Leila’s Dream

“Death by literature”? Despite her fatal diagnosis, Leila Ross clung to reading till the very end.

These were the final lines of Mum’s request:

Although she may never find herself basking in the glow of literary glory in her lifetime, your mother would like to die shrouded in it. Which is why she has asked that you help her plot an end that will see her go down in history. In other words, you’ll have to invent a death for her. Or several. For example, cf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leila_Ross_Wilburn

Leila Ross Douglas de Almeida, as it transpired, died climbing up (or down) an internal staircase at home carrying a huge pile of books. Subsequent investigations by relatives and first responders surmised that she must have been hugging the books to her chest when she trod on the hem of her long dress (which was visibly frayed), lost her balance, and tumbled down the stairs. It was never determined whether she was killed by the impact on the steps or through bombardment by her own books as they fell down on top of her, being easily heavy enough to stave in her head on their own. The autopsy did not pronounce on the matter. Her relatives preferred to spread a romantic version in which Leila Ross died clinging to some of the tomes, clearly hoping to protect them. Her final expression was akin to self-satisfaction.

Other rumors have it that Leila Ross actually died in one of her regular haunts: the gym. Apparently every day she walked the treadmill or rode the elliptical bike while reading, underlining passages with a pencil and even rubbing the lines out while still in motion if she considered them too wavy or askew (which is why she only used pencils with erasers on the end). That way she felt she was accomplishing two things at once—keeping fit both physically and intellectually—and thus making maximum use of her time, as she couldn’t bear wastage. It would seem that she got so caught up in a paragraph by Flaubert about the vice of writing that, as she furiously scribbled large exclamation marks by the side of the passage, Ross accidentally pressed the button to increase the speed of the treadmill. Her feet were taken by surprise and she fell at such an unlucky angle that she hit her head against the neighboring machine hard enough that her general good health was no defense. To make matters worse, her tragic moment of clumsiness saw the owner of the gym investigated by the police for weeks. He subsequently banned reading while exercising at all of his branches. Other large gym chains followed his precautionary suit: on entry, customers were obliged to surrender any literary materials they might have on their person while they remained within the athletic institutions. Specially designed baskets were placed out in which to isolate the offending books. Dynamic literature thus languished in the shadows until people began to forget the incident and one or two daring or careless readers brought the practice back. Leila Ross’s family has preserved the volume containing those final, excitable, but deadly annotations in a glass display case.

Some have theorized that the death took place while Ross was indulging in another of her favorite bibliographic pastimes: listening to an audiobook while driving. In this version, she was so carried away with Bartleby the Scrivener—she knew the story by heart, so it’s not implausible that she was mumbling along with the narrator—that she didn’t notice a truck speeding toward her on her left. An amendment to the tale has it that the accident occurred as Ross was bending over to jot down an interesting phrase into a file on her mobile phone, which she kept for stray notions. She’d copy out lines by other writers she’d read or heard when in motion, alongside original ideas she didn’t want to forget, interesting details about the streets around her, and useful addresses (she had a very poor sense of direction and was always getting lost). After examining the file, the relatives found that it threw light on some of her more inscrutable manias and the darker aspects of her fiction. Police experts called attention to the fact that the time stamp on a phrase Leila Ross had copied out from the aforementioned story—“If I dared to breathe a bitter word against this forlornest of mankind”—and the pausing of her recording—the stereo having survived the complete destruction of the car intact—coincided.

One of the sources consulted about Leila Ross’s unfortunate and sudden end mentioned her habit of hiding objects of economic or emotional value (such as hard drives containing copies of family photographs or her manuscripts) among the books that least interested her, such as travel guides or recipe collections, which were placed on the highest and most hidden parts of her bookshelves. She took it for granted that burglars wouldn’t trouble to look there. On this occasion she wanted to get something down and so brought in a rather rickety kitchen stool to climb up on. When she couldn’t find what she was looking for, she stood on tip-toe to grope blindly around higher up. As one might expect, the stool was tipped off-balance and began to rock backward and forward underneath her feet. The writer’s reaction was the opposite to that of us ordinary mortals (drop the books and leap down to safety); she opted to cling to the bookshelf with all her might, bringing it down on top of herself. A bookshelf fallen over a prone person may sound poetically appealing, but its physical consequences were so unpleasant that said witness—who was careful to maintain anonymity—refused to share any details about the scene or final state of the victim.

Leila Ross opted to cling to the bookshelf with all her might, bringing it down on top of herself.

Another investigation concluded that, in light of the fact that Leila Ross abhorred spending time on activities she considered unnecessary when alone—such as eating—she would wolf down hardboiled eggs or un-condimented ham-and-cheese sandwiches without interrupting her writing or reading. She was so loathe to curtail her literary activities that she rarely took the time to pour herself a glass of water to wash down the dry foodstuff. This would often lead to fits of choking, but her body was well used to such abuse. She had determinedly made herself into an all-weather vehicle. However, supposedly—on this final, tragic occasion—she was so absentminded about her mastication that the sandwich, or possibly whole egg, blocked her windpipe completely. Relatives and paramedics suspected that she had been reading in bed at the time and never bothered to get up to go to the bathroom for a glass of water to flush out the blockage. She was found leaning back serenely on a pile of cushions, a copy of Concrete by Thomas Bernhard lying open on her lap. A pencil sat upon the page she had been reading when she departed this life. Both objects have been preserved for posterity.

Although many people believe that Leila Ross succumbed to a garden-variety cancer, the death certificate, entitled Leila Ross, Undetermined Death by Literature, states that her lifeless body was found full of toxic substances that must have hindered her well-being. Her blood was contaminated with an equal quantity of ink, meaning that it flowed not blue, like royalty, but a shrill shade of violet. After this finding came to light, a group of bibliophilic scientists decided to begin an in-depth study to determine whether this was the kind of blood that flowed through all writers’ veins.

In addition, it was discovered that her cells contained a chromosomal element derived from the addictive consumption of renowned authors and volumes. Said element produced stimuli that interfered with the proper functioning of the subject’s neurotransmitters. Also found were paper mites in such large concentrations that they would have overwhelmed the defenses of even a healthy human being, resulting in (a) a brain that weighed twice as much as normal, (b) a neck unable to take such extra weight, and (c) irreparable damage to her immune system, which is what eventually wore her down. The final verdict stated that the author Leila Ross Douglas de Almeida was born with literaturosis (a rampant literary addiction) and suffered greatly from literatophagy (excessive consumption of books) and literatotrophy (atrophied hypophysis due to a massive overdose of reading).

The document is signed by one Dr. Piglia, who went on to provide the already deeply confused family with a superlative commentary that has since appeared in several distinguished journals and is often cited in similar cases.

“Certainly,” he explained, “what happened to the lady is not at all new. In Poe’s Dupin, Hamlet, or Don Quixote, melancholy is a hallmark of a certain kind of literature—the disease of literature, the excess of unreal worlds, a markedly contemplative gaze, and a glut of meaning. However, it is not a madness but rather a condition produced by reading first described in the classical literature in Don Quixote, one of extreme lucidity. Dupin is the very embodiment of the great rationalist. And so was Leila Ross.”

Translation from the Spanish