style="font-size:15px;"> “I can’t,” she said.
Her voice was no longer recognizable either, it was a cold, mechanical thing, a sound uttered with great difficulty, still audible, but soft and insubstantial as cotton wool. I didn’t have the courage to say anything and simply stood by her side, asking God, with lips that lacked the flame of faith, to give me a little of her suffering. Roused perhaps by the flicker of consciousness that allows the dying briefly to distinguish some tiny detail in the surrounding heap of agglutinative shapes, she suddenly looked at me. Then, in a flash of recognition, she tried to conceal what was happening to her and turned away. And there we were, so near, so far, separated by that powerful presence. I had promised myself I would be sensible and would force the grief in my heart to keep silent, not because I cared what others might think, but purely in order to avoid creating the tense atmosphere of farewell that surrounds the dying. However, seeing her already half-immersed in night, and as far from me as if her presence were a mere memory, I felt beating in my breast a pulse of despair, of irrepressible anger. And by some bizarre coincidence—or perhaps it was simply the ineluctable nature of the hour—I sensed that both our memories were filled with images of times long gone. (Her, sitting by the pond on the day when I was so filled with desire for her and she touched my lips with her fingertips, saying: “Have you ever kissed a woman on the mouth?”—or on that other day when, sitting on a fallen tree trunk, she suddenly slapped my legs, crying: “Why, you’re almost a grown man!” And many other memories came flooding in, multiplying as if under the influence of some narcotic, forming a gigantic, colored spiral, in which her resplendent figure could be seen, like a sun visible from all angles.)
She turned to me as if she had read my mind:
“Ah, André, if only we could live again as we once lived!”
Not daring to take that thought any further, a thought too full of sinful ideas, ideas that should be repelled at that supreme moment, her hand brushed against one of the fallen violets and she picked it up as if trying to pluck a humble witness from the past, then let it fall again—and the flower dropped to the floor.
“But perhaps . . . perhaps . . .” I murmured, not even knowing what exactly I was trying to say.
At that word, a desperate flame, possibly her final plea to the fast-retreating material world, flared into life.
“Perhaps!” and her voice echoed around the room. “Ah, yes, perhaps, who knows, André?”
And she tried to sit up. Her cold, bony hand drew me toward her and, once again, with the same thirst the traveler feels as he pours out the last few drops of water from his canteen, her eyes sought mine—devouring my outer and my inner fabric, my final shape and form, my very being, in order to go beyond that sad, enclosed thing that is the very heart, the umbilical cord, of the material self, and to wander, lucid and uncertain, through my essential self, looking to see if the love that had bound us together was true—seeking, too, the final word, the farewell, the power, the suggestion and the love that had made of me the unique creature chosen by her passion. A cloud obscured my vision and I had to lean on the bed to steady myself.
“Who knows?” she said again. “Maybe this is not the end of everything. So many things happen, so many people recover.”
And drowning me in her burning breath, she added:
“Do you believe in miracles, André? Do you believe in the resurrection?”
When I did not immediately reply—feeling as if I had been hurled violently against some hard, dark wall—she shook me, dredging up strength from her impatience:
“You promised you would tell no lies. Come on, speak—do miracles exist?”
“No,” I answered, and was myself startled by the calm voice in which I said this. “Miracles don’t exist. And there is no resurrection either, Nina, for anyone.”
The silence that followed was so vast that I felt as if an unexpected twilight had descended upon us. The objects sitting coolly in their places were growing dull and turning into still, metallic shapes.
When she spoke again, her voice sounded as if it were rising up from the depths of a well:
“We’ll go somewhere far away, André. I hate this town, this house. And there are other places, there are, I swear, where we can live and be happy.”
I could stand it no longer and tried to free myself from her grasp. This went beyond anything I could bear. I would have preferred distance and solitude and never to see her again, rather than this face-to-face interrogation, in which not the smallest subterfuge was allowed. She sensed my reluctance, and her eyes filled with tears.
“You want to run away from me, don’t you? You want to run away, André. It’s not the same as it once was.”
I don’t know what superhuman energy was driving her just then, but thanks to those feelings, she had managed to sit up in bed, despite the beads of sweat running down her thin face and despite her broken breathing, as if she were about to faint. Now, instead of holding me only by my hand, she was tugging at my arm, my whole body, in a last effort to force me to submit. I struggled, because I was afraid she might die in my arms. I bent lower, although still without entirely giving in to her will, and since, in this ongoing battle, she continued to tug at me, her face sometimes touched mine and I felt rising up into my nostrils the stale smell of an ailing body that has spent too long in bed. This awoke in me only a feeling of intense, desolating pity for her. Our struggle lasted perhaps a minute, and when she finally realized she was going to lose, some instinct, some wounded, outraged female essence gripped her—and she raised her hand and slapped my face. It was a rather feeble slap, but I stared at her in astonishment, with eyes that held not even the faintest glimmer of resentment.
We gazed at each other and she managed to gasp out:
“You’re running away, André, running away from me. And that slap is so that you will never forget, so that you can say one day: she slapped my face to punish me for my indifference.”
And in a quieter tone, with a smile so sad I felt my heart contract:
“And so that you will never unthinkingly betray me, André. So that you will never lie and say: yes, I sinned, but it’s not something I’m proud of.”
Only then did the tears come into my eyes, not out of grief, because, by then, I was incapable of any emotion, but because I knew then that I could not help that poor, unfortunate creature still clinging to the last glimmerings of life. And what a life that had been, what a past, what a future she was evoking, making one final effort to imprison me, when nothing could now save us on that well-trodden path. Nothing. And how wretched we were, and how I felt in my own flesh the despair of that condemned creature. When I turned back to her, she saw the tears on my face.
“I’m a fool, André, I have no right to talk to you like that. I know that you and I, that our love can never die. How could you possibly forget me when I taught you everything you know?”
She fell silent, but kept her eyes fixed on mine, as if she wanted to drag from them the truth about the situation in which we found ourselves. It was easy enough to say that we, that our love would never die—but how to believe it, if all around us everything was slowly fading? Gravely, almost solemnly, she spoke again:
“I want you to remember, André . . . in case . . . in case anything should happen. I want you to remember and for your heart never to lose sight of me. I want you, on certain nights, to remember how I touched you—never to forget the first kiss
