...of a good listener

Irene:
I don't quite recall if you'd already closed your little umbrella while my big one was still open, when we spoke about the man I admired and loved so much in my childhood. But I well remember that standing next to you there beneath the intermittent rain and the streetlight and the green of the trees, I felt the unknown I tried so hard to speak of in my letters. I felt the pressure of the unknown most strongly while recollecting that man, who no longer exists; and the dusk, with its indefinite rain and artificial light and trees and all the rest, formed a scene that would make me go back to those memories later. As I experience that twilight now, it seems much closer to the period when he lived than to the present in which we happened to encounter each other a few days ago. But for a moment this era when I'm still living and he is not seemed to have something false about it: there would be a price to pay, something serious that would happen to me, for the privilege of existing when he no longer did. Yet I felt the present, too: when I was falling into your eyes with my eyes, I remembered how black and deep his eyes were, and that was when I felt the unknown with the greatest intensity: the unknown was looking out at me through those eyes. But at the same time there was something else in your eyes and face, something that made me overcome my momentary feeling of how false the present was, and forced the unknown to begin anew. While we were speaking, there was something that had nothing to do with words; the words served to attract us to each other's silence. Now I feel as though I'm maintaining that silence, and writing in it. But during that twilight, even as I was speaking and anxiously developing my thoughts, I could feel the presence of other thoughts, and I felt those thoughts appearing and disappearing, as if I were riding a horse very fast along a forest path, thinking of nothing but arriving, and other horsemen suddenly passed nearby and were lost among the trees and then appeared once more.
At times among all the words in my conversation, one would make you smile; then I would look in wonder at your face, as if it were a lake into which I'd accidentally dropped some object, and I could see the ripples it produced without knowing what the object had been.
Now I'm greatly inclined to remember certain things and little inclined to write. And you, in your silence, are you writing or not?

[Mistaken Hands from Lands of Memory, Hernandez, F.]