TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

Rodrigo Fresán

things like “There was something in them that made you think they wouldn’t live that long . . . Like a kind of sadness . . . Like a melancholy not for what they had lived, but for what they would never live.” On the other hand, when you are no longer young (when you start to be seen by newer and carnivorous specimens of boys and girls as a dinosaur that can only feed off of bland herbs) death seems to burst forth from the insides of the Earth. Death is like the fiery yawn of a volcano, death is the earthquake of tossing and turning in bed, awake and alert, knowing that half of your life has already slipped away and all that’s left in front of you are shudders, shaking, the incessant aftershocks of bad news. † While romantic love helps you believe the lie that you are immortal, because you need to and do convince yourself that that love will last forever, the truth of constant and eternal love for your children produces the paradox of thinking all the time that you might die at any moment. (Note: there are no beings more aware of time and its passing than pregnant women or the dying.) † The terrible paradox that, as less and less time is left in life, the days pass more and more quickly; and that, when we are children and we have everything in front of us, time seems to crawl, slowly, or to waste its own time, lying on its back and looking up at the tempera painting of the lights and shadows dancing together on the ceiling. There is—as for almost everything—a more or less scientific explanation for the phenomenon. What slows down or speeds up time, they say, is either lack or excess of experience. During childhood, everything is new, everything 196 Here comes another one.