She walked toward the field slowly. Her forehead was now burning while her hard and frozen hands weren’t warming in the sun. Her head was starting to throb atop her weakness and she was shuddering at each breeze. She broke off her stroll and returned painfully home. Going up the stairs she felt someone moving on the landing, she saw Daniel spying on her; his eyes were dry, steady, they would never forgive her. What would she say to him that afternoon in the clearing? what thought would she bring him from the experiment? Fear roiled her in exhaustion. She entered the bedroom, curled up in bed. She was trembling from a cold that seemed to come from her bowels and from a tight and blackened heart, her head was still being hammered with a joyful accuracy. Am I mad? It occurred to her as if someone said it, but she couldn’t stop thinking. I should go to sleep in order to stop — but she couldn’t. What to say to Daniel? She no longer even knew if she’d seen the sky for herself like someone seeing something that exists or if she’d thought about sky and managed to invent it . . . She’d entered an unknown and crazy world, it seemed to her vaguely that the sky was existing in every instant like something always past, always present and quiet . . . and that atop it were floating her desires for things, her visions, memories, words . . . her life. And it was still the one who rose and loomed in moments of silence, giving her also a silence of thoughts . . . or was all that just one of her ideas, an invention? would seeing the truth be different from inventing the truth? her head was cracking, growing rocking like a cold ball of fire. Would seeing the truth be different from inventing the truth? her thought was after all so strong that it didn’t seem to be surrounded by any other. In her near-delirium she kept on thinking: if that sky was a reality, she was observing, once reverting she nevertheless wouldn’t know how to reach another phase, the one prior to the sky, the higher one, through effort: her power to seek had worn itself out. No, she couldn’t. But with an inexplicable certainty of perfections, she was thinking that if she could reach whatever was beyond the sky then a moment would come when it would become clear that everything was free and that one wasn’t unavoidably connected to whatever existed. You wouldn’t have to respect Father, feel pain in your injured leg, get happy about happiness . . . Scared, in an agitation that was kindling the sensitivity of her head, she stood and walked to the window. That knowledge she was feeling, would escape undeniable reality yet was true. Now it was becoming clear: it was true! everything was existing so freely that she could even overturn the order of her feelings, not be afraid of death, fear life, desire hunger, hate happy things, laugh at tranquility . . . Yes, a little touch would be enough and with a light and easy daring she’d leap over inertia and reinvent life instant by instant. Instant by instant! thoughts of glass and sun were trembling inside her. I can renew everything with a gesture, she was bravely feeling, damp like a thing being born, but confusedly she was realizing that this thought was higher than her realization and was doing nothing perplexed and serene, no gesture. Then she would slowly sink into the beneficent darkness of fainting and of happy giving-up — some minutes were passing, the flies of the warm morning were flying around the room, landing on her calm body and leaving it in order to rest on the dry and shining windowpane. Slowly she returned to reality emerging peaceful and cold from the half-light.
In the clearing she told him that she’d failed. Daniel’s first movement was rage. But, as if he’d thought better of it, he suppressed it:
“Do you want to go back to the basement tomorrow?” he asked her a bit absentmindedly.
The delicateness of the question surprised her, how she loved him, how she cared for him, those thinking eyes, that neck strong and straight but gentle. And she always failing, she rebuked herself, moved. But no, now she was afraid of the basement, she’d fainted after she got out of there, Daniel, it was dangerous to think deeply, no . . .
“Silence, the Society of Shadows wishes you to complete another task,” Daniel was finally saying, his focused eyes were pursuing a difficult idea.
Virgínia was waiting without breathing.
“Free the family from Evil.”
“What evil?” she asked immediately.
“Silence, you idiot. The Society of Shadows wishes to know if you know Esmeralda. It wishes to know if you know Esmeralda’s secret, her meetings in the garden with that . . .”
“But I’m the one who told you, don’t you remember?” Virgínia was interrupting faking excitement, flattering him.
“But shut up! Do not dare interrupt me or I will finish off the Society and you too. The Society of Shadows wishes you to tell Esmeralda’s father about Esmeralda’s meetings in the garden.”
She parted
