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For Amparo, Ana and Philip
and for
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A few months after this my grandmother died one night in her sleep. The family was not overwhelmed with grief; the old lady was eighty-nine years old, and although her death was unexpected, everyone said that it was a good thing that it was not preceded by a long or painful illness. ‘She herself would have chosen to go in that way,’ Mami said. Uncle Umberto seemed the one most deeply affected by the old lady’s passing; he seemed not so much grief-stricken as bewildered. It was as though the event had caught him at a particularly inconvenient time and for days he walked about the house and the streets mumbling and distracted. Uncle Umberto should have become the head of our household, and I suppose he was, in a way, but he seemed to abdicate all responsibility in favour of Aunt Teresa, his wife, who took on the role of making the big decisions and giving orders. Umberto’s slippers took their increasingly distracted occupant more and more frequently to the path above the river and he could be seen there not only in the evenings, but now also first thing in the morning and sometimes again in the heat of the day. None of us who saw him ever saw the butterfly woman – nor anyone else, for that matter – walking with him, although there were times when he seemed to be gesticulating to an invisible companion. Mostly he just walked. He haunted the riverside path like a Dutchman’s ghost and we all began to worry about him.
One evening not long after this, Uncle Umberto came home dishevelled and distraught, a wild look in his eyes.
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