Like Family by Paolo Giordano Page B

knew how to approach her. My memory of those days and nights is sketchy and contradictory, riddled with rancor and appalling fantasies in which Nora betrayed me with someone, anyone.
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    What Galen does not explain clearly is whether humors can be mixed together like paints or whether they coexist separately, like oil and water; he does not explain whether yellow produced by the liver combined with the red of blood creates a new orange-colored temperament, nor whether an exchange between individuals is possible, through contact, effusions or even pure sentiment. For a long time, I thought it was. I was sure that Nora’s silver and my black were slowly blending together and that the same burnished metallic fluid would eventually course through both of us. Then, too, we were both convinced that Mrs. A.’s glowing lymph would add another nuance to our own, making us stronger.
    I was wrong. We were wrong. Life sometimes narrows like a funnel, and the initial emulsion of the humors produces layers. Nora’s exuberance and my melancholy; Mrs. A.’s viscous stability and my wife’s ethereal disorder; the lucid mathematical reasoning that I had cultivated for years and Babette’s intuitive way of thinking: each element, despite assiduousnessand affection, remained discrete from the others. Mrs. A.’s cancer, a single, infinitesimal clot of unruly cells that had multiplied relentlessly before becoming evident, had called attention to our separateness. We were, in spite of our hopes, insoluble in one another.

Bird of Paradise (II)

    T here are progressions whose epilogue is written in the prologue. Did anyone, including Mrs. A., even for a minute think that things could go any differently than they did? Did anyone ever mention the word “cure” to her? No, never. At most we said that things would get better, but we didn’t believe that either. Her decline was wholly inscribed in the pulmonary shadow etched on the first thoracic plate. All these cancer stories are the same. Maybe. That doesn’t mean that her life wasn’t unique, deserving of a story all its own; until the very last moment, her life was worthy of the hope that fatemight make an exception for her: special treatment in exchange for the services she had rendered to so many.
    The way things were between us after the summer, Nora and I had no thought for anyone else. It was one of Mrs. A.’s cousins who called us on a day in late November. “She wants to see you. I don’t think she will last much longer.”
    We discussed whether we should bring Emanuele with us. I argued yes, that it made no sense to deprive a child of the sight of suffering, and besides, he was big enough to handle it. But Nora didn’t want the image of Mrs. A. dying to wipe out all the other memories.
    She was right. All that remained of Babette, under the many layers of blankets in the strange bed, was a shrunken, gray form. The room was permeated with a sickly-sweet medicinal odor and something indefinable that, when I bent down to brush the skin of her cheek in a hesitant imitation of a kiss, I found was coming from her lips: a whiff of fermentation, as if her body had already started dying from inside, one organ at a time. There was a strange light, shimmering and somewhat otherworldly, perhaps because of the gleaming elements that reflected it: the gold-embroideredbedspread and translucent curtains, the gilt wardrobe handles and brass fixtures.
    As soon as she sat down on the edge of the bed, Nora burst into tears. I saw them again then, after nine years, in the same roles as before but reversed: Mrs. A. lying down and my wife at her bedside. She was trying to fasten a bracelet around Babette’s skeletal wrist, one we had bought her so that she might have a sign of us to accompany her on her upcoming journey, but Nora’s fingers were trembling and she kept missing the clasp. Even in their reversed roles, it was Mrs. A. who