than all the world’s most blossoming youth. No, this was not the right death for her, at least, I had never imagined it would be like this, in the few difficult moments when I could imagine it—so brutal, so final, so unfair, like a young plant being torn from the earth.
But there was no point in remembering what she had been—or, rather, what we had been. Therein lay the explanation: two beings hurled into the maelstrom of one exceptional circumstance and suddenly stopped, brought up short—she, her face frozen in its final, dying expression, and me, still standing, although God knows for how long, my body still shaken by the last echo of that experience. I wanted only to wander through the rooms, as bare now as the stage when the principal actor has made his final exit—and all the weariness of the last few days washed over me, and I was filled by a sense of emptiness, not an ordinary emptiness, but the total emptiness that suddenly and forcefully replaces everything that was once impulse and vibrancy. Blindly, as if in obedience to a will not my own, I opened doors, leaned out of windows, walked through rooms: the house no longer existed.
Knowing this put me beyond consolation; no affectionate, no despairing words could touch me. Like a stock pot removed from the flame, but in whose depths the remnants still boil and bubble, what gave me courage were my memories of the days I had just lived through. Meanwhile, as if prompted by a newfound strength, I managed, once or twice, to go over to the room where she lay and half-open the door to watch what was happening from a distance. Everything was now so repellently banal: it could have been the same scene I had known as a child, had it not been transfigured, as if by a potent, irresistible exhalation, by the supernatural breath that fills any room touched by the presence of a corpse. The dining table, which, during its long life, had witnessed so many meals, so many family meetings and councils—and how often, around those same boards, had Nina herself been judged and dissected?—had been turned into a temporary bier. On each corner, placed there with inevitable haste, stood four solitary candles. Cheap, ordinary candles, doubtless found at the bottom of some forgotten drawer. And to think that this was the backdrop to her final farewell, the stage on which she would say her last goodbye.
I would again close the door, feeling how impossible it was for me to imagine her dead. No other being had seemed safer from, more immune to extinction. Even in her final days, when there was clearly no other possible denouement, even when, terrified, I understood from the silence and the stillness that she was condemned to die, even then I could not imagine her in the situation I saw her in now, lying on the table, wrapped in a sheet, her hands bound together in prayer, her eyes closed, her nose unexpectedly aquiline (I remembered her voice: “My father always said I had some Jewish blood in me . . .”). No other being had ever been more intensely caught up in the dynamic mechanism of life, and her laughter, her voice, her whole presence, was a miracle we believed would survive all disasters.
However hard I try to conjure her back, she is no longer here. So why speak of or even think these things? Sometimes, awareness of my loss strikes through me like lightning: I see her dead then, and such is the pain of losing her that I almost stop breathing. Why, why, I mutter to myself. I lean against the wall, the blood rushes to my head, my heart pounds furiously. What pain is this that afflicts me, what emotion, what new depths of insecurity, what is this complete and utter lack of faith or interest in my fellow human beings? But these feelings last only a fraction of a second. The sheer energy of our shared existence, the fact that she was still alive yesterday, that she touched my arm with her still warm hands and made a simple request, like asking me to close a window, all this restores to me an apparent calm, and slowly I repeat to myself: it’s true, but I no longer feel the same utter despair, my blood does not rise up before the undeniable truth that she is dead—and I feel as if I no longer believed it, that a last glimmer of hope still burned inside me. Deep in some passive corner of my mind, I imagine that, tomorrow, she will demand that I bring her some flowers, the same flowers that surrounded her in the last days, not as an adornment or a consolation, but as a frantic, desperate attempt to conceal the indiscreet presence of unavoidable tragedy. Everything grows quiet inside me, and that lie brings me back to life. I continue to imagine that soon I will go down the steps into the garden and pick violets from the bed nearest the Pavilion, where there are still clumps of violets to be found in the undergrowth; I imagine that if I walk around the garden, as I have done every day, I will be able to make up a small bouquet of violets and wrap them in a scented mallow leaf, while I repeat over and over, as if those words were capable of devouring the last shreds of reality: “It’s for her, these flowers are for her.” A kind of hallucination overwhelms me; I can hear her slow, soft voice, saying: “Put the flowers on the window sill, my love.” And at last I see her, intact, perfect and eternal in her triumph, sitting next to me, pressing the violets to her face.
Slowly I return to the world. Not far off, probably out on the verandah, a woman remarks how hot it is and mops her brow. I try to recast the spell—in vain, the voice has gone. Through the window, I see the sun beating down on the parched flower beds. Feeling my way cautiously through a now unrecognizable world, I walk down the hallway to the room where the body has been laid out. I know there must be a look of almost criminal hunger on my face, but what does it matter? I hurl myself on the coffin, indifferent to everything and everyone around me. I see Donana de Lara draw back in horror, and Aunt Ana regards me with evident disgust. Two pale hands, sculpted out of silence and greed, smooth the wrinkled sheet—I imagine they belong to Uncle Demétrio. But what do I care about any of them? Nothing more exists of the one thing that united us: Nina. Now, as far as I’m concerned, they have all been relegated to the past along with other nameless, useless things. I see her adored face, and am amazed to find it so serene, so distant from me, her adored son, who so often covered with kisses and tears that brow growing pale beneath the departing warmth, the son who kissed her now tightly closed lips, who touched the weary curve of her breast, kissed her belly, legs and feet, who lived only for her love—and I, too, died a little in every vein in my body, every hair on my head, every drop of blood, in my mouth, my voice—in every pulsing source of energy in my body—when she agreed to die, and to die without me . . .
. . . on the penultimate night, as we were waiting for the end, she seemed suddenly to get better and allowed me to come to her. I hadn’t seen her for days because, out of sheer caprice and because she was generally in such a foul mood even the doctor was frightened, she had forbidden all visits and ordered that no one should enter her room: she wanted to die alone. From a distance, and despite the darkness in the room—for she only rarely allowed the shutters to be opened—I could make out her weary head resting on a pile of pillows, her hair all disheveled, as if she had long since ceased to care. At that moment, I confess, my courage almost failed me and I could take not a single step forward: a cold sweat broke out on my brow. However, it did not take me long to recognize her old self, since she immediately addressed me in her usual reproving tones:
“Ah, it’s you, André. How could you be so inconsiderate when the doctor has plainly said that I must have complete and utter rest?”
Then in a slightly gentler tone:
“Besides, what are you doing in my room?”
Despite these words, she knew perfectly well, especially at that precise moment, that there was no need for either of us to pretend. I hadn’t asked to come in, she had been the one to order that her bedroom door be opened—giving in to who knows what impulse, what inner need to know what was happening outside her room? Perhaps she knew that for hours and hours, and days and days, I had not left her door, alert to any sign of life within—a thread of light, a whiff of medicine, an echo—for the slightest sound or sight or smell was enough to make my heart beat faster with anxiety. And so I bowed my head and said nothing. I would do anything, absolutely anything, to be allowed to stay a little longer by her side. Even if she were dying, even if the breath were slowly fading from her lips, I wanted to be there, I wanted to feel that human mechanism continuing to vibrate until the final spring broke. Seeing me so silent, Nina raised herself up a little on the pillows, gave a sigh, and asked me to bring her a mirror. “I just want to fix my face,” she said. And as I was about to leave, she called me back. This time her voice sounded quite
