Dead Letter

The dead won’t let us go, I say to my friend Sirius, putting away my father’s letters in a drawer. It’s the plight of Mezentius that I endure, stitched to a dead man, hand in hand, mouth in mouth, in a sad embrace. The letters have stopped arriving from the country of my childhood. The man who wrote them died a solitary death, buried by the edge of a stream. But he is here, his skin touches my skin, and my breath gives life to his lips. He is here, I say to Sirius, when I speak to you, when I eat, when I sleep, when I go on a walk. It seems to me that I’m the one who is dead, while my father, the deadwho wouldn’t leave me in peace, is overflowing with life. He possesses me, sucks my blood, gnaws my bones, feeds on my thoughts. Always, I read his letters over and always I see my myself in my childhood home, I live there now, I am no longer here, but millions of kilometers away, and I am an old man waiting for his daughter in front of a cup of tea gone cold, I am a weary man for whom nothing can brighten up, I am a lonely man who thinks of the one who isn’t here, I am a dying man who writes letters as though he bleeds blue ink. When I look at the sea, it is his eyes that are seeing the scintillating water, it is his ears that are listening to the rolling waves. When I walk about the streets, it is his senses that I feel. When I eat a fruit, it is his teeth that are sinking into the apple’s flesh. When I speak, it is his words that demand to be formed, it is his sentences that my mouth recite. It is the muted living through ventriloquism, and at night, I dream his dreams. From this hand-to-hand combat with a ghost, I am left in ruins. I carry the cadaver of my father on my back, my shoulders slack under the weight. I am like those sons who carry their ill mother to a mountain’s summit, only to leave her there to die, and return alone, but everywhere they go, they feel their dead mother on their back, her foul breath on their neck, her skinny hands on their shoulders. Do you believe that ghosts take revenge? I ask Sirius. I let my father die alone. He was once a taciturn man, and now he speaks through me. He speaks of his sadness, of his grievances. I read his letters, and reread them, and put them away, and take them out. Perhaps, I should burn them, and watch the flames consume this ghost. But the dead don’t die. They tread this life at times quietly, as light as a dove’s step, at times menacingly like the dawning of a storm. The storm growles above my head. The dead seizes me. The dead pays me a visit. I wander through the labyrinth where words of the dead echo. I look for him. I find him. I lose him. He plays with me. His voice taunts me, hot, hot, cold, very cold, burning. I go through the labyrinth, a candle in hand. But half-way, my candle is blown. The light is off. I am in the dark. I fumble. The ghost circles me. I hear his whispers. I see him like how he appears in photos, sitting on the bench of a public garden, a hat covering his head, or standing there, facing the sea. His eyes scrutinize me, his hands stretch out for mine. Then, all that I see is a skeleton dancing around me, I see but a specter enveloped in its own shroud, sitting on its gravestone by the edge of the stream. You know, I say to Sirius, that the dead leave their image inside our retina and that through this veil we don’t see the world as before? You know, I say to Sirius, that since my father’s death, I see life as though looking out from beneath the ground? I am locked inside a dark and humid space, the bright clarity of day hurts my eyes, the world’s tumult hurts my ears. I scratch the soil in the search of the traces the dead might have left. The blue of the sky makes me think that his sad eyes no longer recognise colors. The footsteps of passerby make me think that his hearing, once awaited my approaching footsteps to my childhood home, now no longer processes any noise. What color does a man see once he has abandoned life? The white of hospital curtains, the red of his rebelling blood, streaming down without a single loved one coming to stop it, the black of the night that descends on his eyes or the green of the trees that continue to flourish while he withers, with only his bitter tears to water his pale cheeks? What sound does an aching man hear? The whispers of the dead knocking on the door, the first cry of a newborn on earth, or the sobbing of his heart echoing to the distance? Was his hand covered in sweat? His cheeks, sunken? Did he talk, did he protest, cry, call out? Or did he go without a word? Did he ask what time it was, had he sensed the arrival of the void as the daytime drew near? If I had accompanied my father, I told Sirius, I would have had a few images to nourish my memory. I would have been able to recall the expression in his eyes when he saw the last hour approaching, I would have collected his last goodbye, I would have remembered his silent face, or perhaps a hand imprint, but I have let him die alone. And now, he enters me like I’m a desolate house, his silence weighs on me like a tombstone, the words he never had the chance to utter now blow like an icy wind and destroy my soul. The last hour, the last moment, what frightening expressions, I say to Sirius. We use them to mask the terror, the dreadful shiver that seizes us, us the survivors, at the thought that time continues to flow, while to the man left laying here, time means nothing anymore. He has already entered eternity, he has set a foot in the void, and to him, his life was mere dust, smoke and vapor. At my departure, father had said he loved the rain. Those are the only words I took with me. It was a terrific downpour on the day my father died. I recall that he loved warm rains. As a child, I had seen him, those rainy days, standing by the window listening to the raindrops drumming on the roof, I had seen him poking his naked head out, wanting to be refreshed, I had seen him, his ears perking up at the sound of thunder and hurrying to watch the lighting zig-zagging through the gray canvas. My father, I say to Sirius, loved the little things. The raindrops on a banana leaf, the tides coming in and out, the ruffling of winds between trees, the silence of the night. I’m trying to piece together the images of this dead man who once stood me up, only to come back and besiege me. Stone by stone, I will rebuild my childhood home. Piece by piece, I will stitch back together the cloak of memory. When a person dies, we often chant to ourselves that they had loved such and such things, that they had said such and such things, and that their beloved objects are with them in the thereafter, and that their beloved objects take on a singular hue, the singular hue of objects relegated to be displayed in museums: it freezes. We collect the rain into a small box, the sea water in another, the silence of the night in a third, and from the final one, wafts through the odor of tobacco. All these little boxes form an altar and we are content to repeat that he had loved such and such things, without being sure that he hadn’t one day changed his mind, that he didn’t suddenly start hating the rain, the silence and tobacco. The words he used to say, which come back to us in our memory distorted, we recite them like prayers, like invocations to the dead. We say, He used to be like that, and we end by exclaiming, He used to be like that! We wish to hear the voice of the dead, but all we do with their words is pinning them up like dried-up butterflies that we have caught in the net of our words and kept in a museum so that we can contemplate their motionless wings. Now he is dead, he belongs to us. We have appropriated his words, the things he loved, and it is within our power to revive him from time to time by recalling a word he said, by lifting the lid of a little box to listen to the rain he loved, the silence he loved, the sea he loved. My father, I say to Sirius, was frugal with his words, even in his letters. Right until his death, I have never once paid attention to his words. I read his letters, but the words slipped by without leaving a trace on me. Yet now, when I take the letters from the drawer to read, even the smallest of words wrecks me, even the smallest fragment of a sentence gives me a blinding pain in the stomach. These words that speak to me from beyond the grave are like poison. They burn my inside.  I swallow them. I devour them. Acid rises up to my throat. But this, I love.