As social relations change in a global world, so do personal relations and professional networks. Some in reality, in this case, fiction. One day, during one of those multiple corporate conferences, the travelling Hungarian diplomat and author meets the Uruguayan journalist in a hotel lobby bar in Singapore. They hit it off. Later that week, the Hungarian must return to his post in Vancouver. The Uruguayan must go back to her desk in Montevideo. They exchange e-mail addresses and telephone numbers. Although technically in the same hemisphere (depending on the point of view), their busy schedules do not allow them the 18-hour long haul via Toronto and Buenos Aires. They swap intellectually challenging e-mails back and forth, use messenging services and VoIP, the occasional late-night phone call. They discuss world affairs, laugh together, ask each other about the next business travel. Perhaps they could meet somewhere. Eventually, they realise that no conference will bring them together for over one year, and decide to meet halfway. In Panama City, they travel around for five days, hike in the jungle, bathe in the Caribbean and in the Pacific. Then he gets on a flight back to Vancouver, and she flies back to Uruguay.
They do not meet for more than fifteen months. Eventually, their correspondence subsides, sunk amidst paper work, business trips, local friends and acquaintances. He receives a Christmas card stamped in Córdoba, Argentina, and wonders why. She receives none.
In spring, a new corporate conference happens in Tessaloniki, Greece. She is sent to report on it. He is sent as a speaker. His Croatian wife flies from their holiday home in Split, to watch him, sitting in one of the front rows. He comes across the Uruguayan, introduces both in a very awkward moment. She leaves him a note at the hotel’s front desk by the end of the conference, to which he replies one month later, in a short letter stamped in Budapest. It's a crushing letter, even if he did not intend it to.
The redemption letter is ever so complicated. One never knows well how to support it from the very start. She had no idea why, but she needed to tell him things. As she writes that redemption letter now, her present quest is for words, for the right ones, the ones left unsaid in so many other occasions because other less important words took their place. Human nature, she reckoned, often forces one to take action in a way that is simultaneously predictable and unnavoidable. Thus the momentary cut in their correspondence; thus the return to written word; thus the fewer, lesser, bitter e-mails they exchanged from that point on.
He crossed (perhaps without noticing he had done so) the imaginary boundary of a relationship - in this case, of a post-relationship. For it was, or so she called it, a relationship they both lived. A long-distance one, certainly, but one of a very rare brand. A special l.d.r., as the world would nowadays brand that new global aspect of love. One of those relationships few people are entitled to live, but more do than ever before - most dream not of it, for they wish it not; and if they ever dreamt of such, they are too afraid to venture into unchartered waters, even if they wish they'd be brave enough. But what is love but peril?, she thought. One does yearn for it, intimately wishing one can also face every horrible metaphorical monster on this Earth and the next. Because everyone knows quite well that one needs that dodgy feeling of walking on the limb every now and then, that one needs that sense of facing the abyss and loving every second of it, every second of one’s bravery, one needs the thrill of walking one more step into the edge of the abyss, uncertain of whether the time will be available to draw the last step back, in case the cliff colapses. Yes, their kind loved that danger, she thought. One steps over every warning sign, ignores past experiences, one’s own and others’, doomed to sail into void areas of the mind when certain moments are reached - and they are always reached, just after one wakes up thinking of something as odd as walking alone on a wintery beach. Such is human nature, and it includes every single human being. So, he crossed that line, she gathered, perhaps not knowing he had. The line that establishes the limits of pain and sorrow. Relationships end, or if they do not, they sometimes dive into deep valleys of loneliness, and face the obstacles of those dark locations. Their relationship – if he ever looked at it that way – faced extra challenges. Time, distance, culture. They persevered for a while, and then were as predictable as any normal human being. The difference might have been that both had the somewhat rare ability to consider the facts and weigh them over again, under the new light of a new time zone.
His last letter was the black and white flag of a race, waved with energy in front of them, a race that had no finish line, since there was no prior objective to it but to unite minds. They started a new period, as every relationship starts different periods. As he posed it, they never finished whatever they had, for they never had what they could call something; therefore, they were still free to proceed with the normal development of it - the thing they did not had. Whatever curious, erotic, adventuring moments, lines of communication and bonding, whatever threads of spiritual endeavour, highways of artistic and literary understanding once existed, they all were there still, ready to be driven into the depths of a character in any book.
Logically their intercontinental love would not be erased neither from their memories, nor the memories of those who happened to read the one such book (his, for instance), where several parts of it, in bigger or smaller slices, would be portrayed. It was comfortable to think that one day those books would bring her images back. Maybe that scene where two people, somewhere in the world, dine at a cosy, wood-panelled Greek restaurant, the slow sound of rebetika mingling with their thoughts; maybe a scene where a character suddenly feels claustrophobic whilst walking up a narrow stairway - or maybe a scene where he collapses, causing an unforgettable fear in the person with him; perhaps a more intimate one, where a person touches the arm of the other, and the slow motioned thrills dash up both persons' spines; or maybe an intense love situation, one of the sensual kind, described in ten different ways, either soft and romantic or sexual and energetic, either proudly erotic or discreetly ecstatic. Those moments would be part of it. And, nonetheless, he would always have so much more to say about everything, as she would too, and both would never run out of subject, as it would grow with them. And so would separation.
She assumed the risk of ridiculity, the risk of writing the l.d.r. redemption letter, or a letter about the not thing, as he would put it. She assumed it because she could find only this way to say the same: he would always be her fondest memory, albeit so far away in time and space. If that was not the most important letter she ever sat down to write to him, it surely was close.
Years later, she travels to Agadir, Morocco, to report on a new conference. Her Argentinean husband does not travel with her. The Hungarian is one of the speakers, and she discreetly waves at him from the crowd when he sits, vanishing before the event is over. Love in the global world is illusive at best, sporadic at worse. We find her later that night, lounging in her beach-side hotel bar, Martini in hand, flirting with a Tunisian reporter. She never attended any other event with the Hungarian diplomat again, nor did she see him elsewhere.
