The Young Bride

by Alessandro Baricco

  You can’t think I’ll believe that you’ve been sleeping for years because of a silly thing like that . . .

  It was only the last in an impressive series of silly things like that.

  Like?

  The treachery of things. You know what I’m talking about?

  No.

  It’s very instructive: to see how objects contain nothing of the meaning we give them. All it takes is an oblique circumstance, a tiny adjustment to the trajectory, and in an instant they are part of a completely different story. Do you think that this chair will be different for having listened to my words or having held your body and mine? Maybe, months from now, someone will die in this chair, and, no matter what we do tonight that is unforgettable, it will accommodate that death and that’s it. It will do it as well as possible, and as if it had been constructed for that purpose. Nor will it react when, maybe just an hour later, someone will drop into it, and laugh at a vulgar joke, or tell a story in which the dead man plays the role of the perfect idiot. You see it, the infinite neutrality?

  Is it so important?

  Of course. In the behavior of objects one learns a phenomenon that is to some extent true for everything. Believe me, it’s the same for places, people, even feelings, ideas, too.

  What is it?

  We have an incredible force with which we give meaning to things, to places, to everything: and yet we can’t secure anything, it all goes back to neutral right away—borrowed objects, fleeting ideas, feelings as fragile as crystal. Even bodies, the desire of bodies: unpredictable. We can bombard any piece of the world with all the intensity we’re capable of and, an hour later, it’s newly reborn. You can understand something, know it thoroughly, and it has already shifted, it knows nothing of you, it has its own mysterious life, which takes no account of what you’ve made of it. Those who love us betray us, and we betray those we love. We can’t secure anything, believe me. When I was young, trying to explain to myself the mute sorrow that clung to me, I was convinced that the problem lay in my incapacity to find my path: but you see, in reality we walk a lot, with courage, intuition, passion, each of us on our own just path, without errors. But we leave no traces. I don’t know why. Our footsteps leave no imprint. Maybe we are astute, swift, mean animals, but incapable of marking the earth. I don’t know. But, believe me, we don’t leave traces even in ourselves. Thus there is nothing that survives our intention, and what we construct is never built.

  You really believe that?

  Yes.

  Maybe it’s something that concerns only you.

  I don’t think so.

  It concerns me, too?

  I imagine so, yes.

  In what way?

  In many ways.

  Tell me one.

  Those who love us betray us, and we betray those we love.

  What do I have to do with that?

  It’s what’s happening to you.

  I’m not betraying anyone.

  No? What do you call this?

  This what?

  You know very well.

  This has nothing to do with it.

  Precisely. It has nothing to do with your great love, it has nothing to do with the Son, it has nothing to do with the idea you have of yourself. There is no trace of all that in the actions you are performing at this moment. Doesn’t it seem odd to you? No trace.

  I stayed here to wait for him, doesn’t that mean something?

  I don’t know. You tell me.

  I never stopped loving him, I’m here for him, and he’s always with me.

  You’re convinced of it?

  Of course. We never stopped being together.

  Yet I don’t see him here.

  He’s coming.

  It’s what they all believe.

  And so?

  Maybe the truth would interest you.

  The truth is that the Son is arriving.

  I’m afraid not, signorina.

  What do you know about it?

  I know that the last time they saw him was a year ago. He was embarking on a cutter, a small sailboat. Since then no one has heard anything about him.

  What the hell are you talking about?

  Naturally it wasn’t something that could be communicated to the Father, so crudely, and abruptly. So we preferred first to put it off and then to manage it in a, let’s say, more gradual manner. It couldn’t be ruled out, moreover, that the Son would reappear out of nothing, one day or other. You’ve stopped swaying, signorina.

  But you haven’t.

  I no, it’s true.

  Why are you telling me these lies? Do you want to hurt me?

  I don’t know.

  Are they lies?

  No.

  Tell me the truth.

  It’s the truth: the Son disappeared.

  When?

  A year ago.

  And who told you?

  It was Comandini who took care of things.

  Him.

  He was the only one who knew, until a few days ago. Then he came to tell me, shortly before we left. He wanted some advice.

  And all that stuff?

  The two rams and the rest?

  Yes.

  Well, the affair became complicated when you arrived. It was hard to keep dragging things out. So to Comandini it seemed that a very lengthy, endless relocation could gain some time.

  Comandini sent those things?

  Yes.

  I can’t believe it.

  It was a form of courtesy toward the Father.

  Nonsense . . .

  I’m sorry, signorina.

  I will hate you all, with all my soul, forever, until the day the Son returns.

  The Uncle closed his eyes, I felt his shoulders under my hands change their weight.

  I tightened my grip.

  Don’t do it, I said. Don’t go.

  He reopened his eyes, his gaze empty.

  Now let me go, signorina, please.

  I won’t even think of it.

  Please.

  I won’t stay here alone.

  Please.

  He closed his eyes again, he was leaving, to return to his spell.

