“A Breath” (“Soffio”)

Translated by Marella Feltrin-Morris

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “A Breath” (“Soffio”), tr. Marella Feltrin-Morris. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2021.

One of Pirandello’s later stories, “A Breath” was first published in the literary journal Pegaso in July 1931. Pegaso was founded by Ugo Ojetti in 1929 to support the fascist regime. The story was later collected as a part of Stories for a Year in Collection 14, Berecche and the War (Berecche e la Guerra), which was published in Milan by Mondadori in 1934.

Pirandello wrote this story while he was in Paris, working on a new edition of his historical novel The Old and the Young (I vecchi e I giovani, originally published in 1909). A fruitful period, along with the story “A Breath” Pirandello published other material around the same time including another short story titled “One More” (“Uno di più”) as well as the first act of his final play, which was to remain unfinished at the time of his death, The Mountain Giants (I giganti della montagna). As with other works from the period, “A Breath” can be identified as part of Pirandello’s increasing turn toward the fantastic, oneiric, and surreal, where emotions and states of mind become protagonists in their own right. Other stories identified with this dynamic include late stories like “A Single Day” (“Una giornata,” first published in 1935) “The Nail” (“Il chiodo,” first published in 1936).

The story centers on a thematic consideration of the absurd in life, how flimsy our concept of cause and effect could be: logic and reason cannot always explain the mysterious elements of life, such as death itself. When the first-person narrator/protagonist discovers that he has the ability to kill people simply by breathing on them, he is empowered to liberate himself from the clutches of everyday logic and to slip into “madness,” a theme that recurs in Pirandello’s corpus from early works like his novel The Late Mattia Pascal (Il fu Mattia Pascal, 1904/5) through later works. The protagonist’s initial surprise at discovering these extraordinary powers gives way to an eventual decision to use them to punish an overconfident young doctor who refuses to admit the limits of science before the mystery of life. The story’s bittersweet epilogue speaks to Pirandello’s rejection of a single fixed notion of reality, another recurrent theme in his works perhaps best exemplified by the conclusion of his last novel, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand (Uno, nessuno e centomila, 1926). In this outlook, an individual can only rely on the illusion of a reality that is subjectively created.

The Editors

I

Some news springs up on you so unexpectedly that it leaves you astonished, and you cannot seem to shake off that astonishment except by resorting to the tritest clichés and the most banal observations.

For example, when young Calvetti, my friend Bernabò’s assistant, told me about the sudden passing of Massari’s father, with whom Bernabò and I had just recently had lunch, I instinctively exclaimed: “Ah, how flimsy life is! All it takes is a breath and poof—it’s gone!” With that, I held my thumb and index finger together and blew on them, as if to blow away an imaginary feather.

At that breath, young Calvetti’s face darkened, he hunched over and pressed his hand against his chest, as one does when he feels a vague discomfort coming from somewhere inside. But I didn’t pay it any notice, because it seemed absurd to me to admit the possibility that his discomfort might be caused by the silly thing I had said and by the ridiculous gesture with which I had accompanied it. I thought instead he might have felt a cramp or a stinging sensation in his liver or kidneys or intestine, but in any case a temporary pain, nothing serious. Except that, before nightfall, Bernabò turned up at my house, looking deeply distressed:

“Did you know that Calvetti’s dead?”

“Dead?”

“He died all of a sudden, this afternoon.”

“But this afternoon he was here, at my house! Let me think, what time was it? It must have been three p.m.”

“And at half past three he died!”

“Half an hour later?”

“Half an hour later.”

I gave him a dirty look, as if, by confirming it, he meant to establish a connection (but what connection?) between the poor young man’s visit to me and his abrupt death. I felt the urge to immediately refute that connection, however accidental the implication may have been, perhaps owing to the shadowy remorse that seemed to be lurking within me. So I sought a cause for that death that would have no relation to the visit. I told Bernabò of the sudden discomfort that the young man had experienced while he was with me.

“Is that right? A discomfort?”

“How flimsy life is! All it takes is a breath and poof—it’s gone!”

I must have been mechanically repeating the statement because in the meantime, surreptitiously, the thumb and index finger of my right hand touched, and now my hand was instinctively rising up to my lips. I swear that what I did then wasn’t so much to consciously test out the effect as, rather, to play a practical joke on myself—one that I could only play in secret lest I make myself ridiculous: when I found that finger and thumb in front of my mouth, I blew on them, just a light little breath.

