“And did you go swimming?”
Vicente had often invited her but she’d been ashamed. Wavering, hesitating in her lack of direction, she seemed to fear the pleasure she would feel. The idea that the sea could surround her made her eyesight darken while in a deep sigh she’d show herself how much she’d like to feel it and Esmeralda stayed back thoughtful, hearing her silence without understanding. Finally she’d decline because she was afraid of the sea, afraid of drowning. And that’s what she told Esmeralda and that was almost the only thing that she herself knew.
“No, I didn’t. One is afraid.”
“I know,” said Esmeralda.
She was asking again and asking like someone fumbling around distressed, without ever finding the question she really wants to ask. Virgínia was understanding her without words while they were looking at each other sincerely deep and speaking of various things. She knew that Esmeralda would like to hear that one day she was sitting on a bus distracted and tired; suddenly the unmoving faces atop the bodies, the heat of the wheels, the dust shining dry as it met the sun, all of a sudden a movement of her own arm grazing the seat or her breast awoke in her the understanding of the lust that was vibrating in soft uninterrupted sounds in the air and connecting creatures with fragile and quavering threads. Over there the mouth of a woman was quavering, almost in a wail or almost laughing perhaps; and another woman’s neck, smooth and thick, immobilized by repressed and closed movements; and that white man’s hand leaning as if at last on the railing of the seat, full of rings that were imprisoning his broad old fingers . . . another instant and the moment would come together in a muffled scream, in fury, fury and mire. But gradually the bus had started moving again, everyone had penetrated with it a shadowy and silent street, the branches of the trees swaying serenely. Virgínia was vaguely aware that this was what Esmeralda was hoping to hear, aware that she should tell her what had happened on a certain bus; but she kept seeing without understanding the faces traveling and could only think and say: it was so hot! everyone was so tired, it was two in the afternoon — just that. And Esmeralda wouldn’t understand.
“Are there a lot of no-good women over there?” Esmeralda was asking morosely drawing close to the question.
“Yes there are.”
“Ah . . .”
The two were holding back thoughtfully, waiting.
“How do they do it?” she asked Virgínia again.
“One day I was sitting in a café and one of them was drinking a soft drink while looking all around her. She was skinny, little, her eyes made-up, missing a tooth on one side. An enormous man was sitting at one of the nearby tables, laughed, asked in a low voice but I heard it clearly: what kind of drink is that? She said: orange and it’s sour.”
“Just that?” Esmeralda interrupted.
“Just that: orange and it’s sour.” They stopped for a moment looking at each other — “They kept looking at each other, then she said: you’re fat! He laughed narrowing his eyes, said nothing, but then said: yes, yes . . . They both then started laughing. I was scared they’d see me and left.”
“Ah . . .” — Esmeralda was observing her and adding in a smile in which there was some pleasure — “I would’ve stayed.”
Virgínia shrugged tired and distracted. The boardinghouse where she’d lived was close to a street with some suspicious vacant houses. One Sunday afternoon a few women, two thin ones with dark rings under their eyes and two more or less fat ones, ruddy, with intense eyes — came to stroll down the good street, passing the boardinghouse where, on the sidewalk chairs, a few wives were choking: the thought of looking for man here! . . . They weren’t saying “looking for a man” or “looking for men,” but “looking for man.” But no, Virgínia was confusedly understanding, they weren’t looking for man. Their hair was wet from the shower, in bright and calm dresses, and arm in arm they were coming toward the decent street to take a walk on other people’s Sunday. If a man recognized them and spoke to them, they’d have to give in because they’d no longer allow their own desire, they might give in immediately, surprised and thoughtful, with melancholy and brutality, laughing and having fun. Virgínia was understanding them so well that she amazed herself, suddenly reserved and severe; she was avoiding Esmeralda’s questions with irritation and reproach. Esmeralda was peering at her watchfully, her eyes focused. She was allowing slowly and with difficulty Virgínia’s existence and couldn’t quite accept that her sister really was another woman. She was leaning toward her, listening with a certain disdain and a bit of irony, despite her interest. As for Virgínia, for the first time she was experiencing a conversation between women. Even without love or understanding it was good to talk to Esmeralda. Between women you didn’t have to talk about certain things, the main thing was already spoken as if before they were born and all that was left to tell were gentle, fresh intimate notions, little variations and coincidences. It was a familiar and silly conversation, somehow a lament, somehow a defense; a hope mixed with advice full of a long experience while eyes would dive into eyes with depth, rapt and almost distracted, heavy with distant thoughts; her voice was growing softer, slower and lower. Virgínia was ending up leaning on the chair with vacant eyes, in silence, while the other woman was propping her cheek on the hand that her elbow was supporting atop the table. Not among the women of Vicente’s group; they seemed to be specialized in men; they’d feel superior and cheerful about having them as just friends, forming a heroic and vaguely perverted group, astonished at itself.
