As Julián stares into the aquarium, he is reminded of his past life with Karla. In the artificial light of the present, his life with Karla appears to him like a cloud, like a lake. He remembers it as a way station, a country seen from the window of a slow-moving train. He recalls the night of the message on the wall and how he had envisioned himself sitting across from Karla over an obligatory cup of coffee, but that never actually took place. Julián had stopped loving her a long time ago, and he had stopped loving her a second before he started loving her. He had loved the possibility of love, and then love’s imminence.
Karla was studying philosophy at the University of Chile, but she didn’t aspire to get a degree or a job or any such thing. She ate, almost exclusively, chocolate bars or pasta with Parmesan cheese, although when Julián moved in, the menu broadened to include pasta with pesto, ravioli, fried chicken, and even some traditional porotos granados. Julián observed Karla’s absences from afar, with indifference and even relief. He never got very far in his conjectures about Karla—he had other things to think about.
At the end of one cold night of writing, Julián decided to stop filling pages with diffuse and indecipherable fictions; instead, he would write a diary of the bonsai, a painstaking record of the tree’s growth. Every evening when he got home, he would note every change, no matter how tiny, that the tree may have undergone while he was out. But then Karla and her possible mother returned home together, and Julián was left with more questions than answers.
He hardly ever thinks about Karla now. He imagines her drinking tea with her possible mother or nurse, discussing ways to get money to pay for a dental procedure, or to take a trip to London or Paris or Lisbon. It seems terrible to have lived all those years with Karla. Terrible and devastating.
Now Julián has a real family, the kind that spends Saturday afternoons doing science homework or watching Tim Burton movies. As Daniela falls asleep, Julián approaches Cosmo and Wanda in the aquarium and takes on the attitude of a warden, a fish warden, a man specially trained to keep fish from escaping aquariums. He remembers Karla as nothing but a book thief, and he is reminded of all the books he left at her house that night of the message on the wall.
Life has moved on since then, and Julián is grateful for his new family and his new life. He is grateful for the moments he can spend with them in peace and quiet, away from the chaos and confusion of his past life with Karla.
