After so many days in which she hadn’t left the house and not even once had seen Vicente, she was looking to Sunday for pulling herself together and not turning up at Irene’s dinner pale and barely resuscitated. The open air after dragging through so many hours in the unmade bed was awakening her skin in an indefinable and strong scent, timidly harsh. The perfume that heat awakes in thick and green plants — but she was poorly alive and though the stroll was breathing a vague smile into her she was getting tired.
She climbed the hill in search of the dam where the volumes of water were being contained, imprisoned, condensed into such an intimate union that her rough whisper had the force of a prayer. Tufts of weeds were bending beneath their own weight, lying on the narrow path under her feet. She was arranging with one of her hands her little brown hat while with the other she was leaning on the long, black umbrella. She was going up the difficult slope and above herself seeing nothing more than a line of earth linking itself, new and clear, to the sky; the tall weeds were flailing against the cold pink of the air. Near the dam lived the custodian with his dry and wrinkled skin, with clean eyes — a dog was barking without approaching. And from the hill before her, when the wind would blow, a quick noise of movements would come, the peaceful singing of a cock, light and shredded laughter, the children’s shouts bubbling into the Sunday — everything from the remote and disappeared beginning, one that had been forgotten and that you couldn’t put your finger on and that would suddenly repeat, losing itself again. When it would fall silent it was as if someone were breathing while smiling. From afar she saw an old woman smoking, a woman carrying oranges, a man building a house; a fire was kindling and shining. Virgínia was facing forward and kept climbing the mountain; to better feel it she’d almost say to herself distracted with slight stubbornness: she’s old as the earth, she’s old as the earth, and try to feel fear. She’d remember at moments the letter that she’d written to the Farm — shorter every time. My health is fine, I’ve just had a little nausea. I eat a lot of sweets, that must be it, because I became such a glutton in the city! . . . I keep fattening up, thank God, but I’m getting pretty heavy; I don’t remember fainting, no one in Upper Marsh would recognize the skinny girl I was . . . I already paid the rent, having made the most of everything, yes, yes, yes. Each time she found it harder to send news. When Daniel was still living with her she felt like she had to tell them that everything was fine. But now . . . It would be nice to take a walk with Daniel this afternoon. Not that he could define some feeling in her; despite his invulnerable integrity he too would allow things to remain in their own nature. It would just be good to stroll with Daniel and point out to him what she was seeing with that familiar grunt that between the two of them meant something different depending on the tone. In the city the river was smooth, the coconut palms aligned, even the mountains seemed clean and trimmed, everything stretched across the surface, fulfilled. Whereas in Upper Marsh existence was more secret — and that’s what she would say without speaking.
The dam was groaning without interruption, shivering in the air and shaking inside her body, leaving her somehow trembling and hot. She sat on one of the rocks still sensitive to the sun. For an instant, in a light silent whirl, she’d spent her whole life sitting on rocks; another reality is that she’d traversed her whole life looking at the darkness before going to sleep and moving around in search of some comfort while some thin and awakened thing was lurking: tomorrow. Yes, how many things she was seeing — she sighed slowly looking around her with sadness. She’d thought to find other species in the city . . . Yet she still kept sitting on rocks, noticing a glance in a person, meeting a blind man, only hearing certain words . . . she was seeing what she was making out for the first time and it was something that seemed to have completed the capacity of her eyes. A long empty well-being seized her, she crossed her fingers with delicateness and affectation, set about looking. But the sky was fluttering so frayed, robust, so without surface . . . What she was feeling was without depth . . . but what she