English Version | On top of the printer

It wasn't until the machine started beeping that Joana and Ricardo realized what was happening. The red toner had run out while Joana's ass was being relentlessly and involuntarily photocopied in color, blurry and full of grain. Her buttocks, hard-toned from intense gym sessions, appeared flattened on the photocopies like old, sagging buttocks. "Let's stop this," whispered Joana, alarmed, first by the machine's hungry plim-plim, then by the deformed images of her flattened rear, printed there on a 47-sheet stack resting on the photocopier shelf. He got to his feet, put on the remaining clothes, and tidied up those that remained on his body. She picked up the sheets, tore them up, and threw them in the wastepaper basket. Ricardo watched everything without saying a word. When Joana walked away, he pulled up his pants, composed himself, and said "Joana", as if he were shouting, but very quietly, as if he were shouting and whispering at the same time - and even then, Joana reproached him, "Don't make a fuss, they can hear us." Love in the workplace is not just an inexact science of chemical exchange - it's even a post-modern exercise in contemporary human craftsmanship. And there's no better way to introduce the topic than by using a picturesque caricature that alludes to it. We talk about relationships in the workplace and the mind - at least this one, a mind used to thinking about excessive, transgressive, and sometimes scabrous things - immediately travels to a plane in which two professional colleagues, employees of the same company, find a way to circumvent the various social rules that delimit appropriate behavior in order, in the heat of the job, to strengthen ties with those who share the workplace with them. When we talk about rules, we are referring to a wide range of norms, which can range from the laws that regulate marriage - yes, marriage is also a legal contract - in cases where it is called into question or disrespected, to a company's internal regulations, which normally provide for and condition romantic relationships - and here romanticism is used in a broad sense to describe reciprocities that start as chemical and then progress to the physical - among employees. There are entire theses on the subject - it's no exaggeration: there are even academic papers dedicated to the topic -, guidelines followed by human resources departments, general opinions from occasional commentators in the press, and countless other inputs, as they say in post-modern labor parlance, looking at the advantages and disadvantages - of the upsides and downsides, go figure - the risks and potential advantages of two people who, being employed in the same place, allow themselves to fall in love with each other. We went in search of cases of romantic relationships at work, which we tried to retell, generously fictionalizing them. They all have different outlines, not least because the idea was to find different outcomes for each situation. Only in the detail of the fictitious names do these cases seem to coincide, since, surprisingly and without any apparent explanation, all the stories feature a Joana and a Ricardo. Go figure. To those who say there are no coincidences: explain this situation.

Scenes from a wedding

f us working in the same place is that things can go wrong for both of us," says Joana, "which is what happened at the end of 2012." A collective dismissal took them and dozens of other journalists out of the newspaper and, out of disappointment and disenchantment, out of journalism for ten years. "It was sad, but we're fine and we're happy," says Ricardo.

A sad end

After almost ten years working in the same team, Joana and Ricardo developed a naturally close relationship. They became friends far beyond the late shifts they worked each week at the restaurant bar, where he was responsible for the main room and she for the terrace. With time and the progress of their friendship, their families also became close, to the point where, for example, they spent their vacations together, taking advantage of the two weeks a year when their breaks coincided thanks to the closure of the establishment at the end of December and beginning of January. They tried winter destinations - Andorra, Sierra Nevada - and other less obvious and more summery ones, which at this time of year is a small luxury: Joana recalls the trip to Mozambique. And it was on that trip that the end of everything began. When the opportunity arose, Joana and Ricardo kissed. "We were alone for a while, we'd had dinner at a beach restaurant, I don't know what came over us," recalls Joana. For the moment, the matter died down, but their return to Lisbon brought a reopening of the case. Ricardo wanted to talk about what had happened and ended up revealing deeper feelings than the lightness of that fleeting kiss might suggest. Joana was uncomfortable, but "a woman is not made of iron" and "the attention and affection" made her let go. The late shifts became longer and more frequent. Joana's partner became suspicious of the excessive workload, which there was no way of slowing down. He confronted her with the situation. Joana couldn't hide it and confessed everything: yes, she was in a relationship with Ricardo. But no, she didn't love her coworker. It was just an escape. "The relationship shook, it shook," says Joana, "but it didn't fall apart."The condition was to end things immediately, a condition that Joana accepted. Ricardo, for his part, didn't cope well with the outcome and, according to Joana, went into a destructive spiral: first he separated from his wife, telling her everything that had happened; then he said goodbye and left Lisbon in search of a new life. Joana and Ricardo never spoke to each other again.

