“You know, they live far away, that’s because . . .”
“Oh I know,” said the boy with a sudden intelligent look, “I know, you don’t have money to go back!”
“Why to go back? how do you know about these things?” asked Virgínia.
“Just yesterday the maid at home didn’t have money to go back,” said the boy with a certain pride.
“Ah yes, ah yes,” — Virgínia was seeming to meditate.
“So? did you figure it out?” asked the oldest girl, the skinny one.
“Yes, I figured it out, I’ll go back . . .” said Virgínia looking them with fury, disguising it. “I’ll go back, I’ll go back. And now can I go?” she inquired with an indecisive, almost timid air. They looked surprised, glanced at one another quickly without answering. The dark one shook her braids:
“Who was keeping you?”
The others said — “yeah, right!” They laughed a bit wrinkling their noses at the sudden sun that had appeared. Virgínia got up, the children now with their heads raised, hands on their foreheads protecting themselves against the glare, they were retreating watching. She said:
“Fine, goodbye,” she was hesitating as if it were dangerous to withdraw. A few answered goodbye, the little blonde pressed her hand one last time with force on Virgínia’s arm. Virgínia had taken a few steps when the boy ran up shouting:
“Miss! miss! the maid said that when she’d go back she’d buy a ticket in that yellow station, you know, that big one . . .”
Virgínia was stopping listening to him in silence. The boy had nothing else to say, he was waiting. He seemed annoyed:
“So, that’s what I wanted to say . . .”
“Yes, yes, thanks a lot really, really . . .”
When she passed a nearby bench a lady dressed in blue, without a hat, with a big purse, was seeming to say something to her. She stopped, bent her head: ah, yes, the woman had watched the scene, hadn’t heard anything and was asking her out of pure curiosity, with a certain overfamiliar and malicious eagerness, what had happened.
“The world is full of naughty children,” she said showing that she’d be understanding about any fact that Virgínia might tell.
“Yes,” said Virgínia and moved away. The garden was spread in long horizontal lines, the grass was swaying in the fluctuating shadows of the branches, the air was stretching out bright, softly electric. And suddenly warm drops of water started to fall. She took shelter in the gazebo along with a fat old man, with a heart condition, who was slowly gasping with fright and pity, his eyes staring at the rain as at hopeless disaster. A sluggish, thick, and noiseless rain was falling, filling the space with long shining streaks.
The next day, yes it had been at that time, she’d visited the young doctor. He was laughing imitating her. With a falsely paternal demeanor he would brush his body against hers, brush against her cheek that face with two days of beard growth while on the other cheek he was giving her little slaps . . . while she surprised and confused was feeling almost good, very good — he was tall and pale and women were worthless to him. He had a wedding ring; how could you ever guess his relations with his wife? He was getting closer in that calm, white office and she was still sitting on the table where he’d examined her quickly. He’d had two nights of childbirth in a row, he’d said at the beginning with tact and ceremony, hadn’t even been able to shave, he was saying as she was taking off her hat while carefully storing the hairpins. And after he examined her they sat talking, he was losing his coldness, joking so intimately, so distantly . . . in the white, clean office seeing her as just anyone, desiring her without sadness, not even waiting for her to let him try something, just wanting to make himself desired, cheerful, mischievous, and distracted, having fun with his own virility. Yet serious, his eyes watchful and mobile.
“But doctor . . .”
