Blind Sunflowers Read Online Free PDF Page B

your appreciation of me? Do you remember, you used to call me the proletarian archer? Elena loved you for that, and loves you even after her death, I’m sure.
Page 5
    Would Elena have preferred me to disentangle the child from the placenta, to tie his umbilical with one of my bootlaces, to seek to humble the victors with the seed of revenge? I don’t think she would have wanted a defeated child. I don’t want a son born of flight. My son does not want a life born of death. Or does he?
    If the God I have heard about were a good God, he would allow us to choose our past, but neither Elena nor her son will be able to go back along the path that has brought us to this cabin that will be their burial place.
    At first light, sleep overcame me, and I dozed off leaning on the table. I was awakened by the boy’s sobs: they sounded less vigorous, more ailing. His anger yesterday left me indifferent, but today’s lament has touched me. I don’t know whether it was because I was dazed from sleep and cold, or because after three days without food I’m also beginning to feel weak, but the fact is that without realising it I found myself giving him the tip of a rag dipped in diluted milk. At first he did not seem to know if he should live or simply allow himself to become part of my plan, but after a while he began to suck on the liquid. He was sick, but then went on sucking greedily. Life seems determined to win out.
    I think it was a mistake to pick him up. I think it was a mistake to distance him from death for even an instant, but the warmth of my body and the food he managed to take in have sent him into a fitful but deep sleep.

Page 6
    I used some sacks of hay to make him a cosy cradle. I covered him with the crocheted bedspread Elena’s grandmother made. Elena insisted on bringing it with her, as if all her past were bundled up in it. It’s no longer as comforting as it was when the three of us fled, but it warms the child up. Perhaps it still bears traces of his mother’s smell.
    I must confess I find the contrast between life and death unbearable.
    To see the two of them in the same bed, flat on their backs, with Elena completely gone and him still so undefined was like drawing a line between what’s true and what’s false. All at once death was death, nothing more, stripped of the body’s innocence, of life’s animal nature. By the end of three days, a dead body is a mineral without the moisture of breath or the fragility of flowers. It isn’t even a defenceless object. It’s not something that could feel under attack, and yet it crouches there as though trying to hide. By the end of three days, a dead body is nothing more than solitude. It doesn’t even have the gift of sadness. The boy’s umbilical cord is drying out. He’s still crying.
    Around this passage there is a faint drawing in which one can make out a shooting star, or the childish representation of a comet, which is crashing into a tearful, waning moon.
Page 7
    I haven’t eaten. I still have some dry bread and tins of fish that we brought with us on our escape. The boy has had some more diluted milk. It seems to fill him up. Today I’ll bury his mother under the oak tree. I don’t have the strength to milk the cows, but they are becoming ill and their lowing also serves to take my mind off Elena. I’d like someone to come up from the valley and round up the cattle so I don’t have to decide whether to feed myself or let myself roll down the slope to death. But in these fearful times, even cattle have to fend for themselves. Until winter arrives, they will be unaware of the existence of wolves, cold, and the natural order of things. As it stands, they and I are facing the same fate. If nobody comes, the four or five of them that need to be milked will die. How could the person looking after them have vanished, just like that? But that is of no importance in such bleak times as these. Anyway, while I make my mind up, I’ll need milk for the