The Good Sense
(For Spanish translation click here)

There is, mother, a place in the world they call Paris.
It’s a huge place and far away and again very big.

My mother adjusts the collar of my coat, not because
it will snow, but in order that it may start.

My father’s wife is in love with me, pushing and advancing my shoulders when I was born and my breast when I die. I am hers twice: for the departure and the return. She encloses me at the return. For this her eyes give me so much, close to me, fragments of me, happening by works now finished, by consummate pacts.

My mother confesses to me, my namesake. Why does she not give so much to my other brothers? To Victor, for example, the oldest who is so old now, that people say: “He seems like he’s his mother’s youngest brother!” Perhaps it might be because I have traveled so much! It must be because I have lived so much more!

My mother remembers me the first letter relating the return. Before my life of return, remembering that I journeyed in two hearts through her womb, she blushed and was left mortally livid, when I said, in the treaty of the soul: that night was happy. But, she seems all the more sad. She might have become even sadder.

—Son, how old you seem!

And through the color yellow she walks firmly and cries because I seem old in her eyes, in the leaf of the sword, in the mouth of my face. She cries for me, she is sad for me. What difference will my youthfulness make if I will always be her son? Why do mothers feel much pain at having found their sons looking old, if the age of them will never equate or pass that of their mothers? And, why, if the sons the more they get on in their years moreover resemble their fathers? My mother cries because I am old in my time, and because I will never get old enough to be old in hers of my own accord!

My goodbye took a part of her being, more external than that part of her being when I returned. I am, on account of the excessive time-limit of my return, more the man to my mother than the son to my mother. There resides the candor and purity that lights us both with three flames. Then I say to her until I fall silent:

—There is, mother, a place in the world that they call Paris. It’s a huge place and far away and again very big.

The woman of my father, upon hearing me, continues eating her lunch and her mortal eyes travel down my arm slowly.