ry day
that talking to him we might have thought we were talking to his
image. Yes. One would have said he wasn't going to die: that he had
already passed, without anybody's knowing it, beyond death; that he
was with us forever, like a spirit.

* * * * *

"In the little door of the bedroom one already feels well-being. A
trail of the smell of thyme and violets that comes and goes with
the breeze from the open window leads like a delicate hand towards
where he lies.... Peace. All death has done has been to infuse the
color of his skin with a deep violet veiling of ashes.

"What a suave smell, and how excellent death is here! No rasping
essences, none of the exterior of blackness and crepe. All this is
white and uncluttered, like a hut in the fields in Andalusia, like
the whitewashed portal of some garden in the south. All just as it
was. Only he who was there has gone.

* * * * *

"The day is fading, with a little wind that has a premonition of
spring. In the window panes is a confused mirroring of rosy clouds.
The blackbird, the blackbird that he must have heard for thirty
years, that he'd have liked to have gone on hearing dead, has come
to see if he's listening. Peace. The bedroom and the garden strive
quietly light against light: the brightness of the bedroom is
stronger and glows out into the afternoon. A sparrow flutters up
into the sudden stain with which the sun splashes the top of a tree
and sits there twittering. In the shadow below the blackbird
whistles once more. Now and then one seems to hear the voice that
is silenced forever.

"How pleasant to be here! It's like sitting beside a spring,
reading under a tree, like letting the stream of a lyric river
carry one away.... And one feels like never moving: like plucking
to infinity, as one might tear roses to pieces, these white full
hours; like clinging forever to this clear teacher in the eternal
twilight of this last lesson of austerity and beauty.

* * * * *

"'Municipal Cemetery' it says on the gate, so that one may know,
opposite that other sign 'Catholic Cemetery,' so that one may also
know.

"He didn't want to be buried in that cemetery, so opposed to the
smiling savourous poetry o