Read Online This Too Shall Pass by Milena Busquets - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Milena Busquets
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majority of what he’s saying. Then suddenly, once he’s repeated each story three times, he looks at me again, as if he’s just realized that it’s his mother he’s talking to, calls me stone deaf, and shuts hermetically up till the next month’s bout. Our other traditional monthly conversation is of the life-is-wonderful variety.
—Do you even realize how lucky we are? Look how beautiful the trees are. Just look at that street. Breathe it in, I tell them during these euphoric instants that seize me every once in a while, thanks to the wine, the kisses, or my own body, whose physical strength and last drops of youth are gifts on some days.
Edgar usually looks at me with a long face, Nico pretends to take a deep breath, and Edgar tells me they already know, I’ve said the same thing a thousand times, today’s spectacular street is our same street, the one we walk down four times a day, and what he really wants to do is go to Florence like I promised a few years ago. You always threatened him with not going to Egypt. “If you don’t behave, we won’t go to Egypt,” you’d say to him. In the end, the revolution and your disease prevented you from going. The last trip you wanted to take was to Florence. When I told you I couldn’t take care of both you and Edgar at the same time, that if you had a turn for the worse while we were so far away, I wouldn’t know how to deal with it—in Barcelona, the dance of the ambulances and wheelchairs and late-night trips to the emergency room had already begun—you got so angry with me that you told me I always ruin everything. Marisa wanted to go to Rome and I promised that when she got out of the hospital, we would go. We also planned on spending some time at your house where she would teach me how to make her famous gazpacho and legendary croquettes, since she would never be able to return to Cadaqués and live on her own. But it was already too late. I wasn’t there when she died suddenly, either. I hadn’t been there for two days, completely unaware of how much faster life proceeds inside a hospital, where the wicks burn lickety-split, and life and death run crazed races down the aseptic hallways like the cartoon Coyote and the Road Runner, frantic and frenzied, skidding around the nurses and visitors, screwing up our lives. Maybe we all end up with some untaken trip, we plan journeys when they are no longer possible, as if we were trying to buy more time knowing we’ve used up our own, and that nobody can give us a single minute more. How unbearable to think while our eyes are still open that there are places to which we’ll never return, to realize that an opportunity has closed even before our eyes have.
Edgar looks at the three of us petulantly from the top of the stairs and quips: —I’m hungry—can we go now?
Daniel and Nico come up a second later, accompanied by Úrsula, who looks at us and says: —You all look so beautiful!
Sofía is wearing her spectacular floor-length, wine-colored Indian dress that she bought from an antiques dealer. It’s dusted with tiny mirrored lozenges, and she set it off with a pair of big silver earrings. I have on my baggy faded fuchsia cotton pants, a raggedy black silk shirt with little green polka dots, flip-flops, and one of my mother’s old bracelets that sometimes I love and sometimes feels more like a shackle. Elisa is dressed as if we were going out to dance salsa. And Úrsula has put on a very tight yellow T-shirt with a silver palm-tree motif and purple jeans about two sizes too small. We look like a troupe of clowns. Fortunately, the children have brought a modicum of summer respectability with their polo shirts, Bermuda shorts, and flip-flops.
Carolina and Pep have a small apartment just a little way uphill from our house. It’s part of a summer complex that was built in the seventies, with heavy cement walls painted white and stairways made of reddish wood, long corridors, and huge windows that give
—Do you even realize how lucky we are? Look how beautiful the trees are. Just look at that street. Breathe it in, I tell them during these euphoric instants that seize me every once in a while, thanks to the wine, the kisses, or my own body, whose physical strength and last drops of youth are gifts on some days.
Edgar usually looks at me with a long face, Nico pretends to take a deep breath, and Edgar tells me they already know, I’ve said the same thing a thousand times, today’s spectacular street is our same street, the one we walk down four times a day, and what he really wants to do is go to Florence like I promised a few years ago. You always threatened him with not going to Egypt. “If you don’t behave, we won’t go to Egypt,” you’d say to him. In the end, the revolution and your disease prevented you from going. The last trip you wanted to take was to Florence. When I told you I couldn’t take care of both you and Edgar at the same time, that if you had a turn for the worse while we were so far away, I wouldn’t know how to deal with it—in Barcelona, the dance of the ambulances and wheelchairs and late-night trips to the emergency room had already begun—you got so angry with me that you told me I always ruin everything. Marisa wanted to go to Rome and I promised that when she got out of the hospital, we would go. We also planned on spending some time at your house where she would teach me how to make her famous gazpacho and legendary croquettes, since she would never be able to return to Cadaqués and live on her own. But it was already too late. I wasn’t there when she died suddenly, either. I hadn’t been there for two days, completely unaware of how much faster life proceeds inside a hospital, where the wicks burn lickety-split, and life and death run crazed races down the aseptic hallways like the cartoon Coyote and the Road Runner, frantic and frenzied, skidding around the nurses and visitors, screwing up our lives. Maybe we all end up with some untaken trip, we plan journeys when they are no longer possible, as if we were trying to buy more time knowing we’ve used up our own, and that nobody can give us a single minute more. How unbearable to think while our eyes are still open that there are places to which we’ll never return, to realize that an opportunity has closed even before our eyes have.
Edgar looks at the three of us petulantly from the top of the stairs and quips: —I’m hungry—can we go now?
Daniel and Nico come up a second later, accompanied by Úrsula, who looks at us and says: —You all look so beautiful!
Sofía is wearing her spectacular floor-length, wine-colored Indian dress that she bought from an antiques dealer. It’s dusted with tiny mirrored lozenges, and she set it off with a pair of big silver earrings. I have on my baggy faded fuchsia cotton pants, a raggedy black silk shirt with little green polka dots, flip-flops, and one of my mother’s old bracelets that sometimes I love and sometimes feels more like a shackle. Elisa is dressed as if we were going out to dance salsa. And Úrsula has put on a very tight yellow T-shirt with a silver palm-tree motif and purple jeans about two sizes too small. We look like a troupe of clowns. Fortunately, the children have brought a modicum of summer respectability with their polo shirts, Bermuda shorts, and flip-flops.
Carolina and Pep have a small apartment just a little way uphill from our house. It’s part of a summer complex that was built in the seventies, with heavy cement walls painted white and stairways made of reddish wood, long corridors, and huge windows that give
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