Читать книгу Modern Anxiety, Modern Woman - Lida Prypchan - Страница 5

How shall I describe Lucía, if Lucía was not particularly different from any other woman? She had the same body, except that she was a little taller than other women; the same parts, only a little more turned on than other women’s; the same dreams, but more tinged with frustration than those of other women; a similar character, just a little more sour than other women; similar sorrows, maybe a little more pronounced; similar joys, though sometimes mixed with sorrow.

How shall I describe Lucía ...

She never understood the saying that there are as many joys in life as sorrows. For her there were more sorrows than joys, though those sorrows weren’t apparent in her – she was so accustomed to them! She even looked like a happy woman: she felt extremely content when she had her morning coffee and smoked a cigarette; she felt immense joy at the slightest caress, whether from human being or animal; she felt happy, even though sometimes she could weep when she heard a song she liked; she experienced joy when she made a new friend, even though she never got to know people the way she wished – she was always a little suspicious about friendship because it was so relative. Despite the thousands of blows she had suffered she continued to halfway believe in friendship and would feel quite stirred when taking a bath, as if that could purge her of her bad habits and impurities of soul. She enjoyed the movies enormously – after all, as Benedetti said, what is life other than killing time before death gets to us with its sickening punctuality? – and she delighted in dancing, as if that was a means of release from her powerful sexuality.

Lucía went through life with a burden of loneliness on her shoulders: she spent endless hours driving around, thinking about the future, making plans, indulging in impossible dreams, infinite hours living in the past wishing she could put back the damned time so she could do those things she’d never had the courage to do. Don’t we always regret what we didn’t do or what we didn’t have the courage to say, spending endless hours of insomnia thinking about the meaning of life, infinite hours trying to find ourselves without knowing whether we’ve succeeded or not?

Lucía was aware that she bore her life like a funeral on her shoulders, each day closer to death – that’s to say, each day a part of her inner self seemed to die. Her body was like a car, wearing out little by little: each day it became more difficult to get her body going, as if its battery was running down. All her dreams had died with her last love – and dreams, alas, can’t be bought at the pharmacy. Her secrets, too, would die within her, like the cigarettes she smoked, her opinions about others and about life, as well as her thoughts about suicide – which provided a little relief to her turbulent interior life – as well as the friends she had lost and those she still had. Day by day all of this was dying in her soul.

One day in trepidation, as if presaging her death, I called her and was told she had hanged herself. She had left a note that said, “Of life I knew no more or no less than my fellows; I could find no answers to my questions and others could not offer me peace with their answers, but I was able at least to anticipate death – or perhaps it was my destiny to contend with death before my time, or life that trapped me into death. I cannot stand my doubts and I cannot tolerate my life – even less can I accept that death should take me unawares.”