pilates)”. They never take their respective partners’ problems to the hotel. What’s more, they don’t even name them. “We invented a world apart,” says Gabriela.
I ask them if they believe in polyamory and they agree that they don’t. She wouldn’t even include Osvaldo in her marriage. “Ours is two hours and, afterward, cup-cup, each one goes home,” confirms Osvaldo. They don’t feel guilt. No jealousy. They never discussed the possibility of leaving their partners and trying it “officially.”
He believes that clandestinity, in some way, protects them: They do not feel pressured by obligations such as paying bills, going to pick up the baby at the club or filling the refrigerator. “I love my husband,” Gabriela rushes. So? I ask. “Then nothing. “They are different loves,” she closes.
They know that if their spouses found out about their relationship, everything would blow up. That’s why they carefully choose where to meet, they don’t abuse each other with messages, they don’t complain about anything. “I wouldn’t want my wife to suffer,” admits Osvaldo. The world they have invented has a logic that only they understand and accept.
I ask them what would happen to them if they found out that their partners had lovers. Osvaldo hesitates a little, shrugs his shoulders. “I think he would understand,” he replies. Gabriela takes refuge in his response. The two, however, say that they would never confess the romance that unites them, not even in the hypothesis that I have posed to them.
Two hours have passed. Not in the hotel but in a specialty coffee, talking to me. Osvaldo gets up and says goodbye. He has to leave the free zone that has protected him for forty years. Gabriela will follow him five minutes later. Each one to his neighborhood, to his marriage, to the world where the other does not exist. The forms of happiness are sometimes strange.