  Did you hear me? I won’t stay here alone.

  I have to go, really.

  He was already talking in his sleep.

  So I tightened one hand around his throat. He opened his eyes, astonished. I stared at him, and this time it was a firm look, maybe mean.

  Where the hell do you think you’re going? I said.

  The Uncle looked around, more than anything to avoid my eyes. Or to look for an answer, in things.

  I won’t stay here alone, I said. You come away with me.

  I saw his eyelids descend, while he drew a long breath. But I knew that I wouldn’t let him go. I could still feel his sex, under mine, I hadn’t stopped dancing for a moment. I took my dress off, over my head, with a movement that couldn’t frighten him. He opened his eyes again and looked at me. I took my hands off his shoulders and began to unbutton his shirt, because the Mother had taught me that it was my right. I didn’t lean over to kiss him, I didn’t caress him, ever. With a single movement of my neck, in an instant, I loosened my hair. I got down to the last button of the shirt and I didn’t stop there. I kept my gaze on the Uncle’s eyes, I wouldn’t let him return to his spell. He looked at my hands, then he looked into my eyes, then he looked at my hands again. He didn’t seem to be afraid, or to have questions, or curiosity. I took his sex in my hand and for a while I held it firmly, tight in my palm, like something that I had returned from a distance to retrieve. I moved my spread legs forward, and I remembered my grandmother’s lovely expression: a skillful belly. I was about to understand its meaning.

  Don’t do it with hatred, said the Uncle.
r />   I came down on him and took him inside me.

  I don’t do it out of love, I said—and I remember all the rest but I’ll keep it for myself, about that strange night, spent in a crack in the world, not to be found in the ledger of the living, stolen for hours from defeat, and given back at dawn, when the first light filtered through the blind, and I, holding that man in my arms, let him fall asleep, this time for real, and restored him to his dreams.

  It was late when we awoke. We looked at each other and understood that we should not be found like that. The instinct to start over, always. We began to put things in order, hurriedly, I changed, he went to his room. He moved as I had never seen him, lining up his gestures with confidence, eyes vivid, steps graceful. It occurred to me that it would be easy, for the Daughter, to love him.

  We didn’t say a word. Only, at a certain point, I asked him:

  And now what will you do?

  And you? he answered.

  In the noonday sun someone knocked at the door, respectful but firm.

  Modesto.

  It’s more or less at this point that I left my computer on the seat of a bus. A bus that crossed the island from north to south, gliding along roads scarcely wider than itself, with foolish precision. At a certain point I got off and left the computer on the seat. When I realized it, the bus had already disappeared. It was a nice computer, apart from everything else. Inside was my book.

  Naturally it wouldn’t have been difficult to get it back, but the truth is that I let it go. To understand you have to take into account the light, the sea, the dogs moving slowly in the sun, how the people live there. The South of the world suggests curious priorities. There is a particular approach to problems—solving them isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. So I walked a while, I sat on a wall, at the port, and then I began watching the boats come and go. I like that whatever they do, they do it slowly. If you look at them from a distance, I mean. It’s a kind of dance, it seems to involve some form of wisdom, or solemnity. There is also some disenchantment at times. Maybe a hint of renunciation—gentle. It’s the marvel of ports.

  So I stayed there, and things went well.

  Then, at night, I returned to the business of the computer, but without particular anxieties, or fears. It may seem strange, since writing on that computer, and constructing my book, was for months the only activity I could carry out with sufficient passion and constant attention. I should have shit myself out of fear, that’s what I should have done. Instead I thought, very simply, that I would continue to write, and that I would do it in my mind. It seemed to me in fact a natural, and inevitable, epilogue. Fingers on the keyboard suddenly seemed to me uselessly harsh, or an intricate appendix to a gesture that could be much lighter, and more elusive. Besides, for a long time I’d been writing my book walking, or lying on the floor, or at night in the darkness of my insomnia: and with the computer, I tightened its screws, polished it with wax, packed it carefully—all that repertory of craftsmanlike attentions whose exact purpose, to be sincere, I now no longer remember. Surely there must have been one. But I’ve forgotten it. Maybe it wasn’t so important.

  Further, one has to consider that, if you are born to do it, writing is an act that coincides with memory: what you write, you recall. So it would be inaccurate to state that I had lost my book, since, to tell the truth, I could recite it all aloud, or, if not all, let’s say at least the parts that counted for something. At most I could not remember certain sentences exactly: but it should also be said that, in bringing them back to the surface, from the place where they had drifted, I ended up rewriting them, in my mind, in a form very close to the original but not identical, the result being a sort of blurring, or echo, or doubling, in which what I imagined I had written developed, splendidly. For, in the end, the only phrase that can accurately translate a writer’s particular intention is never just a sentence but the stratified sum of all the sentences he imagined before, then wrote, then remembered: they should be piled up, one on top of the other, transparent, and perceived simultaneously, like a chord. It’s what memory does, in its visionary imprecision. So, to be objective, I had not only not lost my book but in a certain sense had found it again in its entirety, now that it had dematerialized, retreating into the winter quarters of my mind. I could summon it to the surface at any moment with a barely perceptible effort, situated in some recess of my body that I didn’t know how to describe: it reappeared in a fleeting splendor compared with which the clear orderliness of a printed page displayed the rigidity of a tombstone.

