The Young Bride

by Alessandro Baricco

  I’m a girl without a family and without a cent, she said.

  Yes, the Father agreed.

  Does the Son know?

  It didn’t seem to me of particular urgency to inform him.

  But he will know.

  It’s inevitable, the Father lied, aware that the matter was a bit more complicated.

  Where are you taking me?

  I beg your pardon?

  Are you taking me away?

  The Father chose a firm tone; he wanted the young Bride to know that he was truly master of the situation.

  Absolutely not, for now you will stay with the Family, signorina, about that there is nothing to discuss. I wanted to be alone with you in order to communicate the news that concerns you. I’m not taking you away.

  Where, then?

  To the city, signorina. I ask nothing other than that you follow me.

  I’d like to go home. Is it possible?

  Naturally. But may I ask you not to?

  Why?

  The Father assumed a tone that he seldom resorted to, and which he had never used with the young Bride. It implied admission to some intimacy.

  You see, I was sorry to have to concern myself with things that regard you, and I wasn’t happy to hear before you news that is mine only marginally. I had the vexing sensation of having robbed you of something.

  He paused briefly.

  So I thought I would be relieved at the idea that you, too, might learn about some circumstances that you are unaware of, and yet that have had and still have a great influence on the life of the Family, and in particular on mine.

  The young Bride looked up, displaying an amazement that she had shown no hint of in hearing about her father.

  Are you about to tell me a secret? she asked.

  No, I wouldn’t be able to. And then I tend to avoid situations that are too emotionally demanding, for reasons of medical prudence, as you can perhaps understand.

  The young Bride gave a slight nod of agreement.

  The Father continued.

  I believe that the best system is for you to come with me where I’m taking you; it’s a place where someone will be able to tell you what I feel is important for you to know.

  Concentrating on a cuff link, he sought the exact words.

  I must warn you that at first it will appear to you a less than appropriate place, especially after the news you’ve just received, but I’ve thought about it for a long time and I have the presumption to believe that you are a girl not much inclined to cliché, and so I’m sure that it won’t disturb you, and in the end you’ll see that there was no other way.

  The young Bride seemed for a moment to have something to say, then she merely turned her gaze to the window. She saw that the big station was swallowing them up with its palate of iron and glass.

  And what do you do in all this solitude? L. asked me, while she inspected, horrified, the maniacal orderliness of my house.

  I’m writing my book, I answered.

  And what did you come to do in this solitude of mine? I asked her, noting that her lips were the same as before, lips difficult to understand.

  To read your book, she answered.

  But with that look I know. Everyone has it, a little, everyone around you, when you’ve been working on a book for months, maybe years, that no one has read yet. Deep down they all think that you’re not really writing. What they expect is to find a mountain of pages stuck in a drawer with The morning has gold in its mouth written on them thousands of times. You should see their surprise, when they discover that you’ve written the book, seriously. Assholes.

  I handed her the printed pages, she stretched out on a sofa and, smoking, began to read.

  I had known her, years ago. Once she had intimated that she was dying, but maybe it was only unhappiness, or incompetent doctors. Now she has two children and a husband. She said intelligent things about what I was writing, while we escaped into hotel rooms to love each other, devious but obstinate. She always said intelligent things, too, about people who live and sometimes about how we lived. Maybe I expected her to reopen the map of the Earth and show me where I was—I knew that, if she did, she would do it with a particular beauty in her gestures, because that was inevitable with her. That was why I answered her, when she wrote, re-emerging from the void into which she had disappeared. It’s not something I’ve done, lately. I don’t answer anyone. I don’t ask anything of anyone. I mustn’t think about it, otherwise I become unable to breathe, for the horror.

  Now she was lying on the sofa reading what was printed on those pages, instead of The morning has gold in its mouth. It must have taken an hour—a bit more. I looked at her the whole time, searching for a name for that film that remains on women we have loved when time has passed, and we haven’t ever really left each other, or hated each other, or fought—we simply separated. It shouldn’t matter to me much, now that I hardly have names for anything, but the truth is that I have a score to settle with that name, it’s been escaping me for years. When I’m a hairsbreadth from catching it, it enters an invisible crack in the wall. Then there’s no way to make it come out. It remains the fragrance of a nameless attraction, and what is nameless is unnerving.

