by Our families were close but not friends. My grandfather sold fabrics to someone who is now my dream. My sister-in-law’s first job was with my mother. With Flor we shared common friends and vacation places, as if we were neighbors using different elevators. We were always close, but we only met in Israel in 2020. We agreed on the same plan along with fifty other people working in companies, attending talks with entrepreneurs and playing volleyball on the beach until Covid put us on the plane. We arrived in Buenos Aires with masks.
We continue by video call. He couldn’t stand having conversations every day where nothing new happened, without being able to go to the movies, the theater or go out for a drink. “It’s the best thing that can happen to you,” Nico, a friend, told me. I still remember his breathing and smile on the video call in the face of my incredulous silence. “Today the world has no distractions, do you realize? Take the opportunity to get to know her. Talk, talk a lot”. She told me almost as a wish. At that moment I realized that I had to look at Flor with the eyes of a tourist and record everything: how she speaks, how she thinks, what she thinks, how she says it, her stories, her anecdotes.
We only saw each other again in September. We had picnics in squares, we began to attend family events. Slowly everything opened again. The distractions began but it was too late: it had become second nature to us to stay in some house and talk, watch a movie or play board games.
A year later I moved out on my own and then it was Flor’s turn. Every acquaintance I told told me: “Why don’t you two just move in and that’s it?” Is it necessary? We believed that yes, that we needed to allow ourselves that space, even knowing that, surely, we would end up living together in the future. We liked to see how the bond rose another level of trust by seeing how we shared each other in each other’s space. Plus, we didn’t want to grow old and have nothing to tell our kids about what it’s like to live alone. Over time we became sedentary nomads. One day at her house, another day at mine. We took the fruit that was about to turn ugly. We no longer knew where who lived. We decided to unify rent with fear: What if it doesn’t work? What if we got along well but until now? What if routine destroys what has been built?
When the first argument came, I remember, I had nowhere to go but in the same room with her. There was no longer the I on the one hand, you on the other. It was there that I recorded my grandfather’s advice: “What you invest in words, you save in arguments.” Knowing how to speak is an art and if I spoke, maybe it wasn’t the time. If it was the time, maybe it wasn’t the way. We discovered that the best thing we could do was something as simple as going to a cafe and letting the problems out of the house.
Already living together, the idea of marriage always slept with us in bed. We didn’t do it because there was something bigger behind it.Simply, among other things, because we wanted to stop being a couple and become a family, even if it were two, in principle. I bought a ring in a panic, grabbed a cardboard box, wrapped it in black film, designed a MercadoLibre shipping label and enlisted the manager to upload it. Flor was waiting for a colored lamp that she had seen online.
We told our families, then our friends, and then came the rhetorical or not so rhetorical questions: are you sure you want to get married? You’re a kid, you’re very young, how old are you… why…? The maxim was said by a friend’s father: “Michael, look, being married means eating the same thing every day.” His words sounded like someone telling bad news or someone who was sentenced to life. And maybe it was true: he felt imprisoned but that was not my issue. I saw being married, precisely, in the opposite direction: understanding – and applying – that from now on everything in my life was going to be shared, even decisions.
We got married on August 26 in a traditional Jewish temple where the procedure to get married is not easy. It was necessary to have many papers that endorse our Jewishness for the rabbinate to approve the marriage request. For that, an uncle who knows a lot about family history always comes in handy. Luckily Augusto, my dad’s brother, was born to fulfill that task. They had asked me for personal information, the ketubah – Jewish marriage contract – and the marriage book of my parents, my grandparents (maternal and paternal) and information about my great-grandparents. When I put all the information together, mine and my girlfriend’s, we had to go to an interview, like giving a final exam. The suffocation that the situation generated in me only decompressed on Tuesdays and Thursdays when I went swimming. Between pools, I thought: Shouldn’t it be easier to get married? More so, being from a town that represents 0.2% of the world’s population. I wrote to my uncle and he replied: “Get out of it, they’re in trouble.”
The date was approaching and I didn’t have a single document to deliver. That is, the marriage was not confirmed and I had sent the invitations. One Thursday morning – still with water and the teacher’s words in my ear: give your stroke more travel – I finished showering and checked my phone: there was a message from my uncle: “I have yours.” But he didn’t send me any information, not even a form. He just said that he wanted to see me for a minute in my car: I’ll get in, I’ll give it to you and you’ll leave.
