The rain with which my mother expired turns one year old today. It turned into tears, silent crying that they call gratitude. I do not believe it is an abuse of trust to take advantage of these lines to publish that May returned to the forest of her intact memory, the crowning of the triumph over the amnesia that gored her 60 years ago and whose slow recovery became the childhood I shared with my sister in that same forest that was called oblivion. Reason enough to tell you, mother, that the daughter who fell into a coma days before your departure woke up months after her absurd car accident to grieve your absence and discover as a surprise that a grandchild was born to her during the months she levitated in silence. I inform you that your daughter is a miracle: she resurrected with the same childlike smile, cloning herself with her granddaughter (who misses you despite her minimal memory of two years old) and your great-grandson is a smiling and silent serene being who now seems to be discovering his feet to walk all his life.
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The heartbeat of absence is a breath that José Lezama Lima wrote and Julián Orbón set to music, but I dare to add the unverifiable number of dawns in which the oxygen tank of your last days is heard, the isolated laughter of my father (with whom I suppose you walk the narrow paths of the forest in Virginia that we reviewed every morning walking with my sister to the little school without the letter ñ). A week after your death, a black squirrel came to wake me up, scratching a window that I had thrown away months later. Many readers assured me that it was you yourself touching the glass at the exact same hour in which your daughter had had the accident and that you had squirrelled that way to warn that from that day on — even at the bottom of the coma — my sister would start to move an index finger and her lips as if to kiss.
A year after starting your last stage, your daughter is a miracle who has started walking again, her legs no longer broken, her left hand as if to tune a natural, her right eye open and seeing visions… and her brain in a meticulous and gradual marvel that accelerates its minutes and the years in which I plan to continue accompanying her with old photographs and all the music in the world, just as we did as children to help you with your own amnesia. May those who interpret these lines as an unnecessary confession forgive me, but I write it so that you can tell my father, your parents, and all our dead that since you warned through the window of each dawn, my sister has returned almost intact to enjoy her exemplary children, the infinite love of those who were there to accompany her in that coma as amnesia now that slowly but surely dissipates in constant spring.
With my sister’s irrational accident — and even more so with your death a week after that void — Madrid distanced itself again to just over 9,000 kilometers. My children have had to succeed far away knowing that I have them closer than ever and the house where you lived as a widow and before with my father has now become walls of books and more books because I have taken out from more than a hundred boxes the entire house that I left stored when I thought I was leaving forever for Madrid more than a decade ago. On every bookshelf there are lined antidotes against absence, but its heartbeat is glimpsed in the face of your sister who survives you (who now looks more like you than before), in the symphonic silence where I hear ghosts and in the calandria that has replaced the black squirrel with a song that starts even before each dawn.
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I want it to be known that today I know that absence beats to verify that gratitude is an infinite gift, that in the voids true friends manifest and perhaps those who offend or harm move away forever, against the grain of the silent music on jarana strings, balm and relief against all forms of silence. I want it to be known that with old faded photographs and music from forgotten scores my sister helps me recognize you in a thousand memories, the smell of your perfume, a yellow Italian silk dress and the night we spied in winter pajamas the unforgettable scene where you dance with my dad with a fireplace in the background, while outside it snowed heavily in the forest that was amnesia to become floating memory, fog like cotton from which your daughter is now also relieved.
I want you to know that I try to write daily, that I read more than before and that I have published two books since your departure: an abbreviated version of the attempt to earn a doctorate as a historian in a Madrid of many years ago, in that adventure that cannot be explained without my parents and without my Teachers with a capital T. For Don Luis I gathered a group of devotees who celebrate the first centenary of his eternity and I am about to finish a biography of that endearing Master who I suppose roams with his Armida scenes where they coincide with the landscapes you now inhabit with my father, faint paintings of Joy with the other Jorge, a friend of my father Jorge’s mischiefs since they were children from Cueva. I imagine all the souls that seem to speak in photographs and in the heart of dawns as breath for other stories, another stubborn novel or full synchronization for this systole-diastole game… heartbeat of absence.