  Or at least so it seemed to me, sitting there in a trattoria at the port, that evening, on the island. I’m a genius at making things that went badly go well. I could find advantages even in being stuck in an elevator on Christmas Day. It’s a trick I learned from my father (ah, he’s still alive and he still plays at night on his personal, nine-hole golf course). To have something to relate at lunch the next day, for example.

  I thought of these things, and meanwhile I reread some of the book, here and there I rewrote it, all in my head: while mechanically I dipped the bread in the meatball sauce.

  At some point a fat, cheerful fellow sitting at a nearby table, also alone, asked me if everything was going well. I thought I must have done something strange—it was possible, when I’m reading and writing the book in my head I don’t control the other parts of my body very well. Those which the book hasn’t entered, I mean. The ankles, maybe.

  I came out of my book and told him that everything was going very well.

  I was writing, I told him.

  He nodded yes with his head, as if it were a thing that used to happen to him, too, all the time, years ago, when he was still young.

  Now he was in his sixties.

  Placid and self-satisfied, he wanted to inform me of the fact that he was there, at the seaside, because he had had a compliant doctor prescribe for him seven days of “balneotherapy.” They can’t say anything, he explained. He was referring to his employers, I think. He explained that with that term “balneotherapy,” you were sitting pretty. Let them send someone to check on me, he said. Then he moved on to politics and asked if Italy could be saved.

  Obviously not, if everyone’s like the two of us, I said.

  He found that very amusing: it must have seemed like the start of a friendship, or something of the sort. He decided we were made for one another, then he left. He had to go home a little early because the next day his neighbors had invited him to eat eggplant: the connection between the two things must have seemed so obvious as to need no explanation.

  So I stayed, and I was the last. It’s another thing I like: to have a restaurant close around me, at night. To notice that they have begun to switch off the lights, to turn the chairs upside down on the tables. I like it especially when you see the waiters leave to go home, dressed like ordinary people, without the white jacket or the smock, suddenly returned to earth. They walk a little crooked, they seem like forest animals coming out of a spell.

  That evening, however, I didn’t even see them. The fact is that I was writing. I don’t even remember paying the bill, for instance. I was writing in my mind: about when the young Bride left. It had to happen, sooner or later, and the day it happened they all knew to make the most appropriate gestures, suggested by upbringing and proved by decades of decorum. Questions were forbidden. The banality of good wishes was avoided. They didn’t like to give in to sentimentality. When they saw her disappear around the bend, no one would have been able to say where she was going: but the biblical delay of the Son, and the suspension of time that that delay had stamped on their days, had left them ill equipped to question the faint relationship that usually holds together a departure and an arrival, an intention and an action. So they watched her leave as, basically, they had seen her arrive: ignorant of everything, aware of everything.

  The young Bride went to settle her eighteen years in the place tha
t seemed to her most appropriate and least illogical. The result of such a mental operation may appear surprising now, but it should be remembered that never for an instant, dwelling in the abstract world of the Family, had that girl stopped learning. So now she knew that there are not many destinies but a single story, and that the only exact gesture is repetition. She wondered where she should wait for the Son, sure that he would return, and where the Son would return, sure that she would wait for him forever. She had no doubts about the answer. She appeared at the brothel, in the city, and asked if she could live there.

  It’s not exactly a job that you can learn in a day, said the Portuguese Woman.

  I’m not in a hurry, said the young Bride. I’m waiting for someone.

  When she had been earning her living for almost two years in that way, someone sent for her in the middle of the night. She was in a room with a Russian traveler—a man around forty, very nervous and unusually well brought up. The moment she touched him for the first time, the young Bride had understood that he was a homosexual and didn’t know it.

  In reality they know it perfectly well, the Portuguese woman had once explained to her. It’s that they can’t dare to say it to themselves.

  And so what do they expect from us? the young Bride had asked.

  That we help them lie to themselves.

  Then she had reeled off seven tricks to enable them to have pleasure and emerge at peace with themselves.

  As the young Bride had later been able to observe repeatedly, the seven tricks were infallible: so she was moving elegantly toward the first when she was summoned. Since the unbreakable rule of the brothel was not to interrupt for any reason in the world the work of the girls, she realized that something special had happened. Yet she didn’t think of the Son. Not that she had stopped waiting for him or believing in his return. Rather: if she had had any remaining doubts, she had killed them all the day Comandini appeared at the brothel, without having himself announced. He had asked for her and introduced himself with his hat in his hand. They hadn’t seen each other for more than a year.