Chapter 226 - The Memory in the Hands

I saw his hands before even understanding that it was what I was looking at, for they did not impose themselves as an evidence, nor even as a gesture, but appeared in the field of my perception with that sovereign discretion of things that have always been there, stretched out toward me without truly aiming at me, arms relaxed, palms offered to the sky in an attitude neither open nor closed, but simply shut — not closed by refusal, nor contracted by fear, just closed with that grave softness that things have when one keeps them without yet knowing their destination, as if one were watching over a secret whose importance one does not yet know, but that one has decided, nonetheless, not to betray.