brief time were going their separate ways. For Nora, widowhood was a betrayal; she felt she had been abandoned in a cruel world with two children and no resources, but at the same time she felt inexpressible relief, because in the last years her companion had not been the man she once loved, and living with him had become a martyrdom. Even so, shortly after the funeral she began to forget Reevesâs final decrepitude and to cherish earlier memories. She imagined they were joined by an invisible thread, like the one her husband had used to suspend the orange of The Infinite Plan; that image restored her earlier security drawn from the years he had ruled the familyâs fate with the firm hand of a Master. Nora yielded to her languorous nature; the lethargy born of the horror of the war was accentuated, a deterioration of will that once she was widowed subtly grew and manifested itself in all its magnitude. She never spoke of her late husband in the past tense; she alluded to his absence in vague terms, as if he had undertaken a long astral voyage, and later, when she began to communicate with him in her dreams, she would speak of it in the tone of someone repeating a telephone conversation. Her embarrassed children did not like to hear about her delusions, fearing they would lead to madness. She was alone. She was a stranger in that environment; she spoke only a few words of Spanish and saw herself as being very different from the other women. Her friendship with Olga had ended, she had little relationship to her children, she was not friendly with Inmaculada Morales or any other person in the barrio. She was amiable, but people avoided her because she was strange; no one wanted to listen to her ravings about opera or The Infinite Plan. The habit of dependence was so deeply rooted that when she lost Charles Reeves it was as if she began to live in a daze. She made a few attempts to earn a living as a typist or a seamstress, but nothing came of it; neither was she able to get a job translating Hebrew or Russian, as she claimed she could, because no one needed those services in the barrio and the prospect of venturing into the center of the city to look for work terrified her. She was not overly concerned about supporting her children, because she did not consider them exclusively hers; it was her theory that children belonged to society in general and no one in particular. She would sit on the porch of her house and stare at the willow for hours on end, with a placid, vacant expression on the beautiful Slavic face that even then had begun to pale. In the years that followed, her freckles disappeared, her features fadedâher whole being seemed slowly to vanish. In old age she became so insubstantial that it was difficult to remember her, and as no one thought to take her photograph, Gregory feared after she died that perhaps his mother had never existed. Pedro Morales tried to convince Nora to busy herself with something; he clipped want ads for different jobs and accompanied her to several interviews, until he was convinced of her inability to face reality. Three months later, when the situation was becoming intolerable, he took her to the welfare office to sign up for payments as an indigent, grateful that his Maestro, Charles Reeves, was not alive to witness such humiliation. The check, barely sufficient to cover the most basic expenses, was the familyâs only regular source of income for many years; the rest came from the childrenâs jobs, the bills Olga managed to slip into Noraâs pocketbook, and the discreet support of the Moraleses. A buyer appeared for the boa, and the poor creature ended its days exposed to the eyes of the curious in a burlesque house, alongside scantily clad chorus girls, an obscene ventriloquist, and various acts intended to amuse the besotted spectators. It lived on for several years, feeding on live mice and squirrels and the scraps thrown into its cage for the thrill of
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