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I NEVER felt so passionately eager to see Buenos Aires lit up on Independence Day, for sales at department stores festooned with green streamers, or for my birthday, as I was to arrive at this moment of supernatural joy.

Ever since I was a girl I’ve been as pale as I am now, “perhaps a little anemic,” the doctor would say, “but healthy, like the whole Andrade family.” On several occasions I imagined my death, while sitting before mirrors and holding a paper rose. Now that rose is in my hand (it was in a vase by my bed). A rose, a vain ornament smelling like a rag, with a name written on one of its petals. I don’t need to smell it, to look at it: I know it’s the very same one. Today I am dying, and my face is the very one I saw in the mirrors of my childhood. (I have hardly changed. Accumulated weariness, crying, and laughter have made my face more mature, forming and deforming it.) Every dwelling place seems old and familiar to me.

The unlikely reader of these pages will ask for whom I am telling this story. Perhaps the fear of not dying forces me to do so. Perhaps I write for myself: to read it over if by some curse I should keep on living. I need evidence that I am distressed only by the fear of not dying. I truly think that the only sad part about death, about the idea of death, is knowing that it cannot be remembered by the person who has died but solely, and sadly, by those who watched that person die.

My name is Irene Andrade. I was born twenty-five years ago in this yellow house, with balconies of black wrought iron and bronze plates bright as gold, six blocks from the church and square of Las Flores. I am the oldest of four rambunctious children in whose childhood games I took a passionate part. My maternal grandfather was French; he died in a shipwreck that rendered the eyes of his portrait, venerated by guests in the shadows of the living room, misty and mysterious. My maternal grandmother was born in this town, a few hours after the first church burned down. Her mother, my great-grandmother, told her all the details of the fire that had hastened her birth. She passed those stories on to us. No one was better acquainted with that fire, with her own birth, with the main square sowed with alfalfa, with the death of Serapio Rosas, with the execution of two prisoners in 1860 near the atrium of the old church. I know my paternal grandparents only through two yellowing photographs, obscured in a kind of respectful haze. They look more like brother and sister than husband and wife; more like twins than mere siblings. They had the same thin lips, the same curly hair, the same detached hands resting idly on their laps, the same doting reserve. My father, who revered the education he had received from them, raised plants: he was as gentle with them as he was with his children, giving them remedies and water, covering them with canvas on cold nights, giving them the names of angels, and finally, “when they had grown,” selling them with the utmost regret. He would caress the leaves as if caressing the hair of a child; I think that in his later years he talked to them, or at least that was my impression. All of this secretly annoyed my mother. She never told me as much, but in the tone of her voice, when she told her friends—“Leonardo is in there with his plants! He loves them more than his children!”—I guessed a perpetual mute impatience, the impatience of a jealous woman. My father was a man of average height, with beautiful, regular features, dark complexion and chestnut hair, and an almost blond beard. No doubt it is from him that I have inherited my seriousness, the admirable suppleness of my hair, the natural goodness of my heart, and my patience, a patience that might almost seem a fault, a sort of deafness, a bad habit. My mother, when she was younger, embroidered for a living: that sedentary life had filled her as if with still water, somewhat cloudy yet at the same time tranquil. No one rocked so elegantly in the rocking chair, no one handled fabric so eagerly. Now, she has that perfect kind of affectation that old age provides. In her I see only maternal whiteness, the severity of her gestures and voice: there are voices that you can see, that keep on revealing the expression of a face even after its beauty is gone. Thanks to that voice I can still recall her blue eyes and her high forehead. From her I must have inherited the whiteness of my skin, my fondness for reading or needlework, and a certain proud, disdainful shyness toward those who, even when they are shy, might be or at least seem to be modest.

Without bragging I can say that until I was fifteen, at the very least, I was the favorite at home because I was older and was a girl: circumstances most parents, who prefer boys and the younger siblings, would not have found so appealing.

