A Story...

"A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

Or it's a love letter, as this story is. They say there is no love between those who do not have the spark of enmity. Luisa Aragon Ramirez was not my enemy, but my best friend. It is true there was no love that could have been made by us together. She held my secrets and I still treasure hers. I told her when Antonio offered to be my agent. I told her when he sold my book to Calderon. I told her when my lover sold my letters. We drank coffee in bars and walked through El Parque San Juan in raincoats and under parasols, sometimes on the same day. She was beautiful, I knew. Others admired her – both at a distance and at close quarters, when they would proposition her before my eyes as though they knew I could not object.

I noticed the pallor long before she told me. The shortness of breath and the sitting on every bench in El Parque. Like the best of friends she searched my face and lied to it. There was nothing wrong, she said – just a little tired. One autumn day as we watched the leaves fall, I waved to a former lover. She pointed at the figure, 'not the one, after all?' She said it in a gently mocking tone, but I felt I heard a descant of sadness, for me, for herself.

Her bed in the Hospital Parque San Juan was in a private room. She never said, but I felt she would have preferred the company of invalids to none at all. Except at the end, of course. The last week was raving, or delirium interspersed with short periods of apparently dreamless sleep. I am glad I held my mother's hand, at the last.