“Ten is like Sunday. People think Sunday’s the end of the last week, right? but it’s already the start of the next. People think it’s the end of nine, right? but it’s already the start of eleven.”
“No, I think ten’s like Sunday because they’re both round, they’re not broken.”
“But Sunday’s not round, only ten is.”
“Well I think Sunday’s round. I think it and see it.”
They were laughing because they knew it was all wrong, wrong in a veiled way. She, more than he, liked being wrong. And faced with Mother’s almost repulsed gaze, Daniel said to her: poor lady . . . — Daniel sort of liked reading. Nobody understood them and that was as exciting as escape. Daniel had told her:
“Why are you eating?”
She listened with surprise and one day asked him:
“Why are you going to sleep?” — both laughed a lot.
Daniel said to her:
“Think of the most beautiful color in the world.”
She was looking at him lit up by the liberty he was giving her. In a fleeting and nearly audible mixture she was making out heavy colors, shining and dizzying, everything moving, running away, turning off before she could grasp a single one and describe it to Daniel.
“But in the whole, whole world?” she was making sure.
“Y-yes,” Daniel conceded with stinginess.
Then, closing with difficulty her overly radiant eyes, she was searching so deeply that a nonexistent, invented, crazy color was rising to her lips: hm!, she was exclaiming sharply and immediately her voice was falling with disappointment.
“What?” Daniel was asking, intrigued.
She couldn’t explain. To bridge the moment she’d say quickly: purple that’s yellowish at the edges.
“That’s a nice color,” Daniel would agree, “but not the nicest.”
For Virgínia, however, anything you could say after that cry would be poor and worn out. Hm, hm, she was repeating without results. Hm, she’d say in a softer voice as if in order to surprise. Yet it was a word bursting with understanding as if from one moment to the next it would start to sing out its own meaning. Truly Mother was looking at them as if she’d nursed them without realizing it. Avoiding a suffocating feeling that she should call Mother over so that she might understand, Virgínia without words was trying to tell herself that after all she had a husband, the odd guest; when evening would fall she’d comb her thin womanly hair, live more slowly, look straight through the window. She wasn’t ugly, but her powerless features never wavered, warned of nothing, in a calm vulgarity that would hide even the unhappy and vital moments. Virgínia and Daniel were quickly delighted to avoid her:
“What’s keeping on buying, buying and putting things away and opening everything one day and peeking at it?”
Virgínia didn’t know: so hard to take the things born deep inside someone else and think them. She even had a certain kind of difficulty with reasoning. Sometimes it wasn’t by starting with any thought at all that she’d reach a thought. Sometimes it was enough to wait a little and she’d grasp it all. Until Daniel would say, victorious, his voice cold:
“It’s collecting things, you grazing mare!”
Virgínia would retort:
“What’s keeping on walking, walking and then saying: oh, forget it, let’s take a stroll, shall we?”
He’d guess immediately, offhand but deep down thrilled:
“Why, it’s not going to school, who wouldn’t know that?”
And then she’d said to him with serious ardor:
“Look, someday, you know . . .”
And he’d given her a look, accepting something she herself didn’t understand. But he’d rarely praise Virgínia’s discoveries, rarely be fascinated by her cleverness. When that would happen he’d usually say as if speaking to some absent person who might understand him better, as Virgínia attentive and curious would listen:
“She’s so dumb that everything’s easy for her.”
One time though — her face was swollen because of a toothache — they were leaning over the guest room balcony and looking at the night. Down below the darkness was stretching out uniformly and when the wind blew the bushes seemed to move in a sea. Fleeting waves of fireflies were lighting up faintly and going out.
“Look, Daniel,” Virgínia had said, “look what I saw: the firefly disappears.”
He looked at her, saw her swollen red chin through the sad light of the oil lamp placed in the room.
“What? . . . ,” he asked without pleasure.
“It’s like this: when you see a firefly you don’t think it appeared, but that it disappeared. As if someone died and that were the first thing about them because they hadn’t even been born or lived, you know? You wonder: what’s the firefly really like? Answer: it disappears.”
Daniel understood and they stayed silent and satisfied. She could sometimes tie a thing with one hand far from the other and make them dance startled, mad, sweet, dragging. Trusting and serene, she went on:
“Would you want to be like that, kid?”
“Like how?”
“Like a firefly is for us . . . Without anyone knowing what you’re like, if you’re appearing or disappearing, without anyone’s knowing for sure, but you think we’re not living in the meantime? living, going about our business and everything like the firefly.”
“For the first time you’re saying something that I think too: it would be good,” said Daniel and again they fell silent watching.
When the afternoon was ending and the whispering and blurry