He had moved off for a second looking at her with a severe appearance, imitating her solemn and hoarse voice: “— but doctor! . . .” A weight was lightly squeezing her neck, her arms, she was feeling a shapeless taste of blood in her throat and in her mouth as always when she’d feel fear and hope — she could overturn some idea and accept the adventure, yes, the adventure that he wasn’t offering her. From a new center in her body, from her stomach, from her reborn breasts a sharp thought, desperate and profoundly happy, was radiating outward, without words she was wanting him, in an instant he was becoming some thing prior to Vicente. Without sadness, as if on holiday, to rush into the future! and since he was coming even closer, she awkwardly, quick, brushed her mouth against that cheek rough like a man, near the ear . . . He looked at her fast shocked and odd! she was wavering with open eyes, the office was spinning around red, a heavy and grave blushing rose to her neck and face while she was trying to make excuses with a difficult and foolish smile. He looked at her attentively for an instant, with wisdom touched upon certain common words and suddenly everything was dissolving into a simple joke. She looked at him dry and ardent, extended her hand to him, he said leading her: don’t get mad, nausea means nothing, you can tell your boyfriend . . . , she exited the office entered the dark, crimson, somber, luxurious and so cool elevator. When she received the dusty, luminous, and strident air of the street she walked fast, free. Little by little she went more slowly through the afternoon, choosing broad streets. A certain indifferent and opaque serenity was making her movements easy and the rest of the day simple — she’d forget, Virgínia, she’d forget. But she’d passed a woman beside her with a perfume of lemon, water, and grass, frightened and penetrating, a smell of lemon and grass — like a horse her legs gained a nervous, happy, and lucid power. Quiet Farm. She was inhaling the mysterious perfume that nonetheless was emerging. Because it was so . . . so alive . . . so . . . , she gave up, pulled back her head feeling herself lacking the courage to go on so strong was her hope. The sun shone pale on the sidewalk, a cold wind pierced the whole afternoon, she hurried her body clenched with power, her heart trembling as if a pure feeling had passed through it . . . a great fatigue that was made of ecstasy, bemusement, permission, and perfume seized her and without being bothered, softened, she felt that her eyes were filling with tears because of the doctor and that they were starting to run warm and radiant down her cheek. She went onto a staircase and blew her nose; she was wanting to alight on the same fluctuating, iridescent, and hard feeling but didn’t know which thought to focus the sensation on, so incomprehensible and fleeting was the world.
She later understood that the doctor had assured her that she wasn’t pregnant . . . How Vicente would laugh. She herself thought she’d never have children. She’d never even feared them as if through some quiet understanding of her most secret nature she knew that her body was the end of her body, that her life was her last life. Ah she liked children; life with them was so rich . . . so . . . — the rest was being lost in a gesture without force, almost inexpressive. But how to watch a life weaker than her own? she’d avoid children with care and when faced with them a desire would quickly possess her, the desire to escape, to seek out people to whom she could give nothing. Above all she wasn’t one of those women who have children. And if someday she made them be born, she’d still be one of those women who don’t have children. And if all the life she’d live should diverge from the one she ought to have lived, she would be as she ought to have been — what she could have been was herself profoundly, ineffably, not out of courage, not out of joy, and not out of awareness but out of the inevitability of the power of existence. Nothing would rob her of the unity of her origin and the quality of her first breath, though these might be entombed beneath their own opposite. In reality she knew little about whatever was hiding beneath her undeniable life. But not dissolving herself, not giving herself, denying her own errors and even never erring, to keep herself intimately glorious — all that was the fragile initial and immortal inspiration of her life. She’d touched her neighbor’s child one d
