Resistance Read Online Free Page A

office, an apparently confident woman I felt more and more apart from.
    I willed myself to believe that my mother was strong enough to overcome the indignity of her betrayal, to let go her losses expeditiously, as if they were broken limbs pruned after a storm. Many people came to our apartment to offer her their support; more often, they went to the restaurant, under the impression, I suppose, that dining there more frequently would help. But when she did not revive the measure of gusto they expected, when she appeared too acquiescent, most of these women drifted away. The ones who kept up their prodding were the ones most bitter about their own lives, at a loss for a solution to their own particular hatreds. They smoked cigarettes with her in the kitchen while she worked up the day’s menu, urging her toward some sort of revenge, variations on plots they all knew from the soaps, but which, they emphatically concurred, had been carried out too ineffectively.
    She’d had grief enough. The day Sonia moved into our old apartment, she hired a janitorial service to clean it. In that rite of exorcism and purification, many of my mother’s most cherished things were broken, dumped into a box, or simply thrown out. One afternoon, just before my mother arrived at the restaurant, Sonia showed up to claim the two most valuable paintings on the wall, cityscapes by Antonio López García. She donated them to a fund-raising effort for a new hospital in Palermo, the part of the city where she and my father lived.
    And then one day I came home from work to find Mother in the living room with an envelope in her lap, and with the look of having been there in the blue wing chair for a long time. She was gazing out the front window into the pine trees growing in Parque Avellaneda, their crowns churning in the invigorating spring blow I had just come in out of. She extended the envelope without looking at me. It was a handwritten note from her physician, sentences of comfort and encouragement which could not obliterate the two words:
Parkinson’s disease.
    We arranged our lives to accommodate her loss of strength and mobility. Her sister’s eldest daughter, a woman who ran a restaurant in another part of Buenos Aires called La Boca, a very competent and likable person, took over the restaurant. When I could no longer see to all of Mother’s needs I brought in private care, a decision which made it disturbingly clear to me that, apart from her, I had nothing to hold my attention except my work.
    I felt I’d arrived at a dead end. I was thirty-five. I had no prospect of children. I could not say that I knew anyone who had taken the trouble to know me—nor had I done that myself, so that now someone might give me a sympathetic ear. I’d lost track of my close friends from school. I didn’t have the scaffolding of a religion to turn to. And I had not discovered anything in recent years to revitalize me—no book, no performance, no movie. I no longer even made the effort. In fact, I couldn’t stand to read more than one or two stories in the papers anymore—it all seemed to be about adapting life to machinery, or scenarios for creating wealth, or politicians promising a future for us that had already come and gone. Worse, the news came festooned with ads, hounding the reader, imploring him to improve his looks, his appeal, his temperament, his prospects with one or another sort of purchase. The manic opportuning, page after page of it, every day, alternately depressed and infuriated me.
    I did not resent my mother’s illness, the burden of worry that she had become for me; but she began to stand out as part of an indictment I felt for leading a life that had become little more than an expression of irritation. Outside of my creative work, those actual hours of imagining and drawing a building or a monument against the restrictions of a set of specifications, I felt no relief from my anger. And then, finally, I could no longer manage to