kiss or caress me, but both kisses and caresses were directed at me as if I were no longer there. It wasn’t her soul, but her lips—impregnated with a thick saliva that was like the last residue of earthly passion and fleshly effort—that were trying to revive the delirium of the past. In the depths of that search, faces, situations, and landscapes bubbled away. And I said nothing, too moved to speak. In her struggle, she must have felt my silence. In her febrile state, she must have thought it was simply a remnant of ill feeling from one of our old arguments—and she perhaps blindly imagined that I could still be seduced by the future she laid out before me, a future in which I no longer believed. For I knew this was the final act, and an unstoppable sob rose in my throat and remained stuck there, preventing me from saying a word. Then, slowly, she ran her hand down my cheek to my lips.
“Ah, so that’s how it is!” she exclaimed in a voice of inexpressible sadness. “That’s how you show your gratitude to me for allowing you to come to my bedside? You’ve clearly already forgotten everything, André.”
Her fingers continued for some time to stroke my cheek and play upon my lips as if trying to cajole some laggardly word from them, and then, sitting up in bed, she again began mechanically combing her hair. Her eyes occasionally flashed like a gradually dying light, but it was the sign of a storm that was already moving off, leaving the ravaged countryside to sleep. And I could not have said what darkness it was that I sensed covering the landscape of her body, what moldering, grave-like smells already emanated from her words.
“You’re right, André,” she said at last. “You’re right. I understand now: you’ve finally found your path. All it took for you to realize you were on the wrong path was for me to step out of the way.” Her grave voice became enticing, wheedling. “But I know you, André, I know you can’t live without women. I bet you’ve already seduced one of the housemaids . . . an easy enough conquest, eh?”
Overwhelmed by grief, I cried:
“Nina!”
And when I leaned toward her, she pushed me away, almost violently.
“Don’t call me that. I forbid you to call me by my name.”
I withdrew, cowed by that voice so reminiscent of the old, authoritarian Nina. She regarded me in silence for a while, doubtless pleased with the effect of her treacherous words. Quietly, like someone gauging the impact of what she was about to say, she went on:
“I bet you’re already anticipating the hour of my death. You want to be free of me . . .”
“No!” I cried out desperately, flinging myself forward onto the bed. “How can you be so cruel, how do you even dare to say such things? You like to see me suffer, Nina, you always have . . .”
Yes, I knew this, but what did it matter now? All that mattered was being able to embrace her, cover her in kisses, and tell her one last time, before she departed, that we alone existed, and that heaven and hell and everything else were futile, childish notions. Scrabbling at the blankets, my head buried in them, I finally allowed my tears to flow freely—and I felt her body tremble beneath my touch, first withdrawing, then allowing itself to be caressed, as sensitive as a plant battered by a furious wind. Only then, when I had revealed my utter devastation, did peace seem to reign in her heart. She slowly stroked my hair.
“I’m so unhappy, André, so jealous. And yet you must stay and I must go . . .” and she sobbed quietly, as if not daring to make too much noise or to wipe away the tears streaming down her face. I looked up and dried her eyes with one corner of the sheet.
“Nina, I swear there’s no one else in my life. How could there be when I’ve known you?” Tentatively, and when she made no objection, I lay my head on her breast. What did I care if she was ill, or if the cracked, thirsty mouth of decomposition were about to burst from the very flesh my greedy lips had so often kissed?
Then she grasped my head firmly between her hands, and her hollow eyes fixed on mine:
“Swear again so that I can believe what you’re saying! You wouldn’t dare lie to a woman about to depart this world, would you?”
“Never,” I lied, and my voice sounded calm and decisive.
“Then swear, swear now!” she begged.
But swear what, dear God, swear that there was no other woman in my life, swear that she wasn’t at death’s door? And yet, with my face pressed to her bosom, I did swear and, if her peace of mind had depended on it, I would have sworn whatever she wanted me to and committed all kinds of perjury. When I looked up, she was gazing into my eyes, and in her eyes I saw the frightened, disoriented expression you see in the eyes of certain animals. It was as if she were staring beyond me and beyond my words into a world she could no longer understand. She let out a sigh, pushed me away, and went back to combing her hair. She must have exhausted all her strength, though, because the comb fell from her hands and she turned deathly pale, crying:
“André!”
I took her in my arms and gently repositioned her so that she was once more leaning against the pillows. She was breathing hard. Silence fell, and in that silence, all the objects one usually associates with illness—medicine bottles, rolls of cotton wool, pills, the whole accumulation of things that, for a moment, I had managed to ignore—suddenly reasserted themselves, as if tearing their way through a mist that had, until then, been omnipresent. I stood looking at her, and an unfamiliar machine, weaving who knew what dark, mortal web, began to function again inside her. I couldn’t say how long we stayed like that, until finally she came to and said:
“What happened? What’s wrong?”
I tried to calm her, saying that she was still weak and had probably talked more than she should have. She shook her head and answered in a strangely serene voice:
“No. That moment was a warning. There’s no doubt about it, André, the end is coming.”
She again took my hand in hers and lay very still. Someone, not that far away, gestured to me in the darkness. I had to leave. But I could feel time flowing through my whole being and fixing me to that spot as if I had put down roots. The doctor came over to me, touched my shoulder—he was a shy young man, who had only arrived from Rio a few days earlier—and indicated the door as if to say there was no point in my insisting. The world regained possession of my dream. Before leaving, however, I looked back one last time: Nina was sleeping, but nothing in her face bore any resemblance to that of a living person.
(That night, I walked endlessly about the garden, prowling up and down beneath the lit window of the room in which she lay. The doctor’s shadow came and went against the white backdrop of the wall. At one point, I saw my father bending over her; he looked even wearier than usual. What would he be feeling, what emotions would he be hiding in his heart, what sense of sad and entirely inappropriate pride? I even considered speaking to him, and in my mind there stirred something like an impulse to console, but my lips refused to utter a word and, when I met him on the steps, as he, like me, came down into the garden in search of solitude, I let him pass, my face a blank.)
. . . When I placed the flowers on her lap, she opened her eyes, and I saw then that she appeared already to have left this world. She could still repeat the same gestures as the living and even say similar words—but the vital force was leaving her body and she was standing on that impenetrable frontier from which the dead gaze back indifferently at the land inhabited by the living. And yet, out of some kind of survival instinct, or maybe it was mere habit, she took the violets in her hand and raised them slowly to her nose, just as she used to do in times past, except that she no longer breathed in the perfume with
