With so much time in my hands, lying on the bed fully clothed with Niño and Niña, I do a lot of thinking. Much of it is in my two languages. I like to compare words.

As an example we have the word love – that translates to amor in Spanish. In English you say I love while in Spanish it is amo. To love is amar.  A loving person is far more romantic sounding when you say, “Mi Rosemary era amorosa”. This might mean that she was loving with me. If you write “Mi Rosemary fue amorosa,” it defines her as a loving person, in essence, with more persons than yours truly.

My mother, when I was 21, told me that as my mother loved me because she was my mother but she had never liked me. Somehow I had changed and now she confessed that she liked me, too.

For her, love was not kissing or hugging. It was doing. She spent lots of money she did not have in giving me a good education. That was her manifestation for her love for me.

I never really understood what love was really all about until I met Susy in Argentina in 1965. I could not understand how such a beautiful woman could possible find this nerd (me) attractive. In one occasion when she took me to the airport, I was going to make a brief Christmas trip to Veracruz where my mother lived, she insisted in kissing me even though I had a terrible and obvious lip sore.

She sent me passionate letters. That was a first for me. She always wanted to feed me an made sandwiches for me when I was about to leave to go to my Argentine Navy pension.

How could she possible love me? And yet one day she called me on the phone to tell me I was a man with no future and that she was leaving me for the violinist of the Teatro Colón.

I have loved, perhaps three times in my life, and if I would see those women now (only one is alive) I would be in love with them. Without really knowing what love is I have never stopped loving those women.

With Rosemary my perception changed a tad. I do not remember exactly what it was that I told her when I spotted her walking away from me and all I saw was her straight and long blonde hair, her miniskirts and her lovely long legs. But two months and 8 days later we were married in Coyoacán, Mexico.

I remember (do not remember if this was before we were married) that in gatherings at my friend and mentor Raul Guerrero Montemayor’s apartment on Herodoto, in Mexico City, I would stare at Rosemary as she would lean against the side of Raul’s fireplace. She did not look at me directly. I stared at her and watched all her subtle movements. Did this represent my falling in love with her? In Spanish it is far simpler. That question would translate to, ¿Me estaba enamorándome de ella?”

Obviously, for me, sexual attraction precedes falling in love. In our 52 year marriage we had sex often. She was  a slightly bit cold as she was a person who kept many of her thoughts and emotions to herself. But she had learned or agreed from my mother that love was doing. She did everything for me. In her I found a stability (that stuff will work out) that I miss now. I feel that my family is becoming fractured since she died. The only stability is the stable stare of my male cat Niño.

When we slept we did so back to back. Now that I have a pain in my left shoulder I am forced to sleep in the direction where I would have seen her back. This means that when I turn off the lights I can see the vacuum of the spot that she would have occupied. I feel that presence and my body wants me to cry. But I don’t.

In 1987 I rang the bell at Susy’s Buenos Aires apartment. When she opened the door, she asked, “Aren’t you going to kiss me? " She died a few months later.

I wonder.