María José Peláez Sierra [1]
Date Posted: 08/18/2026
I saw Katherine for a couple of seconds; then she turned off her camera. She told me she was from Cali, Colombia, and that, “as for everyone else, the world had begun and ended with the pandemic.” I had heard of her through our mutual MA thesis advisor. Katherine too had studied Literature in Bogotá, and was living there until the pandemic was declared. Then she traveled back to her native Cali, and the quarantine was immediately enforced.
Her mom was in Belgium with one of her sisters and had not been able to return because of the border closures. Katherine, her other sister, and her dad remained then at the childhood house in Cali, waiting. The days passed slowly, spent watching the news voraciously and then stretching into long blocks of silence and tedium — but also, at times, of warmth: “we celebrated, argued, laughed, lived—all of us, shut in here, in this house. Here we talked, we read, we ate. Here everything.”
During those first months, Katherine would press her skin to the door frame and watch her dad work for hours with his tools, fixing things around the house, here and there, coming and going with his hands full of collectible toy cars, repositioning them millimeter by millimeter on the shelves after hours of cleaning. They would talk at times; at others, she would just watch and smile at him, as if supporting the walls while leaning on the frames.
**
On July 20, 2020, her father began to feel ill. He had started working again in May. “My dad was an electrical technician and had been at Toyota for 35 years. The auto industry was one of the first to go back to the office, even in the middle of the first peak,” Katherine tells me.
Eight days later he tested positive and Katherine too.
“We took turns to take care of him between my sister, later my niece, and me, in eight-hour shifts, but it wasn’t enough. We were all exhausted and sick, and needless to say so was he… the fever, the discouragement, the shortness of breath, the pain. The house was enormous and, at the same time, so small. So suffocating. I would go into his room, always with a mask, to bring him food, to talk to him a while so he wouldn’t feel so alone, so scared, but there came a point when I told him: “papi, don’t get up anymore, don’t get out of bed anymore. Stay face down and pee into a little jar. Because by then I could see he was very bad. But he was a 61-year-old man with three daughters… He never managed to feel comfortable peeing that way, even though he had to.”
The day they tested him, it was Katherine’s shift. That night, for the first time, he —a man of few words— told her he was afraid. She said to him firmly: “no, papi, don’t worry, everything is going to be fine. We’re going to be fine.” And yet she knew they weren’t fine. Everything was suddenly collapsing and she was looking out from within the ruins.
Katherine would have wanted to tell him that she, too, was afraid. She would have liked to have had her last words there, in that moment, and not to lie to him. She would have liked to tell him that everything was wrong, that she didn’t understand why tragedy settled over them, why it had to be them, one of the many cases that would later appear in the news with an “In memoriam” attached. She would have liked to tell him that she was sorry he was leaving so soon, that the house asphyxiated them all. That she was sorry for, and cherished, his silence.
But they didn’t appear in the news…
“The house the world. It still is. And like the world, sometimes so narrow, so coiled up. We didn’t appear anywhere. The house —it was our news, our doctor, our psychologist, our reading, our unspoken words. Everything. This house”
Suddenly Katherine adds: “I think a lot about what would have happened if we had let him take the Ivermectin[2], which he had in the closet the whole time. But the thing is my dad had cancer, prostate cancer, and we were very afraid he’d mix medications, and it would cause some reaction. Of course, on this too, we had no medical assistance. In moments like that you don’t even know what to do or how to do it. Sometimes you think you’re doing things right… and… well, no, or who knows.”
I tried to say something, to let her know that of course I don’t think she’s to blame for anything. But what could I tell her beyond some heaviness, like: “I read that,” “maybe there is comfort in such-and-such author,” “if you look into this or that idea” —as in fact I did afterward, stammering out something. Which author, which concept, which nothing. Coiled up over myself, in the traffic jam of readings that now seemed lodged in my throat, I fell silent in the middle of the thought. I looked at her through the screen (even though I could not really see her) and waited for her to realize that I realized that nothing I had said made any sense. Her feeling was hers, disconsolate and tenacious, as life so often is[3].
– “A few days later, construction began on the house next door,” she goes on.
The atmosphere of the house —already made strange by the fever that stalked the three of them intermittently— grew even heavier with the cement dust that came in through the windows and the cracks in the doors. They tried to talk with the neighbor.
– “She couldn’t stop her construction, she told me.”
And so they decided to leave their place and go to the grandmother’s house, a few blocks away. “And so, sick as he was, we took him to my grandmother’s house. He didn’t want to go… I’ll settle you in over there, I told him. Easy now, papito, I… a-a-and… That night we stayed there.” And it was her dad’s last in any kind of house.
“At 11 in the morning the next day my dad was already very short of breath, and I had a fever of 38. So, my sister started getting him ready for my niece to take him to the clinic, while I stayed glued to the phone trying to get someone from the health provider to come see us.”
The last time Katherine saw her dad was that day, his full body leaning into the door frame as she herself used to do, in the other house.
— “Bye, sweetie.”
— “Bye, dad,” she said to him while she stayed on the phone with the switchboard in the background.
“I said on the line to wait a moment, so I could tell him: in the name of God, take good care of yourself. And he only gave me a little nod, like yes. He lifted his shoulder off the frame and left. He took the house away, all the houses in the world with him —all the frames, all the rooms, all the rugs, everything— he took the house away.”
