Aquel fin de semana

Last year my cousin Juliana was living in Bergen, in Norway, and in March I visited her.

On Sunday she was working, so I went to the city centre alone. I wanted to see the fish market and the old wooden houses. It was raining — it rains a lot in Bergen — but I had a good coat.

I was waiting at the bus stop when a bus arrived. I got on without looking at the number. I was reading a long message from my mother, and I didn’t notice anything for twenty minutes.

When I looked up, there were no houses. There were trees, a lake and a lot of snow.

I went to the driver. My English was not very good, but I showed him a photo of the fish market. He looked at it and laughed.

“Wrong bus,” he said. “But it’s a nice trip, no?”

At the last stop he got off with me. He was going to have a coffee before he drove back to the city. He bought me one too, and we drank it and looked at the lake.

When I got home, Juliana was making dinner.

“Did you see the market?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I saw something better.”

My best friend Sebastián got married in Villa de Leyva on a Saturday in June. Three months before the wedding, he called me.

“You’re going to give the speech,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

I wrote the speech many times. I was going to start with a joke about our school, then tell the story of how he met Laura, and finish with a short poem. I printed it and put it in my jacket.

On the day of the wedding, everything went well. The church was beautiful, the sun was shining, and Laura’s family was very friendly. At dinner I was sitting next to her grandmother, who told me about her own wedding in 1962.

After dinner, the music stopped and somebody gave me the microphone. I put my hand in my jacket. The speech wasn’t there.

For a moment I couldn’t say anything. A hundred people were looking at me. Sebastián was smiling, but his eyes were asking: “What are you doing?”

So I didn’t tell the joke, and I didn’t read the poem. I told them about the day we met. We were seven, and I forgot my lunch, so he gave me half of his. I told them he was still the same: he always gives people half of everything he has. And I told Laura that she was getting a very good husband — a husband who never knows where his keys are.

People laughed. Laura’s grandmother was crying. When I gave back the microphone, Sebastián hugged me for a long time and didn’t say anything.

The next morning I found the speech. It was in my other jacket, at the hotel. I read it again on the bus home. It was a good speech, but it was not as good as the one I didn’t write.