My lungs are beginning to fail. They work only to half their capacity and they commit me to the house much of the time. I have missed two weeks of teaching. Walking the hill has become difficult, and breathing monumental, as if I am indisposed to the air itself. The cypresses at the end of the road seem further away than ever. I shall be sad not to be able to visit them. I like to see them become luminous in the late evening, as if full of green elixir, or watch their branches shuddering in a downpour, their leaves at a furious boil in the wind. All I can do now is salute them from my window. Though I have days of high energy and optimism, the reverse is often true. It is unfortunate to be an intermittent tutor at the school, and unfair to the children, but if I cannot speak for the rust blowing loose around my heart, what use is my presence among them? If I continue to be absent no doubt the mistress will march the children up here in a prim line, like goats with bells, such is her fanaticism.