  Finally she stretched, placed the sheets of paper on the floor, and turned on her side to look at me carefully. She was still beautiful, about this there was no doubt.

  Where the hell does he take her?

  She wanted to know about the Father and the young Bride.

  I told you where he took her.

  To a brothel? she asked, not convinced.

  Very elegant, I answered. You have to imagine a large room, lit by dim and artfully placed lamps, and a lot of people standing around or sitting on couches, waiters in the corners, trays, crystal, you might have taken it for a very respectable party, but the normality was marred by the fact that there was often so little distance between the faces—the hands initiated inappropriate gestures, like a palm sliding under the hem of a skirt, or the fingers moving to play with a curl, an earring. They were details, but they clashed with the rest, and no one seemed to realize it, or to be disturbed by it. The necklines did not conceal, the couches were tilted in precarious positions, the cigarettes traveled from mouth to mouth. One would have said that some urgency had brought back to the surface traces of a shamelessness that usually lay buried beneath conventions: just as an archeological dig might have brought to the surface patches of an obscene mosaic in the pavement of a basilica. The young Bride was dazzled by the sight. From the fact that some couples rose, and from the fact that they disappeared behind doors that opened and closed behind them, she sensed that the big room was an inclined plane and the destination of all those gestures a labyrinthine elsewhere hidden somewhere in the building.

  Why did you bring me here? she asked.

  It’s a very particular place, the Father said.

  I understand. But what is it?

  A sort of club, let’s say.

  Are all the people real?

  I’m not sure I understand the question.

  Are they actors, is it a play, or what?

  Oh, if that’s what you meant, no, absolutely not. That’s not the purpose.

  So it’s what I think.

  Probably. But do you see that very elegant woman who is coming toward us, smiling? There, I’m sure she’ll have a way of explaining everything to you and of putting you at your ease.

  The elegant Woman was holding a champagne glass in her hand, and when she reached them she leaned forward to kiss the Father, murmuring something secret in his ear. Then she turned to the young Bride.

  I’ve heard a lot about you, she said, and then she leaned forward to kiss her once, on one cheek. She had evidently been very beautiful, when she was young, and now she seemed to have no need to demonstrate anything anymore. She was wear
ing a gorgeous dress, but high-necked, and in her hair she wore jewels that to the young Bride seemed ancient trophies.

  Because I imagined—I said to L.—this elegant Woman and the young Bride, at that big ambiguous party, sitting on a small divan, a little apart from the others, and sheltered by subdued, indirect lighting, as if enclosed in a special bubble, near the reckless joy of the others, but blown in the glass of their words. I always saw them drinking something, wine or champagne, and I know that every so often they cast a glance around, but without seeing. I know that it would not have occurred to anyone to approach them. The elegant Woman had a job to do, but she wasn’t in a hurry, and a story to tell, but carefully. She spoke slowly and pronounced the names of things without embarrassment, because that was part of her profession.

  What profession? L. asked me.

  The elegant Woman laughed, with a lovely, crystalline laugh. What do you mean, what profession, girl. The only one practiced here.

  What’s that?

  Men pay to go to bed with me. I’m simplifying a little, obviously.

  Try not to simplify.

  Well, they can also pay to not go to bed with me, or to talk while they touch me, or to watch me fuck, or to be looked at, or . . .

  I understand, that’s enough.

  It was you who asked me not to simplify.

  Yes, of course. Incredible.

  What’s incredible, my dear?

  That there are women who practice a profession like that.

  Oh, not only women, it’s something men do, too. If you observe with some attention you’ll find around you women of a certain age who seem to spend their money with careless originality. Over there, for example. But also that girl, the tall one, who’s laughing. The man she’s laughing with, not bad, is he? I can assure you that she is paying him.

  Money.

  Money, yes.

  How does one end up making love for money?

  Oh, there are many ways.

  Like?

  Out of hunger. Out of boredom. By chance. Because you have talent. To get revenge on someone. For love of someone. You merely have to choose.

  And it’s not terrible?

