I can recall the scene each time I want to, even now. I know exactly how I will die.

I am wearing a dark checked shirt. When I think about it, perhaps it is for this reason that I never buy dark checked shirts.
Alone. Sitting on the worn stone steps just below the level of the bare soil. I can see short sun-scorched grass and olive trees. It looks like a well, an unfinished excavation, perhaps an ancient tomb. I wipe my forehead with an handkerchief. My chest is oppressed, not enough air enters the lungs. I look at my hands holding the damp handkerchief; I see in detail the ordered symmetry of the fibers stained with sweat, the blue line that borders it. I have the impression that this handkerchief is my father’s, he who certainly must be long dead, I’m so old myself. I am looking for water, and then I remember that I do not have any with me.
A bird sings a complicated song that I do not recognize. I raise my eyes towards the still air without the slightest breath of wind. The sound disappears. I slowly scan the entire cloudless vault of the sky above me. Intense blue, everywhere.
At the end, on the extreme left, I see one. A cloud, small and soft, still and distant.
Beautiful, too, although seeing it is disturbing. It reminds me of something, indefinite and unpleasant. I try to remember what that is.

It’s strange: I know my feelings at that moment but not the details of the circumstances causing them. Tiredness. Discomfort. I feel anger and bitterness. My desire to become a wise old man in a community that loves and respects me is not going to be. I know I am taking refuge. There are enemies. People who think ill of me and forced me to flee. And there are others, devoted friends, who I also want to escape from, even more than from my enemies. There is something in them, sheepish admiration that arouses my indignation and keeps me in isolation.
Is this sultry hole where I am my permanent shelter? Have I been there for a long time or just for a moment, by chance? Perhaps I am visiting, as a tourist, as a pilgrim? Are they who are looking for me far away, in another continent; or just behind the hill, therefore going to get me soon?
I do not know, I cannot interpret the scene although I see it crystal clear. This is a limit of my vision, otherwise as precise as a photograph in which I can check and recheck the details.
I rest my exhausted back on the steps, bow my head, and curl up in the hope of finding a position in which the air reaching my lungs is enough. I am overwhelmed by the scent of myrtle and mastic that permeates the place, the most familiar scent I know, an imprint absorbed at my first breath on this earth, at the cut of my umbilical cord. Am I in Sardinia? Or Greece, Lebanon, Israel, South Africa, Mexico?

And suddenly I remember. I remember that I have already remembered this place where I am now. I remember the steps, the heat, the clear sky, the song of the bird. The cloud. I remember the cloud especially. This is what I have seen again and again since I was a child, it is the scene of my death. Now, yes, I do remember. It seems impossible, but I had forgotten. The last picture: a tiny cloud in the corner of an intense blue sky. I close my eyes.

I cannot embrace the idea that by that time I will no longer be. The only reality I know is the one that is perceived. In this vision I, living, am beholding myself, dead. I close my eyes to die: something remains and knows that I closed my eyes. What will become of me without me? I, the one without faith, still think of myself existing after death, perhaps in the distilled form of a thought without body, that’s where my logic puts its foot down. You see: even this clear, recurrent vision, which seems to promise who knows what unveiling, is quite useless.