The Young Bride

by Alessandro Baricco

  Normal days, on the other hand, as has been said, adhering to the facts, and speaking concisely—those were all marvelously the same.

  The result was a sort of dynamic order that, in the family, was considered flawless.

  In the meantime June came in, gliding on English telegrams that put off the Son’s return almost invisibly, but after all sensibly, reasonable and precise as they were. In the end, the Great Heat arrived first—oppressive, pitiless, punctual every summer, in that land—and the young Bride felt it, as she struggled to remember it after her Argentine life, recognizing it finally, conclusively, precisely one night, in the damp-filled darkness, while she tossed in her bed, sleepless for once, she who, uniquely in that house, fell asleep as if it were a blessing. She tossed and turned and, with a gesture that surprised her, irritably took off her nightgown, dropping it carelessly, and then lay on her side, bare skin against the linen sheets, to receive the gift of a temporary coolness. I did it spontaneously, because the darkness in the room was thick, and with the Daughter, in her bed a few steps away, I had by now established a sisterly intimacy. Once the light was out we usually talked long enough for some comments, some secrets, then we said goodnight and entered the night, and now, for the first time, I wondered what that sort of faint sonorous song was that rose from the Daughter’s bed every night, once the light was out and the secrets and the words had been exhausted, after the usual goodnight—it rose and hovered in the air for a long period whose end I never heard, for I always slipped into sleep, I alone, in that house, without fear. But it wasn’t a song—there was a hint of a moan, almost animal—and on that oppressive summer night I wished to understand it because the heat was keeping me awake and my unclothed body made me different. So I let the song hover for a while, to comprehend it better, and then, in the dark, point-blank, I asked calmly, What is it?

  The song stopped hovering.

  For a moment there was only silence.

  Then the Daughter said, You don’t know what it is?

  No.

  Really?

  Really.

  How is that possible?

  The young Bride knew the answer, she knew the exact day when she had chosen that ignorance and could have explained in detail why she had chosen it. But she said simply, I don’t know.

  She heard the Daughter laugh softly, and then some faint noises, and a match that scraped and flared and approached the wick—for a moment the light of the oil lamp seemed very bright, but soon everything took on cautious, precise outlines, everything, including the naked body of the young Bride, who didn’t move, remaining just as she was, and the Daughter saw it, and smiled.

  It’s my way of entering the night, she said. If I don’t do it I can’t fall asleep—it’s my way.

  Is it really so difficult? asked the young Bride.

  What?

  Entering the night, for all of you.

  Yes. You think it’s funny?

  No, but it’s mysterious, it’s not easy to understand.

  Do you know the whole story?

  Not all of it.

  No one has ever died during the day, in this family, you know that.

  Yes. I don’t believe it, but I know it. Do you believe it?

  I know the story that they all died at night, one by one. I’ve known it since I was a child.

  Maybe it’s only a legend.

  I’ve seen three of them.

  It’s normal, many people die at night.

  Yes, but not all. Here even children who are born at night are born dead.

  You’re frightening me.

  You see, you’re beginning to understand—and just then the Daughter took off her nightgown, with a precise movement of her good arm. She took off her nightgown and turned onto one side, like the young Bride—naked, they looked at each other. They were the same age, and it was the age when nothing is ugly, because everything glows in the light of a new beginning.

  They were silent for a while, they had to look at each other.

  Then the Daughter said that when she was fifteen or sixteen it had occurred to her to rebel against that business of dying at night—she had seriously thought they were all mad—and she had rebelled in a way that she now recalled as very violent. But no one was frightened, she said. They let time pass. Until one day Uncle told me to lie down beside him. I did and waited for him to wake up. With his eyes closed he spoke to me for a long time, maybe in his sleep, and he explained that each of us is master of his life, but one thing does not depend on us, we receive it as an inheritance in our blood and there’s no sense in rebelling because it’s a waste of time and energy. Then I said to him that it was idiotic to think that a fate could be handed down from father to son, I said that the very idea of fate was a fantasy, a fable to justify one’s own cowardice. I added that I would die in the light of day, at the cost of killing myself between dawn and sunset. He slept for a long time, but then he opened his eyes and said to me no, of course fate doesn’t exist, and it’s not what we inherit—if only. It’s something much more profound and animal. We inherit fear, he said. A particular fear.

  The young Bride saw that the Daughter, as she spoke, had opened her legs slightly and then closed them, after hiding a hand there, which now rested between her thighs, and every so often she moved it slowly.

  So she explained to me that it’s a subtle contagion, and she showed me how in every gesture, in every word, fathers and mothers are merely handing down a fear. Even where they are apparently teaching solidity and solutions, and in the end especially where they’re teaching solidity and solutions, they are in reality handing down a fear, because they know that everything solid and solvable is only what they’ve found as an antidote to fear, and often a particular, circumscribed fear. So where families seem to teach children happiness, instead they are infecting children with a fear. And that’s what they’re doing every hour, during an impressive series of days, not letting up for an instant, with the most complete impunity, and a frightening efficiency, so that there is no way to break the circle.