Among the most vivid memories of my childhood I shall mention: a shaggy white dog named Jasmine; a Virgin four inches tall; the oil painting of my maternal grandfather which I have already mentioned; and a vine with trumpet-shaped orange flowers, called bignonia or war trumpet.

I saw the white dog in a kind of dream and later, more insistently, in my waking hours. I would tie him to the chairs with a rope, would give him food and water, would pet and punish him, would make him bark and bite. My loyalty to an imaginary dog, at the very time I scorned other more modest but more real toys, made my parents happy. I remember they would point at me proudly, telling the guests, “Look how she can entertain herself with nothing.” They would frequently ask me about the dog, asking me to bring him into the living room or, at mealtimes, into the dining room; I obeyed enthusiastically. They pretended to see a dog that only I could see; they praised or teased him, to please or distress me.

The day my parents received a shaggy white dog from my uncle in Neuquén, nobody doubted that the dog’s name was Jasmine or that my uncle had been a partner in my games. However, my uncle had been away for more than five years. I didn’t write to him (I barely knew how to write). “Your uncle is a seer,” I remember my parents saying at the moment they showed me the dog, “Here is Jasmine!” Jasmine recognized me without surprise; I kissed him.

Like a sky-blue triangle with golden borders, the Virgin began taking shape, acquiring density in the remoteness of a June sky. It was cold that year and the windows were dirty. I wiped them with my handkerchief, opening up little rectangles on the windowpanes. In one of those rectangles the sun lit up a cloak and a formless tiny, round red face that seemed sacrilegious to me at first. Beauty and saintliness were for me two inseparable virtues. I lamented the fact that her face wasn’t beautiful. I cried for many nights, trying to alter it. I remember that this apparition impressed me more than the dog itself, because at the time I had a tendency toward mysticism. Churches and saints exerted a fascination on my spirit. I prayed secretly to the Virgin, offering her flowers and gleaming candies in little liqueur glasses, tiny mirrors, perfumes. I found a cardboard box about her size, and with ribbons and curtains I turned it into an altar. At first, when she watched me pray, my mother smiled with satisfaction; later, she was disturbed by the intensity of my fervor. One night by my bed, I heard her tell my father when they thought I was asleep, “Let’s hope she doesn’t turn into a saint! Poor thing, she doesn’t bother anyone! She’s so good!” She was also disturbed to see the empty box in front of a pile of wildflowers and votive candles, thinking that my fervor was leading to some sort of sacrilege. She tried to give me a Saint Anthony and a Saint Rose of Lima, relics that had belonged to her mother. I did not accept them; I told her that my Virgin was dressed in blue and gold. I showed her the size of the Virgin with my hands, explaining timidly that her face was small and red, sunburned, without any sweetness of expression, like the face of a doll, but shining like an angel’s.

That same summer, at the market where my mother did her shopping, the Virgin appeared in a shopwindow: it was the Virgin of Luján. I didn’t doubt that my mother had ordered it for me, nor was I surprised that she had guessed the shape and color of the Virgin exactly, even the form of her mouth. I remember she complained of the price because it was damaged. She brought it home wrapped in newspaper.

My grandfather’s painting, that majestic ornament of the living room, caught my attention when I was nine years old. Behind a red curtain, which made the image stand out even more, I discovered a frightening, dark world. Children sometimes find pleasure in such worlds. Deep, dark, vast expanses like green marble were trembling there, broken, icy, furious, tall, with scattered forms like mountains. Next to that painting I felt cold and tasted tears on my lips. Along wooden hallways, women with long hair and men in distress were fleeing, standing motionless. There was a woman covered with an enormous cape and a man whose face I never saw who walked, holding hands with a child carrying a rocking horse. It was raining somewhere; a tall flag was waving in the wind. That treeless landscape, so similar to the one I could see at dusk from the streets at the edge of town—so similar and at the same time so different—disturbed me. One summer day, sitting in an armchair, alone in front of the painting, I fainted. My mother said that when she woke me up I asked for water with my eyes closed. Thanks to the water she gave me, which she also used to cool my brow, I was saved from an unexpected, premature death.

