After obtaining the material, in a slump of exhaustion she could lose her desire to make figurines. Then she’d go on living forward like a girl.
One day however she was feeling her open and thin body and deep down a serenity that couldn’t hold itself back, alternating between not recognizing itself and breathing in joy, things incomplete. She herself sleepless like light — wild, fleeting, empty, but deep down an ardor that was a desire to head toward one thing only, an interest that would make her heart speed up without rhythm . . . suddenly how vague it was to live. All this could pass too, night falling suddenly, the darkness upon the warm day. But sometimes she’d remember the wet clay, run fearful out to the courtyard — plunge her fingers into that mixture, cold, mute, constant as waiting, kneading, kneading, slowly extracting forms. She’d make children, horses, a mother with a child, a mother alone, a girl making things out of clay, a boy at rest, a happy girl, a girl seeing if it would rain, a flower, a comet with a tail sprinkled with washed and sparkling sand, a wilted flower beneath the sun, the cemetery of Upper Marsh, a girl looking . . . Much more, much more. Little shapes that meant nothing but that were in fact mysterious and calm. Sometimes tall like a tall tree, but they weren’t trees, they weren’t anything . . . Sometimes like a little running river, but they weren’t a river, they weren’t anything . . . Sometimes a little object in an almost starry shape but tired like a person. A task that would never end, that was the most beautiful and careful thing she’d ever known: since she could make anything that existed and anything that did not!
After they were ready the figurines were placed in the sun. Nobody had taught her but she would deposit them in the patches of sun on the ground, patches with neither wind nor heat. The clay would dry gently, keeping its light tone, not wrinkling, not cracking. Even when it was dry it seemed delicate, evanescent, and moist. And she herself could mistake it for the sticky clay. Those little figures seemed quick almost as if about to move. She was looking at the immobile figurine. Out of love or merely going on with the work she’d close her eyes and gather herself into a live and luminous force with the quality of danger and of hope, into a silky power that would run through her body quickly with an urging that was destined for the figure. When at last she let go, her fresh and tired well-being would come because she could send something away though she didn’t know what. - - - maybe. Yes, she sometimes had a taste inside her body, a high and distressing taste that would tremble between power and fatigue — it was a thought like heard sounds, a color in her heart. Before it smoothly dissolved quick in her inner air, forever fleeting, she’d touch an object with her fingers, surrendering. And when she wanted to say something that came subtly, dark, and smooth and that could be dangerous, she’d rest just one finger, a pale, polished, and transparent finger — a trembling finger pointing. In the slenderest and most hurt part of her feeling she would think: I will be happy. In fact she already was in that instant and if instead of thinking “I am happy” she sought out the future that was because she was darkly choosing a forward movement that would serve as a form for her feeling.
Thus she had gathered a procession of tiny things. They sat almost unnoticed in her bedroom. They were figurines as skinny and tall as she was herself. Detailed, slightly disproportionate, joyful, a bit surprised — sometimes they looked like a lame man laughing! Even her most mellow figures had a watchful immobility like a saint’s. And they’d seem to lean toward whoever was looking at them like saints. Virgínia could stare at them all morning long and her love and her surprise would not
