My mother was the first one to open her eyes. And for her, waking up meant only that: to open her eyes, to suddenly open her eyes without changing her expression, to open her eyes and keep on with the next word of her story. Salomão slept the heavy slumber of dejection for not having found a day laborer’s job or any kind of paying work. I slowly lifted my mother up by the arm, dressed her, and led her to the kitchen. I gave her some coffee. And I wanted to talk to her. I held her face between my hands. And I said nothing, since there are no words for calling her. Mother. Death is that solitude from where you don’t see me, where we’re not together. And I wanted to say mother. But I could only look at her, I could only see the silence of the word mother in the clear and cool air, in the empty kitchen inhabited by our two solitudes. And I gave her my hand. The skin of her rough fingers furrowed by knives that had cut potatoes into strips, that had chopped collard greens and sliced melons. Their bones deformed. Her hands I know so well and held so often, where I find some slight warmth and longing. And I sat her down in the yard. I sat her down in the same shady spot as yesterday and every day. I brought her the miniature pots and pans and silverware for dolls. And I stayed and watched her. She grabbed a clump of grass, collected drops of dew inside a tiny pot, gathered a pile of pebbles and another of pure dirt. Then she carefully mixed portions of dirt, grass, and dewy water. The morning was far from her and far from me. In the mounting heat I watched her, as if I hadn’t already seen her and it weren’t just a painful memory. Behind me the bedsprings groaned with the wearied sound of Salomão getting up.
The kitchen walls were the sad and faint reflection of the morning’s light and innocence. From yesterday’s dishes, turned upside down to dry, I grabbed a pot for lunch. I acted as if preparing the food were of the utmost importance. Standing there, making useless motions with my hands at the usual speed they worked, I watched Salomão from out of the corner of my eye. Disheveled and unshaven, looking anxious, with his shirt misbuttoned and half out of his trousers, and his belt too loose, Salomão stumbled into the kitchen like a man drunk on brandy, searching for my gaze with his wide-open eyes, like a helpless soul. And whenever his face came within a foot of my eyes, I pretended to be looking for an onion, or wiping up a drop of oil, or picking up a potato peel from the floor. Salomão, who was never mine, whom I only felt sorry for but who imagined he was mine, since he had always imagined he was someone’s and had never, since childhood, let his actions be themselves. Salomão, in the kitchen, like a body without a body’s substance, like a thing, like a body that was a breeze or a silence, like a piece of a person: an innocuous voice, a dull gaze: a piece of a person that had seen itself suddenly promoted into a whole person, with full responsibility and a full quota of suffering. And in the sharp clarity, as the boiling water lifted the potatoes and I felt I was literally boiling within, in the moment when the walls were walls and everything seemed to be exactly what it was, with everything definitively existing at each instant, I looked at Salomão, who was looking steadily at me. Eye to eye, as if we saw each other. And in his gaze or in my gaze, I found what we might have been, were it not for life: the tiny moments we would have deemed greater than these and greater than all moments, since we would have known no others. And in that clarity, as I began to take notice of Salomão, of his face and his shoulders and his arms, the whole of him began coming undone: the skin on his face started cracking like parched earth, coming loose from his flesh and dripping thick blood; and in that red blood, in the bones poking out from beneath his flesh, his eyes kept looking at me, larger and with the same weakness and the same innocence. It was like death, like dying. I lowered my gaze to Salomão’s unlaced boots, and when I looked back up, I saw his face intact and his eyes suspended in the same fragility, like a woman or child on the verge of tears. But I knew it hadn’t been an illusion of my seeing, I knew it for certain, I knew it was the world’s ultimate clarity. I drew closer to him. I stripped him, as if I were stripping an image or a statue or a child, and in the bedroom I picked out some freshly washed and ironed clothes. A pair of trousers, a white shirt. And time mercifully seemed to enlarge to become the moment when we were most together, in which all our tenderness converged and all our gestures asked forgiveness for what wasn’t our fault. I dressed him in the white shirt, which was still smooth on his body, I dressed him in the trousers, placing two coins in one of the pockets, I slowly tightened his belt. I sat him in a chair and, amid the light and shadows, I patiently and carefully and affectionately combed his hair. And as I opened the door for him, as I saw him walk past me, knowing he would go to Judas’s general store, as I saw him grow smaller in the distance and vanish at the end of the street, I knew for certain that it was the last time, I knew that never again, never again would we meet.
