“Have you noticed, Adriano, that a lot of people together in a room and spending a while together end up thinking the same way? at least at the outset . . . Just now that fat man over there said a thing that I almost said just now . . . It seems that we end up guessing, right? But not always because after all” — she was seeming to get a grip on herself and after a small hesitation added with a certain force — “because after all everything’s relative . . . I always thought everything, everything’s relative, don’t you think? not always because naturally there’s an exception to every rule . . . of course, that goes without saying . . .”
He laughed, all his teeth appeared in silence. She turned her face in another direction looking at something new. She headed to the armchair and sat down. All night she’d watched the armchair from afar desiring undetectedly to sit on it. In truth she had always lived as if on the verge of things. The armchair was tall, narrow, and green but not a leaf green nor even an old leaf; it was a green filled with resentment and peacefulness, gathered in itself over the years; on the armrests the color had retreated with reserve and an almost brownish base was poking through sweet and martyred by the constant friction; in truth it was a fine armchair where you could have a dark, opalescent sleep — she felt fatigue and sadness. All of Irene’s living room was dizzyingly greenish, pale, mortal — Vicente was laughing. She was smiling at everyone, Vicente was talking, a cynical air of someone who’s been alive a long time.
“He’s got something feminine about him or at least something that’s very common among women. He thinks with movements, his thoughts are so primal that he acts them . . . You remember, Adriano” — how he pronounced the word “Adriano” . . . — “he came in the room that night and since he saw us all together he found himself excessive and left. All that reached him with little abstraction, a small gesture, a tiny sign came with each phase reached by thought. Daniel” — he turned suddenly toward Virgínia frightening her and she quickly looked at everyone — “Daniel would say in that case: I can’t stand people whose convulsions of intelligence I have to watch . . .”
Everyone laughed, she smiled as if she were Daniel’s mother and had the right to be shy. But from one moment to the next she thought that they were laughing at Daniel — she blushed violently — laughing at that very thing even though she . . . no, she’d never laugh, but . . . yes, a certain way Daniel had of reaching a conclusion out loud that everyone had already figured out discreetly . . . was that it? he, he — why not think it all at once? she grew angry, frightened — he, she continued docilely with the thought she was already familiar with, he really had a hard and comical life.
“Thank you . . .”
“But Virgínia . . .” — Vicente was making his teeth shine odiously — “how many glasses have you had already . . .”
She didn’t smile, Vicente averted his eyes, Adriano looked at them, taking pleasure, people were talking and smoking, she was drinking. It was anise liquor. The thick liquid like something warm, anise was what she’d been given in candies in childhood. Still the same taste sticking to her tongue, to her throat like a stain, that sad taste of incense, someone swallowing a bit of burial and prayer. Oh the calm sadness of memory. Both wild and domesticated, purple, solitary, vulgar, and solemn flavor. Father was bringing anise candies from town! she’d suck on them alone in the world with her love for Daniel, one per day until she finished them, nauseated and mystical, so miserly, so miserly as she was. She drank the liquor with pleasure and melancholy — trying once again to think about her childhood and simply not knowing how to get near it, since she’d so forgotten it and since it seemed so vague and common to her — wanting to fasten the anise the way one looks at an immobile object but almost not possessing its taste because it was flowing, disappearing — and she only grasped the memory like the firefly that does nothing but disappear — she liked the notion that occurred to her: like the firefly that does nothing but disappear . . . and she noted that for the first time she was thinking about fireflies in her life even though she’d lived near them for so long . . . she reflected confusedly on the pleasure of thinking of something for the first time. That was it, the anise purple like a memory. She surreptitiously kept a mouthful in her mouth without swallowing it in order to possess the anise present with its perfume: then it inexplicably withheld its smell and taste when it was stopped, the alcohol numbing and warming her mouth. Defeated she was swallowing the now-old liquid, it was going down her throat and in a surprise she was noticing that it had been “anise” for a second while it ran down her throat or after? or before? Not “during,” not “while” but shorter: it was anise for a second like a touch of the point of a needle on the skin, except the point of the needle gave an acute sensation and the fleeting taste of anise was wide, calm, still as a field, that was it, a field of anise, like looking at a field of anise. It seemed she had never tasted anise but had already tasted it, never in the present but in the past: after it happened you’d sit thinking about it and the thought . . . was the taste of anise. She moved in a vague victory. She was coming to understand more and more about the anise so much that she could almost no longer relate it to the liquid in the crystal bottle — the anise did not exist in that balanced mass but when that mass