  The elegant Woman said that she didn’t know anymore. Maybe, she said. But she added that it would be stupid not to understand that there was also something very intriguing about being a prostitute, and that is the reason that, sitting opposite L., who lay on her side on the sofa, looking at me, I ended up asking if it had ever occurred to her that there might be something very intriguing about being a prostitute. She answered yes, that it had occurred to her. Then we were silent for quite a while.

  For example, undressing for someone you don’t know, she said, must be nice. And also other things, she said.

  What things?

  I asked her because I remembered this lovely thing about her, that she had no shame about naming things.

  She looked at me for a long time; she was searching for a limit.

  The minutes before, or the hours, waiting. Knowing that you’re about to do it, but without knowing with whom you’ll do it.

  She said it slowly.

  Getting dressed without embarrassment.

  Curiosity, discovering bodies that you would never have chosen, taking them in hand, touching them, being able to touch them.

  She was silent for a moment.

  Looking at yourself in the mirror with a man on you you’ve never seen before.

  She looked at me.

  Making them come.

  Feeling that you’re frighteningly beautiful, said the elegant Woman. Has that ever happened to you?

  Once, one morning, said the young Bride.

  Maybe even feeling despised, said L., but I don’t know, maybe. Maybe I’d like to do it with someone who despises me, I don’t know, it must be a very strong sensation and it’s not something that happens to you in life.

  And so many other things that don’t happen in life, said the elegant Woman.

  That’s enough now, said L.

  Why?

  Stop it, come on.

  Keep going.

  No, that’s enough now, said the elegant Woman.

  Yes, said the young Bride.

  I have a story to tell. I promised the Father.

  Do you really have to do it?

  Yes.

  Tell me a story, instead, said L.

  It was the story of the Father.

  Who went to that brothel twice a month, for needs that were more than anything medical, in order to discharge his bodily fluids and assure his system a certain equilibrium. Rarely did the thing cross the emotional borders offered by a home remedy, consummated, as it was, amid the pleasure of conversation and with the purity of a tea ceremony. There were even times when it was up to the nurse on duty to reprimand the Father politely—So, we’ve definitely decided to be lazy today, eh?—while she was holding his sex in her hand, with great mastery but scant results. Then the conversation was suspended and the nurse placed one of the Father’s hands between her thighs—other times she uncovered a breast and offered it to him, to his lips. This was enough to get the procedure back on track, and lead the Father to the broad delta of an orgasm compatible with the imprecision of his heart.

