135 / 194
120
After a few days, you stop looking with such single- minded
eagerness. You just happen upon them. You open your
appointment book and you find a little drawing. It’s an
amusing illustration, a rather wide, ungainly skeleton he’d
drawn for our daughter in a restaurant in Tuscany when
she’d asked what we were like inside. They’d just shown us
the fish they were going to cook for us. Waiting for fish to
be prepared after seeing it, fresh out of the water, always
put Cometa in a good mood. The skeleton was cute and I
kept it in my planner. We walked back along the stone
footpath by the sea, waves splashing us in the night.
You open the closet and see his jacket, and him in it, and
you feel the touch of his fog-cold skin when he arrived for
dinner during our vacation in the house of the three doors.
You open the other closet and you see the dress you wore
last summer and you wonder what you’ll feel next summer
when you have to decide if you’ll wear it again.
You open the kitchen cupboard and you see the kidney
beans he bought in the town of El Barco de Ávila, where he
had the mystical revelation that he should stay and live
forever in a place like that.
You take the cap off the toothpaste and you know it’s
almost finished, and the next tube of toothpaste won’t be
the one he used.