ay; the child lay its little hand in hers, looking out the window. Little by little, with a hard and playful gaze, with light emotion in her body, she grasped his small flesh full of little sightless and soft fingers, squeezed it between her hands, the child didn’t notice, he was looking out the window. Virgínia would stop for an instant so that she wouldn’t get overconfident and go too far. She was getting progressively more excited, telling a story, made up something funny, but really funny, the child laughed a little, his own face reflected in a windowpane broadened shining, flushed, unaware of itself, moving around living and shy. Afterward the child left as if nothing had happened. A fertile woman was so vulnerable, her fragility came from her being fruitful. She herself would sometimes feel an ecstasy made of weakness, fatigue, of a deep smile and of a difficult and superficial breathing; it was a deep, blind possibility that would finally conclude with a sigh and in a quick well-being, in a pale sleep full of exhaustion and scrambled dreams in which she’d seem to want to scream freeing herself from the sheets: my fruitfulness suffocates me. If she had a child she’d always be in panic. Every second she’d expect to see him put beans in his ears with mischief and wisdom, put his little finger in the electric socket. And every second she’d be thankful, skinny, and nervous, for the miracle of nothing happening — because she’d be skinny and nervous. Until, accustomed to the gentleness of events, she would find peace, drinking tea with cakes and embroidering. And then the child would head straight for the electric socket. Only her fear would prevent tragedies, only her fear. She put on her gray wool cloak, went to the zoo. The monkeys weren’t doing anything, grooming themselves, watching, hanging from the bars blinking, making signs, watching like sweet prostitutes. She was approaching the tiger breathing in the heat and the vice of the smell of the cage; conquering her own destiny she was forcing herself to look alone in the world into the eyes of the tiger, at its rolling walk, raising herself above the terror, until from it a kind of truth was emerging, something that was pacifying her like a thing, she was sighing while wrinkling her eyes. That repugnant smell of fatigue was doing her good, she was closing her woman’s teeth. The head guard said to her:
“Some people I have to kick out or arrest. Imagine, madam, that some men light a cigarette, take a drag, and stick it in the animal’s snout.”
She said: how horrible, but her body stirred quietly inside, hurried and dark. The rheas were laughing silent, full of joy and silliness but there was a sign warning that they were dangerous. They didn’t look it, the thin and sinuous neck directly stuck to the voluminous hips, full of calm movements. She was walking slowly, sinking the heels of her shoes into the mud, it was winter, the hush of the empty garden, only the occasional murmur of the animals, the slight cry of a bird. Her steps in the wide squares surrounded by cages, were cautious. She would pass the immobile and cold cobra with her heart dry with courage. One day it started to rain, she was looking, wet, at the animals pacing worried in the cages, the puddles of water were singing. The black velvet jaguar was moving its legs, its paws were touching and leaving the ground in a soft, fast, and silent step. The female, with her face raised above her reclined body, was panting rapt with satiation, her green eyes wild. The guard showed her the open cut in the palm of his hand, the jaguar had made it. But there was a docile tiger, he’d show you, madam.
“I’m going to wash my hand because I touched meat, otherwise with the smell she’ll attack.”
He told her that he always went into the cage with a knife, don’t tell the director, okay? That secret made her slightly dizzy, she closed her eyes for an instant. He held out the knife for some reason she didn’t understand: touch it! But why? she wondered scared, she touched the cold and shining blade that the raindrops were seeming to avoid and that was leaving the taste of blood in her mouth, while with her open eyes, her face almost in a grimace of nausea and horror, she was smiling. Water was running down the umbrella. And if she told Vicente . . . She was feeling the need to tell him. But what could she say about that, she was learning as much as she could learn in herself about sensations while looking at length at a clear glass of water; the sensation would seem to be in the glass of water itself. Thus was the need to confess the only feeling that existed, the only restless reality. What to tell? She was also remembering, as if right on time, that Vicente’s sympathy was almost a disappointment. No, she wouldn’t tell him anything, not even about the Farm. And as she was thinking: the Farm, like bells chiming in the distance, she was feeling that near the mansion in that same instant the meadow was stretching out dead and flat and that atop it were living long unstable abandoned weeds. He wouldn’t have sympathy for that but that was exactly what she couldn’t tell him either. She hadn’t yet managed to tell him how her life had lost its intimate nobility, how now she was acting according to a destiny. The presence of a man in her blood or the city had dissolved her power of directing her own search. Where, where was the power that she possessed when she was a virgin. She’d lost her indifference. Sometimes on the way back from the