The Young Bride

by Alessandro Baricco

  So the cars set off again, sputtering as they had the first time, and even more animated by final waves and cheerful voices. They went ten meters and stopped. They had to shift into reverse again. This time the Mother got out with a hint of anxiety. She covered with decisive steps the distance that divided her from the entrance and disappeared into the house murmuring four words.

  I forgot something else.

  The young Bride turned toward Modesto, giving him a questioning gaze.

  Modesto cleared his throat with two precise contractions of the larynx, one short, the other long. The young Bride’s education in that cuneiform writing wasn’t so advanced, but she sensed vaguely that it was all under control, and was calm.

  The Mother got back in the car, the engines revved again, and in a bubble of noisy joy goodbyes were said conclusively and without regret. This time, before stopping, they traveled some meters farther. They shifted into reverse with a certain fluidity, since they had learned how.

  The Mother returned to the house humming, with the most complete self-control. She seemed to know what she wanted. When she reached the doorway, however, right next to Modesto and the young Bride, she was seized by some second thoughts. She stopped. She seemed to be focusing on some belated reflection. She shrugged and said three words.

  But no, O.K.

  Then she turned around and went back to the cars, still humming.

  How many times does she do it? asked the young Bride in a serious tone.

  Usually four, answered Modesto, imperturbable.

  So it wasn’t a surprise to see the cars leave, stop after a certain distance, back up, and spit out the Mother, who this time walked up the path to the house, apparently furious, her steps heavy, cursing softly in an uninterrupted litany of which the young Bride caught, as she passed, an indefinite fragment.

  Let them all go to hell.

  Or maybe “yell,” it was hard to tell.

  The Mother re-emerged from the house, after an absence longer than the previous ones, clutching in her hand a piece of silverware, and waving it in the air. She seemed no less furious than before. As she passed, the young Bride discerned that the litany had veered toward French. She seemed to recognize distinctly the word connard.

  But it could also be moutarde, it was hard to tell.

  Since Modesto raised an arm to wave, the young Bride understood that the ceremony was concluding and so she, too, with sincere happiness, and perhaps a tinge of regret, began to say goodbye, standing on tiptoe and waving her hand in the air. She saw them growing distant, in a cloud of dust and emotion, and for a moment she was gripped by the fear that she had demanded too much from herself. Then she saw the two cars stop.

  Oh no, she let escape.

  But this time they didn’t back up, and it wasn’t the Mother who jumped down off the running board. Amid the dust they saw the Daughter running toward the house, with her crooked gait, but heedless and decisive, even beautiful in her vaguely childish hurry. She stopped in front of the young Bride.

  You won’t run away, right? she asked in a firm voice.

  But her eyes were tearing, and it wasn’t because of the dust.

  I’m not even thinking of it, said the young Bride, surprised.

  Here, let’s make it so you won’t run away.

  Then she went up to the young Bride and embraced her.

  They remained like that, for a few moments.

  The Daughter, returning to the car, was no longer in a hurry. She walked with her sad, dragging gait, but she was serene. She got in without turning around again.

  Then they all disappeared around the first bend, and this time they had really left.

  Modesto let the snorting of the two automobiles disappear in the distance of the countryside, then, in the regular silence of nothing, heaved a faint sigh and picked up his suitcase.

  I’ve left you three books, hidden in the bathroom. Three texts of a certain notoriety.

  Really?

  As I told you, the pantry is full of food—be content with cold meals and don’t touch the wine cellar, except in case of absolute necessity.

  The young Bride had trouble imagining what a case of absolute necessity might be.

  I’ll leave you my address, in the city, but I wouldn’t want you to misunderstand. I’m leaving it only because, if the Son really should arrive, he might need me.

  The young Bride took the piece of paper, folded in two, that he was handing her.

  I think that’s everything, Modesto concluded.

  He decided that at that precise moment he was starting his vacation, so he went off without taking the first steps backward, as his most glorious number would have required. He confined himself to a very slight bow.

  The young Bride let him go a few steps, then she called to him.

  Modesto.

  Yes?

  Isn’t it a burden to have to always be so perfect?

  No, in fact. It releases me from seeking other purposes for my actions.

  What do you mean?

  I don’t have to ask myself every day why I live.

  Ah.

  It’s comforting.

  I imagine.

  Do you have other questions?

  Yes, one.

  Tell me.

  What do you do when they leave and close the house?

  I get drunk, Modesto answered with unpredictable readiness and heedless sincerity.

  For two weeks?

  Yes, every day for two weeks.

  And where?

  I have a person who takes care of me, in the city.

  May I go so far as to ask what type of person it is?

  A likable man. The man I’ve loved all my life.

  Ah.

  He has a family. But it’s arranged so that in those two weeks he comes to stay with me.

  Very practical.

  Rather.

  So you won’t be alone, in the city.

  No.

  I’m happy for that.

  Thank you.

  They looked at each other in silence.

  No one knows, said Modesto.

  Evidently, said the young Bride.

  Then she waved, even though she would have liked to embrace him, or even kiss him lightly, or something like that.

