The nun opens the door and sticks her head in. She’s wearing one of those terrible grins meant to terrorize children. It seems she wants to let Daphne know that she has tired the Death Mask enough already. He sends the sister away with a look that says, I’m exhausted but I’m still the boss. The nuisance seems not to notice the gravity of her infraction. As soon as the door shuts he begins to stare at Daphne as if he’s seeing her for the first time. Once again. He seems to want to speak, but he says nothing. As if no words were suitable, or he was unable to choose from among the many presenting themselves. Or maybe simply because he’s too far gone.
Your mother was an exceptional woman, he finally murmurs, his voice as feeble as a fine cord about to snap. A very pure woman, he says, his consonants furring. Until just a few days before, his diction had been conspicuously clean, but Daphne can’t know that. Hearing him mention her mother, she feels as if an abyss has opened up under her chair; in this upsetting, surreal meeting so like a nightmare, she had completely forgotten that this priest once knew her mother, of whom she herself has but the faintest memories. A very fine person, he murmurs again, rooting around in her eyes with that gaze out of Death’s pocket. Before she knows it, Daphne has begun to cry. The way she does, silently, without moving a muscle.
You ought to be very proud of her, says the priest, signaling to her, although she doesn’t understand at first, to take the crucifix parked on the night table in her hand. Excellent, he murmurs when she understands and obeys, squeezing the end of the cross between thumb and index finger. He looks as if he wants to add some crucial further information, but instead his weary eyes fill with a transparent liquid, a small tide rising from below. After a while tears begin to overflow onto his lined, greenish skin, and fall on the white of the sheet. He’s weeping too. Staring at the wall at the foot of his bed and weeping. Wheezing louder now, like a bellows about to break.
Daphne looks at him and weeps, he weeps and looks at the wall. Their weeping is rather similar actually, although her tears are larger and descend more quickly, a faucet dripping. His are smaller and spaced out widely, as if like him they are exhausted. She’s not thinking about leaving anymore, she’s not thinking about anything. She’s feeling very strange, there in the fading light, crucifix in hand, but she also feels this is necessary, it’s something like an initiation rite. Were her merciless mental clarity in charge here, she’d leap to her feet and run away, but some overpowering force has nailed her legs to that metal chair.
Now the door opens again and a young man in a white coat appears. The priest makes a tiny—but violent—gesture, outraged that they dare to keep on disturbing him. The doctor lowers his head and disappears. I learned a great deal from your mother, he mutters, picking up where he left off with some difficulty and fixing her once again in his gaze. His voice is even more feeble now, barely rising above the soughing of the river outside. The talks I had with her were a great gift to me, I have rarely met such profundity in matters of the spirit: he looks at her as if for confirmation. For a moment his ecumenical empathy is such that his hand edges toward hers; all his energy is concentrated in that tiny operation. But he lacks the strength to raise his forearm the necessary few millimeters, or even to slide it over the sheet. Daphne therefore reaches out and takes his hand, which is icy cold. She holds it in her own, warming it, the crucifix on her knees. For a long time. It’s almost dark, and the river has become a gleaming course of lead.
Now the door opens once more and this time the young doctor is accompanied by an elderly man who walks in with an authoritarian stride. He turns on the lamp on the night table. They don’t ask permission, they just take up positions on either side of the bed. There’s also a nun with them, different from the first, taller and more in tune with the times. The older doctor has a concertina of wrinkles on his neck; the priest is staring at him, seemingly getting ready to order them to leave. Instead he merely closes his eyes, you can see that the faint light is blinding him. He’s immobile, clearly too exhausted even to lift his eyelids. The young doctor checks the IV line, takes his pulse, adjusts the sheet.
The sister who’s plausibly a web-surfer is staring at Daphne as if she were a serial assassin. The accordion-necked doctor also studies her with something like bigoted rancor. It’s clear they’d like her to beat it right away (beat what, no one knows, but the expression is imperishable). She doesn’t know what to do; she’s feeling a bit woozy. Now she gets up, leaves the room and heads down the corridor, still holding the crucifix. A crucifix she hasn’t stolen; it was given to her by a dying bishop. Yes, bishop: that was how she’d heard him referred to. Descending the few steps at the entrance, she turns again toward the river, spellbinding for an instant in its violet hour. And at that very moment she understands that the not quite dead man is the same confessor who sexually abused her for a whole winter when she was nine, and then again the following year. Or better, she realizes that a warning bell inside her head had sounded smartly the very instant she first saw him, but something prevented her from hearing it. She starts to cry again. This time she’s riven by hacking sobs, like a woman with a bad cough.