  The Daughter spread her legs slightly.

  So I have a fear of dying in the night, she said, and I have a single way of going to sleep, mine.

  The young Bride remained silent.

  She stared at the Daughter’s hand, at what she was doing. The fingers.

  What is it? she asked again.

  Instead of answering the Daughter closed her eyes and turned on her back, seeking a familiar position. She rested one hand like a shell on her stomach, and with her fingers she searched. The young Bride wondered where she had seen that gesture and was so new to what she was discovering that finally she remembered, and it was her mother’s finger searching through a box of buttons for the small mother-of-pearl one that she had set aside for the cuff of her husband’s only shirt. Obviously that was another region of existence, but certainly the gesture was the same, or at least until it began to be circular, moving too fast, or too violently, to be a way of searching, when it had become, rather, a way of hunting—she thought of hunting an insect, or of killing something small. And in fact, now and then, the Daughter suddenly started to arch her back, and breathed strangely—a kind of agony. But graceful, thought the young Bride, even attractive, she thought: whatever the Daughter was killing in herself, her body seemed born for that crime, it was so perfectly arranged in the space, like a wave, even her deformities as a cripple disappeared, disappeared into nothing—which was the damaged arm you couldn’t have said, which of the spread legs you couldn’t remember.

  She stopped the killing for a moment, but without turning, without opening her eyes, and said: You really don’t know what it is?

  No, answered the young Bride.

  The Daughter laughed, in a nice way.

  You’re telling the truth?

  Yes.

  Then the Daughter began that sonorous song,
nearly a lament, that the young Bride knew but didn’t know, and returned again to that small killing, but as if in the meantime she had decided to cast aside a sort of prudence that she had been holding onto. She moved her hips now, and when she let her head fall back her mouth opened slightly, in a way that seemed to me the crossing of a border and sounded like a revelation: in a flash I thought that the Daughter’s face, although it came from far away, was born to end up there, in that open wave that was now turned to the pillow. It was so true, and final, that all the Daughter’s beauty—with which she charmed the world, during the day—seemed to me suddenly what it was, that is, a mask, a subterfuge—or little more than a promise. I wondered if it was that way for everyone, and for me, too, but then the question I asked aloud—in a low voice—was different and again the same.

  What is it?

  The Daughter, without stopping, opened her eyes and turned her gaze toward the young Bride. But she didn’t really seem to be looking, her eyes were fixed elsewhere, and her mouth was softly open. She continued with that sonorous song, she didn’t stop her fingers, she didn’t speak.

  Do you mind if I watch you? asked the young Bride.

  The Daughter shook her head no. She continued to caress herself without speaking. She was somewhere, within herself. But since her eyes were on the young Bride, to the young Bride it seemed that there was no longer any distance between them, physical or immaterial, and so she asked another question.

  Is that how you kill your fear? You hunt it and kill it?

  The Daughter turned her head again, stared at the ceiling for a moment, and then closed her eyes.

  It’s like detaching yourself, she said. From everything. You mustn’t be afraid, go all the way to the end, she said. Then you are detached from everything, and an immense weariness carries you into the night, giving you the gift of sleep.

  Then that last expression returned to her features, the head thrown back and the mouth half open. She resumed the sonorous song, and between her legs the fingers moved rapidly, every so often disappearing inside her. Gradually she seemed to lose the capacity to breathe, and at a certain point she seemed in such a hurry that the young Bride would have taken it for desperate if she hadn’t just learned that it was, rather, what she sought, every night, when the light went out, descending to a point within herself that in some way must be resisting her if now I saw her exhausted, digging up with her fingertips something that the handbook of life had evidently buried in the course of a long day. It was a descent, no doubt about that, and it appeared to become at every step steeper, or more dangerous. Then she began to tremble, and she continued to tremble until the sonorous song broke off. She closed up like a clam, turning on her side, hugging her legs and pulling her head down between her shoulders—I saw her transformed into a child, all curled up, her hands hidden between her legs, her chin resting on her chest, her breath returning.

  What did I see, I thought.

  What should I do now, I thought. Not move, not make noise. Sleep.

  But the Daughter opened her eyes, sought mine, and, strangely firm, said something.

  I didn’t understand, and so the Daughter repeated what she had said, in a louder voice.

  Try.

  I didn’t move. I said nothing.

  The Daughter stared at me, with a gentleness so infinite it seemed like malice. She stretched out an arm and lowered the light of the lamp.

  Try, she repeated.

  And then again.

  Try.

