is vital to me and they’re what I love most, more even than Miguel probably, or, rather, I realize that their loss would have been far worse, the loss of either of them, it would have killed me. But I just can’t cope with them at the moment, they weigh too much on me. I wish I could put them in parentheses or into hibernation, I don’t know, send them to sleep and not wake them up until further notice. I’d like them to leave me in peace and not ask or demand anything of me, not keep tugging at me and hanging on me, poor loves. I need to be alone, without responsibilities, and not to have to make a superhuman effort of which I feel incapable, not to have to worry if they’ve eaten or are well wrapped up or if they’ve got a cold or a fever. I’d like to stay in bed all day or do what I like without having to concern myself about anything except me, and just get better gradually, with no interruptions and no obligations. If, that is, I ever do get better, I hope I do, although I don’t see how. It’s just that I feel so debilitated that the last thing I need is to have by my side two even weaker people, who can’t cope on their own and who have even less of an understanding of what happened than I do. More than that, I feel so sad for them, so unalterably, constantly sad for them, and that feeling goes beyond the present circumstances. The circumstances simply accentuate that feeling, but it’s always been there.’
‘What do you mean, “constantly”? What do you mean, “beyond the present circumstances”? What do you mean by “always”?’
‘Do you not have any children?’ she asked. I shook my head. ‘Children bring a lot of joy and all the other things people say they bring, but you can’t help but feel permanently sad for them too, and I don’t think that changes even when they’re older, although rather fewer people mention that. You see your children’s bewilderment when they’re confronted by certain situations, and that makes you sad. You see their willingness to help, when they want to contribute and do their bit and they can’t, and that makes you sad too. Their seriousness makes you sad, as do their silly jokes and their transparent lies, their expectations and their minor disappointments, their innocence, their incomprehension, their very logical questions, and even their occasional bad idea. It makes you sad to think how much they have to learn, and about the long, long road that lies ahead and which no one can travel for them, even though we’ve spent centuries doing it and can’t understand why everyone who’s born has to start all over from the beginning. What sense does it make that each person should have to experience more or less the same griefs and make more or less the same discoveries, and so on for eternity? And of course something completely out of the ordinary has happened to them, something that needn’t have happened, a great, unforeseeable misfortune. It isn’t normal in our society for one’s father to be killed, and the sadness they feel is an added sadness for me. I’m not the only one who has suffered a loss, if only I was. It’s up to me to explain it to them, and I haven’t got an explanation. It’s quite beyond my capabilities. I can’t tell them that the man hated their father or that he was his enemy, and if I tell them that he was mad, mad enough to kill their father, they can’t really understand that either, well, Carolina can sort of grasp it, but not Nicolás.’
‘So what have you told them? How are they coping?’
‘Well, I told them a slightly modified version of the truth. I wasn’t sure whether I should say anything to Nicolás, with him being so young, but people said it would be worse if he heard it from his school friends. Because it came out in the press, everyone who knows us found out straight away, and you can imagine what four-year-olds might make of it, their versions could be even more gruesome and outrageous than reality. So I told them that the man was very angry because someone had taken his daughters away, and that he got muddled up and attacked their papa instead of the person who had stolen his