I Won't See You Die

“If I’m here and I’m seeing you and talking to you, this must be a dream,” Aristu said, looking around him in amazement, in gratitude, in disbelief, in fear that at any moment it would all dissipate, looking back at Adriana Zuber, half a century later, at the color and the unaltering expression in her eyes, surprised to what point, having believed he would always remember them exactly as they were, he had forgotten them, those beautiful, beaming eyes, somewhere between gray and blue that right now looked at him like the last time, in May 1967, in another century and in another world and yet in this same room, in which from the moment he walked into it he had discovered that almost nothing had changed, not the furniture or the paintings or the curtains covering the windows but the same light itself, the pale light coming in from a building courtyard in the Salamanca neighborhood in Madrid, just like the murmur of the neighbors and the harsh but muffled noise of traffic, a midmorning light and revelation or farewell, sifted with the fresh green shade and recent sap of the trees in the courtyard, more like a yard, almost a park, so spacious, gold hues like pollen or dust suspended in the air, visibly floating in the room, in which Aristu now noticed that the same pendulum clock as fifty years before was ticking, accenting the silence in which both of them looked at each other back then, in the moment of a goodbye neither could conceive of, one in front of the other, her hair red then and not white but just as disheveled, her eyes just as proud and astonished, though not brighter or more beautiful, when they both knew and accepted that they were going to part but they couldn’t imagine the magnitude of the space or the duration of the years they had in front of them, too young to suspect even those amplitudes, the distances that can separate human lives, much younger and more innocent and clumsier than they thought, entrusted in some way to the persistence of the world and to the time that until then they had known, when an absence of one or two months was an eternity imperfectly abbreviated by letters and postcards, when the barely ten years that separated them then from adolescence and their first encounter were for them the slow duration of their entire lives, those years constituted the proof that what they both had experienced up to that point had such deep roots that nothing could weaken it, much less destroy it, not even the distance that was now about to open before them, an entire ocean and continent, a future with no foreseeable date of return, an abyss that was already widening between the two of them but that they didn’t see, each one fixated on the gaze of the other, deceived by the familiarity of the shared presence and the place where they were, in the same old city and with the usual background noises, nearer and farther away, the pendulum clock behind her and the clamor of the neighbors in the courtyard, on which both of them focused, growing quiet, their attention distracted, maids singing in the middle of their morning tasks, or humming along with the voice singing a folk song on the radio, a music program lovers called into to dedicate songs to each other, hammering from workers at a nearby construction site, that he remembered suddenly, because he heard it again at that moment, someone pounding on the roof or on a wall, another lost memory that came back, preserved, during all this time, in the same infallible and sealed archive from which he now rescued the scent of dried flowers and varnished wood, in this house to which he had returned countless times over the last fifty years, although only in his dreams, which he woke from with the astonishment, the heartbreak, that what he had lived so fully up to that moment was not real, with a plausibility as powerful as daily life, though with much more intensity and beauty, as if everything else, his entire other life, was nothing more than a tedious simulacrum, and he lived it more or less absently, as if he were asleep, like when he went through his daily obligations with so much efficiency but without giving even the slightest genuine attention to any of them, like an extra in a movie, one about his own robust, respectable and sterile life, that was the word, sterile and also superfluous, a simulation to which he dedicated each hour of every day from the moment he opened his eyes, and was only interrupted when he turned out the light, retreated into the darkness and into his pillow and felt the consoling proximity of sleep, and in it the consolation of seeing the people who mattered most to him, and those he could only encounter when he was asleep, either because they had died or because they were in the old country, “el antiguo país,” he would say sometimes, on the continent on the other side of the ocean, childhood friends he had lost track of without remorse so many years before but now remembered once again, or his sister, who was now a widow and so clumsy and didn’t want to leave Madrid, much less Spain, no matter how often he and his wife invited her to visit them, offered to buy her business-class tickets and pay for her hotel rooms, if she didn’t want to stay with them in their Manhattan apartment, or in their house on the banks of the Hudson, his sister who was his only connection, the only presence that remained of his former life, his Spanish life increasingly more uninhabited and distant, uninhabited by familiar figures and populated exclusively by strangers, some of whom called him by his nickname when he returned and even had the same last names and features similar to his own or even more distressing, like his unforgettable dead, the tutelary dead, his father and mother, whom he recognized in fleeting moments in the face or in the voice of a niece or nephew, even though the resemblance, the mirage, dissipated immediately, leaving him a melancholy feeling that wasn’t even alleviated on the rare occasions when he had had time to visit their graves, the two headstones side by side, conjugally joined in death as they had been in life, with a mixture of perseverance and sadness, of routine and tenderness, which had always intrigued him, and comforted him like the permeance of a ritual when both of them were still alive and he met them when he returned, each time a little older but still steady in their habits and their quiet quarrels, and in the way time was impartially filing away at them, so that it was impossible to imagine not only that they would separate, but that they might not die at the same time, or that one of them would go to the Sunday concert of the National Orchestra in the middle of the day and the other would stay home, or that they wouldn’t travel together every two or three years to the United States, to meet their son and American daughter-in-law and grandchildren so much more American than Spanish, completely American from the moment they entered adolescence, visible foreigners who spoke clumsy Spanish the summers they came to visit their grandparents, big kids impatient to return to the country they belonged to, and where he, Gabriel Aristu, had become comfortable with the idea that he would stay forever, surprised to discover that the more years he was there, instead of adapting more, he became more intimately foreign, even though he had lived there many more years than in Spain, even though he spoke and thought and even dreamed in English and he was surprised countless times, when he was in Spain, to find himself having reactions and complaints like an American when faced with the inefficiency and somewhat decadent slowness that so many things in Europe had, although when he arrived at the airport he was deeply pleased to show his maroon European Union passport and pass through the customs check in the fastest line, even though he also carried the other blue-covered passport in his pocket, which he also took out with the same secret pleasure when he returned to New York and when he saw the confused travelers from Europe and elsewhere in the world in the arrivals terminal, slowly meandering through slow lines shepherded by rude officials, before facing the threatening Immigration agents sitting behind glass, who on the other hand greeted him with a smile and a warm “Welcome back home, sir,” which he received affably but with a certain reserve