City of the Beasts by Isabel Allende

City of the Beasts by Isabel Allende

Author:Isabel Allende [Allende, Isabel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Sacred Mountain

BATHED IN SWEAT, battered, and burning with fever, Alexander—Jaguar—walked down a long green corridor, stepped across an aluminum threshold, and saw his mother. Lisa was lying back among pillows in a large chair with a sheet pulled across her body, in a room where the light was as clear as moonlight. She was wearing a blue wool cap over her bald head and headphones on her ears. She was very pale and thin, with dark shadows around her eyes. Yellow liquid dripped from a plastic bag into the IV inserted into a vein beneath her collarbone. Each drop penetrated, like the fire of the ants, directly into the bloodstream to his mother’s heart.

Thousands of miles away in a hospital in Texas, Lisa was receiving her chemotherapy. She tried not to think about the drug that, like a poison, flowed through her veins to fight the worse poison of her illness. To distract herself, she was concentrating on each note of the flute concerto she was listening to, the one she had heard her son rehearsing so many times. At the same moment that Alex, in his delirium, was dreaming about her deep in the jungle, Lisa saw her son with absolute clarity. She saw him in the doorway of her room, taller and stronger, more mature and more handsome than she remembered. Lisa had called him so often in her thoughts that she was not surprised to see him. She didn’t ask how or why he had come, she simply gave herself to the pleasure of having him at her side. “Alexander . . . Alexander . . . ,” she murmured. She held out her hands and he moved forward to touch her; he knelt beside the chair and put his head on her knees. As Lisa repeated her son’s name and stroked the back of his neck, from the earphones, through the diaphanous notes of the flute, she heard his voice asking her to fight, not to give in to death, telling her over and over, I love you, Momma.

Alexander’s meeting with his mother might have lasted an instant or several hours, neither of the two knew for sure. When finally they said good-bye and returned to the material world, they were strengthened. Shortly afterward, John entered his wife’s room and was surprised to find her smiling, and with color in her cheeks.

“How do you feel, Lisa?” he asked with concern.

“Happy, John, because Alex was here,” she replied.

“Lisa, what are you saying . . . ? Alexander is in the Amazon with my mother, don’t you remember?” her husband murmured, frightened about the effect the medication might be having on his wife.

“Yes, I remember, but that doesn’t change the fact that he was here a moment ago.”

“That isn’t possible,” her husband rebutted.

“He’s grown, he looks much taller and stronger, but his left arm is very swollen . . . ,” she told John, and closed her eyes to rest.

In the middle of the South American continent, in the Eye of the World, Alexander awoke.



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