all the impenetrable points of her narrow body, thinking all over herself without words, recopying existence itself. She was looking, looking. Slowly, from the silence, her being was starting to live more, an abandoned instrument that started making sound all by itself, her eyes discerning because the first matter of the eyes was looking. Nothing would inspire her, she was isolated inside her capacity, existing through the same weak energy that had caused her to be born. She was thinking simply and clearly. She was thinking small and clear music that was stretching a single thread and unfurling bright, fluorescent and moist, water in water, meditating a silly arpeggio. She was thinking untranslatable sensations distracting herself secretly as if humming, profoundly unaware and stubborn, she was thinking a single swift streak: in order to be born things must have life, for birth is a movement — if they said that movement is necessary only for the thing giving birth and not for the thing that is born that’s not right because the thing that gives birth cannot give birth to something outside its nature and thus always gives birth to a thing of its own kind and so it is with movements too — in this way stones were born that have no power of their own but were once alive otherwise they wouldn’t have been born and now they’re dead because they don’t have movement in order to give birth to another stone. No thought was extraordinary, words are what would be. She was thinking without intelligence about her own reality as if discerning and could never use what she was feeling, her meditation was a way of living. It was coming to her without a shape of its own yet at the same time within it was chiming some precise and delicate quality like thin numbers entangled with thin numbers and suddenly a new light number ringing polished and dry — while the true sensation of her whole body was expectant. And finally something was happening so far away, ah so far away and maybe reduced to a yes that she was growing tired to the point of annihilation, thinking now in words: I am very, very tired, you know. Go, go, something profoundly satiated and already known in her body was murmuring with a certain anguish, go, go. But where? The wind, the wind was blowing. Barely hushed and on the lookout, as if facing the north or the east she seemed to be headed toward some true thing through the great incessant taking-shape of tiny dead events, leading the delicateness of being in the direction of an almost exterior feeling as if by touching the earth with her bare and watchful foot she might feel inaccessible water flowing. She was traversing long distances simply by assigning herself a direction, immobile, sincere. But she couldn’t quite be sucked in, as if it were her own fault. She’d help herself by feeling a vague notion of travel, of the day she’d leave for the city with Daniel, a bit of hunger and fatigue, barely touching her lunch. Sometimes she’d almost approach a thought but she never reached it though everything around was breathing its beginning to her; she’d look with astonishment at the space devoid of mystery, the breeze would raise shivers of understanding on her skin; an instant would yet penetrate the silence seeking in its depths a thread to grab on to. And if a bird were flying or the cry of a winged creature gushing from the nearby forest, she was wrapped by a cold whirl, the wind spinning dry leaves and dust, vague unfinished beginnings, in a vortex of her and of whatever no longer was her. The moment had arrived to let climb to her outermost nerves the wave that was taking shape on the near side of her weakness and that could die of its own urging. From particle to particle, however, the indistinct thought was coming down violently mute until opening in the middle of her body, on her lips, complete, perfect, incomprehensible because it was so free from its own shaping — I need to eat. She took from it then nothing more than its softness, barely alighting on her being; she could go forward without being pushed, without being called, going along simply because moving was the quality of her body. That was her impression and her stomach was plunging deeper, joyful, famished. But she was still seated. She didn’t seem to know how to stand up and actually guide herself, distressingly she was lacking a direction. She stretched into the distance as if slowly she could lose her shape — she thought she could hear the voices and the sounds from the mansion and leaned forward to try to make them out. She leaned back against the tree, rubbing one of her dusty feet, going beyond her understanding and with a kind of irrepressible force attaining misunderstanding like a discovery. Now unsettled, motionless, reality seemed to bother her. She was thinking with her mother’s languid voice: I’m nervous. In a misgiving without sweetness, she was fluttering aridly in the fanciful and hysterical immobility. Until the tautest rope would snap, as if a presence were abandoning her body and she was getting closer to her own ordinary existence. Pushed, extraordinarily indifferent and no longer very hungry, she was forgetting everything forever like a person who’s forgotten.
But what she loved more than anything was making clay figurines, which no one had taught her. She’d work on a small cement path in the shade, next to the last window of the basement. When she wanted to with great strength she’d go down the road to the river. On one of its banks, which was slippery but scalable, she found the best clay that one could desire: white, supple, sticky, cold. Just by touching it, feeling its deliciously joyful and blind delicateness, those timidly alive bits, a person’s heart would warm and
Вы читаете The Chandelier
