Ricardo Silva Romero • The Husband of Maria Klossner • Subtropics

Ricardo Silva Romero
The Husband of Maria Klossner

An old blind man enters a two-story movie theater, the gigantic Astor Plaza of the Bogotá of 1995, ready to hear a German film titled The Husband of Maria Klossner. He knows only one word in German: “ausgang.” But he trusts that his guide, a long-suffering friend his own age, won’t let him miss any of the story’s details. I’m twenty years old at the time. And although there’s no one else in the theater, although all the seats are empty, I have just sat down in the place right in front of them. My name isn’t important. I have seen things that I hadn’t wanted to see when I was a child, but I still haven’t accepted that living is pretending that reality makes sense. I’m sure of everything. I’m intolerant, impatient. And nonetheless I let myself be carried away by how that voice narrates what’s happening on the screen to the man who cannot see.
    He says that the credits at the beginning look like they’ve been done on a typewriter. And when the last opening credit comes on, “Ein Film von Dieter Hasenkamp,” he informs the blind man that that hoarse voice off screen has pronounced the following words: “My wife is going to die in the next three hours.” The guide doesn’t stop talking for a second. He describes the first scene minutely. He makes the blind man see a small apartment besieged by winter, in downtown Ulm, in southern Germany, where a woman who is waiting to die in her favorite chair asks her husband to make her a cup of hot chocolate. It’s like forty years ago, the woman says, when we weren’t even boyfriend and girlfriend yet. She, Maria Junge, was dying of thirst for something cold in the summer. And he, Bruno Klossner, immediately offered to bring her ice cream.
    Maria and Bruno are looking at each other, without saying a word, marveling at having arrived at old age together. The image of the two of them, holding hands, is dissolving into that of a street ravaged by winter. The husband of Maria Klossner traverses the city, travels over the snowy sidewalks of the Frauenstrasse, in search of the chocolate that he hasn’t found in the apartment’s cupboards. And he begins to remember, in black-and-white, the love story that he has lived with his wife.
    At that moment the man who can see whispers to the blind man: “Now we’re in the past.” And without missing a frame, he continues his level-headed description of the facts.
    We see, he says, that the shy young Bruno, who feels a chill because he’s nervous, tells the very young Maria of his troubles with love, his desire to find the woman of his dreams, with the hope that his fragility will manage to seduce her. We see that she, cynical, resolute, with the ice cream in her hand, replies that she is sure that one can fall in love with whomever one wants whenever one wants: her theory is, she says, that because man is a second-hand animal, because monogamy is an impossible plan in a world overpopulated with bodies that need to expend their energy, we should take marriage as a triumph over nature, as a touching attempt to control life like one controls a work of art. Bruno can say only: “Then I want to fall in love with you.” And the movie’s scenes, from that moment, begin to run, pushed by the guide’s voice: Bruno and Maria are attracted to each other, they think they see in small similarities (they’re both left-handed) crowning proof that they’re made for one another, they feel at peace when they sleep embraced, she watches him as he tries to win the favor of her girl friends, he waits for her at the altar of the church while she descends the stairs, she tells him some story of a couple that doesn’t understand each other as well as they do, he tells his colleagues that she is his memory, she scratches his back while they watch a new episode of The Rudi Carrell Show, he feels that the mystery has been lost, she resists having children, he is bothered that she looks old before her time, she’s exasperated that he leaves the doors of all the closets open, he asks himself when exactly he decided to marry this stranger, she’s about to have an affair with one of her high school students, he celebrates his fiftieth birthday with a lover whom he introduces on his trips as “a niece,” they manage to fall asleep together after hearing the news that she will die in the next months.
    The image of the two, settled perfectly on the study’s sofa, dissolves into an image of him, alone, in front of a store on the bank of the Danube. “We’ve returned to the present,” clarifies the blind man’s assistant. The old Bruno has found, after seeking at place after place, a can of instant hot chocolate. In the apartment again, his voice asks, off screen, if it wouldn’t be less cold if it snowed, what else can he be besides a husband, what will become of him if she isn’t there, if she dies.
    When his friend tells him (as a German version of “Autumn Leaves” plays) that the final credits are rolling, the man who can’t see asks what was the last sentence of the last scene. And then he finds out that Bruno has given Maria the cup of hot chocolate, wrapped her in her old blanket and told her, “you’re going to get better,” many, many times while keeping her company as she dies in her favorite chair. The theater lights come on, the curtains close as if the screen were a stage. The blind man tells me, at the door that gives onto 67th Street, that he always comes out of movies with the suspicion that his companion corrects the movies, that he adds endings, sequences, characters. And I reply, of course, that his helper invented the entire plot, that no one has wrapped anyone up in an old blanket in that asphyxiating piece of nonsense.
    After all, I’m twenty years old. I cannot begin to imagine that I will spend the following decade wishing I hadn’t said those words. Or that today I will marry you in order to help you see a world that doesn’t exist.