One day at the end of spring, in the courtyard of our house, I saw the vine with orange flowers for the first time. When my mother sat knitting or embroidering, I would push off the boughs (which only I could see) so that they would not get in her way. I loved the orange color of the petals, the warlike name (confused with the history lessons I was studying at that time), and the light scent, like rain, given off by the leaves. One day, my brothers heard me utter its name and began speaking of San Martín and his grenadiers. In the endless afternoons, the gestures I made to pull the boughs from my mother’s face, so they would not bother her, seemed intended to scare off the flies that sit aggressively still in certain points in space. Nobody foresaw the future vine. An inexplicable apprehensiveness prevented me from speaking of it before it arrived.

My father planted the vine in the very spot in the courtyard where I had anticipated its opulent form and color. It was in the very place where my mother would sit. (For some reason, perhaps because of the sun, my mother could not sit in any other corner of the courtyard; for some reason, perhaps for the very same reason, the vine could not be planted anywhere else.)

I was judicious and reserved. I’m not praising myself: these secondary virtues sometimes give rise to grave faults. Because of vanity or a lack of physical strength, I was more studious than my brothers. No lesson seemed new to me. I enjoyed the quiet that books afford. I enjoyed, above all else, the astonishment caused by my extraordinary facility for all kinds of study. Not all of my girlfriends liked me, and my favorite companion was solitude, which smiled on me during recess. I read at night, by candlelight. (My mother had forbidden me to read “because it was bad, not only for the eyes but also for the brain.”) For a time I took piano lessons. The teacher called me “Irene the euphonious,” and this nickname, which I did not understand and which other students repeated with sarcasm, offended me. I thought that my stillness, my seeming melancholy, and my pale face had inspired the cruel nickname “the cadaverous.” For a teacher to make jokes about death seemed to me to be in poor taste; and one day, crying because I already knew how mistaken and how unfair I could be, I made up a slander against that young lady, who had only wanted to praise me. Nobody believed me, but one afternoon when we were alone in her living room, she took me by the hand and said, “How can you repeat such intimate, such awful things?” It was not a reproach: it was the beginning of a friendship.

I may have been happy, at least until I was fifteen. The sudden death of my father brought about a change in my life. My childhood was ending. I tried using lipstick and high heels. Men looked at me at the train station, and I had a boyfriend who waited for me on Sundays at the door of the church. I was happy, if happiness exists. I enjoyed being an adult, being beautiful, with a beauty criticized by some of my relatives.

I was happy, but the sudden death of my father, as I said before, brought about a change in my life. Three months before he died, I had already prepared my mourning dress and the black crepe; I had already cried for him, leaning majestically on the balcony railing. I had already written the date of his death on an etching; I had already visited the cemetery. All of that was made worse by the indifference I showed after the funeral. To tell the truth, after his death I never remembered him at all. My mother, a good soul, couldn’t forgive me. Even now she looks at me with the same expression of rancor that, for the first time, had awoken in me the desire for death. Even now, after so many years, she cannot forget the mourning dress worn in advance, the date and name written on the etching, the unexpected visit to the cemetery, my indifference to his death at the very moment of our large family’s greatest sorrow. Some people looked at me with suspicion. I couldn’t hold back my tears when I heard certain bitter, ironic phrases, usually accompanied by a wink. (Only then did oblivion seem like bliss to me.) They said I was possessed by the devil; that I had wished for my father’s death so that I could wear mourning and a jet-black clasp; that I had poisoned him so as to be able to spend my time at dances and at the train station without worrying about his prohibitions. I felt guilty at having unleashed such hatred around me. I spent long sleepless nights. I managed to get sick but was unable to die, as I had desired.

It had not occurred to me that I might have a supernatural gift, but when beings stopped seeming miraculous for me, I felt miraculous toward them. Neither Jasmine nor the Virgin (now broken and forgotten) existed. An austere future awaited me; my childhood grew more distant.

