Blind Sunflowers Read Online Free PDF

should come so soon, when life itself has had no time to begin.
    I’ve left everything as it was. Nobody will be able to say I interfered. The mother dead, the child restlessly alive, and me paralysed by fear. The colour of flight is grey; the sound of defeat is sadness.
    At this point there is a poem that has been crossed out. Only a few words are legible: ‘vigorous’, ‘no light’ (or ‘my light’, it is not clear which) and ‘to forget the explosion’. In the margin, in smaller handwriting : ‘Is this child the cause of death, or its fruit?’
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    I want to leave everything written down in order to make it clear to whoever finds us that they are also to blame, unless they are victims too. Whoever reads this, please scatter our remains out on the hills. Elena could go no further, and the boy and I want to stay beside her. I am guilty only of having allowed what happened to happen. I had not learned how to avoid grief, and now grief has chopped Elena from me with its scythe. I only know how to write and tell stories. Nobody has taught me how totalk to myself, or to protect life from death. I write because I don’t want to remember how to pray or to curse.
    How can such a beautiful story end on a mountain wracked by the wind? It’s only October, but up here every night autumn becomes winter.
    The child cried all day, with surprising strength. He has forced me to think of him, even though all I do is stare at Elena dead beside me, and have paid him no attention the whole morning. I now realise I have not shed a single tear over her, probably because the child’s sobbing is more than enough. And it’s necessary. I would never have managed to cry so helplessly; I would never have succeeded in screaming so angrily. Tears have been shed over Elena’s dead body without any effort on my part. How is it possible for someone to shed tears and fade away at the same time? Now it seems as though the boy has lost consciousness. I went over to look at him. He’s still breathing, although it felt to me as though his skeleton had somehow been removed.
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    I’ve been studying Elena’s chalky face. She is not as waxily pallid as she was when she died. It’s as though all the colour has drained from her. Perhaps death is transparent. And frozen. For the first few hours, I felt the need to keep her hand in mine, but little by little the sense of her fingers caressing me faded, and I was afraid this would be the memory of her that remained engraved on my unrequited skin. I haven’t touched her for several hours, and am no longer capable of lying down beside her. The boy is though. He’s curled up against his mother. For a moment I thought he was trying to bring some warmth back to the lifeless body that was his shelter through all the droning numbness of war.
    Yes. We’ve lost a war, and to allow ourselves to be caught by the Fascists would be akin to handing them another victory. Elena wanted to follow me, but now we know we made the wrong decision. I’d like to think it was the most generous mistake imaginable.
    We should have listened to her parents. I beg their forgiveness for having allowed Elena to come with me when I fled.
    Stay here, it’s not you they’re after, I told her. I’ll follow you. They’ll kill me. I’m dying. We talked of death in order to take a chance with life. But we were wrong. We should never have started out on such an endlessjourney with her eight-months pregnant. The child will not survive, and I’ll let myself fall onto the grass. The snow will come and bury me, and later out of my eye sockets will grow flowers that will enrage those who preferred death to poetry.
    Miguel, your prophecy will come true!
    Where can you be now, Miguel, why aren’t you here to comfort me? I would gladly sacrifice eternity to hear your liquid verses just once more, your level voice, your friendly advice. Perhaps all this pain will make a poet of me, Miguel, perhaps you won’t have to be so kind in