With her two suitcases already placed in the baggage car, she was watching other people’s farewells. The brown hat was trimmed with blue matching the dress beneath the gray mantle. She was especially dreading the moment when the train would give the first start, the first whistle and the first pain. She entered the narrow toilet that was stinking, took off the small hat, started to wash her face pointlessly, to put on her make-up, to comb her hair, arranging her clothes, fooling the instant. She was applying lipstick when the train got moving, jostled her arm, left a violent mark of lipstick on her pale and glum face, farewell! Her heart squeezed breathing only on the surface, her face darkened and dead. The worst had passed. She went amidst bumps, sat brusquely among those strange people. She was looking around the train, dust in her eyes, her lips dried out from water and soap. A blondish child was crying in the lap of a young, fat lady. The final cutting brightness of the windowpane was shuddering amidst deaf noises; her heart was hardening small and blackened. She got up to have coffee smoothing her already wrinkled skirt; her chest was contracting rough like an eye reddened and dry from dust. A hoarse and frightened retching was pushing her with jerking movements in the train toward the back of the car while she was forcing her body forward trying to reach the buffet car — the whistle rang out sudden and long, the locomotive shook even faster, no, my God, no, she was saying to herself in a whole and stubborn despair looking coldly ahead and reaching with difficulty the stages of the train that was running; while near her heart it was as if she’d swallowed a black and immobile object. A skinny child was crying in the restaurant in front of a glass of milk, always, always. When she’d come to the city, with her wide-awake body distanced from the back of the seat, her heart dizzy with curiosity and youth, a child was crying too; and an aroused smell of food, perfume, coal, and cigarettes lending her eyes a mysterious and hushed respite; her serious and sensitive face beneath the long ribbons of that hat excessively childish for the advanced girl she was, a few fine wrinkles. But now it was as if she’d swallowed some resistant spark, her eyes burning. She was remembering the journey to the city — on that day a momentum was coming from the hot coal breath and damp grass and from that continuous noise that seemed to push her toward adventure, toward adventure, adventure; beneath the old hat ribbons she was swallowing the dust happily and observing the aroused fatigue of the travelers bouncing benevolent, the women’s bright large eyes; it seemed like a picnic. The noise of the wheels was then preventing conversation and the passengers were looking at one another isolated by the atmosphere gray with noises; and it was good as in a home, she herself sitting with Daniel who was reading newspapers hiding his heart. It was good as in a home. People were eating sandwiches without getting too close to the backs of the seats, as she herself was doing, and chewing busily assessing the distance. And now . . . Now came the coffee, a little bread with butter and she was alone. She wasn’t feeling unhappy. Especially she was feeling a haughty and cold sensation that nobody could take from her everything she’d lived; she was paying a certain intimate and dark attention to whatever was happening and that later, perhaps impossible to remember, would nonetheless be part of her history. She looked out the window: an isolated bar amidst the scraggly bush, built of brick and whitewash, was foreshadowing a village; it was just two doors, a dog lying down chasing away flies and everything passed swiftly, the settlement itself in shadows, in quick strokes, long, unfinished. The train was moving along the clearing in the dark bush, wet from the last rain; the smell of sugary water, the tracks were shining sinuously, disappearing beneath the train. She started to think about how in reality she could have not left; and the idea that she’d be at that very moment in the city waiting for the next day in order to see Vicente awoke a new muffled scream in her heart. She’d never had a more precise and strange notion of two places existing at the same time, of one same hour unfolding all over the world, and that instantaneous feeling brought her closer than ever before to everything she didn’t know. How I know how to make things up all the way to the end — she was leading herself through an unwitting stubbornness to a point where in fact she was reaching whatever she’d wanted and yet couldn’t stand the thing she herself had created. It would be so much easier to be better for herself; people took care to have company during every moment of life, even Daniel; and she, mysteriously detached, had managed to end up alone. She was remembering how shortly before going to live in the city with Daniel she’d agreed to spend a month on a ranch far from the Farm, even when she’d feel boredom and wariness because of what was about to happen; remembering how she couldn’t eat dinner on that ranch of old ladies and offended servants, her chest seized in tears, her body burning in silence; and how she hadn’t been able to sleep, lying in the