“I hold myself back in order not to be loved by everyone.”
That wasn’t it! that wasn’t it! the feeling that followed was as good as if she’d said what she didn’t even know how to think and even feel. But with her eyes half-open and a constant desire she could see herself like veils heaped under lights before the start of a waltz — though she’d grown so much, her movements reflected, and the fear of the clean evening returning, sad or happy and a certain way of seeing returning in which she could sometimes fall not knowing how to take on a false demeanor among the unknown people, unable to steal away like dormant flowers nonetheless giving off perfume uselessly, seeing and hearing everything, mingling and wandering bemused. She mustered a little courage straightening her body and falsely giving it a quicker movement that sounded too alive in the empty room. She headed to the living room. She sliced through that dining room quietly lit by a single pale color, whitish and gold, that was existing solidly beneath the sweet cold dust. She lost her urge — she’d always felt like a prisoner of luxury, of those shining surfaces, shifting and hostile. She stopped watchful. The silence was holding itself back in the set table. Coming from a world not as clean as this one a fly or two was flying over the placid and sparkling plates. A stopped smile was settling over the entire room as if it were so stretched out that it had lost meaning and were just its own reminiscence. Virgínia was floating between the table, the air, and her own body fluttering in search — so indecipherable was that party silence. Don’t forget, don’t forget, she was thinking distractedly observing as if she were about to leave and needed to tell what she was seeing. Also because she was feeling that the alcohol would abbreviate the memory of those instants. She extended her lightly drunken hands in an attempt at tenderness. Without knowing why, surprised and delighted, she was feeling herself on the verge of a revelation. Don’t forget . . . A halo of pale excitement was shining around the ferociously blazing lights, the lamps burning themselves with pleasure, bloodless. Don’t forget. In a glacial and sleek blink a glass existed for a moment and extinguished itself forever in the watchful silence of the china cabinet. She attempted once more an ordinary gesture; she managed to extend her fingers lightly, achieved nothing, retreated. Since what could she do in relation to that world? the two drinks were warming her, wrapping her in a faint bodily fatigue while her lucid eyes were noticing. She was feeling foreign to that milieu but was guessing that she was subordinated to it by fascination and humility. In a few short minutes she would enter the living room by destiny and everyone would not see her while smiling at her for a second. How to free oneself? not to free oneself from something but just free oneself because she wouldn’t be able to say from what. She not-thought for an instant, her head bent. She took a napkin, a bread roll . . . with an extraordinary effort, breaking in herself a stupefied resistance, deflecting destiny, she threw them out the window — and in that way kept her power. One day when she was small the teacher had sent her to get a glass of water for a visitor — she, who sat in the back row, the never-chosen one! She’d gone trembling with pride but on the way back, gripping with care her prize, not out of revenge, not out of anger, she had spit in the water keeping her own power. What else? she was seeking while smiling, her eyes shining with warm love because without assistants she was feeling harmonious and powerful in that live, calm room. What else? she was pushing her drunkenness with sweetness. A wine glass was shuddering in still sparks, its crystal connecting nervous and ardent to the light of the lamps. She stretched out her small hands, so damp, took it delicately as if it were electric in its fragility; intensely slow she let it fall out the window shattering in herself the resistance of her life; she heard its shards singing rapidly alongside the distant cement. Frightened she listened for an instant to the room where Irene’s guests were gathered: nobody had heard and
