This Too Shall Pass Read Online Free PDF Page A

It’s the only article of your clothing I’ve kept. Not because it’s a good one, but because we bought it together at your favorite shop and I saw you wear it a thousand times. I haven’t had the guts to take it to the cleaner’s yet. I guess it still has your smell, though I haven’t been able to check on that, either. I’m a little frightened by the thing; it’s like a dusty ghost covered in dog hair that says hello to me when I walk through the door. I’m still afraid of the dead. When I saw you dead I wasn’t afraid, though; I would have been able to stay there sitting beside you for centuries. It was as if you simply weren’t there anymore, as if the light of the summer morning streaming through the window had nothing in its way, it spilled over the room, over the world, and what remained was merely our residue, your grimace of pain, the silence, the fatigue, and a newfound loneliness, bottomless—as if new floors were opening below my feet as they brushed along, one after the other, welcoming me. If your soul, or something like that, survives, it got the hell out of that depressing room, and I don’t blame you for it, I’m sure mine would have done the same.
    —What’s with the scuzzy jacket? Sofía asks when she walks through the door. She’s wearing one of her mother’s old hippie dresses, white linen with red piping. She took it to the seamstress a while ago and turned it into something fresh, graceful and stylish. Sofía dresses fastidiously and with an attention to detail that’s unusual nowadays—I know of only a few older gentlemen who still dress so meticulously—and completely opposite my own choice of uniform, which is composed of faded jeans and men’s shirts. I had already spotted the seemingly loopy, impeccably dressed eccentric one afternoon at the main entrance of our children’s elementary school, even before we became friendly. She showed up wearing a massive wide-brimmed hat to protect herself from the rain, and the next day she had on fuchsia woolen shorts over a black leotard and leggings. We fell into an immediate platonic crush, the teenage-girl kind, when you meet someone who not only shares the same loves and hates, your passion for white wine, and your quirky way of never taking anything seriously, but who has the same way of throwing herself wholeheartedly into life and everything that comes with it—the result of a passionate character and a protected childhood.
    —It’s my mom’s jacket, I declare. —I haven’t taken it to the cleaner’s yet. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it, in any case, it’s the only piece of her clothing I’ve kept.
    I go on to describe the last time I saw Elenita, who was the daughter of my nanny, Marisa. Marisa was an extraordinary woman and my second mother. She died of a heart attack two years ago. Elenita was suffering from cancer and already very ill when she greeted me, wearing one of her mother’s flower-patterned housecoats. I recognized it the second she opened the door, and thought how logical that she would wear it, though it also seemed like a terrible foreshadowing for the embrace of death. And I also recall how a friend from school many years earlier, a tall and lanky girl with blond hair, had shown me her yellow socks before running out onto the sports field one day. They had belonged to her father, who had just died of cancer, and reached all the way up to her knees. I was a virgin to death then, and it just seemed so sad and so romantic to me (as a teenager, compassion was as volatile and flickering a feeling as any other). A year later, when I turned sixteen, my father died of cancer. And from then on the dead form a sort of chain, a macabre necklace that weighs a ton, and whose last, closing link will be me, I guess.
    —I think you should have it cleaned and then store it on the highest shelf in the cupboard, Elisa says. You’ll decide what to do with it later, there’s no hurry.
    Elisa had come for