I felt guilty for the death of my father. I had killed him when I imagined him dead. Other people did not have this power.

Guilty and unlucky, I felt capable of infinite future joys, which only I could invent. I had projects for my happiness: my visions should be pleasant, I should be careful with my thoughts and try avoiding sad ideas, try inventing a happy world. I was responsible for everything that happened. I tried avoiding images of drought, floods, poverty, and illness when thinking about my family or acquaintances.

For a time this method seemed effective. But very soon I understood that my intentions were as vain as they were childish. At the entrance to a store I was forced to watch two men fight. I refused to see the concealed knife; I refused to see the blood. The struggle looked like a desperate embrace. It occurred to me that the death agony of one of them and the gasping terror of the other were a final sign of reconciliation. Without being able to erase the horrible image even for a moment, I was forced to witness the death in all its sharpness, the blood mixed with the dirt of the street, a few days later.

I tried to analyze the process, the form in which my thoughts developed. My visions were involuntary. It was not hard to recognize them; they always appeared in the company of certain unmistakable signs, which were always the same: a slight breeze, a curtain of mist, a tune I cannot sing, a door of carved wood, a clammy feeling in my palms, a little bronze statue in a distant garden. It was useless to try to avoid these images: in the icy regions of the future reality rules.

I then understood that to lose the ability to remember is one of the greatest misfortunes, since events, though infinite in the memory of normal beings, are extremely brief, indeed almost nonexistent, for one who foresees them and then merely experiences them. Those who do not know their destinies invent and enrich their lives with hopes of a future that will never turn out the way they imagine. That imagined destiny, prior to the real one, exists in a sense, and is as necessary as the other. The lies my girlfriends spoke sometimes seemed truer than the truth. I have seen expressions of bliss on the faces of people who live on always frustrated hopes. I think that the essential lack of memories, in my case, did not proceed from a lack of memory: I think that my thoughts, so busy with seeing the future, so full of images, didn’t have time to dwell on the past.

Leaning out on the balcony, I would see the children, on their way to school, passing by with the faces of grown-ups. That made me shy of children. I could see the future afternoons full of conversations, rosy or lilac clouds, births, terrible suffering, ambition, unavoidable cruelty against human beings and animals.

Now I understand the extent to which I viewed events as final memories. They replaced memories so inadequately. For instance: if I were not about to die, then this rose, right now here in my hand, would not live in my memory; I would lose it forever in a tumult of visions of a future destiny.

Hidden in the shadow of courtyards, of hallways, in the icy atrium of the church, I meditated constantly. I tried to take charge of my memories of my girlfriends, of my brothers, of my mother (always the most significant ones). It was then that the touching vision of a forehead, of certain eyes, of a face began to haunt and pursue me, forming my desires. That face lingered for many days and many nights before taking shape. The truth is: I had the burning desire to be a saint. I vehemently wished for the face to be God’s or that of the infant Jesus. In church, in etchings, in books, and in medallions I searched for that adorable face: I didn’t want to find it anywhere else, didn’t want it to be human, or contemporary, or true. I don’t think anyone has ever had so much trouble recognizing the danger signs of love. How I gave in to my adolescent tears! Only now can I remember the light yet penetrating aroma of the roses Gabriel gave me, while gazing into my eyes, as we left school. That prescience would have lasted a whole lifetime. In vain I tried to delay meeting him. I could foresee separation, absence, forgetting. In vain I tried to avoid the hours, paths, and places that favored a meeting. My prescient caution should have lasted a whole lifetime. But destiny put the roses in my hands and put the real Gabriel before me without my feeling surprise. My tears were useless. Uselessly I copied the roses on paper, writing names and dates on the petals: a rose can be invisible forever in a rose garden, before our window, or in the hands of the lover who offers it to us; only memory will preserve it intact, with its perfume, its color, and the devotion of the hands offering it.

