The Past Ahead. Gilbert Gatore

result was that she’d need to abandon her studies, which had now become inconsequential. The interest of market finance, logistics, and other management controls was dissolved in the idea whose title she was carefully composing.

      The next thing was that her parents were not to know. An obvious necessity.

      They’d taken her in as an orphan of the tragedy when she seemed doomed. She knew how different her lot would have been without their inexplicable generosity. She would have never known any tenderness; she would have never had the benefit of all the attentions she’d been given until this moment; she wouldn’t have studied with the brilliant results for which everyone gave her credit. They had been considerate enough to let her keep her name, Isaro, and, together with her color, that was the only sign preventing her from assimilating into their family. She never took the trouble of explaining that they were her adoptive parents. Better than a family, she often told herself, they were angels. Rescuers and providential protectors whose wings had allowed the little pearl that she was that had been cast out of the water to continue to grow.

      Nevertheless, at a given moment that she has trouble identifying, their relationship came undone, thread by thread, until it was no more than an abstraction, just enough to keep the illusion going of a reality that had actually disappeared. For a while, the photographs they’d look at and would take endlessly formed the one and only pillar of their vanished family. The day she decided to leave and study in Paris, neutrality collapsed. Her parents were merely disciplinarians who flung stifling pieces of advice at her, by telephone and every day. She eventually screened their calls and then changed her number. From then on their sole connection consisted of the automatic monthly deposit from their bank account to hers. Because of it she was able to keep living in the capital city and soon, she hoped, to buy her plane ticket.

      Now she tells herself that having behaved towards them in that manner had been foolish. She regrets it, even without thinking she could have acted differently. She believes that the alienation and then the rupture were born from an inevitable misunderstanding: everything her parents would do to anchor her in life removed her further from the only thing essential in her eyes. The more she realized what seemed for them to be the ultimate objectives or guarantees, the more she suffered from wasting her energy on running after titles that, no matter what, were unjustified. She wrongly confused them with the malaise that they made her suffer. They never stopped loving her, even in the silence she had imposed on them, which they never violated although they could so easily have done just that, by stopping the monthly deposits, for instance.

      Would she be capable of loving someone in spite of herself? Would she be able to resist the desire to treat the person for whom she’d done everything, and who in the end would prove to be as insolent as she was toward her parents, as an ingrate and punish her? Was that wholehearted, unconditional love a characteristic of guardian angels?