Then she was back in the hospital and growing worse, her heart weaker than ever, but her face, colorless against the sanitary white of the pillows, took on an expression of serenity and surrender, and she stopped asking when she could go home. At night she was delirious with thirst or fever, or from the tranquilizers and injections they gave her to calm her unruly heart, and she imagined or dreamed that she was looking down on the swift, transparent river, dipping her cupped hands into the water and lifting it streaming and sparkling in the rays that slipped through the trees. But just as her lips touched the water, it escaped through her fingers, and she was still dying of thirst, and some part of her that remained lucid accepted that she would never again see the stair-stepped houses on the hillside or the valley of orchards with the ever-present sound of water in the irrigation ditches and the breeze in the treetops and waving willows. She twisted and turned in the bed, in the tangle of tubes and straps, moaned, half sleeping, half awake, and then you sat up with a start in your synthetic-leather armchair, with a rush of anguish and remorse for having dozed off when she might need something, might ask and you wouldn’t hear, might die there beside you, gone forever without your knowing.
YOU WILL SEE PERFECTLY, at a precise point in the distance, what you saw as a little girl when you arrived every year for your summer vacation, and what she saw before you were born, when her eyes began to look out on the world, eyes like yours, preserved in your face after her death, the way a part of her genetic code is preserved in every cell of your body. Dead twenty years, she still looks through your eyes at what you will discover with a thrill of happiness and sadness when the car takes the last turn and spread out before you is the landscape that was a paradise not only after it was lost to you but also in the time you enjoyed it with the rare clarity of a child, unaware how sensations from your mother’s childhood were being repeated in you, just as the shape and color of her eyes are repeated in your face, the hint of sweetness and melancholy in her smile. The fertile river valley was covered with green orchards of pomegranates and figs and crisscrossed with paths of loamy soil beneath the concave shade of the trees — poplars, beeches, willows — a water-saturated vegetation nourished by land so gravid that it welcomed with unique delicacy the tread of human feet, yielding slightly to the weight of a body, absorbing it with a welcome as hospitable as that of a river breeze.
“I want to be buried here, I don’t want to be alone when I’m dead, surrounded by strangers in a cemetery as big as a city,” she used to tell you. I don’t mind dying, but I don’t want to be buried where no one knows me, among strange names, that would be like living again in one of those apartment buildings where I was an outsider, stuck in my house waiting all afternoon for my children to come home, and my husband after nightfall, reserved or talkative, bragging about his job or bad-mouthing the people in his office, superiors or subordinates, names I hear and get used to but then stop hearing and forget, just as I get used to the new cities where his work takes us and where I never have time to get completely settled, never have what I want most: my own things, furniture I’ve picked out, a routine, that’s what I miss the most, being able to settle sweetly into the passing of time, to get established, to occupy a secure place in the world, as I did as a child living in my small town, and although I always had a head for fantasy and imagined journeys and adventures, I enjoyed the safety of my home, my brothers and sisters, the presence of my father, the joy of looking out the window of my room and seeing the valley with its flowering almond and apple trees and, high above them, the bare tops of the mountains, with that color earth that’s the same as the houses on the road to the cemetery where I want to be buried.
It makes me sad to leave life so soon and not see my children grow up or sit again with my sister to count and make a list of supplies in the large kitchen that looks out on the garden and the valley. Really it’s more sadness than fear I feel, but there’s something more, something I didn’t count on, a strong desire to be relieved of tormented nights, medicines, sudden crises, trips in the ambulance, hospital rooms, all the tubes and machines. I used to imagine that it all would end and I would get well, but now I know I won’t; even though they tell me they’ve found a new medication, I know that the time I have left will be exactly like now, or worse, a lot worse, as my heart grows weaker. I long to rest as I did when I was young and behind in my sleep. I would jump into bed and pull the covers over my head and close my eyes tight to get to sleep as quickly as possible. I would cover my mouth to hold back the giggles that burst out like the water in the public fountain when you pressed the copper or bronze handle down too hard. The water roared into the jar, cool and deep as the mouth of a well, all those years ago, before there was indoor plumbing and we women went with our water jugs to the fountain high on the hill, where there were always swarms of wasps. My sister would complain that since she didn’t have hips, the full jug always slid down her side. Oh, that summertime water, how I would love to wet my dry, cracked lips in it now, in the drops sweating through the cool belly of the jug, feel against my cheeks the cool beads of moisture, the pores breathing in the clay. That’s what I want, the only thing I want now, to fall asleep, to sink as I do when they give me a pill, or, better, a shot I can feel spreading through my bloodstream, through my whole body. Things fade: faces bending over me, beloved voices growing fainter, distant, and each time it takes a stronger effort not to let myself go along, as gently as closing your eyelids when you fall asleep.
The voices of my two daughters, and their faces so alike and so different, blend into the same sensation of tenderness and farewell, their hands clasp mine, covertly looking for my pulse when I’m lying so still I seem to have died. I have an idea what my older daughter will think when she’s lived as many years as I have, “How strange, I’m as old as my mother was when she died,” and she will wonder what I would have been like had I gone on living. She will finish the courses she’s wanted to take ever since she entered college: she will be a teacher, marry her boyfriend, follow the path that she picked out when she was little and that she’s never veered from. But what’s to become of the younger one? Only sixteen and still amazed by the world, dazzled by the wealth and confusion of her imaginings. One day she wants to be one thing, and the next the opposite, one minute she’s taking in everything but then suddenly only one thing pleases her, and for her there’s no hurry or urgency, not about growing up or what to study or finding a boyfriend or getting married. She still lives as if she were floating, so weightless that any idea can sweep her away, the way I was when I was her age, full of dreams inspired by the movies, the novels I read behind my father’s back, every day painting a different future for myself, cities and countries I’d travel through, but I wasn’t bitter about being stuck in the village, I loved the house so much, though now I’ll never see it again, the paths in the country, the water in the ditches, the fun my girlfriends and I had on Sunday afternoons, the summer night dances, protected by my father’s kindness and my sister’s affection. At least she will live longer than I do, will look after my daughters, she who never had a husband or even a boyfriend, her hips so slight she couldn’t rest the water jug on them on the way back from the fountain.