So I’ll have to take my memories to their conclusion, to the point they reach, to the moment when the flow of what might feed them halted, when they were lopped and no bud remained.
Nobody was at home. That had never happened to me: nobody was there. My sisters had gone to visit their grandmother, something they now did frequently. In fact, they’d resurrected her since Esther’s death, plucking her from nothingness with a vigorous, pleading affection that I interpreted as their greatest deceit. From never visiting her, they now had a program of almost daily visits, because if they had lost their Mom in circumstances nobody ever explained to me, they weren’t prepared to be without a Mom again, and leapt into her frozen arms to protect themselves from death.
There was nowhere I could leap. Grandma couldn’t bear the death of her child: along with her I had been erased from her gaze, had faded and lost the form her affection had granted me and that I so appreciated. When I looked her in the eyes the memory of Esther came between me and her — Esther’s face when she was my age, when she was younger than me, when she was going to give birth to me, when she went to New York to receive her prize…Between Grandma and myself the reflection of Esther, a curtain of tears that prevented my approaching her without drowning in sorrow…
Everyone realized this. People knew I was her favorite, that I was the preferred granddaughter. Now people knew I was a piece of inert flesh who had to be cared for, whom people mentioned with worried looks: Poor girl! Who will look after her?
So my sisters were out. And Dad? He was out. Shut off by themselves in their room, inaccessible, the maids were out as well; they’d asked permission to go out. Where had Dad gone?
Why had they left me alone? I was afraid, this time afraid of everything and everybody. Not only what pursued me was a threat, what surrounded me was too: my white bedroom curtains, curtains alive like insects, like animals caged in a zoo I wouldn’t want to visit, slumbering beasts awoken and enraged by my presence. And the curtains were nothing by the side of the stormy sea, the sea of the floor of the house! Who could step without risking their leather on the cruel wood, the greedy carpet, the silvery beams from a light that didn’t reveal what surrounded me, but spotlighted me as the enemy to be attacked?
I began to feel the problem wasn’t in the house and with me: the threats from everything that wasn’t persecuting me were merely an indication that something fatal was being plotted outside the house. I switched on the radio and sat down to listen, lying back in the armchair to hear what fatality had descended over the city. I listened to the announcer’s warm voice introducing songs, listened to the songs, and felt my whole body on the sofa waiting for the fatal news to interrupt the flow of the radio: those who had left the house (I was convinced of that much) couldn’t return, couldn’t cross the flames or the dense layers of smoke or the flood or the explosion or whatever had happened out there. I stretched myself out alone in the armchair, in the house they’d all finally abandoned because they knew it was inhabited by the one who’d left them forever and that it was my fault.
When I woke up it was already night, early or deep into the night I wasn’t sure. Nine, ten, twelve, three a.m.? Who knows what time it might be. Had somebody come home? I walked over to Dad’s room: asleep, and even snoring. My sisters weren’t in. Who knows if the maids had returned? Esther hadn’t. I went to my room. Sat on the edge of my bed, unfastened my shoes, and was going back to sleep in yesterday’s clothes, clothes which for the first time in my life hadn’t been removed and changed for nightwear, and there, from my shod feet I saw them all looking up at me, my pursuers looking at me from my own feet as if from the window of a high building which they inhabited. I felt real panic! From my feet? And where were my shoes? I spotted the shoes I was wearing a moment before in their rightful place in the vertical shoe rack that hung at one end of the wardrobe.
I ran barefoot from my bedroom, not knowing where to look, not wanting my gaze to linger on myself, I didn’t want to see myself, didn’t want to see who I was or what I was looking for or where I was going; fear struck me down: I had no strategy for trying to escape from my pursuers. I ran and ran and ran. Never walking. Never looking where I was heading. I had lost everything.
When I opened my eyes, I was opposite the door leading to the street. What was I intending to do? Leave the house? Go where?
Had the disaster outside happened? I thought I caught the smell of smoke, air thick with small, carbonized particles, still glowing, because they cruelly stuck to my body. My breathing burnt me. I tried to open the door to the street but couldn’t — it was stronger than I was. My pursuers were there. I could hear them breathing next to me. I felt they would harass me no more and, instead of relief, my body ceased to weigh on the earth; my body was weightless: my body reached upward, obeyed a different pull of gravity. I fixed my gaze on an area of the garden, sought solace there. A hole, a hole as if dug out by an animal revealed a heart beating beneath the earth, a heart like a frog’s but much bigger. I stooped down, picked up the heart in my right hand, held it, clenched my fist around it. My pursuers departed, my body regained its own weight, filled with weight at this contact with the warm heart the earth had given up to stop me: a warm, dry heart, soft but strong as if made of wood or leather. It palpitated. I held on tightly.
My panties were wet; the white cotton impregnated by liquid warm like the heart. They were soaked and I felt it so distinctly, a warm liquid beginning to trouble me, running down my thighs. What was it? What was running from inside me, betraying me? Soon, from the moment I saw the house lights come on and heard Dad call me, I could see my white socks stained with the same blood I knew had stained my panties and legs. What had snapped inside me? I thought: “It’s because I dreamed no more,” because another night I thought the thread holding them, like the electricity cable in the eucalyptus, would at any time lash out inside me. “Is that right?”
Why did I think that? Because I’d let myself be defeated and, at a loss, was contemplating my own defeat too late. Then I thought: “Don’t be foolish, it’s the heart you’re holding!” And I let go. Then my body, with no other defense, now weightless, couldn’t stay a moment more and went up, up, and up, accompanied by those who had always pursued me.
I saw Dad come out and shout my name in the garden. I heard him run to the phone, I saw him (how did I see this?) find me in bed, in my pajamas, with my clothes scattered untidily over the floor…I was asleep, or rather, she, his daughter, was sleeping forever, in flannel pants soaked in blood, on stained sheets, her eyes closed, her face set in an undeservedly serene expression.
The doctor could not tell him why I had died.