  If all this seems irritatingly antiseptic, if not, indeed, cynical, or excessively clinical, it should be remembered that when everything started, many years ago, this story was, on the contrary, one of fierce passions—said the elegant Woman to the young Bride—and of love, death, and life. You don’t know anything about the Father of the Father, she said, but at the time everyone knew about him, because he was a man who stood out as a giant in the prudent panorama of these lands. It was he who created the Family’s wealth, coined its legend, and made its happiness immutable. He was the first who didn’t have a name, because the entire populace referred to him as the Father, sensing that he was not only a man but an origin, a beginning, an ancient age, the time without precedents, and the first land. Before him there had perhaps been nothing, and so he was of everything, and for everyone, the Father. He was a strong, calm, wise, and enchantingly ugly man. He didn’t make use of his youth because he needed to invent, to construct, to fight. When he was thirty-eight years old he looked up and saw that what he had imagined he had now accomplished. So he left for France and wasn’t heard from until, some months later, he returned home, bringing with him a woman of his age who didn’t speak our language. He married her, refusing to do so in church, and a year later she died, giving birth to a son who for his whole life would carry, in memory of her, an imprecision in his heart: today you call him the Father. The mourning lasted nine days, and so did the shock and distress, since the Father of the Father didn’t believe in unhappiness, or still hadn’t understood its purpose. So everything went back to the way it was before, with the nearly imperceptible addition of a child and, more conspicuously, of a promise: the Father of the Father said that he would never love, or marry, another woman in the world. He was then thirty-nine, he was at the height of his strength, his mystery, and his enchanting ugliness: everyone thought it a waste, and he was aware of the risks of a pointless renunciation of desire. So he went to the city, acquired a secluded but palatial building, and, on the top floor, had a place constructed that was absolutely identical to the one, in Paris, where he had met the French woman. Look around and you’ll see. It’s hardly changed at all since then. I imagine that a small part of the wealth you will come into with your marriage is from here. But it wasn’t the economic side that interested the Father of the Father. Twice a month, for twenty-two years, always on a Thursday, he came through that door, because he had resolved to carry until death a heart that would not admit love and a body that would not accept privation. Because he was the Father, he could imagine doing it only in a luxurious setting and an atmosphere of a communal and permanent celebration. For all that
time, the richest, most ambitious, loneliest, and most beautiful women in the city tried in vain to extract him from his promise. It was a siege that flattered him, but he was unreachable behind the walls of his memories and escorted by the sparkle of his whores. Until one girl became obsessed with him. She possessed a magnificent beauty and an unpredictable intelligence, but what made her dangerous was something more impalpable and undefined: she was free, and with such unbounded naturalness that innocence and ferocity were indistinguishable in her. Probably she began to desire the Father of the Father even before she saw him: maybe the gamble attracted her, certainly she liked tackling a legend. Without hesitating, she made a surprising move, which she found simply logical: she came to work here, and waited for him. One day he chose her, and from that day on he chose only her. It lasted a long time: and for all that time they never once met outside of here. For that reason the Father of the Father must have felt that his strength was inviolate and his promise intact: too late he realized that the enemy had already entered, and that neither promise nor strength existed anymore. He was absolutely certain when the girl informed him, fearlessly, that she was expecting a child. It’s hard to say if the Father of the Father contemplated the possibility of redesigning his life around that late passion and that unexpected offspring, because, if he did, he wasn’t given the time to tell himself or the world: he died, one night, between the girl’s legs, with a thrust of his belly, in the half-light of a room that no one has used since then. If you hear it said that it was an imprecision of the heart that betrayed him, pretend to believe it. But it was obviously the dismay, the surprise, maybe the weariness, certainly the relief at not having to invent a different end. The girl remained there holding him between her legs, stroking his hair, and speaking to him in a low voice of travels and inventors, for as long as it took to send someone into the countryside, to tell the people at home. It was all done with a discretion that had been learned by heart, because many men die in brothels, but no man dies in a brothel, as everyone knows. So everyone knew exactly what to do, and how to do it. Just before dawn, the Son arrived. Today you call him the Father, but then he was scarcely more than twenty and because of the imprecision of his heart he had a reputation as a weak, elegant, and mysterious young man. At the brothel he had been seen only a few times, and those few times he had passed almost unnoticed. He trusted just one woman, a Portuguese girl who usually worked for certain bored, very wealthy ladies: they sent their daughters to her, to learn. It was she who met him, that night. She led him to a room, lay down beside him, and told him what he was about to see, explaining everything and answering all his questions. All right, he said. He got up and went to his father. At that precise moment, the Family was little more than a hypothesis, pasted onto the unborn life of a mistake of a child and the uncertain health of a boy. But no one had understood what boy this was, and no one could know that daily intimacy with death makes one cunning and ambitious. He sat on a chair in a corner of the room, and, with his hands pressed to his heart, to protect it, he looked for a long time at his father’s stony back, and the face of the girl who was talking in a low voice, her legs spread to guard a dead man. He understood that something bizarre had shifted, in the destiny of the Family, something because of which it had become difficult to separate birth from death, construction from destruction, and desire from killing. He wondered if it made sense to oppose the inertia of fate and he realized that ten minutes would be enough to ruin everything. But he wasn’t born, nor had his mother died, for that. He got up and had them call the faithful servant who had come with him—a man of unique dignity. He told him that the Father had died at home, in his bed, at three-forty-two in the morning, wearing his best pajamas and without time to ask for help. Obviously, said the servant. Probably an imprecision of the heart, said the Son. It’s clear, said the servant, while he approached the girl and, with an unforgettable sentence—May I?—leaned over the Father’s body. Displaying unsuspected strength he picked him up in his arms. Then he made sure that the body disappeared from the brothel invisibly, without marring the pleasure and the party that, within these walls, were and are an inflexible obligation, always. Left alone with the girl, the son introduced himself. He asked her if she knew something about him. Everything, the girl answered. Good, that will save time, the Son noted. Then he explained to her that they would be married and that the child she was carrying in her womb was his and would forever be their beloved son. Why? asked the girl.