It was a case of posthumous revelation.
The man was standing by her side, holding the camera with his beautiful hands, waiting for an omen, waiting for the air to move the undergrowth and the leaves, waiting for a slight change in the light, waiting to hear his own voice whispering now, totally unaware of her proximity.
She touched his coat, and his hair, wondering how warmly and slowly those hands could travel across the delicate creases of her silken dress.
He ducked to the uneven and mossy ground, trying to put all the pieces of the gravestone together.
Confused, perplexed, she read her own name, slowly, voicelessly moving her pale and deaf lips.
The man took five photographs. Four of them were trashed. He only kept the one that rendered her whole life a mystery.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Agent of death
Brief bolts strucking the forest
The other girl survived the pact and I’m enraged. For a moment I wish her life to be taken, too.
I hate those parents counting the minutes behind the glass walls of the Intensive Care Unit.
I want them to mourn and grieve, I want their lives shattered like mine. I want the mechanical ventilator to stop. I want her breath to stop. Her heart to stop. Her life to stop.
As I watch the news coverage in the mute Tv set in the corner of the waiting room, I feel the guilt, the remorseful playback and a muddy river of useless questions crawling in my brain like worms in a tin can.
It was not my fault. I gave her everything she wanted, I gave her whatever she asked for. I worked sixteen hours a day for her to receive the most exquisite education.
I can’t let myself close the eyes. If I do, even for a moment, I see the policemen cutting the rope, taking her down from the tree just like Jesus was taken down from the cross on Virgin Mary’s lap. Not as sweetly, of course. Not as glamurously.
I could not shut my eyes then either. I was in total wonderment of the whole scene, as in a CSI episode. I could see the flash of cameras like brief bolts strucking across the forest, breaking the dawn’s dim ligh. I could see the paramedics rushing through the CPR, I could hear one of them saying “She’s back, let’s go”. I could feel my knees on the cold ground and the sudden rage pulling my body up and then that scream like a vomit through the cords of the throat, my own scream in that same forest we set our camping tents just before the divorce mixed with the feeling of my daughter’s body last seconds struggle to live.
It cannot be true she snorted neat lines of coke in the bathroom during playtime on a regular basis. It cannot be possible she snorted her pocket money away in powder for years. They tell me she has got a hole in her nose like long time junkies. They tell me that she logged a hundred times in an Internet suicide chatroom. It cannot be true. She was the best little girl in the world.
She must have been bullied extensively or something.