  He understood, and was grateful for her composure.

  He walked away slowly, slightly bent, immediately distant.

  The young Bride went into the house and closed the door behind her.

  It was a torrid summer, that year. Horizons vaporized tremulous dreams. Clothes stuck to the skin. Animals dragged themselves along insensibly. It was hard to breathe.

  It was even worse in the house, which the young Bride kept closed up, with the idea of letting it seem deserted. The air stagnated lazily, sleeping in a kind of damp lethargy. Even the flies—usually capable, it should be noted, of inexplicable optimism—seemed unconvinced. But to the young Bride it didn’t matter. In a certain sense, she liked moving slowly, her skin shining with sweat, her feet seeking the comfort of stone. Since no one could see her, she often went through the rooms naked, discovering strange sensations. She didn’t sleep in her bed, but around the house. It occurred to her to use the places where she had seen the Uncle sleeping, and so she inhabited them one after the other, in sleep. When she slept in these places naked, she felt a pleasant agitation. She had no schedule, because she had decided to let the pace of the days be dictated by the urgency of her desires and the pristine geometry of her needs. So she slept when she was sleepy, she ate when she was hungry. But don’t think that it made her wild. For all those days she took meticulous care of herself—after all, she was waiting for a man. She brushed her hair repeatedly, she spent long moments at the mirror, she stayed in the water for hours. Once a day she dressed with the utmost eleg
ance, in the Daughter’s or the Mother’s clothes, and in her splendor she sat in the big room, reading. Occasionally she felt oppressed by the solitude, or by an uncontrollable anguish, and then she chose a corner of the house where she recalled having seen or experienced something noteworthy. She would crouch down, open her legs, and caress herself. As if by magic, everything resettled itself. It was a strange sensation to touch herself on the chair in which the Father had asked to die with her. It was also remarkable to do it on the marble floor of the chapel. When she was hungry she got something from the pantry and then went to sit at the big table for breakfasts. As noted, it was traditional to leave twenty-five places, flawlessly set, as if at any moment a horde of guests were to arrive. The young Bride decided that each time she would eat at one of those places. When she finished eating, she took everything away, washed, cleaned, and left the place at the table empty, the place setting gone. So her meals were like a slow hemorrhage through which the table lost meaning and purpose, progressively emptied of every jewel and any ornament: the blinding white of the tablecloth advanced, naked.

  Once, having inadvertently fallen asleep, she was wakened by the sudden certainty that waiting for a man, alone, in that house, was a tragically vain and ridiculous act. She was sleeping, naked, on a carpet she had unrolled in front of the door of the living room. She looked for something to cover herself with, because she felt cold. She pulled a sheet that was covering a nearby chair over herself. Mistakenly, she went back over her life in her mind, to find something that would break that strange, sudden fall into emptiness. All she did was make things worse. Everything seemed to her wrong or horrible. The Family was crazy, her trip to the brothel grotesque, any phrase uttered with a straight back absurd, Modesto cloying, the Father mad, the Mother ill, those places ignoble, her father’s end disgusting, the fate of her brothers desperate, her youth wasted. With a lucidity one has only in dreams, she understood that she no longer possessed anything, that she wasn’t beautiful enough to save herself, that she had killed her father, and that, little by little, the Family was robbing her of her innocence.

  Is it possible that it has to end like that? she asked, frightened.

  I’m only eighteen, she thought, with fear.

  So, in order not to die, she took refuge where she knew she would find the last line of resistance to disaster. She forced herself to think about the Son. But think is a reductive word to define an operation that she knew was quite complex. Three years of silence and separation were not easy to retrace. So much distance had accumulated that the Son had long since stopped being, for the young Bride, an easily accessible thought, or memory, or sentiment. He had become a place. An enclave, buried in the landscape of her feelings, which she couldn’t always find again. Often she set off to reach it, but got lost on the way. It would have been simpler for her if she could have had available some physical desire to hold onto, in order to scale the walls of oblivion. But desire for the Son—his mouth, his hands, his skin—was something it wasn’t simple to return to. She could distinctly summon to memory particular instants in which she had desired him even in a devastating way, but now, staring at them, it seemed to her that she was staring at a room in which, in place of colors, little pieces of paper were stuck to the walls with the names of the hues written on them: indigo, Venetian red, sand yellow. Turquoise. It wasn’t pleasant to admit, but it was so. And even more, now that circumstances had led her to know other pleasures, with other people, with other bodies: they weren’t enough to erase the memory of the Son, but certainly they had placed him in a sort of prehistory in which everything seemed mythical as well as inexorably literary. For that reason, following the traces of physical desire wasn’t often, for the young Bride, the best system for finding the road that led to the hiding place of her love. Occasionally, she preferred to dig out of her memory the beauty of certain phrases, or certain gestures—a beauty of which the Son was a master. She found this beauty intact, then, in memory. And for a moment this seemed to restore to her the spell of the Son and bring her back to the exact point at which her journey aimed. But it was an illusion more than anything. She found herself contemplating marvelous objects that still lay in the cabinets of distance, impossible to touch, inaccessible to the heart. So the agonizing sense of ultimate loss was mixed with the pleasure of admiration, and the Son grew even more distant, almost unapproachable, now. In order not to truly lose him, the young Bride had had to learn that in reality no quality of the Son—or detail, or marvel—was now sufficient to enable her to cross the abyss of distance, because no man, however loved, is enough by himself to defeat the destructive power of absence. What the young Bride understood was that only by thinking of the two of them, together, was she able to sink into herself to where the permanence of her love dwelt, intact. She went back then to certain states of mind, certain ways of perceiving, which she still remembered very well. She thought of the two of them, together, and could feel a certain heat, or the tone of certain nuances, even the quality of a certain silence. A particular light. Then it was given to her to find what she sought, in the definite sensation that a place existed to which the world was not admitted, and which coincided with the perimeter marked by their two bodies, kindled by their being together, and made unassailable by their anomaly. If she could reach that sensation, everything became harmless again. Since the disaster of every life around her, and even of her own, was no longer a danger to her happiness but, if anything, the counterpart that made still more necessary and invincible the refuge that she and the Son had created, loving each other. They were the demonstration of a theorem that refuted the world, and when she could return to that conviction, all fear abandoned her and a new, sweet confidence took possession of her. There was nothing more wonderful in the world.

