Talking to Ourselves: A Novel (16 page)

A forest on my bookshelves and a desert in my house. Yet, no matter how far I venture into the forest, I always come across the same desert. As though all the books in the world, whatever they are about, spoke to me of death.

Stories, stories, stories. Escapes, detours, shortcuts.

How Mario would have loved this collection of letters
between
Chekhov and the actress Olga Knipper, consorts at a distance. He always travelling, she always in the theatre. Both speaking of future re-encounters. Until their correspondence is interrupted. And toward the end, suddenly, like an improvisation amid an empty stage, she starts to write to her deceased husband. “So, as I write,” she says to herself, she says to him, “I feel you are awaiting my letter.”

If death interrupts all dialogues, it is only natural to write posthumous letters. Letters to the one who isn’t there. Because he isn’t. So that he is. Maybe this is what all writing is.

Do you agree? I have such a lot to tell you. And even a lot to ask you.

Let’s say you said yes.

Dear Mario, I have put a photo of you in the living room. I write
living room
, and realize for how long you haven’t lived with us while we had meals, relaxed, watched TV. Companionship isn’t about experiencing great moments together. True
companionship
is the other stuff. Sharing a sincere doing nothing.

I put you on one of the highest shelves, near the window, so that you can breathe or amuse yourself a little. Until recently I felt incapable of looking at photos of you. It was like moving my hand toward a sharp object. You gazed into my eyes so trustingly, so shamelessly alive. Those photos triggered in me a feeling of unreality in the opposite direction: what was impossible, dreamlike, was outside the portrait. Not you on that side, grinning. Us here, now. This half a house.

Before, when we used to look at photos of me in a bikini back when we were dating, so skinny, with flowing hair, firm breasts, I felt insulted. As though someone had touched my arse and, when I turned round, there wasn’t anyone there. These days I need to go back to our early pictures, to spy on us in our youth. Seeing us cheerful, not suspecting the future, I have the impression I am regaining a certainty. That the past wasn’t my invention. That we were there, somewhere in time.

Looking at you again when you were beautiful, I wonder whether I am celebrating or denying you. Whether I am recalling you as you actually were or forgetting you when you were sick. Reflecting about it today (if pain can be reflected about and doesn’t disperse like a gas under the pressure of reason), the biggest injustice about your illness was the feeling that this man was no longer you, that you were gone. But you weren’t: he, this, was my man. Your worn-out body. The last of you.

When I placed you among the books, Lito came over, he stood staring at the photo and said nothing. After a while he went into his room and came out with a ball.

I remember, do you remember?, do the departed retain something, somehow?, when we ran into each other at university. You were strolling with your hands in your jean pockets, greeting the girls as you went by, as though you were just visiting. You looked at us with the expression of a marauding prole. I dethrone princesses, you seemed to be saying to us. You sauntered among the desks with the air of knowing far more urgent things than Latin. That was what irritated me. That was what seduced me. Despite all your boasting to the contrary, you actually liked studying. What you disliked was being a student. “I don’t mind having to read all this stuff,” you would say to me. “But having to prove it to some moron in a suit,” you protested, you
swaggered
, “is insulting.” What a liar, how handsome I thought you were.

Meanwhile, there I was attending lectures from Monday to Friday. Scrupulously taking notes. Studying on Saturdays (what a dummy!). Graduating with honours. Passing my exams early. Believing that way I would secure some certainty from among the many daunting possibilities. We used to say my vocation was clearer than yours. That wasn’t the whole truth. A vocation is a never-ending mission. In other words, a refined way of avoiding the unknown. You weren’t afraid of the unknown. Perhaps that’s why you died first.

And I remember how planning trips for others bored you, how you dreamt of quitting the travel agency, and your brother insisted you should give Pedro a try. What a notion. I gradually got used to that name. To the point where whenever I saw a truck I thought of Pedro. I never told you this. The way you never told me that, one fine day, you stopped paying the car insurance. I
found out last week, when I tried to buy a cheaper insurance. Where did that money go? What happened to the fixed-term deposit? It no longer matters. A secret for a secret.

“One night, while he was waiting for them to kill him at any moment,” I catch my breath in a novel by Irène Némirovsky, “he had seen the house in her dream, as now, through the window,” some nights, facing our bedroom window, as my book slips from my hands, I see you smoking on the balcony, crinkling up your eyes at the same time as me, and everything grows dark, and you are like an ember flaring up and going out, “he had awoken with a start,” the book falls to the floor, I open my eyes suddenly, I look out at the balcony, there is nobody, “and thought: Only before death can one remember in this way.”

Today, when I checked my bank balance, I discovered I had more money than yesterday. I stood holding the slip of paper and
calculating
, adding up days, subtracting expenditures, motionless before the cash machine. Today wasn’t payday. No one owed me money.

At home I examined my account over the last few months. I made a printout: a plummeting balance and then a sudden peak. I imagined a plane diving into the sea, and the pilot waking up with a start.

The transfer had no reference. The entry was blank. I emailed my bank to find out which account it came from. For an instant, my heart stopped: the surname was yours.

The first name was Juanjo’s.

When I met you, you were in the habit of travelling every summer. You would make decisions on the spur of the moment. You came and went. You already lived as if you were in a travel agency. You were always more adventurous than I. But every epic has its cook. Because to go on an adventure, and this problem dates back to Homer, every hero needs someone to admire them, to wait for them.

And the one who stayed behind studying, while you reflected about the freedom of the wanderer, was this idiot here.

This is me: in order to forgive, I need to regret something even worse.

I just survived a movie by Susanne Bier, distressing, like all Scandinavian movies. In it a kid says:

“Grown-ups look like kids when they’re dead. My mother looked like a kid. Like she’d never grown up. Like she’d never been a mother.”

In an attempt to explain the inexplicable, the doctor says:

“There’s a curtain between the living and the dead.
Sometimes
this curtain goes up. For example, when you lose a loved one. Then, for an instant, you see death very clearly. Afterward the curtain comes down again. You carry on living. And it passes.”

The kid simply replies:

“Are you sure?”

A surprise: my sister is here. Can you believe it?

In fact, she told me last week she had booked a flight. But since, as you know, she usually changes her plans at the last minute, I wasn’t going to take her arrival as a given until I saw her at the airport. It’s been a while since we touched each other. You can’t see the grey hairs, wrinkles, thickening waist, and heavy hips so well on the screen. I thought she had lost her looks. I wonder how I must seem to her, now I am no longer the younger sister but the widow.

Since your illness, it no longer surprises me to hear about other people’s misfortunes. I respond as if they had already told me. What shocks me is the way the lives of others seem to carry on as before. I felt this when I embraced my sister, and, after so long, she smiled uneasily and told me, yes, things were fine, as always.

Once we were in the car, she asked about Lito. She calls him
my nephew
and she barely knows him. Before she arrived, I thought I’d show our son some photos of his aunt. And I realized he couldn’t really point her out. As soon as she looked younger or wore her hair differently, he no longer recognized her. At first, I was exasperated with him. I raised my voice, I complained he never paid attention, I wouldn’t let him have chocolate. Then I blamed myself for restricting relations with the family, for having come between Lito and your brothers. Then I took offence at my sister for not calling enough, hardly ever writing, not visiting us more: all those things that, in theory, had never bothered me. In the end I thought I understood where my anger came from. If my son had trouble recognizing his aunt, that meant before long he would start being unsure about your face.