Your Face Tomorrow. Fever And Spear Read Online Free PDF Page B

that my children have fallen asleep holding a Tintin book that has now slipped quietly to the floor or with a doll on the pillow that will be smothered by the tiny embrace of innocent dreams.
    But we must get used to the idea that there is no mourning and no respect for our memory nor for whatever we belatedly decide now to erect as symbols, apart from anything else because Luisa is not a widow and we have not died and I have not died, we were simply not attentive enough, and no one owes us anything, and above all because her time, the time that wraps around and steals away the children, is already very different from ours, hers advances but without including us, and I don't quite know what to do with mine, which advances without including me, or perhaps it is just that I have still not worked out how to climb aboard, perhaps I will never catch up and will always follow along behind alone in the wake of my own time. There will soon be someone by her side cooking omelettes and always on his best behaviour with her and the children, for months he will conceal the irritation he feels at not having her all to himself and whenever he wants, he will play the patient, understanding, supportive partner, and through hints and solicitous questions and retrospectively pitying smiles he will dig my grave still deeper, the grave in which I am already buried. That is one possibility, but who knows . . . He might be a jolly, laid-back fellow who will take her out on the town every night and won't even want to know about the children or to step over the threshold of our apartment, where he'll stand dressed and ready to party, drumming his fingers impatiently on the door frame; who will force her to distance herself from them and to neglect them, who will expose her to dangers and lure her into the kind of cheerful excesses I quite often indulge in here ... Or he might be the poisonous, despotic sort, who subjugates and isolates her and, little by little, quietly feeds her his demands and prohibitions, disguised as infatuation and weakness and jealousy and flattery and supplication, a devious sort who, one rainy night, when they're stuck at home, will close his large hands around her throat while the children — my children — watch from a corner, pressing themselves into the wall as if wishing the wall would give way and disappear and, with it, this awful sight, and the choked-back tears that long to burst forth, but cannot, the bad dream, and the strange, long-drawn-out noise their mother makes as she dies. But no, that won't happen, that doesn't happen, I won't have that luck or that misfortune (luck as long as it remains in the imagination, misfortune were it to become reality) . . . Who knows who will replace us, all we know is that we will be replaced, on all occasions and in all circumstances and in whatever we do, in love and friendship, as regards work, influence, domination, even hatred, which also wearies of us in the end; in the houses we live in and in the cities that receive us, in the telephones that persuade or patiently listen to us, laughing into our ear or murmuring agreement, at play and at work, in shops and offices, in the childhood landscape we thought was ours alone and in the streets exhausted from seeing so much decay, in restaurants and along avenues and in our armchairs and between our sheets, until no trace of our smell remains, and they are torn up to make strips or rags, even our kisses are replaced, and they close their eyes as they kiss, in memories and in thoughts and in daydreams and everywhere, I am like the snow on someone's shoulders, slippery and docile, and the snow always stops . . .
    I look out of the window of an apartment, ingenuously furnished by an Englishwoman I have never seen, while I put down the phone, then pick it up again, dial and hang up, I look out at the lazy London night across the square that is emptying of active beings and their resolute steps, to be filled for a while — an