Often the people who love you most are the ones who hurt you most. Our needs do not have to be those of the people who live with us and for whom we are responsible. We are malleable. Childhood keeps us in chains, I think and repeat so as not to have to pay attention or listen, so that what she’s saying now does not touch me, and so that I won’t remember it. It’s all circles and more circles. It’s all explanations for things that have no explanation, that happen and can’t be avoided, like me sitting here in the dark listening, like having no brothers or sisters, like her bedroom door standing open at night, and her never-failing devotion to me. I think, because it distracts me and allows me to escape from her indecision and her nervousness, which is increasingly evident in the thickening silences, in the cigarettes she doesn’t smoke but would like to if it weren’t for the fact that the end is approaching and she wants to remain focused and unfettered. I think, and I escape, and I remember, and I refuse to recognize the trace left by the girl who was and will never be again, there in the thick, anachronistic darkness that dilutes and melds us together and that my mother clearly wanted, because she doesn’t mention it and doesn’t get up to turn on the light. I think, and I remember, and I feel the future approaching, along with the omens telling me that life afterward will continue just the same as it always has. I think, and escape, and remember, but above all, I try not to hear what she’s saying, although sometimes I do and I can’t always prevent a particular phrase seizing hold of me and not letting go. Like this one now: “It had to happen at some point. It’s hard, but I couldn’t allow your dissatisfaction and your distrust of me to continue to grow as it has over the last few days. I couldn’t allow you to continue to blame him when, if he’s guilty of anything, it’s of hurting me, not you.” Or like this: “It’s necessary. I have to do it even though there’s a risk you won’t understand. No, you will. You will understand, because you know that it would be worse if I didn’t tell you.” Or this question addressed to herself: “How can I keep silent, how can I continue to feed your incomprehension or your feelings of disaffection when it’s in my power to stop that?” Or this, later on: “I would hurt you, and you would live forever with that shadow, the shadow of someone who didn’t have the joy of seeing you grow up.” My mother circles and circles, each sentence is a step forward, then she stops and ponders that sentence more deeply; these are the circles and repetitions that allow what we have said to settle before we take the next step, the same tactic she used on that trip to Burgos. My mother talks and talks, and for a few minutes, I fool myself into thinking that she will never finish, that she will go on and on and never reach her goal, that tomorrow will come and we’ll still be here and nothing will have happened. She won’t, she can’t, I think, to distract myself from the knowledge that she will, in fact, because we need to start all over and this is what she wants. She won’t. She can’t, I repeat, once again deceiving myself as a silence falls, the silence that signals the beginning of the end, and I’m still thinking about Paris and thinking She won’t, she can’t, even though at that moment she will and she can and I only manage to say to myself No, no, no before she opens her mouth, which appeared to be closed even though she was speaking, and says it slowly, and calmly. A curve in the road, a particularly tight bend. She opened her mouth, and she said it, and I heard it. She has gone down to the bottom of the hole, and I’ve heard what she said, and her words have remained stuck in my head, hanging there, like a familiar lamp we know is there, above our heads, because we bought it and took real pleasure in it for a few days, but that we no longer look at, because it’s always there and we see it without really seeing it. Her words hang in the air, and my mother falls silent, and I don’t speak or think, and she’s looking at me, and I’m looking at her, and thinking about what she has just said, but I don’t rationalize it or accept it, and it doesn’t worry me, because it’s as if I still haven’t heard or still don’t know. That’s it, I tell myself, but still I don’t react or get up from the armchair in which I’ve been sitting for about two hours without moving, so close to my mother, who, sitting in that chair obscuring the window, has moved occasionally, leaning forward to pick up and light her cigarettes. That’s it, she’s said it, I tell myself. And again: That’s it, she’s said it. And again: That’s it, she’s said it. Four times I do this, until my mother leans across the silence and touches my arm and I think that she has, at last, finished, and that we can, at last, get up. These are cold, inauthentic thoughts, I know, strategies I resort to in order not to go too deep into the meaning of what she has revealed, while she, who has been silently watching me and caressing my arm, starts talking again, this time more melodiously and inquisitively, asking for my response to a question I haven’t heard. I don’t answer, and she continues talking, more hesitantly and uncertainly than before, sometimes trying to sound harsh and authoritarian and pretending to put on a cool, calm front about what she has told me and the next moment, succumbing to curiosity and misgiving about my response that still hasn’t come, and understanding perfectly well why I don’t speak. She talks and talks and once again circles around what she has told me, involving me, explaining again, her hand still on my arm, although she has left her chair now and is crouching on the rug in order to be closer to me and see what she couldn’t see from her chair because the light is not in her favor now. My mother talks and talks until gradually the words grow fewer and she no longer expects any response from me. My mother talks and talks until she no longer has anything to add, and she squeezes my arm and caresses it with her thumb, gradually bringing her speech to a close, because there are no more reasons to give, no new points of view with which to justify what she has revealed to me. She has said everything, and she comes out now only with the occasional sentence, and silence slowly begins to impose itself, until her words cease and she is just watching me and waiting for my reaction, her hand making that painful, monotonous caress. I don’t know how much time passes after that, but in my self-absorption, my serene but artificial not-thinking and not-yet-speaking, it seems like a very long time. Until after a while, a while in which nothing happens, just her crouching there on the floor and her thumb stroking my wrist, she gets slowly to her feet, complaining that her legs have gone to sleep, and she kisses me and, standing up now, takes the two steps that will carry her to the door and the light switch. And only then, when my mother has turned on the ceiling lamp, which I suddenly wouldn’t be able to describe without looking at it, and the living room lights up and I see the white walls as if they were freshly painted, and I see her in her beige sweater, I see the bun on the top of her head and the bracelets over her tight sleeve, only then can I reproduce in my mind what she said minutes before and which I have been putting off while she talked on and on trying to explain what can’t be explained: He isn’t your father, I say to myself. We have the same father. And then everything ends and begins again.