A weight inside my chest stopped me from breathing. I flung Infante’s manuscript away, and its pages scattered. The evening breeze picked up some of them and carried them to the farthest corners of the terrace. Julián’s words reached me across time. The past, contained in my mother’s name, was collapsing on top of me.
If Julián was the man who’d impregnated my mother, Vera and I were united by ties of blood.
I raised my eyes. The city was covered with gray gauze.
I’d always known that my father wasn’t my father. The knowledge had brought with it its own sorrows, its humiliations and disappointments, until in the end it came to rest under the shade of a tree. Maybe my father’s way—firm and at the same time totally without histrionics—of exercising his fatherhood was the reason why my eagerness to discover the identity of my biological father was practically nonexistent. That was a question whose answer I preferred not to know, because it seemed to involve betraying my father.
I got up from the armchair where I’d spent the last couple of hours, absorbed in my reading, and walked to the edge of the terrace, which looked down over the city.
In the sky, the evening airplanes were taking flight, while on the sidewalks people were walking up and down, brushing shoulders, transmitting to one another their animal smell, their sweat, their urine, inhaling the others’ pestilence through their nostrils. Excrement, dampness, decay, secretions. I felt nauseous. My disease was stalking me again.
And attacking me on my weakest flank: memories.
I saw my past rise up like a big wave. So far I’d always succeeded in dodging that great wall of water, whose consequences it was now impossible for me to predict. I brought both my hands to my chest. When I was a little girl, I used to feel my wrists and the sides of my neck, looking for my pulse, trying to find the living being that remained encapsulated in my skin, inside the body I detested. If I had closed off my body from the world, I’d done so not to protect what it contained, but to avoid any form of physical contact whatsoever with my father, who I knew wasn’t my father. When I was a child, I used to like to watch him. With his Viking’s stature, his intensely blue eyes—so different from my mother’s and mine—and that absent expression, which lit up only when he was looking at his stars, or at me. The love we felt for each other filled me with joy, but also with torment. I was afraid that if I took shelter in his arms, maybe I’d never be able to get free of them. Like one of those enchanted forests where the trees reach out their twisty branches to catch children, who then get lost and wander the wooded paths.