Bernabò’s face was upset because of the death of his young assistant, to whom he was very attached. Many times, since he was portly and hot-blooded, and almost with no neck to speak of, if he had been running, or simply walking a little fast I had seen him panting in front of me with his hand pressed against his chest to slow down his heartbeat and catch his breath. Seeing him make that same gesture now, and hearing him say he felt as if he were suffocating and as if a strange darkness were clouding his eyes and mind—what in God’s name was I supposed to think?

Right away, though lost and distraught as I was, I rushed to help my poor friend who had collapsed face-down into an armchair, gasping. He violently pushed me away. At that point I couldn’t understand anything anymore; I was frozen in a stunned apathy and stood watching him shudder in that red velvet chair, so red it looked to me as if it were covered in blood. He shuddered no longer like a man, but like an injured animal, panting frantically and turning blue, almost black, in the face. He kept digging his foot into the rug, perhaps trying to stand up by himself, but the effort exhausted him. As in a nightmare, I saw the rug slip from under him, becoming all crumpled. His other leg was propped askew on the armrest, and his pant was riding up it, revealing his silk sock garter, a pale green with fine pink stripes. Here I must plead for some compassion and understanding: my distress overcame me, so much so that in no time, by simply turning my eyes, I was distracted, suddenly caught up in the annoyance I always felt before the ugly paintings on my walls, or by the color and fine stripes of that sock garter. However, I quickly snapped out of it, horrified by the fact that I had managed, at such a time, to daydream like that. I called out to my house boy, instructing him to quickly bring a cab around to the front door and then help me carry the agonizing man to a hospital or to his house.

I opted for his house, because it was closer. He didn’t live alone; he shared a house with his older sister, who was a widow or an old spinster, unbearable in the fastidiousness with which she ruled over him. The poor woman was shocked, and almost pulled her hair out in despair: “Oh, God, what happened? How did it happen?” She wouldn’t get out of the way, what a nuisance! She insisted on finding out from me what had happened and how, from me of all people, who at that point felt utterly spent, after climbing all those stairs backwards with the enormous weight of that body slumped over my shoulders. “The bed! The bed!” It seemed as if she didn’t even know where the bed was, it took so long to get to it. As I lay him down he gasped for breath—but then again, I was gasping, too. I fell back against the wall, completely exhausted, and if they hadn’t been quick to put a chair under me, I would have collapsed in a heap onto the floor. With my head hanging down from fatigue, I still managed to say to the house boy: “Get a doctor! Get a doctor!” but I felt defeated at the thought that now I would be left alone with the sister, who would certainly bombard me with more questions. I was saved by the silence that suddenly fell over the bed, when the gasping sounds ceased. For a moment it seemed as though the whole world had turned silent, and indeed it had for poor Bernabò, who now lay there on that bed, deaf and motionless for eternity. His sister immediately started howling in desperation. I was aghast. How could one presume, let alone believe, that such an absurdity might be possible? My thoughts no longer fell in their logical place. And in all that upheaval it seemed peculiar to me that although the poor woman had always called her brother Giulio, now that he lay there dead, an immobile mass that admitted no terms of endearment, she began calling him Giulietto. Giulietto! At a certain point I jumped to my feet, flabbergasted. The corpse, as if insulted by that “Giulietto! Giulietto!”, had responded by emitting a horrible grumbling noise from its stomach. This time it was my turn to catch the sister, who was about to faint from terror and fall backwards onto the floor. As it happened, instead, she fainted in my arms. And then, between her passed out and the dead man on the bed, I no longer knew what to do or think; I felt sucked into a vortex of madness and started shaking the poor woman to force her to cut it out with her fainting spell, which was frankly unnecessary. Except that, once she came to, she no longer accepted the reality that her brother was dead. “Did you hear that? He must not be dead! He cannot be dead!” It took a doctor to come and ascertain it, and to assure her that the grumbling noise had not been anything, just some gas or I don’t know what, which almost every dead person tends to release. Then she, who was very neat and cared deeply about propriety, looked distressed and covered her eyes with her hand, as if the doctor had told her that she, too, would do the same after she died.