was feeling . . . above all fainting without strength . . . yes, swooning in the sky . . . like her . . . Quick thick circles were moving away from her heart — the sound of a bell unheard but heavily felt in the body in waves — the white circles were blocking her throat in a big hard bubble of air — there wasn’t even a smile, her heart was withering, withering, moving off through the distance hesitating intangible, already lost in an empty and clean body whose contours were widening, moving away, moving away and all that existed was the air, so all that existed was the air, the air without knowing that it existed and in silence, in silence high as the air. When she opened her eyes things were slowly emerging from dark waters and shining wetly sonorous on the surface of her consciousness, still wavering from the faint. The water from the dam was murmuring deep in her interior, so distant that it had already surpassed her body infinitely behind. The wisdom of the cold air was awakening the flesh of her face stinging it with freshness. My God, how happy am I, she thought in a weak and luminous jolt. Waking so girlish from her faint, she was smiling exhausted, feeling as if she were too little to remain without protective thoughts or experience atop a hill hearing the other hill like another world living painstakingly on Sunday. She was feeling in silence that after a faint she was in the greatest part of life because there was neither love nor hope that could transcend that serious sensation of nascent flight. But why was that instant not calming her with the satisfaction of the attained goal . . . why? it was extending her to the heights, stretching her out almost desperate with the tension of a bow full of its own movement . . . as if living that way on the summit she’d feel more than the potency of her great dark body and wipe herself out in her own perception. Her heart was still beating with fatigue and she was thinking: I fainted, that’s what it was, I fainted. She was looking at the red and illuminated light hovering in the half-lit forest. What did her light mean? her eyes kept demanding opening clearings in the sweet confusion of her fatigue. She couldn’t understand, she could agree, just that, and only with her head, assenting, scared. She was agreeing with the afternoon, agreeing with that fragile power that would sustain her as she met the air, agreeing with her joyful fear — the fear of facing the dinner with almost strangers, Vicente’s love, her own everyday fake feelings? that watchful error — she was agreeing with the living hill saying out loud, out loud inside her: ah, yes, yes! ardently united and quiet. Not however on the level of undeniable reality, only in a certain truth where you could say everything without ever making a mistake, there where there wasn’t even such a thing as a mistake and where everything would live ineffably by the power of the same permission, there where she herself was living splendidly erased, vacant and thing, purely thing like the moist blinking of a bitch lying against the air and panting, agreeing deeply without knowing like a bitch. She felt almost close to fainting again, along with the desire to yield — and even in the dry present she still belonged to the previous part of her life that was getting lost in a calm distance.
After fainting everything was as if easy. She got her balance. She hadn’t fainted in years. Night was now almost falling and lowering her eyelids she could feel the deadened rays of light like somber translucent music tumbling down the mountain in a supple torrent abandoned to the power of its own destiny. She was squeezing with one of her hands the rough handle of the umbrella. It would be impossible for it to rain now, she was feeling looking distracted at the cold sky of the mirror. It was confusingly seeming to her that it would also be impossible for her to free herself from her way and follow another path — she was smiling a bit serious and floating in a frightened but in itself peaceful feeling — so potent and imprisoned she and her nature were seeming to find themselves inside the tenuous balance of their lives. But there was a freedom — like a desire, like a desire — above the possibility of choosing, in her and in her nature, and from it would come the odd and tired serenity of the near-night without rain in the mountains, the laziness once aga
in renewed inside her body.
