Literature

you are alone

I am alone

but sometimes

loneliness can

a flame.

Mario Benedetti

A ray of sunlight filtered through the filmy curtain of the bedroom window. Slowly, as Maria opened her eyes, she savoured the heat of her skin. The night had startled her with dreams so that she now felt an urgency to get in the car and collect her mother and Aunt Reme to take them to the cemetery. How strange! She had never felt like this before about All Souls’ Day. Yes, of course she remembered the dead, sometimes she even talked to them, but she seldom visited the graves. Maybe because the old sepulchres oozed mourning, reeked of oblivion. What a terrible smell! Yet this day she wanted to touch the marble and feel the fire of remembrance burning on the other side.

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I am a woman who no longer understands anything. This doesn’t matter, nothing matters to me any more. I am wrapped in silence, as a wave on non-reason, quiet and opaque, flows over me, leaving a trail of memories in sepia, photographs of my grandmother, my grandfather, photographs displayed on the chest of drawers here, in my bedroom. Like beer spilt on hot asphalt, words dissolve even as they emerge from my lips, from my mind. I am no longer the real protagonist of my own story, the story you are reading, for I have become a mask, a discoloured puppet, articulated by worn-out strings, moved by a superior and anonymous force. Introvert woman, femme fatale, chaste girl, witch. Masked? None of these. I am the mask.

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