The Troubling Love

To speak is to link together lost times and spaces.

To speak is to link together lost times and spaces.

The irony of the lines that connect moments to meetings, to separations, to old rancors

sheets and blankets had been mended with a care that, given their age, they didn’t deserve.

As I passed the mirror I smiled involuntarily, to calm myself.

Amalia, who had always dressed shabbily because she was poor but also because she was in the habit of not making herself attractive—a habit acquired many decades earlier to placate the jealousy of my father—seemed to have suddenly decided to get rid of her entire wardrobe.

I closed my eyes to give her time to detach herself from the ceiling and return to death; then I reopened them and looked at the clock.

“I’m Delia,” I answered. “What is on the top floor? What do you have of hers?”

Maybe I wanted to try to establish an intimacy that there had never been, maybe I wanted to let her know in some confused way that I had always been unhappy.

But she seemed to me only amused by the fact that I had sat suspended in the void, in a dilapidated elevator.