She opened the door of her little apartment, penetrated the cold and stuffy surroundings of the living room. Slight stain was rippling in one of the corners, expanding like a light nearly erased coolness. She screamed low, sharp — but they’re lovely! — the room was breathing with half-closed eyes in the silence of mute pickaxes of the construction sites. The flowers were straightening up in delicate vigor, the petals thick and tired, damp with sweat — the stalk was tall, so calm and hard. The room was breathing, oppressed, asleep. The smaller petals, like hair on the nape of your neck in summer, were stooping, wilted, blind, yet still able to live and amaze. Virgínia hurried laughing toward them, tilted her dark head yet retreated slightly scared. Because they would close hostile without the slightest perfume as if some thing in their nature secretly repelled Virgínia’s nature. But I always got along well with flowers — that was her impression while she was undressing — she touched them lightly with the tips of her fingers, disappointed, discreet and already uninterested. They were trembling. Without knowing why, permission had at last been given to feel sad and she was trying without really managing it all that Sunday afternoon. Her true sensation during the stroll had been so intimate, pervaded her with such delicateness that it just remained like a hesitation, an expectation. She was wanting a thing to dress her for Irene’s dinner, a calm and stable feeling, some clear certainty of defeat so that she couldn’t start again irresistibly to fight and have hopes. She got ready to go out. The white dress was stretched on the bed, lighting up the small room, giving it the look of strange and forbidden excitement. Placed in the short slip and with a body with so little in the way of waistline, she looked at herself in the mirror — would she be ready to confront other people’s laughter and shine? her face was wandering in shadows. Ever since she looked at Daniel’s black spiders her eyes were a little squinty, they’d set a quick tone of wandering and movement to her face where some indefinable trait seemed to waver almost transforming itself — her face would sometimes recall an image reflected in water. Around the room things were living profoundly tranquilized and on the street since the day before the construction noise had ceased. The other apartments in the building at that hour on Sunday were empty: the occasional shout of a child could be heard stuck in the building’s cement. With one of her hands forgotten on her face in a distracted caress she was waiting without enthusiasm. Slowly in the depth of her neglect some spot in her body started to live weakly, to pulsate accompanying the things all around . . . Now she was waiting more cautious, her eyes open, her heart open, darkly open shuddering with hope. She was waiting . . . But it was so unfamiliar the silence and her white slip, which suddenly as if she herself hadn’t been feeling the waiting, set out and kept living in another milieu, easy and light among the quiet construction sites. When she put on her dress someone banged with a jolt on the door. She opened it and found the washerwoman and her daughter with the package of washed clothes, apologizing for not having come on Saturday, looking surprised at Virgínia’s silk dress that had never been washed, Virgínia whom they always saw in poor clothes. The neckline and the fitted bodice raised her bust giving it even bigger proportions; the narrow belt was uselessly squeezing her waistline without shrinking it. The small glass buttons were trembling with every breath. The cream-white was sweetening her fine skin, making her short hair shine. She exchanged a quick look with the women, took on a worldly air while her pupils were darting around with satisfaction and pursuit:
“Now it’s completely impossible, but com-ple-te-ly!” she was saying with a busy and voluptuous pleasure. “I waited yesterday and all afternoon today, you have no idea, do me a favor and come back tomorrow, a big favor . . . tomorrow, I’ll give you dirty clothes because I have a dinner today . . . understand, I must be ready on time, the car will certainly come get me . . . Unfortunately that’s how these things are, you know . . .” — she interrupted herself with blinking eyes in search of more words for her momentum, almost pensive. With delighted and foolish faces, the washerwomen were saying yes, yes, one pushing the other one with awe and anguish while Virgínia was also seeming to push them with fascinating excuses; they were laughing humbly with affliction, disappearing down the stairs with a white smile still on their faces. Virgínia stopped, listening for an instant to the calm silence that had followed her own rampage . . . an instant more. A moment more. She was absorbed and without thoughts but it seemed to her as in an illness of will that she’d never again have strength to want to move. She asked herself for one more, one more instant. She herself was struggling against giving up. She then moved, went to comb her hair. Pensive, it occurred to her that she could never forget the offense to the washerwomen but in the same moment she thought she was late and changed course forever. Before going out, with her hand on the door latch, that prim and careful feeling of face powder and of the fragility of her appearance, she remembered and with slow coldness grabbed the scissors, cut the stem of three flowers, of the hard and opaque flowers, fastened them to the neckline of her dress, there where her large breasts and her heart were living, veiled. In a protest a green smell was rising to her nose, so acrid for her teeth, that revived her. She didn’t want to go to the dinner, she was scared! — she thought for the first time clearly in a light lament, interpreting the pale rattle that was being born, dizzy, in her chest . . . She didn’t want to, that’s what it was . . . No, that wasn’t it, how could she make so many mistakes? . . . on the contrary . . . such confusion . . . she wanted to go so powerfully that . . . she sighed rapidly, felt her already-sweaty waist beneath the light dress that was squeezing . . . understood that the afternoon had naturally been sad and never happy . . . Oh, on the contrary, on the contrary, the flowers were pushing her forward in a happy, nervous urge . . . horribly desperate. . . and she’d see Vicente.