I didn’t sit down. Still standing in the kitchen, with my gaze fixed on nothing, as if fixed on the horizon, I felt a hot breeze that brought with it all the sounds of the backyard, that outlined my body inside my dress and that took it a little farther, like a flag. I placed my hands on the small mass in my belly and thought it was death inside me. I have death inside me. My gaze and the breeze stopped. Slowly, overcoming the force of grieving hands present in each movement, I crossed the kitchen and stabbed a potato with the fork, and it was already cooked through. With the fork and the wooden spoon and with profound resignation, as if it were a task for the condemned, I mashed the potatoes in the soup. And my feet stepped to the back door, from where I watched the sun’s rays passing through the leaves of the trees and piercing the shade all the way to the ground. Delineated, well-defined sun rays, like those that penetrate the quiet water behind dams and also become water, perfect rays of luminous water. And amid the peacefulness I heard the song of the sparrows, the scattered and harmonious noise of the sparrows, like a distant silence, still tolerated, still allowed by the morning’s mild heat, and the uninterrupted whispering, the infinite whispering of my mother, like a sound from earth, like a sound from the beginning of the world. I drew near to my mother, to her body hunched over something, to her flaccid, old-woman’s body. She was hunched over a figure she had sculpted. I drew nearer, to see. And it was me. That face made of soil and small stones and grass was me, as if it were made of skin. It was me. Those hands calmly resting on the figure’s belly were mine, with the fingernails and lines across the knuckles in perfect detail. It was me. I lifted her up and we stood there, mother and daughter. With the morning all around us. I took her hands. She didn’t look at me, but for the first time in my life I was certain that she saw me. I know that my eyes betrayed a grief as large as the morning, an invisible grief, in the moment when the invisible was all that could be seen. And time was that moment multiplied over and over. Our hands clasped over and over, reaching out in front of us and with our arms ending at the same place where our hands were clasped. Our gazes over and over, with their weight like the world, like the earth and the static gesture of things existing. And within that vast time there existed the word mother, as if it had never existed before. The word mother that I didn’t say, but that was. Mother. I took her into the kitchen. I sat her down in a chair. Slowly, one by one, I removed the pins of her hair bun. I let down her long and smooth, gray and white hair. I untangled it with long strokes of the comb until it fell over her shoulders and down her back. I ran my fingers through her hair. I felt the strands slipping through my fingers. I redid her hair bun. Her face looked cleaner and younger. I gave her something to eat. Spoonful by spoonful, as if I were counting them and saying one two three. As if someone were secretly and silently counting them, so that they seemed inexplicably counted. I fed her the soup until the spoon clanged against the bowl, which I tilted to scoop out the last drop. I washed her face and dressed her. I brought her some clothes that looked like new, all washed and ironed, some nice clothes. A skirt and a blouse. I dressed her and took her into the bedroom. In between her lips’ mumbling, while I made the bed, I noticed that the faint sounds of the man shut up in a windowless room writing had grown yet fainter and slower, the ink sticking to the paper with the languid sigh of a flower, as if the words had suddenly taken on new meanings. And I again took my mother’s hands into my own. Our gazes were made of silence. The silence was death. I laid her down in bed. I positioned her head on the pillow. I pulled her feet together. I joined her hands on top of her chest. My mother against the white sheets. Purity. The air like cool water on her skin. The clean whitewash of the walls dawning perpetually. My mother, a girlish mother, mother, a childish mother, skin, girl, mother. I stroked her face gently, as if I weren’t touching it, and, without touching it, felt it. I looked at her. I looked at my mother for the last time, and I left her there. Mother, as if you were just resting, as if you were just waiting for sleep to arrive. Mother, how I’d like to have held you in my arms, how I’d like to have been held by yours. For you death isn’t cruel, mother, since you died to everyone a long time ago, since you only kept existing to remind me of love, and now that nothing in me can turn back, now that I’m sheer vertigo, your mission is finished and you can rest. Farewell, Mother. Thank you, silence. In the kitchen I placed the scarf on my head and tied it around my neck. I went out without looking back but imagining the cool shadows, the noises that would arrive from the street for no one at all to hear, the kitchen forlorn and forgotten, like a coffin beneath the world.