Ríos Verticales: Return to Sender

The debt is paid,
The verdict said,
The Furies laid,
The plague is stayed,
All fortunes made;
Turn the key and bolt the door,
All is now secure and fast;
Not the gods can shake the Past;

–Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Past

As I opened the mailbox and retrieved the package inside, my heart raced with excitement. Tucked in among the bills and commercial flyers was a letter. I immediately recognized the sender's name and address. Anticipating its content, I impatiently ran up the stairs. After I finished reading it, I felt a mix of joy and disappointment.

Dear William: What a great surprise to receive a letter from you after so many years! Thank you so much. I do remember you. I am very sorry that we cannot resume our communication. I am eighty-six years old now, and I can no longer write. But I wanted you to know that I received your letter and that I still live in the same apartment, in Düsseldorf. Only the postal code has changed (it used to be 9200; now it's 09599). Despite that, I received your letter. I wish you the best in your future life. Greetings! from Hildegard Austerlitz.

Months earlier, I had mailed eighty-seven letters. One by one, they were returned to me with different stamped notes: «Wrong address», «Postal code does not exist», «Recipient no longer resides at this address», or «Return to sender».

Ever since I was a teenager I have always wanted to travel around the world and get to know people from all corners of the earth. I used to stare at the pictures on my geography textbook for long periods of time, daydreaming that one day I would visit those remote places.

But before the Internet and email existed, my only window to the outside world was shortwave radio. Thanks to the magic of the ionosphere, the waves could travel around the globe, bouncing from the sky to the ground, back and forth. Every evening I would spend a couple of hours sitting next to the old Philips radio receiver listening to radio station from far away places. I remember the thrill of being able to tune in to a radio station from far-off countries like Japan or South Africa. I frequently listened to BBC, Deutsche Welle, Radio Netherland, Radio France International, Radio Canada International, and Radio Moscow, among other stations.

Those radio stations had listener clubs and correspondence lists. Listeners could write a letter to the station sending a small profile stating their name, address, age, sex, and general interests, and asking the station to add their profile to the correspondence list. Those lists of names and addresses were sent to all members around the world so that they could write to one another. That’s how I got to have so many pen pals. For years, we exchanged letters, stamps, bills, coins, postcards, banknotes, information about our countries, and details of our daily lives. But my correspondence with them was affected by the growing pains: university, work, marriage, children, emigration to another country, divorce, until it eventually ended.

In 1988 I wrote to each one of them, notifying them that I was moving to another country, that I understood the beginnings were always hard, and therefore the letters would stop for a while, but that I would resume the correspondence once I had settled in my new home. The reality is that the beginning was much more difficult than I expected. Immigrating to a new land where I had no relatives, no friends, and no acquaintances, with a wife, a three-year-old child, and a nine-month-old baby, was very complicated. Nostalgia, loneliness, winter, and financial problems proved to be a very oppressing weight. I got sidetracked by the ups and downs of life, and I never wrote them again.

Twenty-five years later, rummaging through a trunk where I keep things from the time when my children were children, I came across a list of names and addresses. When I realized it was the list of my pen pals, I was astonished. A violent wave of nostalgia swept me away, and I decided to write them once more. I was aware that there was little chance of success; it was like sending a message in a bottle, hoping that somehow it would reach the other side of the ocean. I thought that most likely they had all moved, and therefore no one would reply. Yet, I did it anyway. Months later, when I had already given up on the project, not without some degree of sadness, I received Hildegard's letter. I had returned to her a little late. Her life had changed. Mine too.

For the most part, the effort has been futile. Almost all the letters I sent to my former pen pals were returned to me. They have evidently moved. Or, there is always that possibility: perhaps they do not want to respond, maybe they don't want to renew contact with old friends, and maybe they are right. It's probably not a good idea to try to go back in time. The past is in the past, and we have to leave it behind. We must move forward, and only forward.

But, when I say this, I am contradicting myself, as I also received another letter, from Sara, in the Netherlands. We reestablished our communication, and for twelve years now, —even after the advent of the Internet and electronic mail— Sara and I have continued to write letters by hand and send them by post. Almost fifty years after we first made contact, we finally met in person, in 2023. It took me two metros, two trains, and a bus to get to the southern town where she lives, three hours away from Amsterdam. The experience was very enjoyable. We spent the afternoon together. We went for dinner, for a walk, for a drink, and finally said good-bye at the bus stop, knowing subconsciously, but not admitting it, that we probably would never see each other again.

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