movies, grasping Vicente’s arm, she’d see the night pale with moon, the trees in the darkness of a faint, feel that some thing was approaching inside of her and want then to attain it, have a moment of engrossed sadness. She knew however that the man would keep her from suffering, dragging her to the fluctuating and balanced half-sensation of their bodies. He’d force her not to despair, summon her insistent and inaccessible toward a demotion, who knows why. There was a struggle between them that wouldn’t be resolved either by words or by gazes — and she was also feeling, surprised and stubborn, that she was trying to destroy him, that she was afraid of the man’s moments of pureness, she couldn’t stand his instants of solitude as if there were something unpleasant and dangerous to her in them. It was an unnoticed struggle that nevertheless connected them in a same instrument of attraction, misunderstanding, repulsion, and complicity. Despite everything he’d taught her a lot. Listening to him marvel at the path men had taken until discovering the transformation of the moist, sweet coffee bean into a bitter infusion — yes, she was learning a new way of being surprised. The way he had of grabbing common words and making a thought out of them. She’d say: it was raining so much, Vicente, it seemed like the world was going to end; he’d answer playing: and if it ended would you suffer? she was tossed into a greater and deeper world, or could she be mistaken? from everything he’d head off some place. He’d say of someone: what a way to waste your life . . . And she’d scream to herself: but no, you could never waste your life, you just couldn’t . . . he’d hastened things to a strange and irremediable level. I wasn’t happy, I was missing some thing that could satisfy me — he’d say and another time would discover for her almost a way of thinking, so new that it would pain her as if she were ripping the course of a river from its bed. He would without words let her know about things that she had never seen. She told him:
“Sometimes I spend my days with a hope so . . . you know . . . and suddenly I have no hope at all . . .”
“Hope for what?” he asked interested.
“Not quite for something . . .”
“But what do you mean?” he’d insist, “you must know . . .”
She didn’t know how to explain and was surprised by Vicente’s incomprehension. Later she learned that he’d understand if she said; I spent half the day in a good mood and the other half in a bad mood. She started to change into Vicente’s words and sometimes would feel that it was more than words that were transforming. That same afternoon she’d finally met Vicente’s sister, who lived with their aunt and uncle. The big breasts, the pure face without makeup where the nose was fine, pale, and curved; the bare arms, the dark and calm eyes — but she’d be impure when it was her turn. She read mystery novels and her voice was slightly hoarse. Virgínia looking at her was feeling an intolerable envy, staring at her with avidity and cold. Rosita was despising her with eyes without curiosity. Virgínia refused the cigarette pleasing her with nausea and baseness. She
sat with them in the tea house but Rosita wasn’t even an eater; she was staring at Vicente’s “friend” with naked eyes while Virgínia was trying to smile into the cup while holding in a difficult pang of fear, thinking about her own nose that was shining, her unkempt and frightened hair reflected in the fancy black-framed mirror. She had a few dresses of indefinable color, light hazel, cream, bluish, the neckline somewhere between round and oval swimming at her neck, made of a silk that neither plunged nor protected, wrinkled as if just taken out of a suitcase — she would wear old clothes, as if in order not to exist, feel good in them, not betraying Upper Marsh. Because whenever she’d wear them “she ran into someone of circumstance” — and the fact seemed to her to have some extraordinary and invincible inevitability, some thing that would almost demand a respectful deference — there wasn’t even any point in no longer wearing those clothes, such was the force of things. And that added to the unease that she and Vicente would experience when they ran into each other on the street. As if one were surprising the other. She was drinking the tea in little gulps, she’d refused toast secretly in order still to please Rosita and as a sacrifice. She was feeling guilty alongside Vicente — in front of both of them was the virgin dressed in white linen and with bare arms, her big and well-made nose, her pale gardenia skin. How dare I live. She’d always been envious, the truth had to be told. They got up, accompanied Rosita to the aunt’s car where the driver was waiting. They said goodbye, Virgínia sighed out of relief and sadness, the street suddenly had so few people, it was quickly looking like an empty and calm Sunday. She walked with Vicente through the streets without looking at him until they reached the apartment. He too seemed somehow touched, was