“I don’t pray the sorrowful ones,” she says. “I’ve had enough of sorrow.”
A nurse approaches with water, soap, and a washbowl, and I wait outside while Yameelah Semela cleans her face and teeth. When I return, I ask whether the nightmare returned last night. She says yes, but this time the tower of judgment didn’t have two floors, but three. She gave her explanations, just as we’d prepared, and on the first floor, the demon absolved her for her son’s death. He also absolved her on the second floor, for having abandoned her mother and brothers. But on the third floor, he condemned her, without her knowing of what she’d been accused.
Yameelah grows more and more agitated as she speaks, she’s short on air and starts complaining of pressure on her chest. I call the nurses, who take her vital signs and say they have to take her to the emergency room immediately.
“Just a moment,” Yameelah says. “Father, I beg you, give me a penance to do—”
“You don’t need one, Yameelah, you’ve paid more than enough.”
“I’m begging you, Father, give me penance, Saint Isaac the Syrian says there’s no salvation without penance...”
I hear great anxiety in her voice, so I tell her that to please Isaac the Syrian she should sing yesterday’s hymn two times.
“But which hymn, Father, tell me which one!”
“En to stavro pares tosa,” Kia says, coming to my aid by offering those words, which according to them mean “standing beside the cross.”
“Ento stavros...” I try to repeat, but Yameelah can’t hear me, she’s already being wheeled away on the cot.
I tell Zahra Bayda about Yameelah’s dream, about what happens on the first floor, the second, and the recently arrived third, where she’s condemned without her knowing why.
“The guilt of victims is a bottomless hole,” Zahra Bayda tells me.
“Or a tower with countless floors,” I say.
I’m informed that Yameelah’s hours are numbered, and I ask for permission to stay with her through the end. I’d be grateful to be allowed to do with her what I was barred from doing with my mother, namely, to help her pass.
My mother had been weakening, and I swore I could feel, in my own body, the slowing of her blood flow and the oxygen reaching her cells. Sunken into herself, she barely talked to me, but every once in a while she glanced my way even though her glassy eyes could no longer see. Her whole being was a battleground in the wake of a terrible defeat. Her multiplied cells had taken over, like a triumphant invading army. The cancer dragging her toward death was a strange creature that had grown inside her, composed of her own deformed cells. A strange creature that, in the end, was none other than my own mother: a monstrous, unruly version of herself. I wondered whether that monstrous double knew it would die along with my mother—the cancer grows and multiplies until it kills its host—so that nothing would be gained by its crime. It would be a Pyrrhic victory.
I’ve read somewhere that the lifespan of malignant cells has no end; when cultivated in a lab, they show a boundless capacity to live, grow, and multiply. Could it be that my mother’s cancer remains alive, and is the same one now killing Yameelah? Could my mother’s guilt still hold weight, as the same energy tormenting Yameelah Semela?
Three days before she passed, my mother was placed in isolation in an intensive care unit, which she never left. During those three days and nights, I, then a teenager, stayed on alert in a waiting room with green walls and plastic-wrapped chairs. I dozed intermittently on two chairs I’d pulled together as a makeshift bed. I subsisted on french fries and Coca-Colas from the vending machine, as well as the ham sandwiches and little cartons of milk I received from a compassionate nurse. Though what I was really subsisting on was the desperate hope of seeing my mother emerge from that place, alive. I didn’t dare take my eyes off those double doors that led to where she was, I couldn’t stand the thought that she could emerge and I’d miss it. After three days, it was the compassionate nurse who came out of those doors to tell me my mother was dead. The aseptic green of those walls invades me to this day, covering my last memory of my mother with a moldy fog.
I pull a stool up to the cot where Yameelah Semela lies dying. She doesn’t talk anymore, and barely breathes. She doesn’t notice my presence, her glassy eyes don’t see anymore, or perhaps they only see the other shore. She’s being kept very sedated and she’s so still she seems absent, more present now in some faraway terra incognita than in this place, the here and now. Her grayish dry skin evokes in me the cold sensation of priests’ fingers at the monastery as they dabbed my forehead with damp ash. It’s strange that the Ash Wednesday ritual is still celebrated in this century that tries so hard to ignore death. When you’re marked with a cross of ash, you’re overcome with a sudden understanding of mortality: Dust you are, and dust you will become, sure words if there are any in this world; perhaps those are the only sure words we can know.
Dust you are, dust you will become. I say these words to Yameelah as a form of goodbye; maybe they’ll open the door that keeps her shut in here, in this place where she no longer belongs. I repeat the words, paraphrasing “Love Constant Beyond Death,” that sonnet by the Baroque poet Francisco de Quevedo: You’ll be ash, but you’ll have feeling, you’ll be dust, but dust in love.
The dying woman’s breath gradually slows, already as tenuous as a light breeze slipping through fine cracks. Her pulse is faint and a blue double stain appears on her forehead, in the shape of a butterfly. A butterfly, subtle herald of the end, just like a cross of ash. I recite Quevedo into her ear.
“She can’t hear you,” the nurse tells me.
“She might,” I reply.
“And if she hears you she can’t understand. She doesn’t speak your language.”
“Perhaps she does.”
I tell Yameelah Semela, though she can’t hear or understand, that in the Spanish town of Villacañas the Carthusian monks still greet each other as they did in medieval times: Brother, we will die, and the other responds, this we already know.
With all due respect, I continue, to me, thatwe already knowsounds like, Okay, okay, fine, but brother, do you really have to remind me of it every day? Once a year is fine, every Ash Wednesday, but every hour of every day? These, Yameelah, are parts you don’t know of Christianity, my strange religion, which is also yours. In my country, they say: Life is an affair that always ends badly. Funny, right? They laugh at death, the people of my country, a harshness to cure us of fear.
Suddenly Yameelah moves, and I startle. Her stiff hands contract, seeking something, anxiously grasping the sheets.
“She’s coming back to life!” I shout at the nurse, in English, afraid; she explains that these are involuntary contractions that mean the end is almost here. I apologize for my reaction. “There,there, Yameelah.” I try to soothe her. “It’s done now, go in peace, I won’t be scared like that again.”
To lull her, I tell her that in Santiago de Compostela I heard a group of Red Youth standing under the window of Manuel Fraga, a Francoist leader still active in politics in his nineties, to sing,Hai que ir morrendo, Manolo, got to be dying, just like that, in Galician, sung to the tune of “Guantanamera.”
“Want me to sing it to you? Got to be dying, Yameelah Semela, got to be dying. Coming back to life isn’t worth it, I assure you. We have to accept death, there’s no other choice. Resurrection? No, thank you, you wouldn’t want to go through that. Die forever, Yameelah, and may your anguished guilt die with you.”
