Now, looking back, I think I understand why my father no longer bothered me about playing ball again. He had encouraged me for so long, and believed I could play professional soccer when I was older. Then, he stopped. I am certain this was because my father was too busy being worried about my brother, Mauricio. My father, for a time anyway, did not pay so much attention to me.
- At least I was still healthy. At least I had not been struck down with that fever. And, if I was healthy, maybe other considerations had a way of falling away. Of course I could only guess the thoughts that blew through my father's head. But things between us began to change. We became closer. With so much sadness around our house, around our island, the matter of life itself became a strong and silent bond. It was the only good thing to happen that year.
- Only now can I admit my feelings of guilt about my brother, Mauricio. I am haunted by the sound, which I still hear sometimes on the wind, when he would call to me from his hammock on the other side of the room we shared. His voice was small and dry. He only wanted to talk, I knew. Maybe he imagined that, wherever he was going next, there would be no one to talk to. Or, if there was someone, the language of that place might prevent understanding.
- But I would pretend I did not hear my brother's voice. And perhaps it is true, though I am only now beginning to realize this, that the silence itself was louder than any one person's voice.
- This was, of course, my own silence, the same silence that spanned the gulf between us in that small room, that also divided the land of the living and the land of someone dying.
- After a while of this, his faint calling and my looming silence, Mauricio's hoarse, desperate cries seemed to go away. They drifted somehow. Or, as they faded away, his cries sounded like they were coming from a distance, perhaps from the next house. Or the house after that.
- I loved my brother, but I could not be near him, especially toward the end. I could not watch him suffer like that, his body shriveled, his tongue so long and black, like that of a horse kissed by lightning.
- I was afraid to acknowledge my brother's cries. Maybe, I thought, he would ask if I had seen or heard the vultures on our roof. In his great fever, Mauricio saw and heard much more than we could. Still, I could hear the vultures on the roof, usually at night. Their long claws scratched impatiently on the tiles. They knew about my brother.
- And he knew about them. Not yet ready to be carried away by them, Mauricio lay in bed sweating, turning over again and again, halfway awake and halfway swimming through his dark, festering dreams. At breakfast, I would sit with my mother and father. Our eyes were puffy from our being unable to sleep. The vultures had seen to this, but we never mentioned them or the sounds they made. Maybe each of us, in our own way, thought the vultures were something we had each dreamed on our own.
- Caught in his delirium, perhaps Mauricio was fortunate in one respect. All that he saw, everything that he heard, were things he could not be certain of, could not be counted on as being real. He passed days inside the fever oven of his own skin. A dream here, a vision there, a claw scraping tile, all these things were everywhere and nowhere, all at once. Maybe I answered his cries, and maybe I did not. Mauricio would never be sure, and this assuaged my guilt.
- It was my mother who nursed Mauricio faithfully, and who spent the most time with him. It was she who told me something that made much sense at the time. She said that Mauricio's suffering was not from fever alone. When she said this, I must have looked confused. She saw this and explained why she thought this was so. To understand your brother's suffering, she whispered, you must go to the very root of suffering. It goes for us all, this kind of suffering, she added.
- "He's between two places, your brother is, trying to make up his mind," she told me. "Living is bearable because we can be certain it will end. The next life, of course, will be a better one. You have to hope. But for now Mauricio is attached terribly to this life, and ignorant of the life to come. He can't decide between something at his fingertips, and something he can't touch. That's what dying is like."
- It was soon, only a few days later, that Mauricio made his decision.
