Alice wanted to know how long forever is, and the White Rabbit replied: sometimes only a second.
Always and even after, Payán. Forever and a day.
You asked what was that mountain you saw from your balcony. That mountain is La Mare de Deu de Queralt, they informed you. And you, with a smile: I always suspected that the mother of God was a mountain.
Your childhood, in the popular neighborhood of La Merced, in the heart of Mexico City. One Christmas the shoes that the Three Wise Men had just brought you were stolen from you on the street. To comfort you, your mother baked, just for you, a fruitcake with rum, honey and vanilla. I was a poor but happy child, you told me.
You were fun and awesome. You did not forgive one. At the exit of a hotel, in Cartagena de Indias, a gringo who ran by pushed you and said excuse me, carelessly and without turning to look at you. What skiusmi or what skiusmi, you yelled at him, take me back to Texas, bastard!
So many years of such soft love… and suddenly you went too far, too far, ultra auroram et Gangem. Your heart stopped eating quesadillas with zucchini blossom. Your Last Supper.
We were going to Montparnasse, in Paris, to visit the grave of César Vallejo, who predicted that he would die on a Thursday with a downpour. Vallejo was wrong, he died on a sunny Friday. I was wrong too, I believed you when you swore that you were not going to die while I was away.
In the midst of wandering, the nomad dug a grave, and the first settled were the dead. What will you be up to, on the journey or in the calm? Do you seek or find? You were fascinated by stones and compasses.
Graffiti we saw on a wall in Addis Ababa:
UNDOMITTED ROSE OF THE WINDS WHERE EAST AND WEST MEET.
At times I feel that you return and walk through the forest with a flurry of birds in your head.
You repeated a strange phrase that, according to you, your father always repeated: There were four of them and the dark-haired one drowned. You never explained to me what it meant; I don’t think you knew, and surely your father didn’t either.
At sunset you would stay looking at the landscape and say: the mist turns it blue. And during the months of the plague, absorbed in the expanse of the sown field: They will not be able to expel us from paradise, because paradise is already outside.
You wrote this, preparing yourself for that final moment in which “distance turns to dust; the wind, breath; the window, transparency; the river, lustral water.”
Your favorite perfume after the shower: TERRE, by Hèrmes. I’m ready, you said, now I smell like sacristy and coriander.
You liked to say of our stone house, in the words of Aurelio Arturo, “a large house among the fresh branches, and in the corners, angels of shadow and secrecy.” During the day, foxes, wild boars, peregrine falcons, deer, and migrant hoopoes from Africa roam. And in the dead of night, “the ecstatic forest that exists only for the ear”
You liked living among the books. A three-story library with a fireplace in the center and a lemon tree in the backyard.
When I went on a trip, I would recommend that you not leave food out, or our house would fill up with cockroaches. You assured me that you never did. Once, back, I open the door and what is the first thing I see? A dead cockroach in the kitchen. Payán, I told you not to leave food! I didn’t leave out a crumb -you told me and pointed to the bug- that she starved to death.
“…and he was from the Party” used to be the best compliment you uttered when remembering someone. And he was from the Party…, you sighed. By that you meant: he was a brother, an accomplice, a dignified man, a good friend. Today we say about you: And he was from the Party… All your life you were faithful to your years of youth militancy.
Towards the end your memory was fading. Payàn -I complained- you forgot my name again… Yes, you told me, but I don’t forget that I love you.
Reviewing your header books now, I find this phrase by Camus underlined: “rebellion keeps us standing in the formless and furious movement of History.”
And you were a senator, warrior, printer, poet, founder of newspapers, ally of indigenous people, doctor honoris causa, patron, defender of the defenseless, tireless reader…
Tomorrow I will join the voices that sing the great deeds of the complete being that you were.
Today it is these little memories that fall into the soul like a little water in May.
*Laura Restrepo, journalist and writer, is the author of numerous novels such as the award-winning Delirium, Hot On o too many heroeswhere his passage as a clandestine militant through Argentina is recounted.