  Just then the young Bride was struck by the memory of an episode from nine years earlier, which I have to recount now, just as I happened to reconstruct it recently, at night. I specify at night, because this thing happens, where I wake up suddenly, at a certain hour of the morning, before dawn, and with great lucidity calculate the collapse of my life, or at least its geometric rotting, like a fruit left in a corner: I fight it, in fact, by reconstructing this story, or other stories, which sometimes takes me away from my calculations—other times it takes me nowhere at all. My father does the same thing, imagining he is playing a golf course, hole after hole. He specifies that it’s a nine-hole course. He’s a nice guy, he’s eighty-four. Although it seems incredible to me at this moment, no one can say if he’ll be alive when I’ve written the last page of this book: in general ALL those who are alive while you’re writing a book should still be alive when you finish it, and this for the elementary reason that writing a book is, for those who do it, instantaneous, even if it’s very long, hence it would be unreasonable to think that someone can dwell within it alive and dead, at the same time, especially my father, a nice guy, who at night, to chase away the demons, plays golf in his mind, choosing the clubs and measuring the force of the stroke, while I, unlike him, as I said, dig up this story, or others. Which means, if nothing else, that I can say with assurance what the young Bride remembered, suddenly, while the Daughter stared at her, saying a single word, Try. I know that what struck her was a memory she had never set aside, that in fact she had jealously guarded for nine years, specifically the memory of when, one winter morning, her grandmother had summoned her to her room, where, not yet old, she was trying to die in an orderly way, in a sumptuous bed, stalked by an illness that no one had been able to explain. Although it seems ridiculous, I know precisely what the first words she said to her were—the words of a dying woman to a child.

  How small you are.

  Just those words.

  But I can’t wait for you to grow up, I’m dying, and this is the last time I’ll be able to speak to you. If you don’t understand, listen, and impress it in your mind: sooner or later you’ll understand. Clear?

  Yes.

  It was only the two of them in the room. The grandmother was speaking in a low voice. The young Bride feared her and adored her. She was the woman who had given birth to her father, so she was unassailable, and solemnly remote. When she ordered her to sit down and push the chair next to the bed, she thought she had never been so close to her, and with curiosity she noticed that she could smell her odor: it was the odor not of death but of sunset.

  Listen carefully, little woman. I grew up like you, I was the only girl among a lot of boys. Not counting the ones who died, they were six. Plus one: my father. Ours are a people who work with animals, challenge the earth every day, and seldom allow themselves the luxury of thinking. The mothers grow old quickly, the daughters have hard bottoms and white breasts, the winters are interminable, the summers scorching. Can you understand what the problem is?

  Obscurely, but she could understand it.

  The grandmother opened her eyes and stared at her.

  Don’t think you can make it by running away. They run faster than you. And when they don’t feel like running, they wait for you to come back, and then they beat you.

  The grandmother closed her eyes again and grimaced, because something inside was devouring her, bite by bite, each one unexpected and unpredictable. When it passed, she began breathing again and spit out on the floor a fetid liquid, colored with colors that only death could invent.

  You know how I did it? she said.

  The young Bride didn’t know.

  I played hard to get till I drove them crazy, then I let myself be caught, and then I held them by the balls all my life. Did you ever wonder who commands in this family?

  The young bride shook her head no.

  Me, stupid.

  Another bite took away my breath. I spit out that stuff, I no longer even wanted to know where. I was careful only not to spit on myself. It ended up on the covers, not even the floor.

  Now I’m fifty-three years old, I’m about to die, and I can tell you confidently one thing: don’t do as I did. It’s not advice, it’s an order. Don’t do as I did. Do you understand?

  Why not?

  She asked in an adult, even aggressive tone. All at once there was no longer anything of the
child in her. She was tired of it, suddenly. I liked that. I straightened up a little on the pillow, and understood that with that child I could be hard, mean, and imaginative, as I had been, with great pleasure, in every instant of the life that was now fleeing in spasms of stabbing pain in my stomach.

  Because it doesn’t work, I said. Everyone goes crazy, nothing turns out right anymore, and sooner or later you find yourself with a swelling stomach.

  That is?

  Your brother gets on top of you, sticks his prick inside, and leaves a child in your belly. When your father doesn’t. Now is it clear?

  The young Bride didn’t flinch. Clearer, yes.

  Don’t imagine it as unpleasant. Most of the time it’s a thing that drives you mad.

  The young Bride said nothing.

  But that you can’t understand now. Just be sure to impress it in your mind. Is that clear?

  Yes.

  So don’t do as I did, it’s all wrong. I know what you have to do, listen carefully, I’ll tell you what you have to do. I called you here to tell you what you have to do.

  She took her hands out from under the covers, she needed them to explain. They were ugly hands, but it was clear that if it had been up to them they would have waited quite a while before going underground.