spent her whole life sitting on rocks; another reality is that she’d traversed her whole life looking at the darkness before going to sleep and moving around in search of some comfort while some thin and awakened thing was lurking: tomorrow. Yes, how many things she was seeing — she sighed slowly looking around her with sadness. She’d thought to find other species in the city . . . Yet she still kept sitting on rocks, noticing a glance in a person, meeting a blind man, only hearing certain words . . . she was seeing what she was making out for the first time and it was something that seemed to have completed the capacity of her eyes. A long empty well-being seized her, she crossed her fingers with delicateness and affectation, set about looking. But the sky was fluttering so frayed, robust, so without surface . . . What she was feeling was without depth . . . but what she was feeling . . . above all fainting without strength . . . yes, swooning in the sky . . . like her . . . Quick thick circles were moving away from her heart — the sound of a bell unheard but heavily felt in the body in waves — the white circles were blocking her throat in a big hard bubble of air — there wasn’t even a smile, her heart was withering, withering, moving off through the distance hesitating intangible, already lost in an empty and clean body whose contours were widening, moving away, moving away and all that existed was the air, so all that existed was the air, the air without knowing that it existed and in silence, in silence high as the air. When she opened her eyes things were slowly emerging from dark waters and shining wetly sonorous on the surface of her consciousness, still wavering from the faint. The water from the dam was murmuring deep in her interior, so distant that it had already surpassed her body infinitely behind. The wisdom of the cold air was awakening the flesh of her face stinging it with freshness. My God, how happy am I, she thought in a weak and luminous jolt. Waking so girlish from her faint, she was smiling exhausted, feeling as if she were too little to remain without protective thoughts or experience atop a hill hearing the other hill like another world living painstakingly on Sunday. She was feeling in silence that after a faint she was in the greatest part of life because there was neither love nor hope that could transcend that serious sensation of nascent flight. But why was that instant not calming her with the satisfaction of the attained goal . . . why? it was extending her to the heights, stretching her out almost desperate with the tension of a bow full of its own movement . . . as if living that way on the summit she’d feel more than the potency of her great dark body and wipe herself out in her own perception. Her heart was still beating with fatigue and she was thinking: I fainted, that’s what it was, I fainted. She was looking at the red and illuminated light hovering in the half-lit forest. What did her light mean? her eyes kept demanding opening clearings in the sweet confusion of her fatigue. She couldn’t understand, she could agree, just that, and only with her head, assenting, scared. She was agreeing with the afternoon, agreeing with that fragile power that would sustain her as she met the air, agreeing with her joyful fear — the fear of facing the dinner with almost strangers, Vicente’s love, her own everyday fake feelings? that watchful error — she was agreeing with the living hill saying out loud, out loud inside her: ah, yes, yes! ardently united and quiet. Not however on the level of undeniable reality, only in a certain truth where you could say everything without ever making a mistake, there where there wasn’t even such a thing as a mistake and where everything would live ineffably by the power of the same permission, there where she herself was living splendidly erased, vacant and thing, purely thing like the moist blinking of a bitch lying against the air and panting, agreeing deeply without knowing like a bitch. She felt almost close to fainting again, along with the desire to yield — and even in the dry present she still belonged to the previous part of her life that was getting lost in a calm distance.
After fainting everything was as if easy. She got her balance. She hadn’t fainted in years. Night was now almost falling and lowering her eyelids she could feel the deadened rays of light like somber translucent music tumbling down the mountain in a supple torrent abandoned to the power of its own destiny. She was squeezing with one of her hands the rough handle of the umbrella. It would be impossible for it to rain now, she was feeling looking distracted at the cold sky of the mirror. It was confusingly seeming to her that it would also be impossible for her to free herself from her way and follow another path — she was smiling a bit serious and floating in a frightened but in itself peaceful feeling — so potent and imprisoned she and her nature were seeming to find themselves inside the tenuous balance of their lives. But there was a freedom — like a desire, like a desire — above the possibility of choosing, in her and in her nature, and from it would come the odd and tired serenity of the near-night without rain in the mountains, the laziness once again renewed inside her body.
She opened the door of her little apartment, penetrated the cold and stuffy surroundings of the living room. Slight stain was rippling in one of the corners, expanding like a light nearly erased coolness. She screamed low, sharp — but they’re lovely! — the room was breathing with half-closed eyes in the silence of mute pickaxes