That doctor was one of those partially bald young men, who, with a sort of defiant pride, wear their premature baldness amidst a savage forest of black curls that, while they have inexplicably disappeared from the top of their head, have come to cluster densely all around it. He had enamel, nearsighted eyes shielded behind thick lenses, he was tall, rather chubby but strong, with two little tufts of trimmed hairs under his small nose, and plump lips so red and defined they looked painted. He watched with such mocking commiseration the poor, clueless sister, and spoke of death with such casual familiarity, almost as if, since he had to deal with it all the time, none of its aspects could ever prove ambiguous or obscure to him, that at last I let out an irresistible, scornful snicker. Already while he was talking I had caught a glimpse of myself in the armoire mirror, and noticed on my face a cold, sideway look that had immediately retreated into my eyes, slithering like a snake. The thumb and index finger of my right hand were pressing hard, so hard against each other that they had almost gone numb. As soon as he turned around hearing that snicker, I walked straight up to him, and with my mouth still twisted with mockery in the pallor that had frozen my face into a skull-like mask, I hissed: “Look—“, and showed him my fingers. “Just like that! Since you know all about life and death, blow on them and see if you can manage to make me die!” He drew back to take a good look at me, lest he were dealing with a madman, but I tackled him again: “All it takes is a breath, believe me! Just a breath!” I let him go and grabbed the sister by her wrist. “You do it! Here, just like that!” and I raised her hand to her lips. “Put your thumb and index finger together and blow on them!” The poor woman, wide-eyed with shock and terror, was shaking all over, while the doctor, who had already forgotten there was a dead man lying on the bed, was chuckling with amusement. “I won’t keep doing it to the two of you, because there’s already one of them over there, and with Calvetti, that makes two for today. But I have to take off, take off right now, take off!”

And take off I did, just like a madman.

As soon as I was out on the street, my madness was unleashed. Night had already fallen and the street was packed with people. All the houses were leaping out of the shadows as the lights went on and people hastened to cover their faces against the flashes of so many colors lunging at them from every corner—headlights, the glare of store windows, lit-up signs. All of them plagued by a turmoil of dark premonitions. But then again, not really. On the contrary, over here a woman’s face broadened with joy in the reflection of a red light. And over there a child laughed, held up high in the arms of an elderly man in front of a store entrance pouring out a steady spray of emerald drops of light. I plowed through the crowd and, with my two fingers before my mouth I blew, blew on all those fleeting faces, without choosing among them and without turning around to see if my breaths really produced the same effect as the first two. If they did, who could attribute it to me? Wasn’t I free to hold those two fingers in front of my mouth and blow on them in private, innocent pleasure? Who could really believe that those two fingers and the soft breath I emitted had been endowed with such unheard-of and terrible power? It would be ridiculous to admit it; it would only come off as a childish prank. I was just pulling a prank, that was it. Meanwhile, by the time I got to the end of the street, my tongue had already dried up in my mouth, and I hardly had any breath left. If what I had experienced twice was true, well, by God, at that point I must have killed, one prank more or less, over a thousand people. The next day would surely bring with it the news of a sudden, mysterious blight, and spread panic throughout the city.

And indeed, the news came. The next morning, all of the papers were filled with it. The city woke up to the terrible nightmare of an inescapable epidemic that had broken out as quick as lightning. Nine-hundred and sixteen people had died in a single night. No one knew how to carry them out of their homes, let alone how to fit them all in the cemetery. Common symptoms observed by the doctors in all the people affected were first the sensation of a vague discomfort, and then suffocation. The autopsies carried out on the corpses did not reveal any clues to the illness that had caused almost-instant death.

Reading those newspapers I fell prey to a sense of dismay, like the dazed feeling brought about by a terrible drinking binge, a jumble of blurred images that swooped and slammed against each other inside a cloud that whirled all about me, enveloping me. That, and an inexplicable anxiety, a burning quiver that clashed, pressed against something that remained dark and frozen inside of me. My conscience was attracted to that something, but prickly as it was, and on the verge of swerving off course and spilling out everywhere, it refused to draw closer; it would poke at that dark, frozen something and immediately pull away. I don’t know exactly what I meant when I squeezed my forehead with my frantic hand and kept repeating: “It’s just an impression! Just an impression!” The fact is that the phrase, however empty it was, suddenly helped me break through that cloud, and for a moment I felt relieved, liberated. “It must all be some kind of madness,” I thought, “that got into my head just because I caught myself making that ridiculous, childish gesture right before the announcement of the sudden epidemic that struck the city. Such coincidences often give rise to the most foolish superstitions and the most unbelievable obsessions. Anyway, all it takes to get rid of them is for me to wait a few days without repeating that silly gesture. If it is an epidemic, as it certainly must be, this frightening blight will continue and not stop abruptly the way it started.”

