As I ride my bike through the streets of San Sebastián, I glance back at Dámaso riding behind me, checking whether he’s keeping up. His injured knee could slow him down; the steady stream of pedestrians crossing the bike lane might spell trouble.
Coincidentally, I stumbled upon Orpheus attempt at bringing Eurydice from the dead, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for which he accepted “that he must not turn his eyes behind him, until he emerged from Avernus”:
They took the upward path, through the still silence, steep and dark, shadowy with dense fog, drawing near to the threshold of the upper world. Afraid she was no longer there, and eager to see her, the lover turned his eyes. In an instant she dropped back, and he, unhappy man, stretching out his arms to hold her and be held, clutched at nothing but the receding air. Dying a second time, now, there was no complaint to her husband (what, then, could she complain of, except that she had been loved?).