“I like when it’s daylight.”
Yes, he’d always been manly in a way that irritated the family. I don’t want to be a boy, he’d say quietly while shaking his body briskly while his eyes would sharpen dark and ferocious. Virgínia wouldn’t answer, they both knew that he was screaming from emotion, he’d have to wait so long, with eyes squinting, his face mobile as if in response to an approaching murmur, that’s how long he’d have to wait to grow up. His anger was also directed at the family that would watch his development with pleasure and pride, making this into a domestic celebration and since he wanted to grow up alone, watchful. He had a collection of downy gray spiders, caught in the forest.
“Papa can’t know.”
“Why?” inquired Virgínia, curious.
“He might think they’re poisonous, you idiot.”
“But are they?”
“How should I know? how should I?” his useless hands.
“But I’m scared . . .”
“So?” he’d answer.
He’d threaten to open the box of spiders if she ever disobeyed him. And suddenly, without her knowing why, he called her over, his eyes intense, showing her the little box:
“Just look . . .”
She refused, nauseated. But she ended up sticking an eye into the hole of the little box and seeing nothing but slow movements in the darkness. She was saying:
“I saw, I saw it, I saw it all!”
He’d laugh:
“You’d almost be less idiotic if you weren’t so idiotic.”
One day the little box of spiders drowned in the rainwater that invaded the hiding place. A sharp smell, purple and nauseous, was coming from inside it. Suffering, tough and calm, Daniel ordered Virgínia to throw it away.
“No, don’t push it with your feet. Grab it with both hands and put it outside.”
The eye with which she’d peered at the spiders was hurting. For days it had watered, droopy and askew and in the morning she couldn’t open it until the heat of the sun and her own movements would awake it. It swelled later, numb and bloodless. When it was all over, it was no longer the same, it had become imperceptibly squinty and less alive, slower and more moist, more deadened than the other. And if she hid the healthy eye with her hand, she’d see things separated from the places where they lay, loose in space as in an apparition.
“The spider didn’t spit on you, you always liked to lie. What happened with your eye was foolishness. You and Aunt Margarida are made of almost nothing, a sneeze and that’s it! you two ache all over, crippled, so just drop dead.”
She was feeling a certain fear in his voice. It wasn’t the fear of being told on, he knew his sister would never tell. Regret? — that was making her love him with a love full of crazy joy, an excited willingness for the two of them to run off, to ramble, hearts glowing. Her noble ardor was growing in mystery and seriousness when Father was saying:
“The Bay was spooked today on the way home.”
Nobody was saying a word. Sometimes he’d go silent as if the phrase already said it all. Sometimes he’d go on:
“And there was nothing on the road to scare the animal. The weather was clear, the only noise the wagon wheels. I had to say: quiet down, Bay, God is with us. He quieted down.”
And when night arrived, in the middle of dinner, he breathed, said:
“Daniel.”
Daniel lifted his head, paused and stared at him with resistance and disdain. Bemused and scared everyone was waiting. Father said slowly looking him straight in the eye, as if taking his son’s strength:
“You are forbidden to stand in the road making disgraceful . . . gestures at passing ladies” — a deep pallor was making his face shapeless and opaque. Daniel seemed stuck in his own body. Everyone was waiting, contrite, interrupted for a long moment that would never culminate. Then Daniel looked away. Mother sank into her chair, softening her eyelids in a fainting of relief. Their father added, hoarse and low, as if exhausted:
“They complained to me.”
The next morning a leaf came loose from a tall tree and for enormous minutes glided in the air until coming to rest on the ground. Virgínia did not understand where the sweetness came from: the ground was black and covered with dry leaves, so where did the sweetness come from? a desire was taking shape in the air, fluttering about intently, dissolving and had never existed. She cleared off the leaves and with a stick wrote in crooked letters Empire of the Rising Sun. Then she erased them with her foot and wrote Virgínia. She sharpened her being as you sharpen a pencil and made a light scratch on the ground with the stick. She erased it again and wanted to draw a thing with greater intensity, with a seriousness full of fire. She concentrated and a nervous wave ran through her like an omen. In an extraordinary serenity, eyes closed, she drew roughly as if screaming intently — then opened her eyes and saw a simple, strong, rough, common circle. (Today I fell apart) — that was the impression and she’d known it since she was little. I am unhappy, she thought slowly, almost stunned — she was almost a big girl. She let herself slide down the big rock in the middle of the garden. Just a second to reach the ground. But while that second lasted, eyes closed, her face cautious and moving, she scrutinized it at length, longer than the second itself, feeling that it was empty then, big as an unpopulated world. Suddenly she reached the ground with a crash. She opened her eyes and from the darkness to the light her heart opened toward the morning.
