39

THIS MORNING I felt a particular anguish. The first few days were easier. Now, with my flesh striated and looser, I feel like the hole the baby left is about to swallow me up, an internal suction, an implosion that happens in the immensity of the ocean. With my gaze lost in the foam of the shore, trying to hold myself up on my two legs and not give into the pain, I’m assaulted by some fatal longings, dreadful desires to end everything, but following that thought a fisherman appears, and I walk toward him. The pain in my breasts is intense, I’d like to swallow all the little pills the nurse gave me so the milk stops. It hurts when I walk. As I go, in the middle of the water I intimately connect with the sadness of my flesh that wants to flee: neither ancient gardens mirrored in the eyes, shall hold this heart that bathes in waters its delight. Those lines were the last I read before giving birth and now they accompany me like an omen. I see the net full of little fish that the fisherman’s hand holds, and that image is the same one in the painting that accompanied me in that now far-off bedroom. I look at the little bodies jumping and agonizing. It’s a simultaneously horrific and beautiful image and, of course, it reminds me of the moths the man from the cave filmed for hours. This man, now, standing close, looks at me contemplating the image and with a gesture offers a cigarette. I shake my head but keep walking toward him. We move onto the sand; he lights the cigarette and we sit in front of his net. He tells me he’s a widow, that his wife died just a few months ago, and he decided to go back to work. He says something about the breeze, about the beauty of the bodies, about the image of the fish tangled up, and he also says something about hunger and about his kids. I slowly get involved in the conversation, catching words, but don’t dare say anything, I only listen. In a moment of silence he runs his rough finger over my hand and tells me some phrase that keeps echoing in me, and that finger, those simple words, come accompanied by a gust of wind that touches me and touches the waves and all the images that suddenly come to me with that caress: M’s fingers squeezing my hand and the gardens of Bustarviejo, the contorted face of the woman in the painting and her hair moving in the same wind. That same gust of wind coming through the windows in the cave and touching that man’s cheek, his daughter, the turtle in that garden and the board, the same wind that brushes my mother’s blonde hair and María’s knees, the skates lying in my room, it touches the body of the old man flipping through the air, and it touches the river and the poet and my cat, it touches my husband’s shirts now hanging in another closet, and it also touches the grass growing on my brother’s grave, the tuft of grass that emerges from the crack, it brushes the fist of that baby that’s no longer mine, and then an immense, incommensurable gratitude takes over my body and I look at the fisherman and tell him I have to go and I say goodbye after squeezing the hand with which he caressed me, saying my name and keeping his name, Antonio, forever, together with the other names I repeat while walking back: Diego. Luis. Mauricio. Moisés. I walk feeling a genuine love for things, the landscape, for the certainty of the color red and, above all, a genuine love for my pain. I walk with the weight of my overflowing breasts toward the cottage.