A difficult choice

"You reach a point where you have to make a choice, and I did," explains Joana, who guarantees she has no regrets. She met Ricardo when she joined the law firm where he worked. Ricardo was much older than Joana. One day, a case came up that brought them together, "the award of a public works contract, something big, involving many millions", which, due to its size and importance, required many hours of reading, thinking, and debating as a team. "Ricardo had not long been divorced when I met him. I didn't have anyone, my previous boyfriend was still from college." Joana says that she wasn't much of a lover and that she always valued her independence and her space. "Besides, I had and have my ambitions and it's not always easy to reconcile the demands of this job with a romantic relationship. Especially if you're a woman. A man can be a lawyer to his heart's content, go out at night, and take work home with him. But women still seem to be expected to take care of the home and, believe me, there are times when I'd be satisfied just to get more than four hours of sleep, let alone cook dinner." Ricardo had advantages: maturity, the experience of a failed marriage - "I got married early before I was 30, I was very green, very immature, I believed in things that turned out not to be true" - and the fact that he was in the profession helped him to have the capacity to understand Joana's needs that she had never encountered before."Joana, with her youth, gave me back my joy, but a joy with my feet on the ground, without those silly fantasies of imbibing passions."The passion, they say, was first ignited by admiration for each other, until it evolved into a real taste - Ricardo confesses that he missed Joana when the process came to an end. Then he decided to invite her to dinner."I accepted on the spot, I didn't even think about it, of course I did." "It was a very natural beginning, something that had to happen because it made perfect sense for it to happen," says Ricardo. They started dating, openly and publicly, without hiding anything. But the relationship didn't go down well at the firm. "The chairman of the board called me in and said 'Ricardo, either you break up with that girl, or at least one of you has to go'. He didn't want us to set bad examples and he was afraid we'd lose focus." Joana and Ricardo, taken by surprise, were at first shocked. However, after thinking it over, they came to a decision. "Ricardo would stay at the firm and I would leave, it was the most logical thing to do." And so it was."We had to make a pragmatic decision and this was the only reasonable one. It wasn't worth throwing everything away in our relationship and it would be silly for both of us to be out of work."Ricardo and Joana are still dating, but they haven't got married, although that plan hasn't been ruled out. Joana has since been hired by a competing firm.

Their secret

"I separated many years ago, but it had nothing to do with the affair," says Ricardo. "I never dared to tell, nor did I have to. Why tell? To ruin everything? Things are fine as they are," says Joana. Ricardo agrees, "I don't see us having a life together in the future, starting a family, living together." She worked in the real estate company that Ricardo joined, trained him, and was his coordinator. Later, he decided to open his own company and challenged Ricardo to become a minority partner. He accepted. By then they were already in an affair. They were both married. They both had children. It was transgression pure and simple. But Joana doesn't like people talking about betrayal. "I don't betray anyone, least of all least of all my family. I see this relationship as an extension of my professional life: I miss it, it keeps me healthy, active, and awake." Ricardo doesn't mind being "an extension of Joana's professional life" and even adds that "this situation" gives him a tremendous sense of freedom. "We have a very healthy, non-possessive passion for each other," he says. "Joana has her family, I have my life, my privacy. We're good companions for each other. And we have a lot of desire for each other, that's for sure. But we know where the line is, that line we can't cross." They don't exchange non-work messages. They don't follow each other on social media. They don't do programs that don't involve work. "Work is at the center of everything in our relationship," says Joana. "And it's always going to be like that. I don't play games with my family, with my stability," she says. "But I don't give up this secret extravagance of mine either." The secret is kept, we don't tell anyone.

Translated from the original on The Coming Back Issue, published September 2023. Full stories and credits on the print issue.