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and
Selbstmord
—murder of the self. And what she is choosing is
Freitod.
    â€œA
terrible accident,” Armando will tell Horst, “such a misfortune.”
    Horst will stay for the night.
At breakfast he sits at the table where Sabine used to eat, near the retired insurance man from America and his wife who come here for three weeks every winter. The husband orders a fruit plate for his wife, oatmeal for himself. Instead of stirring the oatmeal, he draws up his spoon to eye level and lets the gray, lumpy matter dribble back down. His wife—lips pressed together
—
watches, looking unhappy in her pink sundress. When her husband finally eats, he opens his mouth long before the spoon gets there; his tongue darts out, the spoon trembles, and then he traps the spoon inside his wide mouth.
    When the insurance man offers his condolences to Horst, he tells him that people dont swim on the Pacific side; they swim in the Sea of Cortés. And Horst returns to Berlin reassured that it was an accident
—
that his mother was careless, perhaps even stubborn to attempt swimming in the rough Pacific, where the waves dont flatten themselves against the shore but slam from a great height before they get sucked out to sea as if by greater force.
    He tells his sister, Inge, about the doctor from Holland who came here to fish for marlin and broke three ribs when the waves slammed him against the sand. Armando had to haul him in a wheelbarrow across the vast beach and through the lobby to the circular drive, where the ambulance picked him up. Horst tells Inge about the signs along the beach that warn swimmers of the riptide
—
water agitated by conflicting tides or currents
—
and they grieve as children grieve for their parents, not nearly as deeply as a parent will grieve for a child.
    Because that is the nature of being a parent, Sabine has discovered. You love your children far more than you ever loved your parents, and —in that love, and in the recognition that your own children cannot fathom the depth of your love—you come to understand the tragic, unrequited love of your own parents.
    A pattern of tire tracks stretches along the length of beach. Last night Sabine heard one of the fat-wheeled, motorized tricycles pass her hotel and return an hour later. The sand is pale where she sits but looks darker, heavier the closer it gets to the ocean.She has been in Cabo San Lucas for one week. She has tasted the most fabulous cheese pie sold by local women at the ferry landing; has slept deeply without anything between her skin and the night air; has walked beneath the beauty of the vultures and the stars; has watched sleek surfers in glistening rubber suits return from the sea.
    She has felt embarrassed by three German tourists she overheard while on an excursion boat, complaining loudly—as though no one else could possibly understand their language—about the Mexican food. “At least we still have some good German booze,” one of them said, startled as Sabine turned around and reminded them in German that they were guests in this country.
    It has been a week of colors, a week to test her choice and let herself return to Berlin if that is what she decides. Ever since that afternoon in the doctor’s office, when he wanted to schedule her for surgery, Sabine has felt as if everything around her has snapped into focus, the colors brighter, the shapes clearer. It makes her regret not always having seen like this. And even the pain—which keeps growing heavier, as though a sharp-fanged animal were trying to gouge its way from her belly—has not been able to take from her that sense of everything happening for the first time.
    Sabine has always known when to end what doesn’t work before it becomes unbearable. Like her marriage when she was forty-two. It could have gone on in the same way, becoming increasingly silent until the only sound would have been that of her breath while