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many of the most important things in his life had happened in a hospital bed, amid pain, anesthesia, and fear.
Hypnos is sleep and Thanatos is death. They look alike, but obviously they’re not the same.”
he kept a certain distance, as if he were capable of studying the situation and avoiding adolescent nerves. And, in a way, he was. It was the illness, he’d explained to her later. Each thing he did was a negotiation, a calculation. As if he were tasked with carrying and caring for a delicate crystal treasure that he could never set aside, not even in a safe place, and that had to be moved gingerly so as not to damage or break it. He had to think out every movement in advance, always tiptoeing, always wondering if this jolt would bring the disaster, the final break.
“Oh, but falling in love has nothing to do with beauty.”
Juan thought it was remarkable how similar children and old people were: both extremes with their forgetful dementia, unable to retain people or places or situations. Gaspar had spent many months of his life in that house, ever since he was a baby. And he remembered it “a little.” Would he forget Juan so easily too, or was it different with fathers?
A wife didn’t have to be the woman one loved.
But he knew his son well enough to know that if he wasn’t talking about what had happened, it was because he was still mulling it over. And when Gaspar kept quiet in order to think, it was because something had bothered him, and he still hadn’t found the words to talk about it. He needed time,
I want to drain your entrails with kisses Exist inside you with all my senses For I am a pitch-black toad with two wings. Baldomero Fernández Moreno, “Sonnet of Your Entrails”
just a few years old and already i was entirely old Elena Anníbali, The House of Fog
He did that when his father was in a very bad mood, which in the past year had been more and more frequent, to the point that Gaspar had started to miss him, as if that man who lived in his house were someone else, someone who was ever more silent, violent, and distant.
We don’t feel with our skin, son, we feel with our brains. Pain is in the head.”
We feel with our brains.”
Animals have a perception that we humans have lost.”
But once awake he never lounged or lingered in bed, not even on the coldest winter mornings. He felt a certain apprehension about lying down for too long: it reminded him of his father’s illness and exhaustion. Plus, sometimes he had the feeling that if he stayed there sleeping, wrapped in the covers and breathing in his own smell, he would just never get up again, surrender to that empty state, so like the feeling of floating when he was tired out from swimming too much.
Gaspar’s dad had his eyes closed and he was different, beautiful, thought Pablo, beautiful; everyone said he was sick, how was that possible? Weren’t sick people always ugly?
“When your mom liked a song a lot, like this one, she’d play it over and over until it drove us crazy.”
Anyway, it’s always sad to fall in love.”
because it was better to know, it was always better to know.
Parents should not exist, we should all be orphans, grow up alone, let someone teach us how to cook and bathe when we’re little and that’s that.
It’s the house my mother hates, because she hates everything beautiful and wants to destroy it; that is her true faith and her nature.
All fortunes are built on the suffering of others, and ours, though it has unique and astonishing characteristics, is no exception.
When I was very little, he told me that if I wanted to be a pretty woman I would have to make an effort. He made me cry, but I was grateful to him. Riches can replace beauty, but not entirely.
It took a long time for the method of survival to be revealed, and it is, of course, repugnant. I should also add that, so far, it’s not only repugnant but also a resounding failure. There is no arguing with faith, though. And it’s impossible to disbelieve when the Darkness comes. So, we trust, and we go on. At least, many of us do. Others are sick with doubt.
how can we go on after this, how do you all do it, the world is stupid, the people who know nothing are contemptible. And he gave an answer that was so true I sometimes repeat it out loud. The thing is, nothing happens after this, dear. The next day, we get hungry and we eat, we want to feel the sun and we go swimming, we have to shave, we need to meet with the accountants and visit the fields because we want to keep having money. What happens is real, but so is life.
he and I needed separate lives so we could find each other again.
The truth is that you can function under the influence of drugs a lot better than people think, plus I was so young I could wander around on acid all day, and the next attend several classes and study as many hours as I needed to. We had enviable stamina.