Well, I waited three days, five days, a week, two weeks: no new cases were reported in the papers. The epidemic had abruptly stopped.

Crazy? Excuse me, but no—I just couldn’t remain in the grip of such a suspicion: that I might actually be crazy. Crazy, suffering from a form of madness that, to confess it to anybody, would make them burst out laughing. No, I couldn’t. I simply had to get rid of that obsession as soon as possible. But how? Should I start blowing on my fingers again? It was human lives I was dealing with. I needed to be convinced that my action was, in itself, completely innocent, child-like, and that if others died from it, it was not my fault. I could always believe that the epidemic had resumed after a two-week hiatus, because, until the very end, I had to regard the possibility that I was a harbinger of death as absolutely inconceivable. But in the meantime, I was possessed by the diabolical temptation to be certain, and that need for certainty was much more terrible than the suspicion that I might be crazy. A certainty that I was endowed with a shocking power—how to resist that temptation?

II

I had to allow myself one more test, a tentative, cautious one; a test that would be, as far as possible, “fair.” Everybody knows death is not fair. The one that depended on me (if indeed it did depend on me) had to be fair.

I knew a sweet little girl who used to play with her dolls, leaving one dream just to enter another, each of them different from the one before; one would take her to a mountain village, another to a beach, and then from the beach to a country far away, where there were other people who spoke a language different from hers. Eventually she awoke from all those dreams, still a little girl at twenty years of age, a child really, with someone next to her who, as soon as he emerged from her last dream into reality, immediately became a big ugly stranger: a six-foot giant, dumb, lazy, and depraved. And in her arms, instead of a doll she found a poor tiny creature, not exactly a little monster because he did have a sweet face like a sick angel’s—that is, when his face wasn’t horribly deformed by the continuous spasms to which his little body was prey. It was called “P—‘s disease,” the P standing for... I can’t remember, maybe the name of a foreign doctor, British or American. Pot, I seem to recall, if that’s indeed the right spelling (blessed glory, to give a disease one’s own name!). “Pot’s disease,” [1] in one of its most virulent, incurable forms. That child would never walk or talk, would never use his little skeletal hands, gnarled by the violence of those horrible spasms. He might linger on like that for a few more years. Was he three years old? He might make it to ten. And yet, though it was hard to believe, in the arms of someone who had learned how to hold him properly like his father the giant, whenever he got a little relief from those spasms, the poor child smiled. Such a blissful smile beamed in his angelic face that immediately the horror for his convulsions ceased, and the most tender compassion made the eyes of anyone who gazed upon him well up with tears. It seemed impossible that everyone but the doctors could understand what the child was asking for with that smile. But perhaps they did understand, because they had already declared that it was definitely one of those cases where there would be no hesitation, if the law permitted it and if the parents consented to it. But the law is the law, and it can be cruel, as it often is, but never merciful, or else it would no longer be the law.

Therefore I showed up at that mother’s door.

The room where she welcomed me was flooded with darkness, and the two curtained windows cast a veil over the livid glimmer of the twilight. Sitting in an armchair at the foot of the little bed, the mother was holding the convulsive child in her arms. I bent over him without saying anything, with my fingers in front of my lips. When I breathed on him, the child smiled and passed away. As soon as the mother, accustomed to the continuous spasmodic, twitching tension of that little body, felt it suddenly loose and soft, she stifled a cry, looked up to me, then looked at the baby:

“Oh, God, what have you done to him?”

“Nothing, you saw it, it was just a breath...”

“But he’s dead!”

“Now he’s at peace.”

I took him from her arms and lay him down, all loose and soft, on the bed, his angelic smile still on his tiny, pale lips.

“Where’s your husband? In the other room? I’ll free you from him, too. He has no reason to torment you anymore. But then go back to your dreams, child. See what you gained from stepping out of them?”

