I sit there watching her. It’s true, as everyone says, that we look alike, but even more so when she’s frightened. Then, we’re all but identical. The large bags under her eyes are the same ones I contemplate every morning in the bathroom mirror, a little more wrinkled, perhaps, but just as deep. It’s like a reflection of my own ruin, only grotesquely amplified, a bit like a verdict that this whole debacle of mine could be a lot worse than it already is and that the particular process of demolition in which I’m immersed continues unabated. It’s enough to let time go unhurriedly about its business. For the moment, I recognize the anguish in which she loses herself as my own, I can sometimes feel myself tumbling down slopes that are in her head, into wells that belong to her. With her walking stick, she roams these corridors that always smell of stale soup and used diapers, and she does so with my own weariness, much as I stagger through my days under the weight of hers on the other side of the ivy-covered walls. In my bones I can feel the weight she bears on her back, and I even sometimes walk on her aching legs, almost always rummaging around, just like her, among sunken memories. I think of my current confused state and these nerves writhing on top of one another within me as the small outpost of a dementia that belongs to her.
I know she’s going to tell me the same old stories. There hasn’t been much variety to her repertoire lately. Things from way back, from a time long since passed. I take a deep breath and resolve to be patient and to try and listen to those tales as if I were hearing them for the very first time. Sometimes she recounts them as a memory, and sometimes it’s as if we were still in the midst of that time. She takes me back to the streets of her childhood, which smell of wood and soapy water trickling down the gutters along the edge of the sidewalk, and once again tells me how she and her friends, in the games they played back then, liked to sneak into the houses in which a wake was being held, spurred on by a morbid dare. In the entrance to every house there stood a table covered in a black cloth, a book of condolences, and a silver platter bearing cards, one corner folded over as a token of mourning. The girls would climb the stairs, trembling on the inside, acting prim and proper and truly downcast until they reached the right floor. The door was always ajar. They might grab a cookie or two as they passed through the room, or a handful of sugar cubes, and as soon as they’d seen the body, they would sprint down the stairs, half-hysterical, doubled up with a laughter that was anything but light-hearted. They would never let a chance pass them by, and whenever they spotted the macabre signs in a doorway, a new game would begin in which none of the girls could be left behind. The game was cut short once and for all one winter afternoon on the Calle Padre Huesca when they discovered that the dead body lying on the bed belonged to a child their age. She still describes the scene as if she were seeing it now, the boy’s face so pale it was almost white, how dry his lips looked, the short trousers, the rosary beads in the clutches of stiff fingers with the cleanest, most neatly trimmed fingernails she had seen in her life. I think that what she’s getting at when she tells me all this is that, quite simply, one day her childhood came to an end for good, and it might well have been precisely that day.
One thing then leads to another, and she inevitably moves on to another of her old favorites: the Easter procession the year in which one of her classmates headed out with the brotherhood performing the Seven Words while brandishing a banner bearing the words I’m thirsty, and how that same classmate, just days later, drowned in the river, and what folks said, wavering between terror and jest, and the fear of laughter, and sorrow, for back then the incense that filled the air was still a smoke that arrived dense from the world of shadows, sent forth by a wrathful God who, though it might appear otherwise, took note of everything and sometime forgave and sometimes did not. This was during the same period when she was banned from taking to the streets to join the Procession of the Holy Burial during Holy Week, owing to the public disorder caused by the scenes of terror and the bloodcurdling screams from the balconies, the uproar and the charging throngs on the sidewalks, born of the popular belief, very firmly entrenched, that wherever the sinister float came to a halt to let the bearers catch their breath, someone would die that year. And she described to me the blade of that rusty scythe in the clutches of the skeleton vanquished and trampled underfoot by the angel, the scent of melted wax, the sparks that flew when the Romans’ spears scraped against the cobbled streets, the wailing of children, and the bare feet of the hooded penitents, their eyes deep behind the slits in the cloth like hidden, menacing animals, their black leather gloves, their bloodied ankles, the chains they dragged behind them as they walked. And the fear. Though she spoke to me of a time in which I had yet to be born, it was as if she were refreshing memories of my own, for the fact is I, too, have seen all of that, except for the famed Procession of the Angel of Death. My mother would not have us miss the Easter processions for anything in the world, which leads me to think that she considered that all that cowering, that fear she felt as a young girl perched on the edge of the Calle del Coso with her little bag of lupini beans, would in the long run do her children some good, almost as if she wished to offer us her very own nightmares, something about which she could later console us, thus making us more alike, bringing us closer together and causing us to need, just as she had begun to some years previously, to leave the light on in the hallway in order to be able to sleep. What she was looking to give us was a certain idea of intensity, much as when she told us bedtime tales of terror and abandonment. She was equipping us with all of the darkness we were unable to see with our own eyes and which, by contrast, made us appreciate all the more the daylight, the everyday household objects, the hours of tedium, the bowls of soup, the homework notebooks, the scent of soap on sheets and pillows, her own scent as she leant over our beds, just before switching off the light, to wish us goodnight, one by one, and sketch an invisible cross with her thumb on our foreheads. One cannot truly love a safe haven unless there are dark forces lurking outside, a world brimful of orphanages and tombs and beasts, of children who have gone hungry that night and a wind that howls as it whips around the corners in neighborhoods in which we had never set foot.
I listen to my mother talk, seated in front of her coffee, with those girlish gestures and her gaze lost in the distance, and I picture her mind as existing within a ravaged landscape — fallen trees, dried-up ravines, houses torn down. I think of those twin panoramic images on the news showing the same view of a city before and after an air raid: on the left, a cathedral tower topped with bells and storks, and on the right, the heap of rubble that lay in its place; on one side, the sturdy bridges over some river anywhere on the map of Europe, and on the other, the solitary pillars protruding from the water’s surface like concrete stumps. Then I turn my gaze on myself and wonder if, after a certain age, the mind can be anything other than a ravaged stage — raised floorboards, nails jutting out here, there, and everywhere, stripped wires, spotlights that shine no more — and if there is nothing for it but to place there, half in darkness, everything we see or that happens to us, so that it might blend in with our existing memories, the desolation of before, the ancient fear. Once you have a few years on the clock, this new form of a priori sensitivity to the outside world emerges sooner or later — the broken stage of a twobit theater in ruins on which the world unfolds, now moth-eaten, with no show to premiere, poorly lit. That’s where everything must go, good and bad. Outside those borders lies the dark realm of the noumenon where, owing to its sheer vastness, there is room for nothing, nothing happens, and nothing has a name.