22 Mandras Behind the Veil They talk about me as if I were not there, Pelagia, the doctor, and my mother. They talk about me as though I were senile or unconscious, as though I were a body without a mind. I am too tired and too sad to resist the indignity. Pelagia has seen me naked and my mother washes me intimately as though I were a baby, and they cover me with unguents and lotions that sting and soothe and stink, so that I am like a piece of furniture that is treated with oil and wax, whose worm-holes are filled, and whose cushions are plumped up and repaired. My mother inspects my stools
22 Mandras Behind the Veil They talk about me as if I were not there, Pelagia, the doctor, and my mother. They talk about me as though I were senile or unconscious, as though I were a body without a mind. I am too tired and too sad to resist the indignity. Pelagia has seen me naked and my mother washes me intimately as though I were a baby, and they cover me with unguents and lotions that sting and soothe and stink, so that I am like a piece of furniture that is treated with oil and wax, whose worm-holes are filled, and whose cushions are plumped up and repaired. My mother inspects my stools and talks about them to my betrothed, and they feed me with a spoon because they have no patience to see me struggle with the trembling of my hands, and I ask myself if there is any sense in which I can be considered to exist. I suppose that I don’t. Everything has become a dream. There is a veil between me and them, so that they are shadows and I am dead, and the veil is perhaps a shroud that dims the light and blurs the vision. I have been to war, and it has created a chasm between me and those who have not; what do they know about anything? Since I encountered death, met death on every mountain path, conversed with death in my sleep, wrestled with death in the snow, gambled at dice with death, I have come to the conclusion that death is not an enemy but a brother. Death is a beautiful naked man who looks like Apollo, and he is not satisfied with those who wither away in old age. Dea...
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...th is a perfectionist, he likes the young and beautiful, he wants to stroke our hair and caress the sinew that binds our muscle to the bone. He does all he can to meet us, our faces gladden his heart, and he stands in our path to challenge us because he likes a clean fair fight, and after the fight he likes to befriend us, clap us on the shoulder, and make us laugh at all the pettiness and folly of the living. At the conclusion of a battle he wanders amongst the dead, raising them up, placing laurels upon the brows of those most comely, and he gathers them together as his own children and takes them away to drink wine that tastes of honey and gives them the sense of proportion that they never had in life.
But he didn’t take me and I don’t know why.