  As she lay on the carpet, curled up under that dusty sheet, this was the journey the young Bride made, saving her life.

  So she still had her love entirely available when, two days later, at a table where nine settings remained, and just as she was preparing for another to vanish, she heard in the distance the sound of an automobile, dim at first and then increasingly clear—she heard it arrive at the house, stop, and finally turn off. She got up, left everything as it was on the table, and went to her room to prepare. She had long since chosen a dress for the occasion. She put it on. She brushed her hair and thought that the Son had never seen her so beautiful. She wasn’t afraid, she wasn’t nervous, she didn’t have questions. She heard the engine of the automobile start up again and then grow faint. Barefoot, she went down the stairs and through the house, her steps firm. When she reached the front door she broadened her shoulders, as the Mother had taught her. Then she opened the door and went out.

  In the courtyard she saw a number of trunks, resting on the ground. She knew them. Sitting on the biggest—a large creature of dark leather, slightly scratched on one side—she saw the Uncle, dressed just as he had been when he left, and motionless. He was sleeping. The young Bride approached.

  Did something happen?

  Since the Uncle continued to sleep, she sat down next to him. She realized that he was sleeping with his eyes half open, and that occasionally he trembled. She touched his forehead. It was burning.

  You’re not well, said the young Bride.

  The Uncle opened his eyes and looked at her as if he were seeking to understand something.

  It’s lucky to find you here, signorina, he said.

  The young Bride shook her head.

  You’re not well.

  No, I’m not, said the Uncle. Would you mind very much doing a couple of things for me? he asked.

  No, said the young Bride.

  Then be so kind as to fill the tub with very hot water. Then would you open the yellow trunk, the small one, and find a sealed bottle, in it there’s some white powder. Take it.

  It was a long sentence, and it must have tired him, because he sank back into sleep.

 
The Young Bride didn’t move. She thought of herself, of the Son, and of life.

  When it seemed to her that the Uncle was about to wake, she got up.

  I’m going to find a doctor, she said.

  No, please, don’t, it’s not necessary. I know what it is.

  There was a long pause and a nap.

  That is, I don’t know what it is, but I know how to treat it. A hot bath and that white powder will be enough, believe me. Naturally it will do me good to sleep a little.

  He did for three days, almost without interruption. He stationed himself in the second-floor hall, the one with the seven windows. He lay on the stone floor, his head resting on a shirt folded in four. He didn’t eat, he seldom drank. At regular intervals the young Bride went up and set beside him a glass in which she had dissolved the white powder: each time, she found him at a different point in the hall, sometimes curled up in a corner, other times lying under a window, composed, tranquil, but trembling: she imagined him crawling on the stone, like an animal whose paws had been crushed. Every so often she stopped to look at him, without saying anything. Under a suit dripping with sweat, she sensed a body that seemed to be all ages, scattered in the details, without a precise plan: the hands of a boy, the legs of an old man. Once she ran her fingers through his sodden hair. He didn’t move. Surprised, she was aware that she was thinking, without the least distress, that that man was perhaps dying: nothing seemed to her more inappropriate than to try to stop him. She went back downstairs and began waiting for the son again, with what seemed to her the same intensity and the same beauty as before. But that night, when she returned to the Uncle, he clutched her wrist, with strange energy, and, sleeping, told her that he was tremendously mortified.

  For what? the young Bride asked.

  I’ve ruined everything for you, he said.

  And the young Bride understood that it was true. First the surprise, then the instinct to make herself useful, had kept her from realizing that the Uncle’s arrival had marred something perfect, and diverted a flight that was gliding along without errors. She saw again all her magnificent gestures, which she hadn’t stopped performing, and understood that since the arrival of that man they had been done without happiness and without faith. I’ve stopped waiting, she said to herself.