a breeze as cool as the current, the clean, swift water where she dabbled her bare feet one summer morning in her early youth. Irrigation ditches snaking through heavy shade, gurgling water hidden beneath thickets of blackberries and willows, scales of gold glittering in the sun, clean pebbles on the bottom shining like precious stones, and in the eddies, spongy masses of eggs brushed the feet with the same delicate feel as water or mud, and bubblelike protuberances, imperceptible to the untrained eye, betray the presence of half-submerged frogs. She swallowed saliva and her throat burned, and once again her mouth was dry, her rough tongue licking lips that you didnât moisten because you fell asleep,
overcome by the exhaustion of so many sleepless nights, now in the hospital and earlier at home, when they released her after her first stay and it seemed she would recover, would regain her health even though she was fragile and frightened. But once she was back home, it was obvious that she belonged in the hospital, for in those few days she had become a stranger to the place and things that once had formed the framework of her life. She would walk with a strange air through the kitchen or the living room in her bathrobe, as if she couldnât find her way, get lost in a corridor or stand before an open closet, looking for something she didnât know how to find, trying unsuccessfully to resume the domestic patterns of the time when she was well, the simplest tasks: preparing a snack in midafternoon, changing sheets.
Then she was back in the hospital and growing worse, her heart weaker than ever, but her face, colorless against the sanitary white of the pillows, took on an expression of serenity and surrender, and she stopped asking when she could go home. At night she was delirious with thirst or fever, or from the tranquilizers and injections they gave her to calm her unruly heart, and she imagined or dreamed that she was looking down on the swift, transparent river, dipping her cupped hands into the water and lifting it streaming and sparkling in the rays that slipped through the trees. But just as her lips touched the water, it escaped through her fingers, and she was still dying of thirst, and some part of her that remained lucid accepted that she would never again see the stair-stepped houses on the hillside or the valley of orchards with the ever-present sound of water in the irrigation ditches and the breeze in the treetops and waving willows. She twisted and turned in the bed, in the tangle of tubes and straps, moaned, half sleeping, half awake, and then you sat up with a start in your synthetic-leather armchair, with a rush of anguish and remorse for having dozed off when she might need something, might ask and
you wouldnât hear, might die there beside you, gone forever without your knowing.
Â
YOU WILL SEE PERFECTLY, at a precise point in the distance, what you saw as a little girl when you arrived every year for your summer vacation, and what she saw before you were born, when her eyes began to look out on the world, eyes like yours, preserved in your face after her death, the way a part of her genetic code is preserved in every cell of your body. Dead twenty years, she still looks through your eyes at what you will discover with a thrill of happiness and sadness when the car takes the last turn and spread out before you is the landscape that was a paradise not only after it was lost to you but also in the time you enjoyed it with the rare clarity of a child, unaware how sensations from your motherâs childhood were being repeated in you, just as the shape and color of her eyes are repeated in your face, the hint of sweetness and melancholy in her smile. The fertile river valley was covered with green orchards of pomegranates and figs and crisscrossed with paths of loamy soil beneath the concave shade of the treesâpoplars, beeches, willowsâa water-saturated vegetation nourished by
overcome by the exhaustion of so many sleepless nights, now in the hospital and earlier at home, when they released her after her first stay and it seemed she would recover, would regain her health even though she was fragile and frightened. But once she was back home, it was obvious that she belonged in the hospital, for in those few days she had become a stranger to the place and things that once had formed the framework of her life. She would walk with a strange air through the kitchen or the living room in her bathrobe, as if she couldnât find her way, get lost in a corridor or stand before an open closet, looking for something she didnât know how to find, trying unsuccessfully to resume the domestic patterns of the time when she was well, the simplest tasks: preparing a snack in midafternoon, changing sheets.
Then she was back in the hospital and growing worse, her heart weaker than ever, but her face, colorless against the sanitary white of the pillows, took on an expression of serenity and surrender, and she stopped asking when she could go home. At night she was delirious with thirst or fever, or from the tranquilizers and injections they gave her to calm her unruly heart, and she imagined or dreamed that she was looking down on the swift, transparent river, dipping her cupped hands into the water and lifting it streaming and sparkling in the rays that slipped through the trees. But just as her lips touched the water, it escaped through her fingers, and she was still dying of thirst, and some part of her that remained lucid accepted that she would never again see the stair-stepped houses on the hillside or the valley of orchards with the ever-present sound of water in the irrigation ditches and the breeze in the treetops and waving willows. She twisted and turned in the bed, in the tangle of tubes and straps, moaned, half sleeping, half awake, and then you sat up with a start in your synthetic-leather armchair, with a rush of anguish and remorse for having dozed off when she might need something, might ask and
you wouldnât hear, might die there beside you, gone forever without your knowing.
Â
YOU WILL SEE PERFECTLY, at a precise point in the distance, what you saw as a little girl when you arrived every year for your summer vacation, and what she saw before you were born, when her eyes began to look out on the world, eyes like yours, preserved in your face after her death, the way a part of her genetic code is preserved in every cell of your body. Dead twenty years, she still looks through your eyes at what you will discover with a thrill of happiness and sadness when the car takes the last turn and spread out before you is the landscape that was a paradise not only after it was lost to you but also in the time you enjoyed it with the rare clarity of a child, unaware how sensations from your motherâs childhood were being repeated in you, just as the shape and color of her eyes are repeated in your face, the hint of sweetness and melancholy in her smile. The fertile river valley was covered with green orchards of pomegranates and figs and crisscrossed with paths of loamy soil beneath the concave shade of the treesâpoplars, beeches, willowsâa water-saturated vegetation nourished by
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