strange low bed, hearing big rats passing by; and how she wouldn’t have been surprised then if the door had opened and a being had come in and branded her with sweet purple fingers, without anyone to save her, far from her lax-limbed family but who would circle around her and prevent fatal things from approaching; how had she been able to forget that month of fear and meditation? only now had the memory returned. And then, her eyes staring at the darkness through the window of the train, she remembered how she hadn’t gone to the Farm with Daniel when he’d been engaged and how nevertheless it would have been easy not to end up alone; then she’d lived with the cousins . . . and yes, before she found an apartment she’d stayed at the boardinghouse. With a sigh she finally approached the memory of the boardinghouse. It was a religious holiday; when she’d come in for dinner for the first time — the little tables covered with red checkered tablecloths, a little jar of wilting roses, nobody was looking at her, she’d already acquired a distinct and calm demeanor — once again she couldn’t eat anything, her throat constricted by a disturbed and nervous solitude. Her hands were trembling and she was looking at them astounded. Then she’d gone up to the bedroom with its grimy partition screen; put on her nightgown and with a single movement discovered herself in the long mirror, her thick body appearing in a sad voluptuousness through the fine fabric — those horrible spinster nightgowns before Vicente. She was seeing her face red with tears, her hair arranged in a discreet bun of a woman who’s alone; a misshapen and odd child who would arouse looks of curiosity. Ah yes, God didn’t exist, that was becoming so clear, the cheerful fresh wind was saying so as it entered the bedroom, the red flowers in the jar were repeating it and everything was contented with secrecy and terror. Without knowing what to do with the long night she’d taken off the nightgown, got dressed once again. She didn’t dare think foreseeing that thought would isolate her even more. A light on in the neighborhood was giving a slight dimness to her bedroom; the screen was seeming to shift and breathe. The flowers were trembling in the narrow jar. The little table covered with a dusty tablecloth was hovering extraordinarily still as if not making contact with the floor. She had half-leaned on the covered bed, lain on the pillow and was staring at the air of the warm night; buzzing was filling the stifled summer silence. Suddenly, in the heart of the old house a vein burst in splinters and blood, in congested joy — she sat up with a start in the bed, suppressed a scream of horror. A little band was playing in the hall below. The saxophone was piercing the meager instruments dislocating them. Motionless, clasping her blouse to her chest, she was hearing as if in a dream the hoarse and disjointed foxtrot. Someone turned on a light in the house across the way and her room lightly struck opened into vacant brightness. The music halted, moist, short claps followed one after the next in broken lines, broke off. That day with its sanctified date, businesses closed, finding men in pajamas in the hallways and in the coed bathrooms of the boardinghouse; now they were getting a band . . . Tomorrow! leave tomorrow and find somebody once and for all! she was promising herself. And that idea — how powerful she sometimes was — and that idea which she knew was a lie was calming her down, making her able to wait with a more uniform heart, consoled like a child, feeling around carefully so as not to get hurt. How n
ecessary it was to be delicate with herself — she’d learn this ever more, with each moment she was fulfilling; to live as if she had heart problems — feeling her way around, giving herself nice good news, saying yes, yes, you’re right. Because there was an instant in the permission one gave oneself that could reach a dry and tense awe, a thing whose purpose one simply couldn’t quite say. A state in which having power would be death itself perhaps, and the only solution would be in the quick surrender of being, quick, eyes closed, without resistance. She’d spend her days in the room. While the husbands were working, the wives would wander through the boardinghouse in light and flowery bathrobes, getting together in the living room to chat, one would paint another’s nails, giving one another new hairdos and lending one another lipstick, sewing clothes, looking at magazines, like the monkeys in the zoo. Just one couple hardly ever turned up. He had low eyebrows over shifty eyes, a tiny face and wide ears like a bat’s. She was small, with little neck, a slightly protruding chest, docile, odd, and ugly. The two seemed connected through secret things, as through a sexual crime; but he’d protect her and she felt protected. She also remembered how she’d thanked almost ardently one of them who had lent her a magazine and how then she’d backed off with coldness thinking that she’d been ridiculous; she’d gone to her room and sat wondering whether she’d thanked her too little or humiliated herself too much; and then she’d tried to punish herself by not reading the magazine right away, thereby seeking perfection? yes, my God, but yes, that was what she’d