Antonio Molina - Sepharad

The eyelids, bare of lashes, scarcely part, but there is a gleam of pupils in the dark and a rictus that is almost a smile on the swollen lips that dentures have been pushing out as the face shrinks. One hand lifts very slowly toward you, bones and blue veins and ashen skin; it finds your hand, reaches farther, touches your tear-wet face, recognizes it, feeling it as a blind person would. She murmurs your name, using a diminutive I’ve never heard, undoubtedly the name your mother and she gave you when you were little, and sitting on the edge of the bed you put your arms around her, sinking into the odor of sickness you kiss the unrecognizable face, the hard bones of death beneath transparent skin, you call to her quietly, as if wanting to wake her from all this. You will remember all the times you snuggled near her in this same bed as a child, looking for warmth on cruel winter nights, and how again, when you were sixteen, you sought that same solace on the night they buried your mother.

For the moment I have disappeared, become invisible, blending into the shadow of the corner where I stand, neither guest nor spy, a mute presence from another world and another time. But she, the person I have seen only as she is dying, who seemed to have her eyes closed, has noticed me and motions me forward with a faint gesture of a cadaverous hand, the hand that for you was as warm and reassuring as your mother’s. You smile and look toward me as your aunt tells you something in a hoarse, whispery voice I can scarcely distinguish from the rasp of her breathing. “She says come over here, she wants to see if you are as good-looking as I’ve told her.”

I walk toward her with respect, at first uncertain and clumsy, like someone moving in the sanctuary of a religion not his own. The slits of her eyelids open a little wider. As I bend down, I peer into a life and eyes that are fading, and my lips brush skin that will be like ice in a few hours or minutes. The face so near my own is that of a stranger already lost in the shadowy land of death, and the hoarse voice is a death rattle, an anguished effort to breathe, in which words, barely formed, fall from pale, dry lips. Your aunt’s hand holds mine for a long moment, and I feel as if I am receiving the affectionate pressure of your mother’s hand from across time and from the other side of death, as if she too were seeing me through your aunt’s last gaze, and as if seeing you with me so many years later will dissipate a part of her sadness and uncertainty about your future in this life in which she is not at your side.

In the Greek funeral stelae we saw together at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the dead serenely clasp the hands of the living. The hand holding mine is slightly sweaty, and the pressure ceases at the same time the eyelids close. I panic, I’ve never seen anyone die, but when I move back a little, the eyes open weakly, a movement as faint as the voice was, as the smile on lips the same yellowish hue as the face. Her hand drops from mine; the scratch of her voice becomes a moan, and the doctor, who has a hypodermic syringe in his hand, gently moves me aside. “I must give her morphine before the pain gets worse.” But she shakes her head, her thin gray hair stuck to her temples in swirls from having been pressed so long against the pillows. She says no and murmurs something; the doctor leans down to hear. “Cousin, she’s calling you, she says bend over.” She’s using the name no one has called you since you were a baby, and when you are near, she opens her eyes wide, as if to assure herself that it’s really you. She strokes your wet face, and with her other hand she tries to hold both yours, patting and pulling, as if to tell you something or to kiss you. The hand never lets yours go, but after a slight shudder it is no longer squeezing yours, and the open eyes do not see you. She’s left you without your realizing, just as your mother did, slipped away so stealthily that you are stunned death can happen so quietly, like the faintest ripple on the surface of a lake.

WHO CAN SLEEP THIS NIGHT, in which so much is under way, the prelude to a burial overseen by women trained in the rituals of mourning, in dressing the dead woman before she stiffens, in ordering the coffin and the catafalque on which it will rest, and the candles and large crucifix that for a few hours will lend the somber air of a sanctuary to the house, a place where the cult of the past and death is honored. I hear your soft breathing in the darkness and know you’re not asleep, even though you haven’t spoken for a long time and are lying as still as possible in order not to disturb me. The bed with its cold sheets and the room that smells of mildew and gloom feel strange to me, but must feel stranger to you, who haven’t slept here since the end of your teenage years, the first bed and the first room you slept in alone after you outgrew the crib in your parents’ bedroom, the room where you knew terror and sleeplessness on stormy nights, when rumbling thunder shook the windowpanes and a lightning flash blinded you with its white blaze, where you were afraid to fall asleep and dream of the horror movie your cousin and you saw at the theater that opened in the summer, the two of you huddled beneath the sheets and talking all night long, trading secrets of shameful intimacies, your first period and first boyfriends, slow dancing at the town fiestas with boys who were also summer residents, or in the sinful reddish darkness of the first discotheques you visited, you always tagging along behind your cousin, who introduced you to the giddiness of beer and cigarettes and didn’t seem to recognize any of the limits that held you back — not modesty, not danger. Who could have said then that your destinies would be so different, that she, so like you, born at almost the same time, would slowly disappear into the dark maze of misfortune? She never made her way out, and it would have been so easy for you to wander into it, not consciously but just drifting, as she did. One year your cousin didn’t come back to spend the summer with her parents and the brother who became a doctor, so serious and docile from the time he was a little boy, always the exact opposite of his sister.

Green eyes — her father stares at the photograph in silence, as if asking a question whose answer he must await forever. Curly hair, suntanned skin — hair made blond by the summer sun and swimming pool — the still plump cheeks of a teenager, the smile like a declaration of complacency or defiance, and the chin so like yours. She was very thin the last time I saw her, but still pretty, tall, with curls falling into her face and that gleam in her green eyes and the same crazy laugh I remember from the times we set out on some risky adventure. But by then she’d become so pale, and she spoke with a slur I’d never noticed before, and although she was married and had a child, she kept telling me the same kinds of crazy things she had told me when we started going out with boys in the summer. For instance, that she met a man on a train, and within a few minutes they’d locked themselves in the bathroom for a quick fuck. We were in a cafeteria, and she was smoking too much and glancing around, nervous, making a great effort to contain herself. I could see that she enjoyed being with me, but also that she wanted to leave, to get something she needed, something that made her bite her fingernails and chainsmoke, and we both also saw that despite our mutual affection and memories we weren’t alike anymore, we didn’t have things to talk about and just sat there sometimes in silence, then she would turn and look outside or put out a just-lit cigarette in the ashtray, crushing it violently. We agreed that the following summer we’d go back home together, but I couldn’t because I had too much work, and she didn’t go anyway, and I never saw her again. Not until after her parents had lost track of her completely. By the time my doctor cousin learned what hospital she was in, it was too late. An ambulance had picked her up in the street. He told me she was so wasted he could recognize only her green eyes.