Farewell to a Friend
By Ignacio Zamorano
Staff Writer
It had been a dark evening since before they left the island—seasonally, it was desolate other than the ubiquitous Christmas music. It did not matter to them. It was not long before they were at the cash, right before closing time, with what seemed like the entire store personnel gathered to count his bills; it wasn’t the first time his payment methods had caused a commotion. I’d noticed that people tend to get paranoid seeing a good few $100 bills, but after the precautionary parade, we were good to go from a large off-island outlet with remarkably soulless surroundings. Having accomplished the gruelling task of getting past rush hour traffic for the purchase, the clearest thing in our minds was hunger, and he’d given me carte blanche to pick the spot for the evening.
I was always fascinated by his ability to grasp where his mind was at a particular moment. As my picks from the Christmas songbook played in the car, he mentioned how desirability in men came from good looks and wealth, while the latter was replaced with purity for women; the fundamental unfairness, in his eyes, came from the fact that you cannot fake wealth while you can fake purity.
It was the kind of cynicism that would typically sicken me; nonetheless, the self-awareness in its amorality endeared him to me. I’d only seen two people make a romantic of him—that facet of his has been dormant since before the lakes had come to freeze, with the expiry date on his presence strengthening his current resolve to enjoy his freedom. Having seen both facets of him, I can attest to how their nuances only serve to make him a more fascinating character.
A quality of his I find remarkable is his refusal to peddle in bullshit about himself to me, when it’d be much easier for him to lie, like most people in situations similar to his tend to do, which creates troubling dissociations between a person’s words and their actions. His brash rhetoric signalled his refreshing honesty—in a landscape where, as he described it, “lying is overpowered”—or the exceptionalness he had to him. The sparkle in his eyes made everything he said, from the revolting to the insightful—these categories were not mutually exclusive—have a distinct quality that you could not get worked up by, regardless of the content; it lured you in to his monologue, one already more compelling than that of almost everybody else, giving it a quality that made you want it to never end.
At the restaurant, whose ambiance reflected its location in one of the most liveable suburbs on this continent, they certainly were the youngest on a weeknight. The bit du jour at the dinner was as follows: while waiting for the main courses, he’d told me: “Turn off your location, I’m tryna see something”. So I did, a minute or so before I heard him read to me: “Didn’t work, she said: ‘there’s no way you’re alone’”. Later in the conversation, trying to establish moral clarity in a sentimental tone, I struck: “These people are evil, man”. With incredulity in his voice, he shot back: “And I’m not?”, as he smirked. I chuckled as I recognized his implication was accurate. Set apart by his sharp self-awareness, he, nonetheless, shared certain attitudes that I despised in others. Yet, I could not find it in me to feel an emotional condemnation of them in him. The meal was delightful; they’d both come to enjoy each other’s presence in the couple of years following the accidental circumstances that brought them to sit next to one another in the only class they’d share that year. They’d wound up first talking about financial news—a curiosity-driven interest for one, a subject of inherent importance for the other—organically building from there. Lost in the conversation, my Espresso Martini and the later Chartreuse-based concoction from the house—he did agree with me that the latter was a significant stepdown from the former, “too bitter”—was the calculus test I was to have two days later—I’m pretty sure that’s the one I failed—but everything else then was secondary to the splendid meal in his presence—one which I was already aware would have an expiration date.
A few weeks later, I was dealing with a particularly tough week, one of those weeks where stress makes one allergic to food to an extent where the change that the bathroom scale reflects scares you, counting with his presence on my side. The adverse circumstances were entirely of my own making—was one’s social life to be seen as a chess game, as the most calculating of my peers would think, it was my blunder that I had to live with. Through the initial shock and later despair, he was there for me; it might even have been beneficial for him not to do so, but he cared about me. By Friday night, I found myself defeated, hungry, weak and alone in a bar downtown, after the peak hours of this chain that did not attract the most vibrant crowd but had a convenient location at St. Catherine with McGill College. After a while, a Vodka-Cran—I was looking for the sweetness my week had lacked—and a portion of fries eaten so pathetically you’d think somebody was paying me to lose weight did not bring me in tune with the joys typically found in my surroundings. Pleasant bartenders whose niceness was a service were serving a group of Mexican temporary workers—to the latter I’d spoken in Spanish, an expression of my mother tongue that was dismissed as the formality of our registers was worlds apart—the group displaying the particular set of attitudes that dissuades people from working as the former. I’m sure that dynamic would’ve been even colder had the bartenders understood their long-winded conversation in Spanish—about the different prices they’d seen quoted for a night with a working girl. Amidst this, I had nothing better to do but shoot him a call: he picked up. I’d been sending texts for him to proofread—he normally proofreads these stories as well—and determine if I had been striking the right tone, but I felt that he needed to hear me to understand me best. After a few minutes—it’s a rare sight to see somebody taking a call at the bar—we’d come to an understanding, and I felt free to shoot my response; with that response, I could begin to close that chapter.
Often, we and our broader group of friends spent time in his basement: a massive, cozy space perfectly equipped for the creation of innumerable memories. It was a forum for conversation, and as it typically happens in these spaces, there always are embellishments of the reality we share; sometimes, unbeknownst to the speaker, he knew that the speaker was full of shit or about other transgressions that are more subtle and only evident if you’ve shared a social space for somebody for quite some time. We were at his house, and it is a group that would be pretty receptive to him holding court, though he does not have a preference to do so, preferring that others hold that responsibility. He found himself more comfortable smiling at these incredible remarks that came up. It was a smile that made you an accomplice to his observations—save for the target of the ridicule in the moment—; it resonated with me in the same way he did himself when a sensible matter came up and I started speaking in tongues—merely ramping up the complexity of my vocabulary—to obscure my emotions. In those moments, he understood me as I needed to be understood. It was not a smile that everybody saw the way I did; over time, I think I’ve gained more of an understanding of it than everybody else in that room has. It was a smile whose pleasantness was enough for most to be content with; it was self-aware of that and how the reassurance it brought one dissuaded people from further examination; still, it was a smile that desired to be understood in a deeper level, one whose radiance came from its recognition of its holder’s fortune in the absurd world he saw around him. The full extent of its luminosity was visible, though it needed some learned ability to understand it, as you can say of the man himself. And that’ll forever be the smile, which will remain etched in my memory.
For he’ll be gone, and things won’t be the same.