“Is there a lot of noise when you’re trying to sleep?” asked Esmeralda. “And the cinemas? And that guy, that Vicente, where’d you meet him? what’s he like?”
“Daniel took me one day and introduced me at a party . . . He . . . he . . . he’s just a normal person . . . I don’t know, there’s nothing really special about him. He wears glasses.” — She wouldn’t be able to tell anyone and not even herself what he was like. Yet how well she knew him inside herself, engraved in the reactions of her own body. She was feeling him clearly, refreshing by an effort of desire and memory the slight aversion that her flesh would experience in his presence; like the quick and immediately fleeting perception of a perfume: a light tightening beneath her skin; less than repulsion, a deep certainty of the man inside her blood as if he were connected to her in an excessively intimate way, almost wretched. Through Esmeralda who knew nothing, she got a different and more intense liking for the city. And looking at that beautiful woman who’d never known a man she felt insultingly rich, straightening her body with pride, surprise, and disillusionment. She was remembering Vicente clearly just then . . . seeing him walking as if inside of her. And her feeling was so real that she was discerning him walking through a shadowy and smooth atmosphere because her own interior must be shadowy and smooth — that had always been the air of her thoughts and dreams. But if deliberately she wanted to remember his face, surprised she’d see emerge before her eyes an outline of Adriano. And one night she had a dream with Adriano — a dream that filled her with surprises, shame, and mystery; she deeply forbade herself any joy and dreamed nothing more. With disdain she however could not refuse herself, confused: yes, certainly Adriano was a person, yes; the little man; after being with him she’d sometimes want to fill the vacant urge of power that would be born with a clear and lively exclamation: yes! even if no. She pushed him off with a wave of her head; yet he lived on holding himself in at her brink. She was forcing some memory that by blossoming would bring Vicente into her presence. What she’d most recall about him however was some thing you couldn’t say or think; a certain condition that would arise between them as soon as she thought of him, establishing the connection . . . and that would solidify in the vision of Virgínia herself watching Vicente’s serious taste for walking around the room knowing that she was present, in some thing that would fill the air of both of them, a watchful reserve of both — an atmosphere of slight difference of sexes like a m
uffled smell of face powder — while he with small gestures of his eyelids, teeth, lips, kept affirming his free discreet masculinity that, though it truly existed, had something fake and excessive about it — Virgínia and the walls were watching. She was remembering in a second how he’d change clothes in front of her. It was one of the inner events of their shared life. When he was going to change clothes, as if somebody pressed a button, life would fall into a familiar framework and they’d carefully repeat their gestures in every detail: she’d freeze with big eyes as in a classroom, her lips touching each other in innocent watchfulness of herself because she really was interested; he’d seem to interrupt his thoughts while changing clothes, his eyes focusing on a spot on the ceiling or the wall according to whatever movements were imposed on him. In the moment of transition between one article to the next, his body unwrapped in the cool air of the bedroom, she would stare at him quickly but without harshness, smile at him with her eyes while lightly squeezing her mouth. Right as a new piece dressed him, the event ended and the moments were carrying on scarring all around him. The fact was so tenuous that she’d remember all of him in a slight second, in a movement of the eyelids — the recollection would actually reduce itself to the throwing of a shirt on the chair, while seeing that movement again she’d stay for an instant in the air listening, her body living in its own insides as in the velvety, shady, and fresh insides of a fruit. He’d been terribly well-disposed lately; in such clear health that it depressed her; how naturalness would shock; she only felt good among shy people and nothing bothered her as much as self-assurance. Watching Esmeralda’s life now it seemed to her so frightening and wide to have a man as if he’d been born from her desire. And sometimes even that desire would seem extraordinarily wrong. To have a man who could die from one instant to the next but who high, high, in a tension of balance, seemed to live eternally. She was leaning on the column of the balcony, looking at the full stars, so shining and without blinking, wrapped in a vague sheet of fog, milky way! she was looking as if she