No, but I know how I will end. I always knew that the men in my family die young. Based on the family average, I’ll have my first heart attack in two years. It’s all about genes. But recently, since Ari got sick, it’s been having a real effect on me. The feeling I had in my twenties and thirties that nothing’s urgent has now become a feeling that everything’s urgent. Among other things, the crucial question of whether I want to spend what’s left of my life on earth writing. Whether finishing another book is the most important thing to do before the chest pains begin. Maybe, instead, I want to spend more time with Dikla and the kids? Maybe I want to go into politics? For a short time, is what I mean. Until the heart attack. Or live in Australia for a year or two? Or travel around the world looking more seriously for my childhood friend who disappeared on me after the army, and then have the attack knowing that, at least, I did what I could to find him?
I usually begin to see the end of my books—the way you see land from a sinking ship—close to the end.
I keep on swimming a while longer in the sea of infinite possibilities. Then I emerge from it in sorrow and relief. How do you choose the names of your characters?
Ari’s mother came to take her shift at his bedside.
Usually, we exchange only a few words in Spanish and I leave. But there was something in the way she came into the room. The way she walked, heavier, wearier than usual, made me decide to stay a while longer. I didn’t have a home to go back to anyway. Just a yoga mat. So I offered her my chair and dragged one in from another room.
Ari was sleeping. From the way he was breathing, it was a deep sleep.
I brought a few empanadas, she said, taking a plastic container out of her bag.
She looked a bit like Mercedes Sosa. That thought flashed through my mind every time we met. Something Indian in her eyes. And, in fact, in her son’s eyes as well.
Gracias, I said, and took one.
Your friend, he’s very strong.
I know.
Finalmente, he will conquer this disease.
What are the chances, I didn’t say.
When he was two—she said, and stopped.
I looked at her. She was silent. I took another empanada.
He was…very naughty, your friend, she began again. We ran around the house after him to keep him from breaking things.
That sounds just like him.
When he was only a year old, he refused to take his afternoon nap. All the children in preschool went into the room with the small mattresses and went to sleep, and he would drive the teachers crazy. But they loved him. Because he did everything with that smile of his.
I can picture that.
And one evening—she said and closed the box of empanadas—I was in the kitchen. Marcello, my husband, was at work. I usually picked up the pieces of Lego after Ari finished playing, but I forgot. It just happened. I forgot. I was with him all afternoon and I was tired. He didn’t tell you this story?
No.
All of a sudden, all I heard was silence. I was in the kitchen and I heard a bad silence coming from the living room. I ran there. He’d swallowed a Lego piece.
Uh-oh.
A big piece. Four quarters.
Oh no.
I tried to get it out, I slapped his back. It didn’t come out. I called an ambulance. Meanwhile, he didn’t have any air. He couldn’t even cry because he had no air. The ambulance came fast. On the way to the hospital, he actually died. Muerte clínica. How do you say that in Hebrew? He was clinically dead? But in intensive care, they brought him back. And he was like that for a few days, between life and death.
Wow.
Then we changed his name to Ari.
What do you mean, changed it?
He never told you he had another name?
No.
Bueno, maybe he forgot.
What was his other name?
Enrico. That was the name of Marcello’s brother, he was one of the desaparecidos, the ones that the junta disappeared.
I didn’t know that—
You see, Marcello, instead of blaming me for being so stupid to leave the boy alone with the Lego, the way any man would, he blamed himself for giving him a bad name, an unlucky name.
Why unlucky?
You heard about the Madres de Plaza de Maya?
Yes, of course.
So Marcello’s mother was one of them. Her son Enrico, Marcello’s brother, went to work at the printing house one morning and never came back. She demonstrated with the mothers in the plaza every Thursday until the junta fell. But even after the junta fell, the government didn’t give any information about Enrico.
Bastards.
They say some of the disappeared were thrown out of airplanes.
Really?
And that’s why Marcello came to Israel. He didn’t want to stay there anymore.
What a story.
And the doctor in the hospital said, Your son fought like a lion, an ari. He fought like an ari for his life. So Marcello went to the Ministry of the Interior and changed his name to Ari.
And it helped?
Only God knows. And I don’t believe in God at all. But yes, Ari opened his eyes and started breathing again, and the doctor said—I will never forget his words—“The deciding factor in cases like this isn’t only the death force but also the life-force. And your son has a very strong life-force.”
That’s true.
And that’s why I tell
