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Why would a man feel jealous of the girl his best friend loves? Why would he feel such rage when he should be happy for him? "It’s because of how she pulls him away from the goal", he tells himself. "It’s not the way he looks at her", he repeats. "It’s not how she gives him, with a glance and a blink, everything I once promised him".
It’s not the way he laughs with her, nor how he wants to kiss her, touch her, love her for the rest of his life. It’s not that Dignan wishes to be in her place.
"She’s a pretty girl", he thinks. "Maybe a little quiet." But it makes sense, when she can’t understand a single word they say. He doesn’t understand how Anthony could fall in love with Inez. He doesn’t understand how his hands could touch her in the intimacy of a stranger's room. He doesn’t understand how they could let out a soft laugh as they reached orgasm. He doesn’t understand how sex can be fun. But above all, he doesn’t understand why he longs to be her.
He’s driving the stolen car as they leave that forgotten town behind. "We’ll go back home and everything will be like before", he thinks. "It’ll be just him and me again." Of course, that illusion falls apart the moment he sees Anthony sigh with melancholy, as if thinking about his foreign lover.
What’s so sexy about Paraguay?
“What are you thinking about?” he asks, already knowing the answer.
“I think I’m in love,” Anthony says, and it’s something Dignan never thought he’d hear come out of his friend’s mouth.
The rest of the trip grows tense when the car breaks down and the money runs out. The money that was theirs. The money he risked his skin for, is now in the hands of the one who took everything from him.
A thief who steals from a thief, they’d say.
That damn housekeeper.
Weeks later, Anthony becomes euphoric when she tells him she loves him over the phone. Dignan smiles, seeing him happy, while inside he withers more and more. She has said out loud what he has always thought while watching him sleep beside him during those childhood sleepovers and secret grown-up dreams. He loves him. More than anything. But he will never be brave enough to say it. And that’s fair, because he will never be enough of an Inez for Anthony to love him back.
Even when he visits him in prison, he mentions her. And if sleeping badly seven days a week on that iron bed weren’t enough, the memory of Inez holding him tenderly repeats itself, tormenting his sleep.
"Take care of Anthony", she had said.
Take care of him for me.
Keep him safe for me.
"There you have him", he thinks, as his eyes fill with tears. "He’s yours. He never was really mine."
What’s so beautiful about Paraguay?
And why is there nothing like that in poor, old Dignan?