sought, her big, rough child’s body, that was what she’d sought with seriousness: the perfection of herself. A child’s wide and mysterious life — that was what she’d always seemed to experience with big cold eyes. She also remembered how in the silence of the new apartment whatever it was she didn’t lack would so often arrive every month and how in that way life would follow life inside her body, impassible, following a rhythm that she would watch proud and restless, cautious. She remembered how she’d sit after dinner at the table, sweetly watchful, her heart pierced by fear and by waiting; a light wind would run across the surface of her body, chilling the air, the new curtain snapping blindly. A presence with frightened white lips was languishing in the air, the silence was inhaled in a dizziness, she’d lower her brow, a sound was coming from afar in the street, born of movements and words: yes, yes . . . , her breath was panting weakly, her eyelids blinking. Yes, yes . . . , in a surprised fatigue some thing was not being carried out, sliding like the wind and disappearing forever; a cold apprehension was making her shudder; the long and tense silence was uselessly sharpening her senses . . . She’d spend her days understanding herself. She finally remembered how one afternoon, scratching the tablecloth with her nail, she thought she heard someone knocking on the door. She got up and opened it onto the empty hallway. Finding no one had frightened her so that she’d cringed, closed the door quickly without noise and pressed herself to the wall feeling her heart beat dizzy and brusque, that feeling of error that never would explain itself, an inevitability chiming in the clock with courtesy and precision. The solution was in the quick surrender of her being, yes, yes, with eyes closed, without resistance. That really was existence. So that was existence — she’d always need to repeat it to herself and thus could live with a certain absorbed happiness, amazed. How to seek the joy in the center of things? no matter that on some remote and nearly invented occasion she’d found and lived in that very center. Now she was possessing the responsibility of an adult and unknown body. But the future would come, would come, would come.
Her berth was above a blind lady’s. A smiling and scrutinizing face that would seem extraordinarily lively, intelligent. She offered her help with lukewarmness without managing to suffer with the woman. The blind woman responded with a firm voice, clear and polite:
“If I need anything I’ll call.”
She went up with effort, closed the curtains and in the narrowness of the compartment lay down. The rolling of the train was vibrating in her brain and lulling it to sleep; she closed her eyes deeply.
Maybe she opened them with slowness much later, but they unclosed as if in the same instant . . . It was dark night, the train was fleeing. The curtain over the window was moving sluggish and soft to a mild wind. And she thought or saw a shadow that was that of an extraordinary woman, slim and peaceful, mobile and lively as the air itself, looking at her like someone bending over in silence. Virgínia really opened the eyes she’d closed so long ago and in a fright rose slightly on the narrow and shadowy berth that the curtain was veiling. The train was running without obstacles through the calm and perfumed night. How much time had elapsed around the rueful woman? she smiled without knowing why, her head pensive; she was having a foreboding with a serene and absorbed pleasure of how new, naive, and undecipherable existing was, how she herself could one day be figured out by a stranger on a railway without saying a word. She closed the windows, the curtain, lay her heavy and pale head upon the pillow that was shaking along with the whole sleeping car. She lost consciousness and only every once in a while would feel the weak and nauseating light that was on without really shining above her head, within reach. She’d turn over and forget once again. Then she opened her eyes and without understanding herself sat staring, heard the snoring of a man near her body, behind the curtain rough with dust, in the contiguous compartment. Now the whole car was wheezing darkly, the lights had been turned off, the rolling of the train was intimate, fantastic. A compact darkness was pressing on her open eyes. She removed the curtain that was covering the outside window of the berth and a bluish moonlight sliced her body with surprise . . . The train was running violently through the night and the meadows were stretching wan, bloodless . . . behind in the past, never managing to reach the moment in which she was living. Her eyes were passing in a run over a tree and the tree was motionless, without a breeze to threaten its leaves. Yet it was cold. The green of the silent cornfields was stretching out purplish blue and shimmering in the mysteriously bright landscape; but the depths of the vision were hiding, black and reserved, an arm hiding eyes with the secret. She could make out a telegraph pole in the distance and the train was nearing it in the same rhythm of watchful puffing; when her window was reaching it and both were the present, the post was flung back all at once with violence and the train was