We meet in the car like two lovers. Augustus began to speak. “When my dad died I was in the colimba and I missed the distribution of papers and objects.” His eyes looked at the ceiling, straight back to those years in Acoyte and Aranguren. In a few seconds he told several family stories that were intertwined like a magician. “I was left with the papers that no one wanted.“: a document from who knows what date that was inside another piece of paper wrapped in a tiny little book.”
My uncle stretched out a wooden envelope recording everything with a smile. I opened it thinking of finding all the information he needed and I had gone looking for it but it wasn’t there, nor were the papers or documents, but I came across the tiny little book. I stood amazed looking at the worn cover with the scent of age that at some point must have been black, the yellowish pages that looked like papyrus, the ink inside that was stronger than the passage of time. The little little book was a Yom Kippur prayer book from 1909, printed in Vienna in the middle of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In my hands I had a prayer book written before the First World War, inherited in the midst of the Argentine devaluation in 2022 on Av. Gaona in front of the Day supermarket that received a shipment of bananas.
I was immersed looking at the Hebrew letters. I felt the ink of prayers for forgiveness speaking to me. The truth is sustained over time. After taking out a sheet of paper from his pocket: it was the Excel printed with all the information of my ancestors including place of birth, cemetery and tombstone number. There I found out, for example, that my great-grandmother had been born on the ship that brought her to Buenos Aires. Only when my uncle left did I understand why there was so much bureaucracy in the temple.. One believes that the information is for them, but the one who needs it most is oneself. That was the very essence of Judaism: knowing who you are, where you come from and where you are going. And marriage is adding one more sheet: with whom.
The day before the wedding I had to go to the mikveh, a space where purification baths are done. The last stop of the preparation. It sounds solemn but the mikveh is like swimming, writing and getting married. It’s about the same thing: moving from one state to another. Dive. The body goes through an experience and the experience goes through the body. Judaism is a religion that requires the body to be permanently put on all its levels. I dove into the water, curled up into a ball. Naked. I closed my eyes and wished myself things. Now it was ready.
I arrive on Saturday. The illuminated temple was intimidating. Before entering, my mother grabbed my hand and together we laughed because the night before we had practiced the walk. She wanted to loosen her shoes. The doors opened and we began to walk slowly, as we had promised, in contrast to the roller coaster that was spinning inside me, full of curves with memories, people who passed through my life, corners of a blank mind. Then I focused on walking with my mother by my side, unlike the time she made us walk the entire Quetrihue peninsula. Now we were both side by side, celebrating and looking at each other. It seemed like we were reaching the finish line of a race. But my mother’s words in my ear – I give you to your new life – They made me understand that the line was the starting line.
I stood on my back for a few minutes until the Rabbi told me: “Your girlfriend has arrived, go look for her.” I took a deep breath and turned around with my arms open. Flor had a smile that she had never seen before and that, until now, she still had not returned. We looked at each other with fire. My fears vanished when she took my hand. Seven blessings were sung that spoke of joy, the joy of the bride and groom, rejoicing, enchantment, happiness, harmony and love. While the blessings were happening, I felt an intense heat in my head, as if those outdoor heaters that are in restaurants were on on the ceiling. So much so that at one point I looked up but there was nothing. It was impossible. I had the fire in my head, it didn’t go away, it chased me. Until I understood that it wasn’t nerves, it wasn’t the photographer’s flash: it was the heat of God that rested in me. A heat that didn’t burn or make me sweat, it only elevated me even higher.
The day after we got married, we returned home with the cake in our hands, balancing between the suit and the dress. “Hello, little house, we’re here, we’re getting married,” we told her. We spoke to her house, because we thought that she had also been part of our journey until we had a ring – uncomfortable until that moment – on her finger. We were floating, we felt that the energy had been renewed, or better yet, unified. We left being two, we entered being one. We had the same excitement as when midnight strikes and the year changes, but here our lives had changed. The house was still the same: it had not changed overnight like us. Now we had to look at it with the eyes of a tourist and build more than a house, a home. Our home. A home that forces us to put our bodies and enlighten others. That was why we wanted to get married.
Michael Josh (Buenos Aires, 1995) He studied advertising and worked in various agencies. She published 770 Grams (2018) and attended literary workshops – group and individual – for four years. During the pandemic, writing workshops were also held for more than fifty teenagers. Currently, she has finished writing another novel, a movie, and is developing a series. She works with people and companies developing their narrative identity and communication. In her free time she swims and likes to try new specialty coffee shops in the neighborhood.
