In the winter life would become focused on itself, understanding and intimate. The smell would grow gentler, mud would pacify the countryside. Her voice which was silent for hours sounded hoarse and dull. The air was humid, the things in her bedroom were isolating themselves through the cold and only darkness would melt the furniture. Outside rain was falling without power, without pause. The lowered glass of the window was weakly lit by the sleeping light of the courtyard. Drops were running trembling, sparkling, secret, down the windowpane. But the leaves were letting go of the trees and dragged by the wind thrashing against it with an almost imperceptible whisper. She would have liked to tell or hear a long story made only of words, but Daniel at such times would stay silent and difficult, almost inexistent in the mansion. She’d grow more and more alone, watching the rain. She’d feel purplish and cold inside, in her body a little bird was slowly asphyxiated. But it was so much living that the hours would roll by happy and distant as if already marked by longing. From her wide bed she could make out the ceiling lost in the shadows, the walls fusing in half-light. Only the window was calmly shining, only the wet incessant noise. In the air a pent-up breathing was hovering in the dark like the continuous beating of a butterfly’s wings. She’d turn her back to the window, move slowly in her grandmother’s double bed. The existence of the butterfly kept gasping with its eyes fixed on her. A wind of screams was coming from inside the forest like souls fleeing in despair. It was a mixture of the voices of the owl and of the waters, of the chafing of the leaves, of the last dry cracking before the moisture, all united in the same sharp wild flight, a wind of screams piercing the mansion like a breath. Virgínia would pull the hot and thick bedspread with a slight smell of ash. Underneath it, her body and the narrow space that her body was occupying would become a familiar world. She’d then let fear finally flow, now that she was sheltered. She’d even try not to fall asleep in order to feel everything until everything got along by itself and transformed itself into something else besides fear. In that way she’d miss nothing of the silence of the winter night. The days were of a perfect sadness that ended up overtaking itself and sliding toward a limitless stillness. The branches were bending nervously in the wind, water was flowing quickly and sparkling through the leaves, a push without direction would torture the trees and from the murmur without rhythm was being born like a great fresh wind the hope of loving and living.
She’d go to the back of the mansion with the old cape over her body. For an instant more she would stop to look at the half brightness of the rain flowing and then go on. She couldn’t see much in front of her, her eyes would bump up against the rain that seemed to rise from the earth in a thick smoke. With a cold face she’d move ahead and something was pungent, high, and indecisive in her heart. She’d part her lips receiving the frozen mist in the warm center of her body. She’d walk pushing off the branches that were heavy with water, painful, trembling. She’d look back and could no longer see the mansion, rain, only rain. Then she’d say out loud in a voice that sounded strange and daring amidst the murmur of the dripping water:
“I am alone.”
As if she’d said more than she could she’d bow her head for an instant, scared, happy, wondering. She lifted her wet face and needed to say some thing more than herself, more than everything.
“I’m alone, I’m alone,” she was repeating like a small rooster singing.
Then she went back. She’d put on dry clothes, smooth her wet and limp hair, taking care of herself with seriousness. Her image was reflected in the old yellowing mirror among the shadows of the guest room and there she was hesitant and damp like the brightness of a rainy dawn on a travel day. The white face floating above the thick blouse was strange and young, her eyes were hiding in warm light and her lips were breathing calm, innocent. Some thing in her was sweetly shining in the glory of ignorance as in a god with an exposed heart, there was in her existence the afterlife of martyrdom but she hadn’t been martyred, she’d been created many times. She was looking at herself quietly hearing the rain fall in a single canticle. There she was flickering like light slow flames, her shapes in shadow and light animating the mirror.
“I,” she said to the frozen mirror in a silky and hoarse voice. And her body dissolved with the sound in the dark air of the room.
The end of the year was approaching, classes were coming to a close and Virgínia was attending the lessons sitting among the truants. The school’s glee club was strained and shaky, Virgínia would sing with squinting eyes without hearing her own voice, her fingers would wander distractedly across the nearby wall. She knew how to fake a concentrated face while checking out in an instant. Sometimes the teacher would join the choir,