I didn’t even have to go and look for her husband. He showed up at the door, like a bewildered giant. But in the thrill I derived from the terrible certainty I now had, I already felt that I had grown a prodigious amount and that I towered over him. “How flimsy life is! All it takes is a breath and poof—it’s gone!” I breathed on his face and left the house, a giant in the approaching nightfall.

I was it, I was it: I was death. I had it right there, between my two fingers and in my breath. I could make anybody die. In order to be fair to those I had killed earlier, shouldn’t I now kill everybody else? It would take no effort at all, as long as I had enough breath. I wouldn’t do it out of hatred towards anyone in particular; I didn’t know anyone. Just like death. A breath, and that was it. How much of humanity, before those now passing like ghosts before me, had already been wiped out with a single breath? Could I really do that to the whole of humanity? Depopulate every house? Empty every street in every city? The countryside, the mountains, the sea? Erase everyone from the face of the earth? No, it wasn’t possible. And so, no, I couldn’t kill anyone else, not anymore. Perhaps I should chop off those two fingers. But who knows, maybe my breath would still be enough. Should I try? No, no, enough! The mere thought of it made my blood curdle. Maybe my breath alone was enough. How to stop myself from breathing? How to fight the urge? With a hand over my mouth? Could I condemn myself to live the rest of my life with a hand over my mouth?

As I wandered around ranting about this, I happened to walk by the door of the hospital, which was wide open. In the lobby, a few ER nurses on duty were chatting with two cops and the old doorman. And by the door, looking out on the street with his long lab coat and his hands on his hips, stood the young doctor who had rushed to poor Bernabò’s deathbed. As soon as he saw me walk by, perhaps because I was waving my hands about as I ranted to myself, he recognized me and started to laugh. I wish he had never done that. I stopped and shouted at him: “Don’t you dare put on that foolish smile of yours now! I am it, I am it! I have it here,” and I showed him again my fingers pressed together. “Maybe even in my breath alone! Do you want to test it out in front of these gentlemen?” Puzzled and intrigued, the nurses, the two cops, and the old doorman had drawn closer. With his smile withering upon those lips that looked painted, and without even bothering to take his hands off his hips, this time the wretch couldn’t content himself with thinking it, but shrugging his shoulders dared say to me out loud:

“You’re crazy!”

“Oh, I’m crazy?” I pressed on. “The epidemic has been over for two weeks now. Do you want to bet that I can start it up again and spread it around in an instant, causing panic all over?”

“How are you going to do that—by blowing on your fingers?”

The roaring outburst of laughter that followed the doctor’s question made me reel. I knew in my mind that I shouldn’t give in to irritation just because every time my gesture was revealed, it inevitably made me the object of ridicule and humiliation. No one except for me could seriously believe its deadly effect. Still, the irritation got the best of me, like a red-hot brand on naked flesh, as I felt that ridicule like a mocking stigma that death had marked me with while at the same time endowing me with such incredible power. Add to that, like a lash, the young doctor’s question:

“Who told you the epidemic’s over?”

I was flabbergasted. It wasn’t over? My cheeks started to burn with shame.

“The papers,” I said, “haven’t reported any new cases.”

“The papers haven’t,” he retorted, “but we at the hospital have.”

“So there have been new cases?”

“Three or four a day.”

“And you’re sure they’re from the same illness?”

“Well yes, sir, I’m positively sure. If only it were so easy to shed light on the darkness! Save your breath, listen to me.”

The others laughed again.

“Fair enough,” I said. “If that’s the case, then I am crazy and you won’t be afraid to put me to the test. Will you also assume responsibility for these five gentlemen?”

The young doctor, faced with my challenge, was baffled for a moment, but then the smile returned to his lips. He turned to the other five:

“Did you hear? This gentleman maintains that all he needs to do is blow on his fingers and he can kill us all. Are you in? I am.”

Snickering, they all exclaimed:

“Go ahead, blow. Blow on those fingers. We’re in, we’re here.”

They stood in a row right in front of me, their faces leaning forward. It looked like theatre taking place in a hospital lobby under the red light of the ER. They were sure they were dealing with a madman. I couldn’t back out anymore.

“So I’m not the epidemic, eh?”

