We said goodbye at the corner of
Eleventh. From the other sidewalk I turned to look back; you too had turned,
and you waved goodbye to me.
A river
of vehicles and people were flowing between us. It was five o'clock on
an ordinary afternoon. how was I to know that that river was Acheron the
doleful, the insuperable?
We did
not see each other again, and a year later you were dead.
And now
I seek out that memory and look at it, and I think it was false, and that
behind that trivial farewell was infinite separation.
last night
i stayed in after dinner and reread, in order to understand these things,
the last teaching. Plato put in his master's mouth. I read that the soul
may escape when the flesh dies.
And now
I do not know whether the truth is in the ominous subsequent interpretation,
or in the unsuspecting farewell.
For if
souls do not die, it is right away that we should not make much of saying
goodbye.
To say
goodbye to each other is to deny separation. It is like saying "today we
play at separating, but we will see each other tomorrow". Man invented
farewells because he somehow knows he is immortal, even though he may seem
gratuitous and ephemeral.
Sometime,
Delia, we will take up again - beside what river? - this uncertain dialogue,
and we will ask each other if ever, in a city lost on a plain, we were
Borges and Delia.