and Vicente were seeing together. Without remembering that when they were together she wanted almost outraged to be by herself in order to look better. She was seeing the hard, calm stars, thoughtful before going to sleep — reflecting things so high that not even by living every life could she accomplish her thought: Vicente was a man; he was living far away. I feel you somewhere and I don’t know where you are — she was managing to think in words. Her love was so delicate that she smiled uncomfortable, pierced by a frigid sensation of existing. It seemed to her extremely strange that in that same night he was living in that same world, that they weren’t together and that she wasn’t seeing what he was doing, so much stronger than the distance was her thought of love. Love was like that, separation couldn’t be understood — she was concluding with docility. But she also didn’t know whether she wanted to have at her side on that night that pale unshaven doctor, the only man from whom she’d felt the inexplicable, anguished, and voluptuous need to have a child; she felt her life press down with love for him, her heart was thinking with strength, with shyness and blood, come to me, come to me, for a long swift instant. How she’d passed through whatever could be without managing to touch it . . . What she loved in him couldn’t be accomplished like a star in the chest — she’d so often felt her own heart like a hard ball of air, like an untranslatable crystal. Above all what she loved in him, so pale and mischievous, had an impossible quality, pungent like a sharp ridiculous desire; she was feeling sweetly able to belong to both. And Vicente was perfect, he was a calm man. She thought with surprising clarity, using for herself nearly words: I love him as I love something that’s good for us, that gives well-being but not like something outside of the body and that will never pacify it and that we want to reach even with disillusionment; my heart isn’t inflamed by that love, my most intimate tenderness isn’t worn out; her love was almost a conjugal dedication. It hurt her however to think that way, it was so tender, keen, and full of bristling life for him to exist inside her, to breathe, eat, sleep and not know that she could think that way of him. She was forcing herself severely to a fidelity whose secret species only she understood. My love, my love — she was saying and with a certain effort love was finally trembling so much in her interior that for the first time it was rising to an unreality and an unconquest, seeming not to exist melding with the most ravishing part of the dream. And to get still closer to Vicente she was reflecting that the doctor, along with Arlete and the guard at the zoo, was still out there waiting and that she, out of impatience and lack of time, hadn’t absorbed him. She was also feeling unhappy, leaning on the balcony, on the lookout for the noise of a distant carriage — and suddenly, out of pure volatility, she was desiring something perfect, something like whatever would kill her. A certain ardor overtook her, Vicente, not even he knew how he could be almost perfect, not even he knew how hungry he was and would ask to go to a restaurant and hesitate between the dishes on offer and suddenly calling the waiter with a loose gesture to impress her and impress himself. And at the same time the world was existing around us without menace. Especially all those thoughts were also the lie. Leaning on the balcony, she was wanting some thing with more vehemence than she’d ever wanted — and she didn’t have the nerve; it’s just nerve, that’s it. But it was also sweet to fail — she leaned forward, rested her face on the column, smiled because it was strange and exciting to smile by yourself in the darkness — deep down she was confusing the vanity of feeling new desires with the taste for possessing the things that they represented and was mixing with everything the faraway despair of ignorance. Yet it was perfect to live alongside that instant as if both were forming some thing that ought to be looked at by someone who was a stranger to the moment and to her — she was taking for a second the shape of the stranger and thinking it was perfect to live in that moment. She went to bed, it was a cozy cold. She’d still experience the best things in sleep. She liked more than anything when it was raining and she’d feel the warmth of the bed and the windowpane shining; she’d try not to fall asleep in order to live the wait for sleep while she was blinking with comfort, with sweet and panting mischief — it was so good, so much more sensual than moving, than breathing, even than breathing, than loving a man. She’d have so much hope for what she might dream. You didn’t even have to think about it, going to sleep happened all by itself, smooth like smooth falling, like the body’s insides living without awareness, without purpose.