I’ve always needed to be well dressed to have serious conversations. With the right clothes, all my insecurity vanishes.
I, on the other hand, have had so little love that it seems to me like a delicate jewel, and I’m terrified of losing it. My fear is not just that I’ll misplace it, like an earring on a night of sex or sweaty dancing, it’s that it will evaporate and vanish like alcohol.
Even so, it excited me a lot to see them kiss unabashedly, with that discomfort of men’s kisses that at first makes them seem like a fight, and then spills over into an emotion I didn’t understand, a lost and recovered fraternity.
What will you ask for? I inquired. To be able to have my secrets, he replied. I thought it was so strange. Why not ask to be cured? It needs me sick, he said, pointing to the door. It’s only capable of finding me because I’m close to death.
“I’m so sorry,” I told him. “I wanted this place to be different for you. You have no idea all the things I pictured us doing. Taking the train, going to Brighton, you wouldn’t believe how good the fried fish is there, though the seagulls are really bold and they’ll snatch it right out of your hands. People eat fish at the beach here the way we eat churros. I thought about asking Dad to buy us a house by the ocean. I also thought we could throw parties in this house, invite all the kids, no one complains about the loud music. I imagined filling this room with books and records, taking care of
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I was the girl of books and lists: though I would take risks, I also liked order.
Love is impure, that’s what Anne’s eyes were saying. And it was true. It contaminates you and makes you possessive, savage, destructive. Florence had once told me: We love our children and our partners until we must let them go. The sacrifice for something greater demands that we remain detached.
It was our worst fight, the one that seemed definitive, and I was afraid of it even in advance. It was the first time Juan mistrusted me. I had seen that look and its dark depths of disappointment before, but never directed at me.
Ever since then, every time he’s left and come back, the first thing I’ve done is open his shirt, unbutton it, lift it up: I need to touch his skin. The days without him are physically painful for me. Getting him back after that absence made me feel insecure for the first time. He didn’t need me either, and he was capable of leaving me. I had never before imagined that possibility. Such was my arrogance. When he came back, Juan said things like, I miss you, I need you, I forgive you, I’d kill you, I can’t be away from you or from Gaspar. I felt his love had hardened, and his need.
Doña Margarita tells me how her people have always been nice and quiet, quiet, and maybe that’s how it has to be, because only God shouts.
The victims’ fathers tend to be silent companions. Many have died during these years spent in the background, accompanying their wives. They’re killed by impotence and love; they’re unprepared. Women know how to manage these emotions better.
Beetles. I think how I’m afraid of beetles, but I know that if one of them falls on me, I’ll take it out of my hair like it was just a hair clip. Fear changes, accommodates. I don’t want to get used to that.
One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted Emily Dickinson
The boy was angry, and when he wasn’t angry, he was depressed, an adult depression that collapsed him into bed.
how Gaspar couldn’t go to school because the pills gave him a headache and terrible exhaustion and there he was, at thirteen years old, doing nothing all day but thinking about himself, banging his head against the wall when he couldn’t stand the guilt about his friend Adela anymore. It’s obscene, Luis told Julieta, it’s obscene to see this in a boy of his age.
Everyone was scared, impoverished, worried about only themselves.
Men just don’t know how to handle two crises at the same time.”
“Because I’m tired all day.”
“He says that if he’s crazy there’s no point in living.”
he spent too much time lying down, in bed or on the living-room sofa—but
“ ‘There is the Hidebehind, which is always hiding behind something. No matter how many times or whichever way a man turns, it is always behind him, and that’s why nobody has been able to describe it, even though it is credited with having killed and devoured many a lumberjack.’ ”
I’ve seen patients after years of abuse who barely suffer a slight depression. Others collapse.
And she gave him instructions regarding three things: establish a routine—four meals a day, schedules, outings, movies—monitor Gaspar’s medication, and have him exercise.
“He likes to read.” “That too, then. Get him a library card. That way he’ll leave the house, and he’ll have a commitment to return the books. I need him to establish ties, to have simple responsibilities.”