Gabriel would be playing with my brothers, but when I appeared with a book or with my sewing basket, and sat down on a chair in the courtyard, he would leave his games to offer me the homage of his silence. Few children were as astute. He made little airplanes of flower petals, of leaves. He caught fireflies and bats; then he tamed them. From closely watching the movements of my hands, he learned to embroider. He embroidered without blushing: architects made house plans; he, when he embroidered, made plans of gardens. He loved me: at night, in the dark courtyard of my house, I could feel his involuntary love growing with all the naturalness of a plant.

Without knowing it, how I hoped to penetrate the chaste memory of those moments! Without knowing it, how I yearned for death, the only keeper of my memories! A hypnotic fragrance, the rustling of eternal leaves on the trees, comes to guide me along the paths, now so long forgotten, of that love. Sometimes an event that seemed labyrinthine to me, so slow to develop, so practically infinite can be expressed in two words. My name, written in green ink or with a pin, on his arm, on him who filled six months of my life, now fills only a single sentence. What is it to be in love? For years I asked the piano teacher and my girlfriends. What is it to be in love? Remembering a word, a look within the complexity of other spaces; multiplying and dividing and transforming these things (as if they were displeasing to us), comparing them unceasingly. What is a beloved face? A face that is never the same, a face that is ceaselessly transformed, a face that disappoints us . . .

A silence of cloisters and roses was in our hearts. No one could guess the mystery that linked us. Not even those colored pencils or the jujube candies or the flowers he bestowed on me gave us away. He would write my name on the trunks of trees with his penknife, and when he was being punished he would write it with chalk on the wall.

“When I die I will give you candies every day and write your name on all the tree trunks in heaven,” he once told me.

“How do you know we’ll go to heaven?” I answered. “How do you know there are trees and penknives in heaven? Are you sure that God will let you remember me? Are you sure that in heaven your name will be Gabriel and mine Irene? Will we have the same faces, and will we recognize each other?”

“We’ll have the same faces. And even if we didn’t, we would recognize each other. That day during Carnival celebrations, when you dressed up as a star and spoke with an icy voice, I recognized you. With my eyes closed, I’ve seen you so many times since then.”

“You’ve seen me when I wasn’t there. You’ve seen me in your imagination.”

“I saw you when we were playing nurse and patient. When I was the one who was wounded and they were blindfolding my eyes, I guessed when you were coming.”

“Because I was the nurse, and I had to come. You could see me under the blindfold: You were cheating. You always cheated.”

“In heaven I’ll recognize you without cheating. I’d recognize you even in disguise, I’d see you coming even with my eyes blindfolded.”

“Then you believe there’ll be no difference between this world and heaven?”

“Only what bothers us now will be lacking: some family members, bedtime hours, punishments, and the moments when I don’t see you.”

“Perhaps it’s better in hell than in heaven,” he said to me another day, “because hell is more dangerous and I like suffering for you. To live in flames because of your guilt, to save you continually from the demons and fire, would be a source of joy for me.”

“But do you want to die in mortal sin?”

“Why mortal and not immortal? Nobody forgets my uncle: he committed a mortal sin and they didn’t give him the last rites. My mother told me, ‘He’s a hero—don’t listen to what people say.’?”

“Why do you think about death? Usually young people avoid such dark, depressing topics of conversation,” I protested one day. “Right now you look like an old man. Look at yourself in the mirror.”

There was no mirror nearby. He looked at himself in my eyes.

“I don’t look like an old man. Old men comb their hair in a different way. But I’m already grown up, and familiar with death,” he answered. “Death is like an absence. Last month, when my mother took me to Azul for two weeks, my heart stopped and, with deep sorrow, I felt not blood coursing through my veins but cold water. Soon I will have to go far away, indefinitely. I console myself imagining something simpler: death or war.”

Sometimes he lied to move me to pity: “I’m sick. Last night I fainted in the street.”

If I criticized him for lying, he’d answer, “One only lies to people one loves: truth leads us to make many errors.”

“I’ll never forget you, Gabriel.” The day I said that I had already forgotten him.