addressing her with an excitement interrupted at intervals — in the elevator he touched her waist with his hand and she ducked almost rudely. But in the bedroom she became sad, looked peaceful, resigned, loved him with a strange and wistful tone that she herself didn’t know, loving in him the inaccessible sister, the dead father and mother. As the end of the three days a week closed the door behind them, the heat of Vicente’s apartment brusquely isolated itself behind its walls, soon in front of her the ground, quiet and fragrant in its coolness, would stretch. The lights were blinking in trembling halos and that’s how a golden lamppost was communicating with another across the distance. She was crossing the dry street, the walls in darkness, taking the bus and the wind was light whipping her cheek. In the bright, warm, and shaking interior of the vehicle the faces beneath the hats were condensing in the silence of the journey through the night and behind each one life for an instant would seem tossed to the back of the stage, the theater seats empty in the half-light — the bus was moving forward. The driver kept his hand on the steering wheel, almost still, slow, the illuminated cabin was apparently moving all by itself. Virgínia was getting off, walking with large useless rain boots squeezing her feet. On the deserted street her footsteps were slapping sonorous and expectant on the sidewalk. The moonlight was pouring over the construction sites. The Farm livid and sleepless was coming to her in a wave amidst the fog, she was hurrying her dark pace, going forward. She was placing the key in the lock, sweetly the door was giving way and the tall and pale staircase was popping out for an instant before her eyes quite clearly; it would immediately shift its position when she’d advance her foot. Her own figure was moving ahead filling the narrow hallway — slowly going up seeing the steps half dark half light until getting lost in the confusing height of the house. She was finally reaching the landing, the staircase and the street would stay behind immobilized in the quiet for an entire night until dawn emerged and someone once again would move their air. In the illuminated bedroom she was taking off her rain boots, examining her toes pressed together like small smashed birds. She was separating them with slow hands, smoothing them out. How she liked her bedroom; she’d smell its tunnel odor when she was getting close and it was nice, nice inside it when she’d go in. She’d notice that before going out she’d forgotten to open the windows and a smell of herself was coming from all over — as if when returning from the street she was finding herself at home waiting. She’d open the windows and an air cold from the sky and from fresh water would rustle limpid over the things renewing them. She was hesitating a bit trying to connect herself to her things, to see a sign in the objects, but soon felt right away that it was no use, that she was free and among calm outlines. She was leaning out of the window for an instant, her face offered to the night with anxiety and delight, her eyes half-closed: the nocturnal, cold, perfumed, and tranquil world was made of her weak and disorganized sensations. Oh how strange, strange it was. She was feeling good and knew that before she was suffocating, it seemed to her that at night the water of the world would start to live — she was breathing and the relief was almost violent, maybe the strongest moment of the day; always an instant had saved her, a gesture wouldn’t let her be lost and was making her lean toward the next day. She was changing her clothes serene and careful. She was getting into bed with deep self-love. She was concentrating for an instant until discovering a faraway, clear, and fragile chirping, the cricket shining. Her own spirit was taking her over. She was sighing. Oh God, it was strange how she didn’t feel any hurry. Deep down she was terrifyingly quiet. She was lightly thinking about the next morning. In the city, even if silence were the closest air, behind it always some sound was lurking. You’d wake up, hear that continuous, soft paper bruise that was silence . . . notice a little flute and a small drum set loose who knows where in the air, resounding remotely, limpid and good-humored — and know that in the square of a barracks soldiers were doing exercises in the sun. But now it was night, she’d just finished taking the last, hollow steps on the shady sidewalk. Submerging in fatigue, looking for it. Her fatigue had something flowerlike about it, a winged and unconquerable perfume of fresh melon, that ecstasy of exhaustion and flight . . . weakness was getting mixed up with the sheerest exultation. Before closing her eyes she was remembering in a final vision the staircase placed on the earth, dark white, dark white, dark white, running motionless among the walls up to the closed door. Closed, dark, compact, serious, smooth, large, tall, impassable — how good it was, how happy.