moving off forgetting it brusquely. She sought a feeling in herself and was just bright, sleeplessly bright. She didn’t try to sleep, the decision calmed her face — with her head on the raised pillow she was watching the plains go by one after the next, hearing the train’s alert whistle lift itself toward the sky; the odd spark would whirl by the window, a small painless scream, dragged along. Water would sometimes shine quietly out there and immediately disappear forever, until the end of her life. She was floating in the deep vacancies of sleep with her senses lax and lost. Rarely, like the silent scratching of a comet, she’d emerge quiet from the waves to the surface, lifted by a simple urge, by the same absence of power that would inspire an unclosing of eyelids. Slightly awake she was hovering far from the world, wavering atop her own dormancy, surrounded by the dark past moment and by the one that was already being drawn up; being awake was at that point of the same matter as sleeping, but purified in a single veil and she was seeing through it sleepwalking and meek. As long as the long second lasted she was thinking and her lucidity was the raw brightness of the moonlight itself; but she didn’t know what she was thinking; she was thinking as a line departs from one point prolonging it, thinking like a bird that just flies, simple pure direction; if she looked at the colorless void she couldn’t make anything out because there was nothing to make out, but she would have looked and seen. In that way she’d have another kind of sleep on days of confusion and martyrdom; she’d then gather herself into sleep as if she’d been poked with a lance and she shriveled up her existence leaving the waking life empty. Much of her past hadn’t been carried out on the surface of day but in the slow movements of dreaming, though she could rare
ly remember them. She heard muffled sounds of suitcases and footsteps, understood that she’d slept. It was dawn, night was evaporating; a foggy light was hovering in halos above the things. Through the lowered window she could see that the sun had still not risen but was noticing the freshness and the new life trembling delicately in every leaf. She sat on the bed, raised the thick glass and a sudden cheerful cold surrounded her; she hadn’t suspected that the night had ended so completely. She combed her tangled hair, went down to drink something. To her relief the blind woman had disappeared. She drank coffee with dust, tried dark and greasy sweets. A fat man was looking at her from inside eyes with his chin parked on his chest. She was drinking the warm liquid; maybe she was sad but had just then the firm feeling that she couldn’t live off her own sadness, off her joy, or even off whatever was going on; off what then? she was spinning around worried and watchful as if seeking a position in order to live. It finally occurred to her for the first time that she’d see everyone from home, that she’d go back to her room. That Daniel would be at the Farm, his wife . . . no, his wife was spending six months with her own parents . . . Daniel tending to the stationer’s with their father? Since later she’d find the landscape lovely she started to notice it in a slightly distracted perception. After her coffee she smoked and while she was smoking she tried to focus, understand her life in that instant. She was seeking while observing herself — but was seeing nothing but the ashen sky as always happened whenever she tried to think with profundity. She was apparently seeking the connection that must exist between the elfin thing she’d been until her teens and the woman of reasonable, solid, and cautious body that she was now. She was going to see again the place where she was from and feared, a little nervous, impatient, and shy, her own judgment. I had my chance in adolescence, she wasn’t aware that she was thinking while blowing the smoke with the kind of prudence and awkwardness that she was deploying toward the cigarette. I lost my chance in childhood. Though her current body had a daily destiny. She remembered Vicente with a frightened yearning that was also surprise at the strange calm and joy of relief. She might not even return, she came to imagine. She observed at last that this had been her impression ever since she’d received the letter from her father. But she didn’t want to think and pushed away the thought closing her eyes quickly, moving her head and expelling the smoke with decisiveness. She was a little hungry and that promised to erase something. When I get to eat . . . , she was saying to herself in a vague threat, her lips dry, as if addressing a new day. It occurred to her in a first stirring joy that she’d see Daniel, that he’d repeat “your type is becoming more and more material . . .” and she’d blush at her lack of children. She felt pacified, expectant; even in a not very happy and comprehensible life the continuity of moments would result in some floating and nonetheless stable thing, which ended up meaning a balanced life. A little girl with a flannel tied around her neck, broken, brown teeth in a round face, serious and pale — was standing beside her. Looking at her. Virgínia gave her a quick smile. Her last experience with children had been tragic.