Transatlantic

By Giovanna D. Preda Robertti

Two months in Dublin, two muffled laughs, two sharp words. That’s all it took for me to start missing Paraguay.

It caught me off guard, on a Monday afternoon after physics class—a Brazilian classmate talking to our professor about the Brazilian side of Itaipú. I chimed in, mentioning it was binational. He whispered something to his friend, both of them giggling.

"You talk a lot about Paraguay," he said.
"Sorry, I miss speaking with Paraguayans," I replied.
"You can speak Spanish here with the Mexicans."
"It’s not the same as speaking with fellow countrymen."
"It is."

I’ve replayed that conversation in my head a thousand times, like a scratched record, trying to pinpoint what exactly stung so much. That day, I came back to my apartment in tears and stared at my flag, hanging above my bed, hoping to summon memories of red dirt and yellow lapachos. Now, six months after leaving and four months after the Monday that broke me, I still don’t know what about Henrique’s words cut so deep—the it is slicing into me like paper cuts, sharp and unassuming, burning worse over time—but I’m grateful for the tears. That afternoon, drowning in longing, I bought a ticket to Ñande Fest, a Paraguayan community event in Ireland, where I met someone who would change the course of my life in Dublin.

On November 21st, I went to Ñande Fest. Originally, I had invited Dana, who was born and raised in Gaza and whom I had met in math class not long before, but that day she woke up sick and couldn’t come. I arrived at the event with the intention of talking to everyone, of creating a sense of community. That goal went out the window the moment I saw him.

Lorenzo was leaning against the bar, speaking in English to an older man. At an event where everyone was at least four years older than me, he seemed to be the only person close to my age. He had a certain air to him, a foreigner amongst equals quality—so much so that a fellow compatriot approached him in English, mistaking him for Irish—that made me quickly decide to strike up a conversation. I greeted him, introduced myself, he introduced himself, said he was studying music. I told him I was studying physics.

"Where do you study?"
"Trinity. You?"
"BIMM. Wow, I never thought I’d meet a Paraguayan studying at Trinity."
"Me neither. I wouldn’t be surprised if I were the first."

Those were the first words of substance we exchanged, and the only ones from that night I remember verbatim, sacred transcripts of one of the best friendships I’ve built on this island; our initiation contract.

We talked for a while at the bar and then moved to the staircase to keep chatting, away from the ruckus that happens when Paraguayans in self-imposed exile gather to dance to cuarteto and cumbia, with sopa so’o and Guinness. We joined the rest on occasion, but relegated ourselves to the same semi-quiet corner for most of the night. When we left, I walked him home. He hugged me goodbye, and we promised to stay in touch.

After my first exchange with Lorenzo, I was consumed by a premonition of closeness—an unshakable feeling that the boy from the party would become fundamental in my life in Dublin. A life left behind, abandoned on the transatlantic flight that brought us here, simultaneously worlds apart and seconds away from meeting, crashing onto the same island in the beginning of new, parallel lives, gazing at the horizon with ten lives ahead of us. This is what Lorenzo meant to me in those early days; both an anchor to home and a glimpse into the future. But as our friendship evolved, I began to question the nature of our bond.

"Do you know any other cool Paraguayans around here?" he asked me as we said goodbye at the door of his building one Saturday after I had visited to cook feijoada. I don’t remember what day it was, but within a week, we were at a concert by the Cateura Orchestra, hoping to socialize with fellow compatriots. We talked, we connected, but my conversations with the other Paraguayans never went beyond casual debates over the best yerba mate available in Dublin and superfluous details of our lives in Asunción. The following weekend, we made vori vori with other young students, with whom I connected more than with the rest, but never at the same level—never like with Lorenzo. An occasional like on my Instagram stories, returned a week later, a “Loved your essay!”, a picture of cassava gnocchi on the 29th of some unremarkable month. We never went to pubs alone, I was never invited to their friends' concerts, I never invited them to dinner in Dun Laoghaire, they were never Lole, as I had learned to call him.

