Waking up, sitting up, removing the bed–lift frame — that contraption meant to keep the sheets and blankets from pressing on his feet. Combing his hair.
While he has his breakfast, he watches the children wake up, come to give him a hug, prepare their backpacks, put on their uniforms, nibble at a light breakfast… He won’t go to the bathroom until they’ve left.
Today, however, he feels like doing nothing at all: he’d only like to sleep, or pretend to sleep… Sleep, so no one bothers him.
The book he finished before being discharged from the hospital comes back to him: Slow Man, by J. M. Coetzee. The story of a man whose leg—below the knee—must be amputated after a car “sends him flying” while he is riding his bicycle. He has several books by Coetzee (South Africa, Australia, Nobel) on his shelves at home. But that one caught his attention: an accident, a before and an after, and the passage between the two; the way Paul Rayment faces that process. While reading it, he understood that he himself would go through moments of pride, stubbornness, denial, rejection, incomprehension, depression, shadow…
Is today one of those days?
He knows how to hide his emotions. He doesn’t want to worry those who do everything they can to help him, ease him, offer precise attention, a detail, a small gesture of affection.
He stretches, closes his eyes, exhales, says he didn’t sleep well.
When the house falls silent — the children already at school — he inhales and exhales deeply, slowly, and begins his exercises to strengthen the muscles he can still work, from the knees upward, until the time comes to work the calves. Today, in this slump, he adds to himself: if that day ever comes.
When he finishes the exercise routine he feels he can carry on with his day, take care of everyday tasks, and also that other task, more subtle, more difficult: giving himself time to let time pass. That motto of Jennie’s Literary Café cannot be ignored. Since the café opened, it was its central idea, its compass: a place outside the ordinary; and, at the same time, his philosophy of life.
Live the now.
That’s how Jennie and he learned to live during their years of travel, and how he kept perfecting that way after her death.
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