“What do you like more: eating or sleeping?” she’d ask pensively.
He’d hesitate.
“Eating.”
“Why?”
“Because you fill your stomach. What about you?”
“Sleeping . . . because you sleep, sleep, sleep . . .”
A cold wind was rising from the ground and making the small plants fragrant mixed with the still-hot earth. Though the day had been joyful and busy it was then seeming to begin anew.
“Rain is coming . . . look at the smell,” Daniel was saying.
“I’d like to have an odd and sad life, you know,” Virgínia was saying.
There was an impossible sliding in her truth, she was like her own error. She was feeling strange and precious, so voluptuously hesitant and strange as if today were tomorrow. And she couldn’t correct herself, every morning she’d let her error be reborn through an urge that would find its balance in an imponderable inevitability.
“Well I’d like to be able to say what I think, the world would be amazed,” Daniel was saying. “Only if I could, but it wasn’t any trouble to find out!” he’d finish in despair.
“I don’t want to sleep by myself, I’m scared.”
“Bedtime isn’t for a long time,” he’d answer calmer and drier.
“It feels like it’s soon.”
He was aware she was asking for help. In a horrible act of kindness, as if feeling sorry for himself, he didn’t make his sister wait:
“Then I’ll sit and read with the lamp on the stairs.”
Sometimes he’d push her rudely, in a game that would give her the painful and surprised feeling of being hated. But that was just his strength. Playing with Daniel always wore her out, because she had to take care not to displease him. They’d grown too subtle and Daniel was strict, he didn’t allow a single stumble. Her answers had to be fast and he was smarter than she was. Until once he woke up in a good mood and first thing in the morning said:
“Good morning, human . . .”
The illuminated surprise of seeing him start the day by letting her in, made her freeze for an instant, delight gave her excessive confidence and in a sharp and happy cry she answered:
“Good morning, so-and-so . . .”
He turned around surprised, almost ashamed, while inside her the smile was quickly dying. He stared with disgust as if she’d ruined everything, all his life:
“You always have to say something stupid.”
Because sometimes she’d think such slender thoughts that they’d suddenly break halfway before reaching the end. And since they were so thin, even without completing them she understood them all at once. Though she could never think them again, even point to them with a single word. Since she couldn’t transmit them to Daniel, he’d always win their conversations. In some mysterious way her fainting spells were connected to this: sometimes she’d feel a thin thought that was so intense that she herself was the thought and since it broke, she’d interrupt herself in a faint.
“But there’s ab-so-lute-ly nothing wrong with her!” the old doctor of Upper Marsh was saying containing his impatience under his eyeglasses.
In fact she’d never suffered. Yet her head would sometimes spin, though rarely. Suddenly the ground would threaten to rise to her eyes, without violence, without hurry. She’d wait for it quietly but before she could understand, the floor had already sunk to somewhere she couldn’t make out, falling to the bottom of an abyss, far off like a stone thrown from a height into the sea. Her feet would dissolve into air and the space would be crossed by luminous threads, by a cold and nervous sound like violent wind escaping through a crack. Then great calm would envelop the light world. And then there was no world. And then, in a final and fresh reduction, there was no her. Just air without strength and without color. She’d think about a long shaky line — I’m fainting. A pause would be born without color, without light, without strength, she was waiting. The end of the pause would find her abandoned on the floor, the bright wind piercing the motionless window, the sun staining her feet. And that weightless silence, buzzing and smiling, of a summer afternoon in the country. She’d get off the ground, vaguely start taking shape, everything was waiting around her meekly inorganic; then she’d walk and keep living, spending hours and hours drawing straight lines without the help of a ruler, just with the weight of her hand, sometimes as if only with the spur of her thought; she’d slowly manage to trace pure and plain lines, deeply amused. It was such refreshing, such serious work; it would smooth her face and open her eyes.
Sitting in the shade of a tree, she’d soon be surrounded by empty instants because nothing had happened for a while and future seconds would bring nothing — she’d foresee. She’d calm down — she couldn’t quite disguise the broad inexplicable well-being that would sink her deep into her own pensive body, the being leaning toward a delicate and difficult sensation — but she’d hide herself for some reason trying to see the stones on the ground, her eyebrows furrowed, deceitful, all of her sly and stupid. Some curious and cold thing was happening to her, something a bit smiling with contempt but careful to go to the end, making her almost think in a futile and ironic urge: if thou art as thou sayest a living creature, bestir thyself . . . and she’d almost want to stand and pluck a slightly tender bright weed. Within her face notions were whispering liquefying in decomposition — she was a girl resting. She was looking, looking. She’d close her eyes observing
