La Finadita
The dead know not any thing…for the memory of them is forgotten.
Ecclesiastes 9:5
(Based on a true story recounted by Gabriel Poch)
I am telling this now, after years of silence, though I suspect that in the telling, it loses something of its truth.
Emilse and I had met the previous year, in the Capital, at a church kermesse—a modest affair of saints and pastries, with strings of little colored lights hung across the trees and the low ceilings of the parish hall. She had promised to bring me south, to meet her parents. When our free days finally aligned, we traveled.
Emilse’s parents were simple, kind people—just as I had imagined them. The house was low, enclosed on all sides by a patio where fruit trees leaned inward and a few dozing dogs kept indifferent watch. I have never been drawn to the trappings of domestic life, nor to the rituals of minor conversation. And yet I recall enjoying the guests as they passed around their mate—an Argentine devotion I did not share.
The cold compelled such gatherings. There was little else to do but circle round the warmth of the kitchen, the familiar talk, and those stories that, through repetition, acquire the weight of history within a family. August in Tres Arroyos offered little more.
They had set aside for me a room at the far end of the house, floored in brick and scarcely furnished. Opposite the heavy embossed wooden door by which one entered, another door—this one of iron—opened onto the back patio. From there a path of uneven stones led to the latrine. Beyond it, a wire fence, scarcely more than a meter high, marked the boundary with the neighbor’s lot.
The room was modest, without windows save for the panes of glass in the metal door. A clammy dampness hung in the air. The iron-framed bed conspired against repose. The night table was diminutive, with an embroidered, tasseled cover nearly engulfing it. A battered wardrobe awaited dismissal. In the opposite corner, a tailor’s mannequin—stained by moisture—stood stubbornly erect, as if awaiting the figure it once served.
After supper we exchanged goodnights and retired to our rooms. Worn by the journey and the change of air, I skipped my customary reading. I extinguished the kerosene lamp and lay down.
In the darkness, once beneath the covers, I began to perceive the room anew. First, the silence—dense and absolute, as if the world beyond had been hollowed out. Then the odors. Dampness still clung to the air, but the sheets exhaled a mingled scent of dust and smoke, as though hastily dried near the kitchen fire.
Yet the darkness was not complete. Gradually, the room disclosed itself, suffused with a faint, bluish radiance—the moonlight, straying between heavy clouds, a herald of the frigid dawn. It came through the panes of the door that opened onto the patio, where the branches of a laurel—barely two meters away—swayed gently in the wind. Sleep came quietly, and for a few hours the world withdrew.
The next thing I remember is that something stirred me—perhaps no more than that intuition with which one sometimes wakes, unbidden, in the dark. Judging by the slant of moonlight filtering through the door, it was no later than three. The lace curtain, more ornament than veil, did little to obscure the view of the laurel. A breath of cold air passed through the room and shifted the curtain. My gaze fixed on the glass. I felt a certainty—without knowing how—that something would appear.
And so it did. I cannot say whether I truly saw it, or merely expected to—but there, beyond the window, emerged the outline of a white figure: slight, of uncertain stature. Whether it faced me or was turning away, I could not tell; it was entirely veiled in a transparent mantle, like that of a bride. I recall, with particular clarity, the headpiece—made of embroidered cloth—its edges irregular, like torn lace from an old mantilla.
The image seemed to pass from one side of the window to the other, moving deliberately—or so it seemed to me. At last, the figure slipped from view and vanished behind the wall. Once again, only the branches of the laurel swayed in the wind, their motion barely discernible in the paling dark.
The impression of that visitation lingered—I do not know for how long—until, at last, sleep returned.
I remember stepping out that morning into the patio and examining the ground before the door, as though expecting to find some trace. Yet even as I did so, I knew my efforts were futile. Needless to say, I spoke of it to no one—not even to Emilse. I saw no reason to trouble the family with my account, and I feared, too, they might regard me as a superstitious or fanciful man.
The day passed without incident. I might have forgotten the vision entirely, had it not been for the subtle unease that returned each time I crossed the threshold of that room. Emilse showed me family photographs; her mother recounted, with solemn pride, episodes from the lives of ancestors whose names I have forgotten.
At some point, Emilse led me into one of the rooms used as a dormitory. She wished to show me some dresses—meant, I believe, to be altered. Of such matters I knew nothing, but courtesy demanded my presence, and I even offered opinions with confidence. It was there that I noticed, hanging on the wall, a framed photograph that unsettled me. It showed a young woman, dressed in white, her head draped with an embroidered mantilla. She held a small white book in her hands. A portrait taken for her first communion.
Emilse explained that it was her sister—one of the elder ones. She referred to her, without emphasis, as la finadita—merely stating a fact. When Emilse was five or six, this sister had taken her own life in that same house, in the room at the back.
I did not press the matter. Under some pretext I steered her toward another part of the house, away from the picture, and turned the conversation to lighter things. Yet the unease that had seized me yielded to a quiet melancholy—one that colored the rest of the afternoon and, truthfully, did not quite leave me until I was back in Buenos Aires the following day.
Naturally, I spoke of the episode to no one—for years.