Yesterday, a friend wrote to tell me that his eyes had, as he put it, “unexpectedly become moist.”
He is currently travelling through Italy with his family. Almost a week ago, I arrived in Uruguay. At thirty-three and a half, I have left behind the only home I have ever known, and my life is beginning again from scratch. Slowly, I am learning how to find my way around it.
Leaving Vienna was difficult—and then, somehow, surprisingly easy, if you understand what I mean.
My final weeks there were filled with packing my life into boxes and spending as much time as possible with the people who matter to me. This friend was, of course, one of them.
We have known each other for almost ten years. It started with boxing. Then we began going out for good food and, very often, to the cinema. Afterwards, we would discuss whatever we had just watched over dinner. Films, ideas and personal traumas changed places in our conversations as frequently as some people blink.
Yesterday, it was raining where he was staying, so he decided to visit an underground cinema and cultural centre with his family.
Before going there, however, he stopped at a small cobbler’s shop where, he informed me, shoes could be altered and bought very cheaply. He found a beautiful pair, but needed a shoehorn to try them on. When the shopkeeper handed him one, he already had to swallow.
It looked exactly like mine—the one he had often used in Vienna and that I had left behind when I moved. He had previously destroyed my other, less stable shoehorn. It had been wonderfully practical because it was extendable, but apparently it had not been built to survive him.
So, before he had even entered the cultural centre, I was already there in his thoughts. He wondered what I might be doing on the other side of the Atlantic.
A little later, he walked inside.
And there it was: our song.
It was the music from Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, a film we had watched and cried over together. We both love it, and its music has come to occupy a particular place in our friendship.
Shortly before I left Vienna, this wonderful friend gave me a farewell present he had made himself: a small illuminated cinema inside a music box. When I wind it up, it plays that melody.
Inside, Lego versions of the two of us sit comfortably in Vienna’s Gartenbaukino, drinks in hand. Each of us has a Michael B. Jordan on one arm. We needed two of him, naturally, because we both loved Sinners, in which he plays twins—and because one Michael B. Jordan each seemed only fair.
The figures were customised to look like us. The miniature cinema is fitted with tiny lights, and a sweet bow sits on top of the box. It is something I can switch on whenever I miss him, whenever I think about him, or whenever I want to return for a moment to all the evenings we spent together in darkened cinemas.
He used to study the programmes of Vienna’s cinemas weeks in advance, working out which films to see and where he might fit me into his schedule—alongside his family and other friends, of course, although the two of us really are freaks when it comes to cinema. Reservations followed, occasionally along with the planning and successful execution of double or even triple features.
Yes, all on the same day.
Now he is in Italy and I am in Uruguay.
It was raining, so he stepped into a cultural centre. By then, an ordinary shoehorn had already carried his thoughts across the Atlantic. And soon afterwards, in a place neither of us had ever connected with our friendship, the melody from our film began to play.
His eyes unexpectedly became moist.
I find it beautiful that we can create and preserve this connection from two different places: him in Europe, me in Latin America. An ocean between us, but for a few minutes, as though nothing had changed.
I wind up my box, and the song comes to life.