July 2024

The date as requested so thanks for that and I have dated most of the earlier ones. And speaking of dates, we have now struggled through both our birthdays which have come and gone unnoticed by her: she 74 and me 82. Many ’phone calls and greetings which seemed only to make the disparity between the facts and what we were experiencing ever more emphatic. The pendulum rocks back and forth as the universe turns the key each night and winds up the mechanism for the following day.

I see her off to the Day Centre five times a week where she eats and sleeps and plays baby games. Eating becomes more of a battle each day, knives and forks carefully placed in her hands in the hope that she will take them up and eat. Mostly it works. She takes my hand for a walk. Is much loved at the Day Centre as she is so amenable which makes things easier for the carers there. Rain has now given way to heat which makes things harder. I have bought an air conditioner which helps. And the mosquitos have arrived along with the ants so we know summer is here.

She seems smaller suddenly and older and drops off to sleep whenever possible: sitting at the table or on the sofa. She sleeps well at night which is a blessing. This seems to be a kind of retreat from life, a not having to deal with things which I have to admit I also feel. We have our routine which keeps things clocking along nicely from hour to hour and I, at least, have the news from Britain and America which casts a bit of light and momentum over us here in el culo del mundo. Labour and Kamala have advanced and Biden and Sunak have retreated.

This is the first Día del Apóstel that we have entirely ignored. All the excitement in Santiago has passed us by. Lucia was at university there so we used to go and join the crowds to celebrate. When the Saint’s Day falls on a Sunday, which it does every five years, the Holy Door is opened and, if you can stand the heat for a couple of hours, you can wait in the queue and go through it and be excused some time in purgatory. There is a great hullabaloo in Santiago and it is a fiesta day here also so everything is closed for four days. They call it a Puente or bridge: holiday on Thursday so no point in going in to work on Friday and then there’s the weekend so . . . Stock up!

It is strange how a kind of numbness has crept up on me as I succumb to the routine over the months. The tears have largely dried back into a saturation of the soul where they accumulate day by day. There remains a terror that the soul will at one point no longer be able to cope any more and there will be an explosion which will shatter it into a thousand pieces. In Latin the soul is ‘anima’ or that which animates and give us the will to go forward into possibilities as long as we live. If that disperses into fragments, then we will be lost, soul-less, helpless in the face of those possibilities. In effect dead. It may sound contradictory but one must have the strength to reach forward into the numbness that allows things to keep going from day to day, that keeps life away and allows each hour to pass as monotonously as possible. It is, as Keats wrote, like living a posthumous existence, like a retreat into a semi-death that keeps us

alive, each half asleep in our different ways.

Examples of this are music or poetry or anything exceptional. We were listening to the end of the arietta of Beethoven’s Opus 111, the final Piano Sonata. I recall Mann’s reasons for there not being final movement. There is a moment towards the end when the music enters paradise and stays there until the end. Half a dozen high notes which turns the heart over. You must not allow this to affect you, to drag you out of the humdrum and lift you into a recognition of what you have lost. Beauty is a drug you can overdose on with just half a pill and when the pill is late Beethoven! Well keep away. Slink back into the routine which allows for survival. At least for her and, if for her, then for me.

And so we progress into August and the promised heat which threatens enervation. Just to keep going is an effort. Another day and then again another day. Wish us luck.