And to be more certain, I joined my two fingers in front of my lips as usual. At my breath, all six of them, one after the other, pressed their hands against their chests, staring at each other with clouded eyes. Then one of the cops attacked me, clutching my wrist, but he immediately started suffocating, his legs gave in, and he fell to his knees at my feet as if begging for help. Meanwhile, the others were teetering, or flailing about, or they just stood there, wild-eyed and gaping. Instinctively, I raised my free arm to stop the young doctor from collapsing against me, but he, too, like Bernabò, violently pushed me away and tumbled loudly onto the floor. Meanwhile, a number of people who were increasingly becoming a crowd had gathered in front of the door. The rubbernecks were pushing in from the outside, while the frightened ones were withdrawing from the door, squashing in between the anxious ones who wanted to know what was going on in the lobby. They were asking me as one who must surely know, perhaps because my face expressed neither the curiosity, nor the anxiety and fright that they felt. I couldn’t say what I looked like; at that moment I felt lost, as if I was being suddenly attacked by a pack of dogs. My eyes must have been filled with fear and pity for those six fallen men and for all the others around me. Perhaps I was even smiling as I threaded my way through them, saying to one or the other:

“All it takes is a breath... just like this... just like this...”, while the young doctor, stubborn until the very end, screamed as he writhed on the floor: “The epidemic! The epidemic!”

At that, everyone took off. I saw myself for only a short while longer—amidst all those people running around in panic, I alone was walking, but like a drunkard who talks to himself, gentle and concerned. At last I found myself, I don’t know how, in front of a store mirror, still with those two fingers in front of my lips in the act of blowing... just like that, just like that... perhaps to prove the innocence of that gesture, showing that, yes, I even did it to myself in the only way available to me. For an instant I caught a glimpse of myself in that mirror: I didn’t even know how to look at my eyes, they seemed so hollow in my dead man’s face. Then, as if the void had sucked me in, or as if I were victim of a dizzy spell, I didn’t see myself anymore. I touched the mirror; it was there, in front of me, I could see it, but I wasn’t in it. I touched my body—my head, my chest, my arms. I could feel it under my hands, but I didn’t see it anymore, nor the hands I was touching it with. And yet I wasn’t blind: I could see everything—the street, the people, the houses, the mirror. There, I was touching the mirror again, stepping closer to look for myself in it. I wasn’t there. Neither was my hand, though my fingers did feel the coldness of glass. I felt an overwhelming urge to sneak into that mirror and look for the image of myself that had been blown away and disappeared. And while I was standing like that against the glass, somebody coming out of the store crashed into me and I immediately saw him jump back in horror, his mouth wide open with a madman’s scream stuck in his throat: he had run into someone who should have been there but wasn’t. There was no one at all. I then felt the compelling need to affirm that I was there. It was like speaking to the wind. I breathed on his face: “The epidemic!” and pressing a hand against his chest I pushed him to the ground.

Meanwhile, the street was in turmoil: those who had taken off earlier were now coming back, looking frantic and urging everyone to search for me. People were swarming there from every corner, springing up from underground in a huge multitude, like a thick smoke of morphing faces that suffocated me, billowing in the hallucination of a terrifying dream. But even though I was squeezed by the crowd, I could still keep moving, plow my way through just by blowing on my invisible fingers: “The epidemic! The epidemic!” I understood at last. I was no longer me. I was the epidemic. And ghosts, yes, all ghosts were the human lives that my breath blew away.

How long did the nightmare last? All night and part of the following day I had to struggle to get out of that crowd. Finally freed from the clutch of those houses in that horrible city, in the air of the countryside I felt I was air, too. Everything was bathed gold by the sun. I had no body, I had no shadow. The greenery was so fresh and new it looked like it had sprouted up right then and there, compelled by my urgent need for coolness. And it was so mine that I felt touched by every blade of grass brushed by an insect. I tried to fly with the detached, almost paper-light flight of two white butterflies in love. As if it really were a prank now, I drew a breath, and poof—the detached wings of those butterflies fell lightly into the air like pieces of paper. A little further away, on a bench surrounded by oleanders, a young girl sat wearing a light, voile dress. On her head was a large straw hat adorned with tiny roses. She batted her eyelashes; she was thinking, smiling with a smile that made her distant from me like an image from my youth. She may have been nothing more than an image left over from life, now all alone on the earth. It would only take a breath, and poof! Touched to the point of anguish by so much sweetness, I just stood there, invisible, my hands clasped together, holding my breath, watching her from afar. And my gaze was the air itself, caressing her, without her feeling its touch.