While I lingered, absorbed in my thoughts, on the leaf, the court rose, and so did the onlookers; only Leo remained seated in his cage and lit a cigarette. Perhaps it was a scheduled recess, I don’t know, but I tiptoed outside. The air was clear and the sky blue; in front of the courthouse an ice-cream cart seemed to be abandoned, and few cars passed by. I started to walk towards the docks. On the canal a rusty barge, apparently without an engine, was gliding silently by. I passed near it, and aboard there were Leo and Federico, the one with his devil-may-care expression, the other grave and thoughtful. They were looking at me questioningly, obviously expecting an answer. And at the stern, as if she were holding the tiller, sat Maddalena, radiant with youth and smiling, like a girl aware of her youthful radiance. Do you remember Dusty Road? I wanted to ask them. But all three were static and motionless, and I realized that they were overly coloured, lifelike plaster figures, in the caricature poses of mannequins in a shop window. And so, of course, I said nothing but merely waved as the barge carried them away. Then I walked on, towards the docks, with slow, cadenced steps, trying not to tread on the cracks in the pavement, the way, as a child, I tried in a naive ritual to regulate by the symmetry of stones my childish interpretation of a world as yet without scansion or meter.
WAITING FOR WINTER
Then the smell of all those flowers… positively nauseating. The house, too, the rain veiling the trees, the objects in glass cases — Spanish fans, a pregnant m Madonna of Cuzco, baroque angels, seventeenth-century pistols — all of them nauseating. This, too, was sorrow, one of its signs of pain — the sheer unbearableness of the things around us, their stolid, peremptory presence, impervious to change, living in unassailable immanence, unassailable because of its flagrant and innocent physical presence. I shan’t make it, she said to herself; I know I shan’t make it. As she spoke, she touched her warm forehead and braced herself against the back of the chair. She felt a knot of grief in her throat, and she looked in the mirror. She saw a noble, austere, almost haughty figure and thought: That’s me, it’s not possible. But it was she and there, too, lay her pain. Part of the sorrow of an old woman, wounded by death, was the pain already inherent in that figure of a pale, well-dressed old lady, her head covered by a black lace mantilla, a mantilla made with weary skill, as she well remembered, in a dark room, by taciturn and unhappy Spanish women. And she thought of Seville, many years before, the Giralda Tower, the Virgin of the Macarena, the solemn commemoration, in a hall with sober dark furniture, of a long-dead poet.
At this moment there was a knock at the door, and Francoise appeared. “Madame, the Minister is asking if you will see him.” What a treasure, Franchise! She seemed so tiny, so frail, with her mouselike face and the round glasses which made her look like an ageless child; she was so totally and obtusely intelligent. “Tell him to wait in the small drawing room,” she answered. “I’ll be there in a few moments.” She liked to talk this way. “A few moments,” “a second,” “let him wait a moment” — these gave her an urbane way of being proud and detached from herself, like an actor who wants to be a different person on stage in order to forget the emptiness he feels within. She looked again into the mirror and adjusted the mantilla. You mustn’t cry, she said to the beautiful old woman looking out at her. Remember, you mustn’t cry.
But she couldn’t have cried. Because the Minister was pink-cheeked, pudgy and dressed in black; he bowed and kissed her hand; he was a man who was equal to the situation; he was cultivated, unlike most of his kind, and sincerely admired the dead writer. These things didn’t call for tears. If he had been a mediocre, indifferent governmental type, carrying out his official duty, uttering appropriate set phrases and ceremonial commonplaces, then she might have given way to her diffuse and ambiguous sorrow. But not with the man who stood before her, genuinely regretful for the loss to the nation. “Our culture,” he said, “has lost its greatest voice.” This was incontrovertibly true, but it left no room for tears. She thanked him with a clear, honest sentence. This, too, belonged to the man-made conventional code of mourning, which has no connection with the dark shapes of sorrow. How she would have liked to cry! Then he struck a note of gratitude, a feeling less intense than sorrow, one which, for the moment, lay at the outer edge of her mind, together with nostalgia. And, with that gratitude, he spoke of plans and projects, of a debt of appreciation, which the government wanted to repay with a museum or a foundation, giving grants and fellowships and official celebrations. Recurrent celebrations, he specified. This brightened her, brought her a comfortless relief, causing her to think of a future that had already arrived, of a conventional monument. She reflected, also, how the nation had grown, matured and turned intelligent, in its fashion, something that he had hoped for all his life. Yes, she said, yes, certainly the nation deserved this inheritance. She thanked the Minister for the proposal and the offer, but she was still living in this house and here, for a short time, she would stay. Life can last only so long, and she didn’t want to share hers with a nation’s feelings, however noble.
Meanwhile the sun had risen higher, and a crowd had gathered in the garden. The Minister took his leave, and she went to stand at the window. The rain had given way to watery mist, which seemed to rise out of the ground. Cars drew up silently, and out of them got solemn-faced men whom the master-of ceremonies met with an umbrella and led to the door. The functional and efficient formality of a state funeral afforded her subtle relief because it appealed to her pragmatic sense of ritual. She realized that she could not linger in her solitude, and so she drew the curtains and started down the stairs, without holding on to the banister, slowly, her head held proudly high, her eyes dry, looking people in the eye as if she saw nobody, as if her look were trained elsewhere, perhaps towards the past or into herself, but certainly not there, among the objects of the tastefully arranged vigil room. She took her place at the head of the coffin, as if she were watching over a living man rather than a dead one, waiting for people to bow, kiss her hand and murmur words of sympathy and farewell. And while she stood there, removed from herself as well as from others, her heart beat calmly and regularly, remaining apart from the absolute devastation that was like a physical weight on her shoulders, from the terrible, incontrovertible evidence of the facts.