Right up until she died, Noelia received a weekly magazine called Astros, written by a certain Madame Elisabeta. For the last five years she had it sent to her email, but before that, for what felt like a million years, she had it delivered. And before that, when I first met her, Noelia read her horoscope in the newspaper. Every morning, she would pop out of her bachelorette apartment in her slippers to buy it. So rigorous was she in her routine that the vendor billed her weekly. I was horrified by her horoscope habit, but loved having the newspaper first thing in the morning: it was one of those wonders a relationship only knows in its early phase, like doing it in the kitchen.
Astros magazine gave you a seven-day horoscope personalized to your sign, ascendance, and even your name, which someone typed directly onto your typed copy (you could tell from how the letters of Noelia formed a zigzag, with those dainty typographical dances produced by typewriters). As you can imagine, it wasn’t a cheap publication.
One day, Noelia welcomed into her consultation room none other than Madame Elisabeta. She turned out to be a pale, obese fifty-something with her heart in a terrible state. She was friendly and foulmouthed. The a at the end of her name, Noelia soon learned, had been her mother’s idea, and wasn’t just some half-baked pseudonym. At first, Noelia didn’t say anything about the magazine, because in her role as a cardiologist she tended to keep her superstitions to herself. She fitted Madame’s pacemaker and that was that. Except, it being December, the patient — saved in the nick of time and eternally grateful — invited us to her magazine’s Christmas party. I was happy to go along, both out of anthropological curiosity and also because I was convinced that, on witnessing the commercial inner workings of Elisabeta’s magazine, Noelia would finally recognize her ongoing error. But the event turned out to be nothing like what either of us expected. For starters, it was in Elisabeta’s house: a big, shabby apartment where she lived with a parrot and a much younger woman who served as both lover and nurse, as well as helping out with the magazine, the cleaning, and the astral cards. Everyone referred to her as Pisces. I remember Pisces as being permanently positioned on Elisabeta’s lap. There were others at the party: some astrologers, musicians, and a couple of intellectuals who could actually see beyond the shadow of their egos, which is unusual. Dinner consisted of rum (with a dash of punch), and a mountain of takeaway pizzas. As soon as we arrived, Pisces made us mark our preferred toppings on a list, and at some point she must have called to order them because not long after they turned up at the door. Fat old Elisabeta was poor as a church mouse and esoteric in the extreme, but she understood, long before Google did, the value of a seemingly personalized service.
Before I knew it, that humble soirée had washed away the bad taste in my mouth I’d had every morning on waking up to Noe and her horoscope. The fact that Madame existed, and that her stars were specked with parakeet feathers, cheap pepperoni, and a lustful and tender lesbian romance put me at peace with the whole issue of the horoscopes. I can’t really explain why.
Everyone knows that a horoscope is like a shelclass="underline" it needs to be wide and hollow enough to accommodate exactly what we need to hear. But I got tired of explaining this to Noelia, who knew it full well anyway. The change in my perception didn’t occur at this superficial level (I knew that the tried-and-tested recipe — add together a planet, an illness, and a sudden windfall, whip it up into a paragraph and you’ve got yourself a horoscope! — still applied), but at a deeper one: as formulaic as they might be, those texts didn’t appear out of nowhere. There was an author behind every one: and not some evil corporation, but a middle-aged lady who really did believe in the stars. The signs of the zodiac were Elisabeta’s dearly beloved characters. She brought them to life each week with her pen, just as worse writers have done with worse characters. The open nature of Astros — its capacity for multiple interpretations — wasn’t a failing. On the contrary, this was the characteristic — the only one, but still — it shared with all great literature: its universal ambition.
I never mentioned any of this to Noelia because I could have written her an entire essay on it (Astrology is a Humanism) and still she would have raised her eyebrows and told me how typically Virgo that was of me. But the point is that my rationalization of astrology as a literary art form worked wonders for me. It opened the doors to a level of tolerance I’d neither possessed nor managed to feign over the previous years, and which was the main culprit behind our early morning squabbles. From that moment on, on the days when Noelia announced over breakfast that Mercury was in retrograde, I immediately switched into consolatory mode. I would stroke her hair, compliment her, give her little pinches on her butt, and paw at her as she left for work. If, on the other hand, Noelia merrily announced something like, ‘Tonight, a benevolent full moon will light my house of relationships and fall in line with Neptune,’ I’d think, ‘This morning she’ll be strong.’ And this was like a license for me to not be strong.
Marriage is nothing but a relay race, and Noelia’s daily horoscopes became my handoff cues. And that’s how the very thing I’d accused her of for years — having an astrological dependence — became true of me too.
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‘If all else fails,’ I would say to Noelia in the periodic moments when it seemed that this time I wasn’t going to finish an article, let alone get through the protracted process of revision, sending, editing, rejection, guaranteed humiliation, etc., etc. that academic life implies, ‘let’s go and live by the sea and I’ll grow papayas.’
Growing papayas was my crowning ambition.
For Noelia, on the other hand, failure didn’t factor in her professional life. Even when she was totally fed up, her reaction was never to jack it all in. Instead, she focused on the future; on ‘when I retire’.
‘When I retire,’ she’d say, ‘we’ll install a jacuzzi in the yard.’
But we never did. Noelia Vargas Vargas died working. Páez would bring her printouts of ECGs which she’d read in bed. She died as she lived: among other people’s heartbeats.
Systole and diastole, and that was that.