Nine Months of Terror

Am I being cheated by my ex-girlfriend?

I put myself in a challenging situation when I was young.

When I started working in a clothing store in a shopping center in São Paulo, I was highly interested in one salesperson, a stunning blonde with green eyes.

We quickly approached, but I discovered something that should have stopped my onslaught: she had a boyfriend.

The boyfriend, however, had moved out of São Paulo. And she was feeling lonely. She wanted company, and she told me so.

So we started a doomed relationship. Because of this, neither she nor I invested much in the emotional part of dating. But the physical part was quite intense. After all, we were twenty-one, twenty-two. We spent most of the free time we had in bed.

We were together for about seven months. During all this time, her boyfriend did not come to São Paulo. Until one day, after working hours, I was waiting for her at home. She left the store at ten; she was supposed to get home at ten forty. But nothing. Eleven o’clock, midnight. And nothing. As there were no cell phones — this happened in 1991 — the only thing I could do was call her house (she lived with her sister) and ask if she showed up. No, she didn’t show up. The sister hoped she was with me.

After that, I could only wait. I woke up at nine with the home phone ringing. It was her! Her boyfriend showed up at the store by surprise; she had no way of letting me know.

OK.

The boyfriend stayed in São Paulo for a week and left. As soon as he left town, she called me. We slept together that day, but we didn’t have sex. She didn’t want to, and I respected it. The next day, the same thing. On the third day, I ended up getting angry. After all, she stimulated me, we kissed, we were naked. But the central part didn’t happen.

I took her home that day, and we didn’t speak to each other anymore.

Four months later, a mutual friend showed up at my new job. During the conversation, he commented something like, “Did you see what happened to your ex-girlfriend?”. I replied, “No, what is it?”.

“She is pregnant!”

At that moment, my world collapsed. As much as we were careful, that child could be mine! I asked how many months ago she was pregnant, and he replied it was three. According to my calculations, the child could not be mine since we last had sex four months ago.

But what if she had lied? What if she got pregnant with me, but she wanted to marry her boyfriend and then pretended that the son was his?

I spent five months terrified, not knowing what to do. Until, finally, I took courage and sought it out. She was in the last month of pregnancy. When I confronted her, she said that the daughter — it was a girl — was not mine.

But I still didn’t have the conviction that what she said was true.

Finally, the girl was born, and only then would I be able to make sure that she was or was not my daughter. And there was an easy way to do this. My reasoning was both I and the mother have light skin and eyes. I knew that the mother’s boyfriend was of black descent. His genes would undoubtedly prevail over hers. So if the girl had eyes and dark skin, she would be his daughter. If she doesn't, I would probably be a father.

I went to the store where my ex was working. She was happy to see me and wanted to show me her daughter. We didn’t carry a digital camera in our pocket all the time, so she took a photo in her wallet.

It looked like this.

Finally, after so many months, I was sure that I was not a father!

Which ended up becoming a sadness years later, when I met the pre-teen girl. She was a fantastic child. I would be proud to have been her father.

But, as the Vietnamese say… C’est la vie!