"That Paraguayan telepathy, it’s priceless here," Lole once said during a brief moment of particular tension in our friendship. But ever since the Cateura Orchestra concert, I had known in my bones that it was never about that. Looking back at my relationships with other Paraguayans in Dublin, I share my undergraduate student status with Luz, my critical yet hopeful patriotism with Estrella, my interest in science and art with Katterine. The sibling-like chemistry so evident in my conversations with Lole, I also share with Adela; the feeling that “Paraguay is a small town”, always present in anecdotes of Asunción narrated in English for the understanding of our common circle, is even more intense when I see Rufino. Many of the compatriots I have met here have life experiences far more similar to mine than Lorenzo does. Many share my worldview. Many have similar interests. They are all memories of Paraguay, fragments of the childhood I left in Asunción half a year ago. They are all Paraguay in Dublin, but Lole just is. It was none of this, or perhaps it was all of it, that reinforced my bond with Lorenzo above the rest of the Paraguayan diaspora here.

I don’t believe in destiny, but it’s hard not to when I meet people like this. He reminds me of my friends back home, which made it easier to open up, to show a part of myself that the rest of my friends in Dublin don’t know. The key point here is that I never justified my friendship with Nico, Sofi, or Alelo with “Paraguayan telepathy”; I simply let it be. And I think this is the hardest part when I apply my usual exercise of analyzing every aspect of human relationships to my friendship with Lole—Paraguay has nothing to do with it, and at the same time, it has everything to do with it. He’s not someone I share particularly private details of my life with, he’s not someone I call or see daily, and by no common standard of friendship is he as close to me as Sofía, Nico, or Dana. And yet, he knows me better than anyone in the world. Because he understands my life here and my life there, because he knows both The George and Consti, because we speak in Jopará and in English.

Because he is the private Paraguay, the Paraguay whose flag is not the two-sided tricolor but the polaroids with my friends, the country that has no place, that is born and dies in nights out with the people I love. Because we bonded over a shared national identity, but we built a friendship that transcends any flag. He’s not my friend because he represents Paraguay; rather, in the most beautiful, most infuriatingly confusing friendship I have in Ireland, I rediscovered my home.

I can’t rationalize it—I tried, believe me, I did, but I can’t. I don’t know why I got closer to him than to the others, but I did. I don’t know why we talked so much that first night, but we did. And this is what sent me into a crisis that nearly made me believe in destiny; our friendship is so improbable, so dependent on chance, on circumstances, on a rejected visa after applying to an English university, that it feels predestined. Going back to my gut feeling from that first night, I now know what caused it: he simply reminded me so much of my friends, at a time when both the private Paraguay of beers on the rooftop and the material Paraguay of chipa and mbeju felt distant. But I don’t want to admit it, because admitting it would mean breaking the illusion of a life written in the stars. It would mean accepting that, if not for Henrique’s words on a Monday in November, taking me to buy tickets for a Paraguayan event in Temple Bar, my life would be fundamentally different.

Two months in Dublin, two muffled laughs, two sharp words. That’s all it took for me to start missing Paraguay. Two words—that’s all it took for me to buy tickets to Ñande Fest. Two words—that’s all it took for me to find the boy who made me question my life here, my life there, and the very existence of my country beyond its traditional foods and the Guarani language. Two words cut me, two words opened me up, two words changed my life. And it was that “it is”, now a distant echo of the person I was when I arrived in Dublin, that set off a chain of events that now makes me wonder—if it hadn’t been Lole, would it have been someone else? If it weren’t Lole, would I have found another person to anchor me to the reality of a country breathing in the people I adore? I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.

I want to live this story, to see where it takes me. I want to keep having adventures through Ireland with Lole, I want the comfort of knowing that when I return to Paraguay, there will be someone waiting for me, someone who knows the me of Dublin and who, just as he understands my jokes about La Chispa here, will understand my jokes about Parnell Street back there. I want to exhaust the possibilities of this bond until I live in the ease of the full understanding I have with my closest friends.

What do we live for, if not for this? For comfortable silences, me with a book in hand, Lorenzo scrolling through his phone while a pot of cornbread browns in the oven of my kitchen in Marino. For Friday afternoons in city-center pubs and my unexpected friendship with Dana, who grew up worlds away yet somehow ended up in the same place as me. For walks down Grafton Street with Nil and Ildana, for park outings with Varvara. For tears in the school bathroom with Fer, for bus rides with Alelo to spend three unforgettable days with Ana Sofi along the Parana coast. For late nights drinking cheap wine on Nico’s rooftop, talking until all words have been exhausted, waiting for the sunrise. For long transatlantic calls with Sofía, my soul sister, the girl who taught me how to love.

Because while waiting for something to happen, submerged in transatlantic sorrow, I rediscovered life far from home. And when I looked around me, all I saw were the people who, time and time again, had taught me what love is.