She spoke quickly, as if speed would diminish the effort of saying something she finds difficult to say, and as if her difficulty might then pass unnoticed by me. That final phrase, although spoken more for her own benefit than for mine, sounded forced, unnatural. She hasn’t said anything I don’t already know, but hearing it put so bluntly troubles me, and I peer timidly into her eyes, two dark hollows barely visible in the steadily thickening mist covering them. The little light coming in through the window is in her favor, and noticing my look, she hurriedly adds, “I’m not saying anything you don’t know, anything you haven’t already guessed, I imagine.”
She spoke as quickly as before, but I noticed the tension in her words, the door left open to the possible error represented by that fragile, hesitant “I imagine.” I sense her overwhelming need as a mother for me to respond, and I nod affirmatively. She doesn’t sigh or smile, but conceals her relief by taking another deep pull on what little remains of her cigarette. She stubs it out with more tinkling of bracelets, then uncrosses her legs and leans forward to replace the ashtray on the table. Only after exhaling the last puff of smoke, as if she had regained her strength, does she say, “We’ve never spoken about it before, but we both know that’s how it is. We know each other so well that sometimes we forget to speak. It’s as if when we think something, we assume that the other must have thought it, too. ‘I’m there in your eyes and you’re there in mine,’ you said to me once when you were very small. You won’t remember. You were only about three. But I remember, because it sums up our relationship so very well. We live so closely, so dependent one on the other, without siblings or cousins, that we forget to speak. We’re like an old married couple. .”
My mother intends this as a joke. She’s more relaxed now and is smiling again as she was at the beginning, but I can’t do the same, I can’t show her that I, too, have relaxed, because I can’t stop thinking about what she said about cousins. She said “without siblings or cousins” without specifying whose, but it’s obvious she meant mine. She has unconsciously brought my attention to the fact that I have no siblings or cousins. I have cousins on my father’s side, but I never see them or have anything to do with them, and so it’s as if I had no cousins. I don’t have grandparents, either, and my only real aunt is Delfina, but she didn’t mention that. There’s something about her remark that shocks me, and even though it’s perfectly true, it still troubles me to hear her say it, as if she had gotten inside my head or as if my mind were an open book. I don’t know if she realizes this, but she carries on almost without stopping, “It’s good that we should be so close, but it can be awkward at times and lead to misunderstandings and false impressions, because we don’t talk enough, or because we assume that the other person already knows what we think because we’ve already thought it.”
I’m listening intently despite my blushes, despite the darkness that’s gradually filling the room but that my mother, so sunk in her own thoughts, appears not to notice. Nevertheless, I feel quite calm, and my thoughts emerge from somewhere deep inside, as if I were not the person sitting across from her but someone else watching and listening to myself; there’s what my mother says, what the person with her is thinking, and then what I’m thinking. I know we haven’t yet gotten beyond the preliminaries and that it will take a while to get to wherever it is she’s heading, but my second me, the one accompanying her and whom I only see and hear in the distance, is not quite so calm and feels somewhat tense and irritated by my mother’s slow way of speaking, by her feigned seriousness, by the absence of the name she still hasn’t mentioned and yet is the one name that cries out to be spoken.
“I know it’s my fault. I haven’t deliberately kept silent, I just didn’t notice that all the while time was passing, and so the two come to the same, in the end.”
My mother, who raised her voice slightly as she spoke those final words, falls suddenly silent, reaches forward as if to get another cigarette, thinks better of it, and withdraws, glancing around her, as if she’s only just noticed how dark the room is and is thinking that perhaps she should turn on a lamp; then she looks at me and says, “It can hardly be news to you. You knew he would never come back to live with us, even though we haven’t actually spoken about it. You knew as well as I did. .”
I see how difficult she is finding it to continue, and I understand, too, just how extreme that last statement is from the speed with which she corrects herself, “All right, not as well as me, the difference being that you were under no obligation to speak, whereas I was.”
She’s finding it hard to go on, I feel the care with which she weighs each word, and even though the darkness covering her face has thickened, I see her struggle and frown.
“I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted to unconsciously delay something that brooked no delay, but meanwhile, time has passed and made the decision, because sometimes it’s time that decides, not us.”
She has gotten into her stride now, and the words emerge from her mouth fluently, but for a few moments, I stop listening and wonder what it was that brooked no delay. Her words are ambiguous. I can’t understand her, just as I can no longer see her face, which is almost completely obscured now, just a pale, evanescent smudge against the earth-brown backdrop of the armchair and the mauve light of the window. What was it that brooked no delay — talking about it, or not wanting to think about it? It’s true that we both knew, but why exactly does he no longer live with us, I ask myself. The fact that we both know doesn’t explain anything, and only makes the need for an answer more urgent.
“The problem is that nothing in particular happened to prompt me to tell you. And it’s difficult if there’s nothing putting pressure on you to do something, if nothing happens and only time decides.”
My mother falls silent and looks at me, then decides to pick up the cigarette she had previously rejected. She keeps her eyes fixed on me while she lights it and doesn’t reply to what I’m thinking without saying but that she can doubtless sense. She’s gone back to that same idea, that time decides. I don’t know if it’s true, but just supposing it is, when does time decide? What happens in between so that one day, we know what we didn’t know or hadn’t wanted to know before? There’s no answer, only my mother’s eyes fixed on me as she exhales the first puff of smoke and leans back again in her chair.
“Nothing happened, and yet we both know.”
She’s getting tangled up in her own thoughts and repeating herself, and it’s that inability to progress that seems to me to confirm that she’s lying, or at least not telling the whole truth. She’s finding it hard to justify her inaction. This doesn’t annoy me, it doesn’t interrupt my thought process. I think about Paris and wish she would say something about that. Perhaps she’s right and nothing did happen, but without knowing whether or not she was there with him, I can’t believe it. That void will always be there. Like the void of the name she doesn’t say out loud but is a constant presence. Why then and not now? Time helps only in some respects but is, by its very nature, too insubstantial, too slippery.
“There was no precise date. There was nothing that made any announcement or explanation necessary. I didn’t get married again, and we haven’t changed the way we live. There was no need. Just because something ends doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be replaced by something else.”