The construction sites had covered themselves with shadows, with long irrevocable stains — she saw crossing the deserted street. A pure smell of quicklime, angles, cement, and cold was being born from the debris where the silence of some stone chip was strongly shining. She inhaled with pleasure the fog that was seeming to rise from the damp construction and kept going in a controlled urge that would take her to the dinner but that could bring her forward . . . as without end inside the luminous and bustling bus where she’d installed herself with her white dress and the resistant flowers; she was keeping her eyes firm as if to sustain the reality of those instants — with one of her hands she was clasping the white hat with its wide brim against her head, her neck stiff and prudent. And that’s how from far away, jumping from the bus and walking on the polished cobblestones and most of all maintaining above whatever could happen the same reality, straightening herself like a bouquet of flowers above the crowd, she spotted Vicente with Adriano waiting for her. She spotted him so suddenly with surprise that in a movement of life and confusion the flowers were connecting to the dead smell of the construction sites, the vague lost afternoon sad or happy? to the urge that had breathed into her hope for the dinner, to the silent construction sites . . . mixing herself with everything to which she was saying: yes! yes! almost irritated and she agreed intensely with the moment; yes, she was agreeing at a glance and with a wisdom of fireworks understanding the yellow and dense light that was coming from the lampposts trembling in thin rays within the noisy half-dark of the night; she was feeling behind the tender lights, traversing them, the sweet and softly sharp sounds of the wheels of the cars and of the hurried conversations, a near-scream rising and giving quick silence to the murmuring, the slabs of the sidewalk shining as if it had just rained and above all from afar, as if brought by a wide free wind, the touching almost painful and mute perception that the city was extending beyond the street, connecting to the rest, was big, living quickly, superficially. With effort she was transforming her pace into something that would mean reaching, the brim of her hat was trembling, her breasts were trembling, her big body advancing. Her serious eyes smiled, drifting forw
ard as if she knew that upon contact with her body the air would give way; she was deeply hearing the two men and inventing a confused and cynical body as only a woman could imagine; no one could accuse her of being immoral, and she was moving ahead, offering her body to the street, meeting her lips, wetting them flirting, imagining them red like flowing blood because the instant was asking for blood flowing toward her luminosity of newborn matter. How dare I live? yet that was the persistent impression. And despite her lips being only pink — who? but who would ever notice? she gave them a strong thought like the glory of a saint and that thought was of blood flowing. And, by God and by the Devil!, Vicente’s friend was seeming to understand. Yes, she and Adriano were communicating, he small, peaceful, clear, and unknown was looking and noticing and scarcely knew, oh scarcely knew that he was noticing — she didn’t know what he was thinking. Vicente was staring at her slightly surprised amidst the greetings, averting his attention but coming back with almost severe eyes — since what expression could he use for that minute if the minute was invented? And he scarcely knew what he was feeling . . . he would even die not knowing what had happened but maybe not forgetting . . . No, there was nothing picturesque in the moment, there was something calm and old around the instant. Vicente had understood why he was addressing her or not with that look that he’d only adopt in the presence of still-unpossessed women and to whom he never could say: close the door before going out. But nothing had happened after all, just that quick confusion of smiles and greetings, that satisfied uneasiness born of the awareness that everything was happening delicately as it should be, that arrival of Virgínia’s with her head held up and her wide eyes . . . just that, one person feeling that her dress and lipstick are fine, above all they exist, an inexplicable attitude of pride in her own femininity itself like a woman.