On the third day they intubated him; on the sixth, he died alone.
After she told me that, we talked a while longer about other things, and about those same things. When I stopped recording the conversation, she turned the camera on again and said to me very slowly: “that’s what I remember… the rest I’ve been forgetting. I have gaps, dark clouds that suddenly settle over me, I have a lot of confusion. We were all so sick in the house that I couldn’t say exactly how things happened. And even less now that my dad has died.”
“We don’t talk about him anymore. These days, especially, I’d been feeling a strong urge to talk… I don’t know…”
***
Just before hanging up, I ask her whether she would change anything about that farewell; whether now that the months have passed, she has imagined other conversations, other ways of saying goodbye to him. She, blunt, knowing where the question is headed, tells me:
“I think I would change it, this time and a thousand times, that moment of the farewell, for a moment, maybe, more romanticized. But I know death isn’t like that; we will never, never manage to say all that we would like to say. Yes, people say things like: live this day as if it were your last, live to the fullest and blah, blah, blah —but is it like that?” (Are we capable of living every day as if it were the last? And besides, isn’t the last day just the same as the most ordinary of days?) “Even with my dad being so sick, there, standing, looking at me from the door frame —the phone, the illness itself, the anguish, the urgency of all those suffocating days went on being the same. And into that life that comes crashing down on us, the farewells too. We always stay there, with things left to say.”
“We’re left with the words,” she insists, “we’re left even when everything is planned.”
Her dad thought about death all the time; he did so for decades. He talked about it, he had insurance, and his funeral paid for, everything. He had cancer —maybe that was why, Katherine thinks— or simply because of his almost taciturn, light-hearted nature. “For him, thinking about death was thinking about life.” And not even he, whom death did not catch by surprise, and who was supposedly prepared for it, had the chance to rest into it, to take it in, to say goodbye and look it in the face; because who has words for death? For whom does a life suffice to prepare? We always end up left with something…
But Katherine replies: “Even knowing that, almost as a fact, of course, in my imagination, I would change —and I do change, every day— that farewell. I play with it, I make it again, I say it again. In my mind I hang up the phone and I hug him. In other versions I recreate, I ask him how he feels. In others, I tell him to stay a little longer. In others, I stay at the door with him… I have re-created that farewell many times. And, in it, I tell my dad that I loved him, that I loved him so much, and that I still think about him all the time, even in the small things, like making the bed, for instance,” and she laughs in a way I hadn’t seen her laugh during the whole call.
“My dad always told me that screws are unscrewed with the hands of the clock, and I still sometimes find myself arguing with him, letting him know that I don’t understand how to unscrew the bed and how the whole clock-hands thing goes… I talk to him all the time.”
“In my imagination I talk to him because I think that way I can create memories with him that I didn’t really have. I talk to him because I would like to remember him the way one of his closest friends described him to us recently. His friend ended up almost bringing him back to life. It was very beautiful, because I realized he was much more than what we remembered. It’s like assembling a character, and it’s as if that character had a thousand voices, a thousand faces, a thousand forms. And that is precious; I would have loved to record that, to capture it somehow so as to keep filling in my dad bit by bit. Now, when I imagine him standing in the doorway, I remember him the way his friend described him to us.”
And Gaston Bachelard (1964) resonates in me one last time, but I keep it to myself: “Is it possible, further still, to restore not only the timbre of the voices, the inflection of the beloved voices now silenced, but also the resonance of all the rooms of the sonorous house?” And in the middle of that room, in the childhood house once again, Katherine turns off the camera one last time. And then I know that no: the house no longer sounds, the frame no longer exists, the rarefied atmosphere clings to the walls, and there are no words for definite goodbyes.
The skin on the door frame, in the room of toy cars, in the gaze. The skin taken over by the house. The skin he left her. The house abandoned by the skin.
Notes
[1]A longer Spanish version of this article was published in: Peláez Sierra, María José. (2022). La casa. Argos. 9. 63-75. 10.32870/argos.v9.n23.6a22.
[2]At that time the WHO had not yet warned about the dangers and inefficacy of this medication in the treatment of COVID, and there was much speculation and disinformation about it.
[3]In the face of that reality —certain, implacable— it is not the Elegy, as I have said in earlier pages, that finds its way into the last moments of life; it is the Farewell, a plain and raw genre, that speaks to us, with its sorrow pure and simple. Utter irremediableness. It is, as Idea Vilariño says in her Complete Poetry (2016), a pity, death.
Qué lástima
que sea sólo esto
que quede así
no sirva más
esté acabado
venga a parar en esto.
Qué lástima que no
pudiéramos
sirviéramos
que ya no demos más
que no sepamos ya
que estemos ya tan secos.
Qué lástima
qué lástima
estar muertos
faltar
a tan hondo deber
a tan preciada cita
a un amor tan seguro.
[What a pity that it should be only this / that it stays like this / be of no more use, be finished / come to rest in this. / What a pity that we could not / be of use / that we no longer know how, that we give no more / that we are already so dry. / What a pity, what a pity / to be dead, to fail / so deep a duty, so treasured an appointment, / a love so sure] (Vilariño, 2016, p.171).