She’d been talking for a while but noticed I was distracted and assumed that I needed some peace. “Come over whenever you want if you need to talk a bit,” she said, and smiled with a friendly gesture. She moved gracefully, with short little steps. Anything I might need; I already knew she was a widow and spent many hours alone, so it would be a pleasure to talk and have tea at her house anytime I wanted.
The motto of my youth had been to live in third person, but now I was losing myself in the abject turmoil of personal memories. “Best if I just take a shower and sit down to do some work,” I said, and realized that I was talking out loud, and not only was I talking to myself but I was also staring at myself in the bathroom mirror as I spoke. A clown, naked, exhausted. The shower had a lever that you pulled to the right for hot water and left for cold water, but I had trouble getting the temperature just right, and sometimes it scorched me and other times it felt like freezing rain, so I stepped out of the tub and dried off briskly as though playing the role of a vigorous man rubbing himself with his towel in front of the bathroom mirror. I was a bit shaken, no doubt about that. I changed clothes, because clean clothes always make me feel better. Soft socks, ironed underpants, impeccable shirts. The woman who came to clean my house twice a week was an “illegal” as they call them here; she’d crossed the river illegally, without papers. She’s from Mexico, her name is Encarnación, and she says that living here “in the North” is like being inside a gold cage. Her parents lived in Oaxaca, and she would return to her hometown for Christmas and then cross back secretly. Sometimes she came over with a coyote, and once she’d entered through California. She was always thinking about the police from Immigrations and talked about “la Migra” as if it was a ragged witch with a crafty eye that wouldn’t leave her in peace. One afternoon she came in crying because the boss—la gringa—from the house where she worked every day had humiliated her in front of “other people.” She dried away her tears with the palm of her hand; she was a woman of uncertain age, she could be twenty-four or forty-two depending on her expression, and after drying away her tears she seemed to have recovered and said that she had her pride too, and with a smile she opened her work smock to show me the T-shirt she wore underneath, with Che Guevara’s face embroidered on the cloth in the old style of popular images or the shining stars of Mexican Lucha Libre. She stood there for an instant, that tiny little woman of uncertain age, with a face like an Aztec statue and the image of Guevara under her work shirt. She said that the T-shirt was handmade by factory workers in Monterrey, and a friend who worked at a gas station in Lawrenceville had given it to her.
I remembered this story because I too needed the courage to endure what was to come. I had to keep going, had to cry in secret, to erase the cyclical progression of images: Ida’s car, cordoned off by yellow security tape on the corner of Bayard Lane, close to the outer wall around Palmer House, which I’d seen on TV. The way she entered a room; her slight gesture as she opened her overcoat to reveal what she was wearing that night. I had to stop thinking, I thought, and I started to translate that Robert Frost poem into Spanish to see if the rhythm of the verses could help me to breathe. Frost was frozen, icy, a chill in the bones, cold as stone, cold as marble, cold as death. Frost was also fragile, brittle, cracking, delicate, a shattering icecap, invisible. Dust of snow becomes copo de nieve or cristal de nieve, because polvo de hielo doesn’t sound right, cristal de nieve, diamante en polvo, agujas de nieve, a snow crystal, little crystals of snow, a frozen mist, Polvo de nieve. The way a crow, el modo, la forma en que el cuervo, El modo en que un cuervo / Shook down on me, hizo caer en mí, dejó caer sobre mí, Sacudió sobre mí / The dust of snow, El polvo de nieve / From a hemlock tree, desde ese árbol, desde el abeto, Desde un abeto // Has given my heart, le dio a mi corazón, le infundió al corazón, Le ha infundido a mi corazón / A change of mood, un cambio de ánimo, otro ánimo, Un nuevo ánimo / And saved some part, y rescató, salvó una parte, Salvando una parte / Of a day I had rued, de un día triste, un día apenado, De un día de pesar. Maybe in Spanish it could work better in third person. Los copos de nieve que un cuervo sacudió, desde lo alto del árbol, llovieron sobre él, y le infundieron un nuevo impulso a su corazón, aunque su vida estaba en ruinas, The snowflakes that a crow shook loose, from the top of a tree, rained down upon him, instilling in his heart a new impulse, though his life was in ruins.
I threw myself down on the bed. I suddenly remembered what I’d gone through when my father died. The things I’d done when he died. The opera