“With a steady job a woman who has a brain manages to put off her husband, not live with him all the time, oh you can,” their mother was saying as she came to embroider with the two of them.
“What do you mean ‘put off’?” Virgínia was asking confused.
“Oh, honey, every woman knows that a man is a big bother.”
Virgínia was mutely astonished.
“I don’t think it’s right to meddle much in my daughters’ lives. Apparently only Daniel wanted to get married: the girl’s very nice, a little quiet, but seems to be a good match for him, at least that’s my impression, and you know, everybody makes mistakes. Even we should be happy with whatever happens. I actually think you two are right not to marry” — she was stopping the embroidery, looking ahead with squeezed eyelids. “Basically things are inconvenient,” she was saying with wisdom, blinking her eyes a bit and that, she was confusedly feeling, was the highest point she’d reached in her understanding of whatever was surrounding her.
Hearing her, Esmeralda’s eyes were sparkling in her hardened face. Just now she ought to blame her mother. Virgínia asked her, in the half-intimacy that was floating between them:
“When I was small I heard hints about something that happened to you . . . some boy, I’m not sure . . . Papa mentioned it again when I did that foolishness of telling about your other affair in the garden.”
Esmeralda was blushing, her face was being disturbed in a delicate smile.
“Just nonsense,” she was trying to look
unconcerned. “You know how ‘he’ is, from a bit of nonsense he makes a world and invokes God. I hadn’t wanted it to be nonsense, I wanted it to be a serious sin and now at least I’d be free,” she concluded with a muffled violence as if this were an old thought she’d decided to surrender out of fatigue.
“But you can start to be free now or whenever you like.”
“I don’t know,” she said with her face tight and red.
“Why not?”
“Why?” she mimicked with rage. “You think it’s simple for people to get rid of everything they have, end up without a home, without anything . . . just to be free?” — she stopped for an instant, face suspended, understanding vaguely that she was blundering against herself . . . — “Just to be free?” she repeated hearing with growing despair the sound of her voice. “Why speak of those things? the hell with you!” she screamed irate. — In a delicate slightly astonished pleasure she felt the hardness of the very heart of life, her reborn body breathing with a vibrant warmth, in legitimate rage; a sharp urge to movement rose up through her legs, spread hot and painful through her chest, found its balance in her face, held back and then freed itself through her suddenly shining and tender eyes. Her figure slightly extinguished in a shadow of uncertainty and melancholy. So, then she was living just off herself, off herself . . . off her own solitude . . . off her anger . . . so . . . No, what happened? she was getting mixed up.
Virgínia shrugged.
“Either it’s worth it or it’s not,” she said without pleasure. But she was also feeling that she couldn’t fight, even if her path forward could only be chosen by fighting. Something above fighting was making its way slowly and reaching a goal. She was feeling, they were just two women. She stayed quiet for an instant looking out the window at the bright and exasperated air of two o’clock. When she turned her head, Esmeralda was observing her. She looked at her too, thought about how the other woman was pretty and calm with her thoughtful, wide eyes, her whole body abandoned and pale, that tired strength.