Without anxiety, without weeping, already accustomed to his absence, I withdrew from him before he left. A train pulled him from my side. Other visions already separated me from his face, other loves, less touching farewells. I last saw his face through the pane of the train window, sad and in love, erased by the superimposed images of my future life.

My life turned sad, but not for lack of amusements. Once I confused my own destiny with that of a character in a novel. I should confess: I confused the face of an illustration I foresaw with a real face. I waited for a conversation between two characters that I later read in a book which was set in an unknown city in 1890. The antiquated clothing of the characters didn’t surprise me. “How fashions are going to change,” I thought with indifference. The figure of a king, who didn’t look like a king because he only appeared in the plate of a history book, devoted his fond glances to me in the autumn twilight. Up until then, the texts and characters of books had not appeared to me as future realities; it’s true that before I never had the chance to read many books. The books belonging to one of my grandfathers were stored in a room at the back of the house; bound with twine and wrapped in spiderwebs, I first saw them when my mother decided to sell them all. For several days we inspected the books, dusting the volumes with rags and feather dusters, gluing back the loose pages. I read during the moments I was alone.

Far from Gabriel, I understood by some miracle that only death would let me recover his memory. The afternoon when no other visions, no other images, when no other future disturbed me would be the afternoon of my death, and I knew I would wait for it holding this rose. I knew that the tablecloth I would embroider for months on end, with yellow daisies and pink forget-me-nots, with garlands of yellow wisteria and a gazebo surrounded by palm trees, would be used for the first time the night of my wake. I knew that this tablecloth would be praised by the guests who had made me weep ten years earlier, when I heard the voices, a chorus of female voices, repeating my name, disfiguring it with sad adjectives: “Poor Irene,” “Unfortunate Irene!” Then I heard other names, not people’s names but those of little cakes and plants, uttered with pained admiration: “What delightful palm trees,” “What madeleines!” But then with the same sadness, and with the insistence of a psalm, the chorus repeated, “Poor Irene!”

The false splendor of death! The sun shines on the same world. Nothing has changed when everything has changed for only one being. Moses foresaw his own death. Who was Moses? I thought that no one had ever foreseen his own death. I thought that Irene Andrade, this modest Argentine woman, had been the only one in the world capable of describing her death before it happened.

I lived, waiting for life’s limit that would draw me closer to memory. I had to put up with infinite moments. I had to love the mornings as if they were the last ones; I had to love certain shadows in the main square and Armindo’s eyes; I had to get sick from typhus fever and cut my hair. I met Teresa, Benigno; I visited the Fountain of Love and the Sentinel in Tandil for the first time. In Monte, in the railroad station, with my mother I drank tea with milk after visiting a lady who taught needlework and knitting. In front of the Garden Hotel I saw the death agony of a horse that looked as if it was made of clay. (It was tormented by flies and by a man with a whip.) I never went to Buenos Aires: some calamity always prevented the trip I planned. I never saw the dark outline of the train in Constitution Station. Now I never will. I will die without seeing Palermo Park, the Plaza de Mayo all lit up, and the Colón Theater with its boxes and its desperate artists singing, their hands on their breasts.

I agreed to being photographed against a sad backdrop of trees with beautiful, tall hair, wearing gloves and a straw hat decorated with red cherries, so battered they looked real.

Slowly, I carried out the last episodes of my destiny. I will confess that I was oddly mistaken when I foresaw the photograph of myself: although I found it similar, I didn’t recognize my own image. I felt indignant with that woman who, without neglecting my imperfections, had usurped my eyes, the position of my hands, the careful oval of my face.

For those who remember, time is not too long. For those who wait it is inexorable.

“In a small town everything is quickly over. There won’t be any new houses or new people to meet,” I thought, trying to console myself. “Here death arrives more quickly. If I had been born in Buenos Aires, my life would have been interminable, my sorrows would never end.”

