The Last Resort by Carmen Posadas

last stop on her very eventful journey through life. About when he turned fifty, he had begun to care for his mother, his only source of company, in their rambling old house near Holland Park. Unfortunately, the costly upkeep had forced him to take in boarders, horrid as they were, and little by little he had had to sell off all the paintings, the dining room set, and much of the living room furniture to pawnbrokers and secondhand shops. He couldn’t have cared less when the paying guests complained about the lack of creature comforts, the cockroaches, the chill in the austere, curtainless rooms, and a thousand other annoyances, but his mother’s room was untouchable, unaffected by the passage of time. He went to great pains to ensure that the room was exactly as it had always been, so that when she opened her eyes, the whites whitened by all the sedatives he gave her, she would see exactly what she had always seen in all of the houses they had lived in together: the blond-wood armoire that went so well with the queen-size Indian mahogany bed bought in Havana; the mirror with the silver handle that sat on top; the clock that no longer told the correct time—not because it was broken, but because one day his mother had decided that it should always be set at ten minutes to five. And then there were the photographs. Very close by, almost within arm’s reach, was the little table where his mother had kept her collection of silver frames, filled with photographs arranged in rather idiosyncratic order. They were something of a walk through her life and began with a large, magnificent portrait of her at a party in Biarritz as an adolescent; it was signed by Cartier-Bresson himself. Next to this photograph sat a cluster of smaller frames that constituted the River Plate series: the house in El Prado where her husband had been born; a group of people dressed in white at a picnic; and finally, his mother in her wedding dress, standing alone at the door to the house in all her regal beauty.
    There were also two other oversize frames. The one closer to the bed featured a very young Molinet in a raw linen suit and Panama hat on a ship’s deck. This photograph was occasionally moved from its spot—not because of any intrinsic virtue or flaw it possessed, but because its placement on the table blocked another frame whose fate waxed and waned depending on the ailing woman’s mood. Whenever she said to him, “Rafael, I want to see your father today,” he understood exactly what she meant and would quickly turn around the one photograph that was normally condemned to face the wall.
    These memories came rushing back into Molinet’s mind all because of a clumsy brush against a footstool upholstered in petit point. The experience very nearly prompted him to call Dr. Pertini, but he decided against it. He had to learn to live without Dr. Pertini.
    “From now on, whenever you start to feel nostalgic, dear Molinet, why not write to a friend, get your feelings out on paper. It is, after all, far less expensive than Kleinian therapy,” Pertini had said to him as he sent Molinet on his way at the end of their last appointment. “Sending him on his way,” of course, was not quite the same thing as “declaring him cured,” even though the result was the same. It meant he was on his own now, without a penny to his name and still plagued by the same nightmares that led him to the doctor in the first place. Following his comment, the doctor had written out three or four prescriptions on an elegant red notepad before ceremoniously walking Molinet to the door in his white, probably custom-made, robe:
    “Here you are,” Dr. Pertini had said to him. “A muscle relax-ant, some vitamins, and these sleeping pills. But, please, don’t abuse them, because if you do, they might start causing you more nightmares. And think, my friend. Think that you are cured, that you have emerged from your depression, that there is nothing more that science can