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You open the mailbox and find the hand-addressed
envelope that he regularly received from Librairie Vrin, the
old philosophy bookstore in Place de la Sorbonne that we
occasionally visited (“the only ones who ever write me,” he
often said).
You open the freezer and see the
escudella
and the
fabada
,
his bean stew. (Now that should be nice, to wolf down a
fabada
two months from now and be able to say:
He made
it.
) At least that’s interesting. I don’t make any changes: I
want his objects to accompany me forever. For the time
being, they’ll pound away at me until every wave wears
down the pain, transforming it into fine, soft sand. I don’t
plan to remove things from the closet. Much like the
smoker who gives up smoking (and every time he does
something he’d previously done while smoking he feels a
powerful, intense, unbearable absence), it is only through
repeated actions that we can learn to incorporate his things
into our lives, until finally they are under our skin. At that
point, his things will no longer cause us pain, and it won’t
matter where we go, they’ll go with us. Píulix participates
in this with her characteristic cheerfulness. It’s almost as if
his things, scattered around the house, intensify her father’s
presence rather than saddening her by his absence.
•
But a shadow has been cast over certain areas. The living
room/dining room is one such case. The place where we ate