whole of the intervening day, it’s as if I carried him with me all the time, as if he were part of my body.’ She looked at her arms, as though her husband’s head were resting on them. ‘People say: “Concentrate on the good memories and not on the final one, think about how much you loved each other, think about all the wonderful times you enjoyed that others never have.” They mean well, but they don’t understand that all my memories are now soiled by that sad and bloody ending. Each time I recall something good, that final image rises up before me, the image of his cruel, stupid, gratuitous death, which could so easily have been avoided. Yes, that’s what I find hardest to bear, the sheer stupidity of it and the lack of someone to blame. And so every good memory grows murky and turns bad. I don’t really have any good memories left. They all seem false to me. They’ve all been contaminated.’
She fell silent and looked over at the adjoining room where the children were. The television was on in the background, so it seemed that everything was fine. From what I’d seen of them, they were well-brought-up kids, far more so than children usually are nowadays. Curiously, I didn’t find it surprising or embarrassing that Luisa should speak to me so openly, as if I were a friend. Perhaps she couldn’t talk about anything else, and in the intervening months since Deverne’s death, she had exhausted all those closest to her with her shock and her anxieties, or she felt awkward about going on and on at them, always harping on about the same thing, and was taking advantage of the novelty of my presence there to vent her feelings. Perhaps it didn’t matter who I was, it was enough that I was there, an as yet unused interlocutor, with whom she could start afresh. That’s another of the problems when one suffers a misfortune: the effects on the victim far outlast the patience of those prepared to listen and accompany her, unconditional support never lasts very long once it has become tinged with monotony. And so, sooner or later, the grieving person is left alone when she has still not finished grieving or when she’s no longer allowed to talk about what remains her only world, because other people find that world of grief unbearable, repellent. She understands that for them sadness has a social expiry date, that no one is capable of contemplating another’s sorrow, that such a spectacle is tolerable only for a brief period, for as long as the shock and pain last and there is still some role for those who are there watching, who then feel necessary, salvatory, useful. But on discovering that nothing changes and that the affected person neither progresses nor emerges from her grief, they feel humiliated and superfluous, they find it almost offensive and stand aside: ‘Aren’t I enough for you? Why can’t you climb out of that pit with me by your side? Why are you still grieving when time has passed and I’ve been here all the while to console and distract you? If you can’t climb out, then sink or disappear.’ And the grieving person does just that, she retreats, removes herself, hides. Perhaps Luisa clung to me that afternoon because with me she could be what she still was, with no need for subterfuge: the inconsolable widow, to use the usual phrase. Obsessed, boring, grief-stricken.
I looked across at the children’s room, indicating it with a lift of my head.
‘They must be a great help to you in the circumstances,’ I said. ‘I imagine having to look after them must give you a reason to get up every morning, to be strong and put on a brave face. Knowing that they depend on you entirely, even more than before. They’re doubtless a burden, but a lifeline too, a reason to start each day. Or perhaps not,’ I added, when I saw her face grow still darker and her larger eye contract, so that it was the same size as the smaller one.
‘No, it’s quite the opposite,’ she replied, taking a deep breath, as if she had to muster all her serenity in order to say what she then went on to say: ‘I would give anything for them not to be here now, not to have them. Don’t misunderstand me: it’s not that I suddenly regret having had them, their existence