divided into particles and spread out as a taste inside of people. Anise, she was thinking distracted and seeing through the open door a sliver of the dining room and in that sliver a quadrilateral of the china cabinet and atop the china cabinet the plate of artificial fruit, radiant, smooth and stupid with lacquer. Now she was starting to follow an almost-silent feeling, so unstable that she carefully shouldn’t be aware of it. At those same instants her body was living fully in the living room such was she divining the need to surround with solitude the beginning erected in the half-light. Beneath an appearance of calm and hard brightness she was addressing herself to nobody and abandoning herself watchful as to a dream she would forget. Behind secure movements she was trying with danger and delicateness to touch the same light and elusive, to find the nucleus made of a single instant, before the quality came to rest on things, before what really came unbalanced in tomorrow — and there’s a feeling ahead and another falling away, the tenuous triumph and the defeat, perhaps nothing more than breathing. Life making itself, the evolution of the being without the destiny — the progression from the morning not aiming for the night but attaining it. Suddenly she was making an almost harsh interior gesture or was seeing Maria Clara’s sleepwalking and luminous smile and everything inside her was muddled in submerging shadow, the diffuse movements resounding. She wanted to go back down her sinuous path in the darkness but had forgotten her steps with the dizziness of a white rose. She’d forgotten in what part of her body she’d arranged herself in order to wonder. An indecisive feeling lingered like a promise of revelation . . . some day in which she wanted with real true strength . . . ah if she had time. But when would she have in life such a potent care that it would make her grasp through desire the same thing that had come to her mysteriously spontaneous. All that had remained to her was a sensation of the past. Suddenly she was only aware that something had happened because she herself in a material proof was existing now seated in the armchair. She started living again off the fact of being seated in the armchair in front. She remained absorbed staring with an almost terrorized insistence at the beyond of a chair, it seemed impossible to be awakened from her strange dream. And as everyone fell silent for a moment in a pause at the end of a conversation, they looked around, discovered her, and smiled in an ironic surprise. She held back with an absurd look, eyes astonished, lips thickened, and her face seemed to be buzzing imperceptibly in vibration. But as if they’d looked at a strong light for an instant too long, the surroundings seemed to darken beneath a shady cloud, an error of vision, and a pale stoppage of life widened their pupils for a second.
“Virgínia’s quiet tonight,” said Irene smiling, awakening quickly. Her role seemed to be to nudge them. Everyone pulled thems
elves together with a light movement of sighing.
“Oh, it’s not just today,” Vicente answered in a falsely happy tone, “she is, how can I put it?, a serious creature . . .” — Everyone laughed and thus he repudiated her in public extricating himself clearly from the responsibility of her existence. They made the record play in a shady corner of the living room and she felt the music unfurl above the sounds, she who never thought about music. Suddenly the sounds were rising, harmonic, high, chaste, without sadness. They were sounds so connected to themselves, they would sometimes fall into a richness almost heavy but not complex, only comparable to the smell of the sea, to the smell of dead fish — she closed her eyes stricken, tolerating something sweet, sharp, and full of joy: no, it wasn’t like love, not spinning helplessly in the nausea of desire, not loving meanly its own agony. Pain, but a pain that was not the kind that would appear on those interrupted and impossible paths — how things were falling into themselves, becoming true, finally true, oh God, God, help me. That was the sensation: oh God, help me. Her despair was mysteriously going beyond the bitterness of life and her most secret joy was escaping the pleasure of the world. That intimate impression of astonishment. How new it all was, how she was freeing herself from all of them, from her own love of life, calm and without ardor.
“Now I’ll put it on a second time . . .”
She opened the eyes she had closed for an instant, saw herself sitting in the armchair in a quiet posture, her body closed inside itself. Several people were moving, passing one another luminous. Her back curved, she couldn’t pose for a Greek sculpture but was profoundly a woman, a sensation of unreality overtook her. It suddenly seemed to her — as if she were watching something disappear in silence — it seemed to her that she was erring herself, mystified and fluctuating; and how high the error was, and unattainable, even the error. She looked with vacant eyes at a certain immobile and light life around her while her lips were parting in a scared smile — she touched with the palm of her hands the thin railing of the shelf next to her and upon the rough contact returned to the surface of the occasion and the dinner party, Maria Clara walked over to her and as if giving her a quick flower said smiling:
“Virgínia come one day to my house . . . I’m not just saying that,” she repeated . . . “Come . . . I live alone . . . We’ll have a good conversation just between us girls, we’ll talk about bras, menstrual cramps . . . whatever you want . . . all right?”