I remember the solitude of the afternoons when I sat in the square. Would the light hurt my eyes so I would weep of something other than sorrow? “She’s thirty years old and still has not married,” some glances told me. “What is she waiting for,” others said, “sitting here in the square? Why doesn’t she bring her sewing? Nobody loves her, not even her brothers. When she was fifteen she killed her father. The devil possessed her—God knows in what form.”

These dreary, monotonous visions of the future depressed me, but I knew that in the rarefied space of my life, where there was no love, no faces, no new objects, where nothing happened anymore, my torment was coming to its end, my happiness was beginning. Trembling, I was coming closer to the past.

The coldness of a statue took possession of my hands. A veil separated me from the houses, drew me away from the plants and people: nonetheless I saw them clearly outlined for the first time, minutely present in every detail.

One January afternoon, I was sitting on a bench by the fountain in the square. I remember the stifling heat of the day and the unusual coolness brought on by the sunset. Surely somewhere it had rained. My head rested on my hand; in my hand was a handkerchief: a sad pose, at times inspired by the heat, yet at that moment inspired by sorrow. Someone sat down next to me. She spoke to me with a woman’s soft voice. This was our exchange:

“Excuse my impertinence. There isn’t time for formal introductions. I don’t live in this town; chance brings me here from time to time. Even if someday I will sit in this square again, it’s unlikely that our conversation will be repeated. Perhaps I’ll never see you again, not even in a store, or on a railway platform, or in the street.”

“My name is Irene,” I replied. “Irene Andrade.”

“Were you born here?”

“Yes, I was born and will die in this town.”

“I never thought about dying in a particular place, no matter how sad or enchanting it might be. I never thought of my death as a possibility.”

“I didn’t choose this town to die in. Destiny assigns places and dates without consulting us.”

“Destiny decides things but doesn’t participate in them. How do you know you’ll die in this town? You’re young and you don’t look sick. One thinks of death when one is sad. Why are you sad?”

“I’m not sad. I’ve no fear of dying and destiny has never disappointed me. These are my final afternoons. These pink clouds will be the last ones, shaped like saints, like houses, like lions. Your face will be the last new face; your voice will be the last one I hear.”

“What has happened to you?”

“Nothing has happened to me and, happily enough, few things are left that will happen to me. I feel no curiosity. I don’t want to know your name, I don’t want to look at you: new things disturb me and only delay my death.”

“Haven’t you ever been happy? Don’t certain memories fill you with hope?”

“I have no memories. The angels will bring back all my memories on the day of my death. The cherubim will bring back the forms of all the faces. They will bring back all the hairstyles and ribbons, the positions of arms, past shapes of hands. The seraphim will bring me taste, sound, and fragrances, the flowers I received as gifts, landscapes. The archangels will bring back conversations and farewells, light, the silence of reconciliation.”

“Irene, it seems to me as if I’ve known you for a long time! I’ve seen your face somewhere, perhaps in a photograph, with tall hair, ribbons of velvet, and a hat decorated with cherries. Isn’t there such a picture of you, with a sad backdrop of trees? Didn’t your father sell plants a long time ago? Why do you want to die? Don’t lower your eyes. Don’t you admit the world is beautiful? You want to die because everything becomes more definitive and more beautiful at times of parting.”

“For me death will be a time of arrival, not of parting.”

“Arrival is never pleasant. Some people couldn’t even arrive in heaven and feel happy. One must get used to faces, to the places one has most loved. One must get used to voices, to dreams, to the sweetness of the country.”

“I’ll never arrive anywhere for the first time. I recognize everything. Even heaven sometimes scares me. The fear of its images, the fear of recognizing it all!”

“Irene Andrade, I’d like to write your biography.”

“Ah! What a favor you would do me if you could help me cheat my destiny by not writing my biography. But you will write it. I can already see the pages, the clear script, and my sad destiny. It will begin like this:

I never felt so passionately eager to see Buenos Aires lit up on Independence Day, for sales at department stores festooned with green streamers, or for my birthday, as I was to arrive at this moment of supernatural joy.

Ever since I was a girl I’ve been as pale as I am now…