had fallen. Don’t rush! but suddenly something couldn’t contain itself and started to happen . . . Yes, right there the vapors would arise of the sickly, pale dawn that was like the end of a pain — Virgínia was suddenly seeing calm, submissive, and absorbed. Each dry branch would hide beneath the brightness of a cave. That land beyond the trees, castrated in the bud by the fire, would be seen through the soft mist, blackened and difficult as if through a past — she was now seeing quiet and inexpressive as if without memory. The dead man would slip for the last time among the frozen and sleeping trees. Like bells ringing from afar, Virgínia would feel in her body the touch of his presence, would get out of bed slowly, wise and blind as a sleepwalker, and inside her heart a spot would beat weakly, almost fainting. She would raise the window, her lungs enveloped by the cold mist. Plunging her eyes into the blindness of the dark, her senses beating in the frozen and sharp space; she would perceive nothing but the shady quiet, the twisted and motionless branches . . . the long expanse losing its limits in sudden and unfathomable mist — there was the limit of the possible world! Then, fragile like a memory, she would make out the tired stain of the drowned man moving away, disappearing and reappearing among the haze, plunging at last into whiteness. Forever! the wide wind would blow in the trees. She would call almost mutely: man, but man!, in order to keep him, to bring him back! But it was forever, Virgínia, listen, forever and even if Quiet Farm withers and new lands emerge indefinably never would the man return. Virgínia, never, never, Virgínia. Never. She shook herself out of the sleep into which she’d slid, her eyes had gained a shining and shrewd life, contained exclamations were aching inside her narrow chest; the hard and suffocating incomprehension was hastening her heart into the dark of the night. I don’t want the owl to cry, she shouted at herself in a soundless sob. And the owl immediately cried blackly on a branch. She jumped — or had it cried before her thought? or at the exact same time? I don’t want to hear the trees, she was saying to herself fumbling within herself, moving forward stunned. And the trees upon a sudden wind were rustling in a slow murmur of strange and tall life. Or hadn’t it been a foreboding? she was begging herself. I don’t want Daniel to move. And Daniel was moving. Her breath light, her hearing new and surprised, she seemed to be able to penetrate and flee things in silence like a shadow; weak and blind, she was feeling the color and the sound of whatever was almost happening. She was tremulously moving ahead of herself, flying with her senses ahead crossing the tense and perfumed air of the new night. I don’t want the bird to fly, she was saying to herself now almost a light in her chest despite the terror, and in a tired and difficult perception was presaging the future movements of things an instant before they ring out. And if she wanted to she’d say: I don’t want to hear the rolling of the river, and there was no nearby river but she would hear its deaf wail over small stones . . . and now . . . now . . . yes . . .!
“Virgínia! Daniel!”
In confusion everything was hurrying scared and dark, their mother’s call was sprouting from the depths of the mansion and bursting between them in a new presence. The voice had not altered the silence of the night but had split its darkness as if the cry were white lightning. Before she was aware of her movements, Virgínia found herself inside the house, behind the closed door. The parlor, the stairs were stretching in indistinct and somber silence. The lit lamps were flickering on their wires under the wind in a prolonged mute movement. Beside her was Daniel, his lips bloodless, hard, and ironic. In the quiet of the Farm some unbridled horse was slowly moving the grass with thin legs. In the kitchen they were rummaging through silverware, a sudden sound of a bell and Esmeralda’s steps quickly crossed a bedroom . . . the lit lamp flickering calmly, the sleeping stairs breathing. Then — neither from relief nor from the end of a fright, but in itself inexplicable, alive, and mysterious — then she felt a long, bright, high instant open inside her. Stroking with cold fingers the old latch of the door, she narrowed her eyes smiling with mischief and deep satisfaction.
Quiet Farm and its lands extended some miles from the houses clustered around the school and the health clinic, keeping a distance from the center of the municipality of Upper Marsh, to which they belonged. The mansion belonged to their grandmother; her children had married and lived far away. The youngest son had brought his wife there and in Quiet Farm Esmeralda, Daniel, and Virgínia had been born. Little by little the furniture had defected, sold, broken, or grown old and the bedrooms were emptying palely. Virgínia’s, cold, light, and square, had nothing more than a bed. On the headboard she’d deposit her dress before going to sleep and sheathed in her thin petticoat, her feet dirty with earth, hide beneath the enormous queen-size sheets with extended pleasure.
“It’d be preferable to have more furniture and fewer bedrooms,” Esmeralda would complain lowering her eyes with rage and annoyance, her big feet bare.
“Quite the contrary,” her father would answer when she wouldn’t shut up. The stairs meanwhile were covered with a thick carpet of purple velvet, dating from the time of her grandmother’s wedding, branching out through the hallways to the rooms in a sudden luxury, safe and serious. The doors would open and instead of the cozy wealth that the carpet announced you found emptiness, silence, and shadow, the wind