Virgínia was laughing confused, charmed, laughing too much animating her body: yes, yes . . . all right . . . The circle formed tight and noisy beside the door and Virgínia stayed beyond it having in front of her fat and dark backs shaken by movements of laughter that she couldn’t follow. Being expelled belonged to her own nature. She tried to squeeze between two men but suddenly realized her gesture and retreated, she remained a few steps away from the noise, looked around, free. She finally slid her eyes toward the window, toward the black and shapeless night that was stretching beyond the pale and vivid light of the living room. Wherever she was she could always look at the night, there was time — the branches were hovering suspended in the frozen darkness and each leaf encrusted itself in the air as if forever. The city below was shimmering and cold, from afar it seemed motionless, calm and dangerous. And since nobody saw her she took one more glass from the tray, drank, coughed a little, nothing was noticed, things were wavering shining and suffocated. Everyone was extending a hand to a woman, she too offered hers and indeed it wasn’t long before she felt it lightly crushed with a certain dampness, an unpleasant insistence and several words. Irene. The car was gliding smoothly, in the tepid interior the motor was breathing like a heart. With extreme comfort and yearning she shrank between Vicente and Adriano. With eyes shining and hard from whiskey they were talking while coming closer to Virgínia feeling the heat of her body, staring eyes dissimulating, brief words. Amid her sleepiness she felt a bit unhappy and abandoned, heavy eyelids, lips numb and cynical. In a fluctuating and fleeting crisis she wanted to be protected, for someone to defend her, consider her excessively pure to be touched like that, erring and stirring her — between the two men comfort was deepening her. From the street sounds of solitary horns were coming, her pupils dampened with sleep she was peering at the shadow. Without realizing it she dozed a little clutching with vigor in her lap the wide hat that was swimming white atop the half-light, seeing as in a dream the lights blinking in the empty city. The trip was so fast that soon she was undoing the sheets from the bed, opening her lips saying a name full of softness and darkness: vicente. The flowers were shuddering vivid in the darkness. As if she were dissolving and plunging into her own dissolved matter and in the milky and translucent darkness she herself were gliding as a pure fish swinging her serenely resplendent tail. Yes, vicente. She was moving ahead without fear and without hurry, her big limpid eyes closed through herself while the man was moving away with another man inside a taxi through the city accompanied by the way that she was missing both of them squeezing her and insulting her, leaning on her in the back of the car. The neighbor’s clock, suddenly moved, struck three transparent notes on three levels of sound, the first high and scared almost solidifying her in the beginning of a vigil, the second containing itself between the first and the one to come, the last, lower, pacifying, pacifying, each separated from the next and brilliant like diamonds separated from one another and brilliant — but the three notes were liquid and diamonds would never fear breaking in a single confusion; she went on undone in a great thick sea and crossing it filled with a calm that was made of satisfaction, of the feeling in the deep car, of hope, of memories scattering — with a beating of eyelids she was changing the level of her inner existence. A little child dressed in a long nightgown and very slowly was standing like a target at the back of her sight but she was scarcely trying to see her better everything was disappearing into its own sea — she was always experiencing short visions and when she’d close her eyes over her already-closed eyes she’d see in the darkness shapes made of darkness itself. Each little wave was passing on to another like a message: vicente and with each vicente everything was much more real and it would be useless to deny. For a second she was feeling that she was atop the white bed, excessively fast since she wasn’t the one who was feeling it but just a section of her arm pressed beneath the pillow — with each vicente she was sinking more and more into her own nature. And also more, more, almost to the point of seeing from the other side something dusky green lighting up like a lantern that was the immobile memory of a party lantern in Upper Marsh, ah Upper Marsh. One last vicente like a sigh before dying and sleep closed in a single unhappy rock, Virgínia held onto herself like a black stain. She could see no more through the sleep and if she dreamed she’d never know.
These were the moments when she suffered but loved her suffering. She’d go through the day, the necessity of doing little tasks, tidying the bedrooms, waiting, reality and the streets — part-serious, part-anxious, scrutinizing herself and space as if she were already mysteriously linked to Vicente through the distance. Because she’d scarcely woken and she knew that today was a day she’d see him. Perhaps it wasn’t so sudden — she was offering herself the small surprise in order to give herself happiness even at the price of keeping her conscience closed and locked inside there the dark and stimulating lie. The first hours burned out difficult and slow but near ten in the clean morning time was hurrying along happy and fleeting, bright with the day and in a smile she was watching herself moving ahead easy and gentle. She was hardly having lunch, it was hard to cook just for herself and anyway today she’d have a nice dinner with Vicente — she was eating a fruit to satisfy her distant mother. And that’s how she was getting ready to live-daily, eager to transform herself into what she wasn’t in order to get along with things around her. If Vicente had woken up shapeless and abrasive she would keep herself in waiting, her hands delicate, not expressing herself in any direction so that he could change all by himse
lf, free of her existence. If he stayed mute and nervous she’d try to be ample and though she couldn’t quite manage it — neither her slightly absorbed eyes nor her body with little gestures would help that approach — Vicente would notice her effort to appease him; and that so often was enough for him to smile and improve with goodwill.
