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I always imagine that my mother is only twenty-five years old (the age she was when I was born), and that’s why I get angry if I hear her dragging her feet, clucking, coughing, or thinking like an old woman. I don’t understand why at twenty-five years of age she has wrinkles, and I can’t figure out why she goes to bed so early when she’s so young. If in a moment of dreadful lucidity I realize that she is old, I’m horrified , and I try immediately to expel this knowledge from the light of my conscience, so that she can go back to being twenty-five right away. She constantly treats me as if I were a little girl, that’s why we understand each other perfectly. I don’t insist on growing up, because I know it’s useless: for the two of us, time has stopped and nothing in the world can make it run. I will die at five, and she at twenty-five; our funerals will be attended by a crowd of elderly children and children who never got to grow up. —— 14 —— 8 ...

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