After the Winter, page 22
“I’ve just arrived,” I told her. “Give me an hour to take a shower and unpack my suitcase. I’ll be there for dinner.”
Before getting into the shower I took off the prosthetic leg. I washed sitting on a plastic seat, with the aid of a walking stick. I sorrowfully admired my new leg’s technical sophistication and recalled that some time back I had been thrown out of a restaurant for shouting that I wanted to be a robot. As I headed for Tribeca in a taxi, I thought about how hard it is for us human beings to maintain physical or psychological stability. I recalled the words of Juan Ramón Ribeyro, one of César Vallejo’s most illustrious compatriots to whom Cecilia had introduced me: “Imperfect beings living in an imperfect world, we are condemned to find only crumbs of happiness.” What is the alternative? Perhaps to accept our limits, our contradictions, our many needs; to try to be stronger than the weight of any guilt. To focus our talents on what we can do best, our minds on what we can best understand: one thing at a time. One life at a time. To live without losing, as much as is possible, the capacity to return to a center from where we can trust, hope, be happy right now in spite of it all, in spite of the pain and the certainty that life, essentially, is pain and impossibility. I continued thinking of this as I rode in the taxi. I arrived at Ruth’s building and pressed the number of her apartment, surprised I still remembered it. Her voice came onto the intercom and I recognized that note of quivering excitement I had not heard for months. As soon as I opened the door, I was greeted by the smell of apple strudel, and the welcome feeling of someone returning home after a long journey.
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
I decided to stay in Paris, partly to finish my studies, but mainly for Sathya. Making a huge effort to concentrate I finished my thesis and, once I got my diploma, began a doctorate, this time with a new supervisor. Recently, I have discovered that, as well as research, I am minded to write other sorts of things. In a stiff-backed red notebook I began to keep a kind of diary where I regularly note down the most important memories or scenes from my life that for some reason or other I am obsessed with. I like, for instance, to describe the people I have lived with and do not see anymore. I co-opt them as characters. Sometimes I mix them up, or invent plausible fates for them, benign or macabre. I do not know what value any of this has, as biography or literature, but what I can say is that I enjoy it and this is enough for me. Haydée reckons it is a good idea. According to her, I have a lot of experiences still to digest and I ought to make the most of being so introspective. Since I moved, and also since she got pregnant for the second time, I see her less and less, but this does not prevent us from enjoying intensely the time we do have together. On Saturday, for instance, I spent the morning with her and the little girl walking around Châtelet. We bought a couple of sandwiches and a salad and had an impromptu picnic in the gardens around the Tour Saint-Jacques. As her little girl crawled around next to us, we lay down to rest on the grass. Among the different subjects we talked about that day, Haydée asked me if I had heard from Claudio.
“He stopped writing to me a long time ago,” I replied.
“He’s probably still running, like Forrest Gump,” she said, and we both laughed with a kind of mocking fondness.
Haydée’s voice grew weaker as she was overcome by sleep. I was left in charge of Sathya. As I watched her crawl back and forth near the sandpit, I thought of the huge number of children who had never once interested me before. For a few months now, I have had the impression that I am seeing far more pregnant women on the street, starting with my best friend. Before we got to the tower, we took several turns with the buggy around place Joachim-du-Bellay, where a flock of kids was racing around like mad, precisely where the old Cimetière des Saints-Innocents used to be. I thought that, just as spring follows winter, making us forget its harshness year after year, so there will always be children running around and playing on top of our dead. And they, the children, were the ones who, while they would not consign our dead to oblivion, would best be able to renew our desire to live, despite the painful absence of our loved ones.
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Photograph © Rita Platts
ROSALIND HARVEY is an award-winning literary translator and a teaching fellow at the University of Warwick. She has worked on books by Guadalupe Nettel, Elvira Navarro, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Héctor Abad Faciolince, among others.
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Guadalupe Nettel, After the Winter
