All This I Will Give to You

by Dolores Redondo

The blinking cursor seemed about to burst with the pressure of all the words still behind it.

“Looks like I’ll take just about as long to leave the world as I did to get here.”

The instant captured by the camera had confirmed his suspicion he’d never been entirely present in his own life. Today that image amounted almost to an indictment.

But weeping required warmth, or at least some sort of arousal; the arctic chill that had invaded his house had frozen much of his heart.

A relationship with another human being leaves upon the skin an indelible mark that’s subtle but impossible to erase.

Reading was the fortress from which he could defend himself as he struggled in a losing campaign to control the exultant instincts of his sexuality. Reading was a defense, a shield his timidity could use to arm itself, a guide to seeking relationships.

Writing was an interior palace with secret sites, gorgeous places, a complex of unlimited spaces. He explored them, laughing, running barefoot, and stopping to touch the beautiful treasures stored there.

In order to write he would have had to embrace the immensity of grief.

There’s a type of open grief that’s public, one of tears and mourning; and there’s another, immense and silent, that is a million times more powerful.

Sometimes he imagined that time as the odyssey of the last remaining soldier, the heroic valor of being the last survivor.

He wrote to maintain his vows under that truce, the armistice imposed as he made his way back to the palace, the only redoubt immense grief could not conquer, and the place where he wasn’t breaking his promise.

That’s where he’d discovered the palace. He could enter it whenever he wished, and that storehouse of happiness and perfection inspired him and took him away, providing the perhaps inexhaustible, sparkling source of new expression.

For they were denizens of the ivory tower, that safe and welcoming place where they’d all greet him with open arms whenever he returned. Because they were sure he’d eventually be coming back after his little fling with literature’s great prostitute, the popular novel.

One must make a conscious decision to feel pain.

claiming he couldn’t write, saying he was suffering too much to achieve the necessary state of grace. Nothing could be more wrong, because the truth was exactly the opposite. The palace was the site of ritu...

The hands of the dead do not change. They lie there full of their caresses, half-open and inert, as if in sleep.

He’d sworn he’d never let anyone become important enough to make him fear loss, but that was no obstacle to getting laid.

bridge and an escape to the everyday, available if anguish overwhelmed his dreams.

as if it were ruled by its own desires and not by any passersby who had the liberty to walk away.

Now at last he saw a childhood that was happy, although entirely fictitious; this was what it must mean to believe, to have faith. He hoped with all his heart that there was a heaven for her, for the two of them. It would be this garden, a paradise where someday they’d be united to frolic without care in a lush and welcoming Eden.

He knew that writing is driven by human necessity and erupts from the poverty of the soul, from an interior hunger and cold that can be tempered by writing, if only for a time.

The essence of the magic of creation was suggesting them without ever revealing them, never allowing the nakedness of the soul to become a pornography of emotions.

to shelter in that endless palace of your imagination and bring back one story after another. But there’s a man who confronted that pain, a man who consoled that boy, a magnificent, sincere man who buried his parents and his sister and did it with a novel. I fell in love with that man. You can’t tell me to stop admiring that strength. That would mean giving up the best thing that ever happened to me.”

He was that foolish angel sleeping in the open and refusing from sheer pride to return to paradise.

They have this weird talent; they step out squeaky clean from shit that would swallow up any of the rest of us.”

Those who kill themselves lack the empathy to put up with life and with other people. A good deal of what was troubling Fran had to do with the family, and he felt deeply responsible for them. Whatever was on his mind, he wasn’t ignoring a problem; he was trying to solve it.

He felt himself reduced to the primitive hunter who persists within us all. The last five days had utterly destroyed the world he’d thought solid and lasting, leaving him at the mercy of a numbing inertia. And there was nothing he could do about it.

The evidence of betrayal and a scarcely hidden derision in the voices of Nogueira and Santiago had poured salt on his wounds. Acid shame had burned its way through his guts in a cruel, unrelenting advance of unbearable humiliation that annihilated his very essence. He’d been determined to ignore it, to flee from this corrosive situation, and to walk away with his head held high.

He’d invented those pretexts to persuade himself he could flee from untruths, but what he was really trying to escape was reality. He’d refused to accept the warning signs that the inexorable corrosive process was consuming his guts and would eventually overwhelm him. And later he’d set himself this impossible investigation as a refuge from which to continue the struggle. He’d embraced the fiction that some supernatural force was driving him, that some irresistible inertia was impelling him to take on this task. By fooling himself he’d committed the greatest sin one can commit against oneself. He’d violated moral principles instilled in childhood, ideals of honor and dignity he’d held sacrosanct. He’d lied to the only being in this world entitled to know the truth: himself. Uncertainty is caustic.

He’d thought he could get on with his life uncrippled by despair and unhurt by the fear of not having been loved.

My son has no guts. He’s a fraud from head to toe.”

if my husband appointed Álvaro to run the affairs of our estate, it wasn’t out of a benevolent heart but because the marquis smelled in him the cruelty and strength required to preserve his legacy, our family line, and everything it represents. At any cost. And I assure you,” she said, sitting erect and holding her head as if wearing a crown, “Álvaro didn’t disappoint. He achieved all we expected of him and more. So if you see me as a soulless monster, know that your beloved Álvaro far exceeded me. He didn’t disappoint. His father knew he wouldn’t, because he’d proved himself capable of it before. He would not flinch from doing whatever was required, no matter what. He proved that long ago.”

morcón

He was starting to regain his taste for life, and it was largely due to this place.

each and every word came from the black space where her heart should have been.

She knew that candor is the sharpest dagger.

He felt it as well: Heroica gathered in a single word, the acts, virtues, and processes so often ignored in daily life. They converged in this place like sharply drawn lines. They endowed it with a sense of the holy, making it a place where weakness, fear, and the abject ruin of the outside world were alleviated and washed away. A place where one could be robed in the fresh tunic of a hero.

crocodile with a heart of gold.” “Sometimes even the worst degenerates have one. That’s what’s confusing. If the good folks were good and the bad ones were simply bad, the world would be a lot easier for everybody.

Everything denied becomes fodder for evil; when renounced by the legitimate owner it fades away as the dark underside of the universe collects its due.

Those memories had been erased, because in his determination to deny, pain had dedicated him to no. That no was devouring him. It was making him disappear as if he’d never existed. On that day of revelation he began to write.

it captured the pretentious self-regard of a writer who claimed an intimate knowledge of the very truths to which he’d deliberately turned his back.

Álvaro scrupulously safeguarded him and maintained the balance between that world and demanding reality.

Today she’d recognized in Manuel’s gallant gesture the love imprisoned within him, gagged and bound hand and foot, sentenced forever to the darkest depths of his soul.

Manuel’s mind was in a whirl. He and Nogueira shared the pain of all men, the knowledge that the dragon we seek to overcome dwells deep within our own hearts. The fact that our quest for justice and restitution is lost in advance. That monster, our worst nightmare, is immortal. It will perish only on the day we sacrifice ourselves to all-consuming flames.

When you’re convinced you’re eternal, there’s no need to destroy documents. That

Sharing grief is the only way a good man can find release from his own pain.

They were supporting him and keeping him from falling to pieces even as they themselves crumbled. These devastated and guilt-ridden men were nevertheless capable of empathy and pity.

Manuel felt a profound gratitude toward them, toward all men who take responsibility for the horrors committed by others, who condemn themselves for injustices wrought elsewhere.

An estate is like a whorehouse; there are no secrets.

she was of the opinion that going home makes sense only if someone is waiting for you.