After lunch she’d quickly tidy the house because by the time she got back it would already be late. It had been hard to get used to the new empty apartment since Daniel had married, gone to the Farm, and she’d had to move. She tolerated a quick shower, she’d always had a certain repugnance toward taking baths; undressing, exposing herself to the jet of blind and excessively happy water frightening the silence. The cold and then drying off with the towel that was never quite dry from the day before in the dirty bathroom where everything that couldn’t be shown in the little living room was squeezed — the longer she lived the more she accumulated useless things that she couldn’t get rid of without pain. After the shower she’d close the windows, shut the kitchen into its old smell of frying, coffee and cockroaches, put on her hat, lock the front door and go out with her red purse in hand — before closing it for good she’d stop for an instant, glance at the already-asleep house, immersed in warm darkness, smile at the things that were already now vacant in a farewell — for a moment she was feeling lightly hesitant and pensive between closing the door and going out gloriously to Vicente’s house and going back in, taking off her so high heels, keeping herself in bed and hearing nothing, absolutely nothing. And if frightened Vicente came looking for her — he never would — she’d announce with closed eyes, intense: I died, I died, I died. But that was just a second of swirling error because in an immediate truth she was pulling the door toward herself with a small hard tug, turning the smooth key and entering excessively in contact with things while reproaching herself: why be so rough on the door. In the street she could be discovered by someone’s gaze — the secret union she was feeling with people until getting to know them intimately. These encounters could happen to a woman in the city. Someone unexpectedly would understand her most silent substance, going through it with unsurprised eyes; she was afraid to meet that gaze, knew confusedly that this was an intuition that wouldn’t last even an instant beyond the instant itself; she’d never even really remembered being understood. Her heart nevertheless was beating faster, in her chest a contraction of freedom and pleasure was being born, so intense and so mundane that she was surrendering herself in truth with a movement, doing something as if for the first time — a secret way of removing a strand of hair, a certain controlled gaze in a shopwindow as if thus closing her hands in order not to scream. She knew nevertheless how to spare Vicente’s love: she was pushing with her trembling hand the perception of the things around her and her life was closing around her like the only life — she had barely infiltrated the bus when another breath began, she was forgetting the small dead apartment, her heart was growing rich in difficult movements; a shapeless pain was passing through her and her eyes were opening more anxious and transparent. Even if no one looked at her in the streets and she could walk them indissoluble with her red purse swaying, even if her gestures upon taking the bus divided themselves into various industrious and attentive stages, even if her body suddenly foresaw itself abandoned, aghast, all of that would be a bearable prelude because . . . why? deep down it wasn’t because she was going to see him but much lighter, shorter, sillier: because she was going. A pure thrust forward like leaning onto the damp and thin bridge sniffing the rotten wood and looking at the water that was finding its balance beneath the colorless sun — like waking up without any feeling and slowly remembering a bit of hunger mixed with the smell of the neighbor’s coffee with milk mixed with the tired and pale sun upon the clothes on the chair — and no memory of the previous day, only the certainty of the day to come. When she was arriving at Vicente’s apartment pushing the small door of the side entrance in order not to ring the bell she was waiting for a moment — for an instant it seemed more sensitive for her to guide herself through herself, through Vicente and through her absence from the Farm toward some still-nonexistent thing; the sensation of the present was coming to her so real that she was sliding toward another more solid and more possible feeling: that of delighting, delighting — the moment that was coming was quick and fresh and she was looking at it tired. Suddenly she was gaining more life, acutely, as if she herself were finally beginning. She would manage to spend that new mood better if she had to tidy, sweep, wash — but she couldn’t pet and even talk in great tension the way one works, makes the dust fly, and almost sings like the washerwomen. And also because beforehand she needed to know what approach to take with him — sometimes she’d notice that she should keep leaning forward because he was wanting to talk. After seeing him she’d spend hours with her head full of notions already transformed into conversation and of movements born as if out of her own presence in front of herself. Her impression then was that she could only reach things by way of words. It was always a bit of an effort to understand, to understand everything. She would close up and with a small initial exertion make his voice monotonous and cozy as one takes refuge from the rain, even feeling some sensual pleasure in listening to him without hearing him. One day she had almost managed to explain to him that she was with him even when distracted. He’d said — and she’d found out about it later:
The Chandelier Page 11
