she’d long since understood something, already forgotten it but still bore the mark of that understanding; she didn’t know how to talk or explain but nevertheless went around as if she did; so silly at the same time, so in a certain way base; what you’d call a normal person right at the beginning, affected like a silly and normal person; sometimes however a demeanor so profoundly unknown that you barely noticed it, a diluted gesture, a movement in the depth of the sea suspected at the surface. Who? who was thinking? he, he himself — he shivered with a luminous smile, as if resigned, someone just barely awake. Fingernails cut too short resting on the dry whitewash of the wall, the perfect teeth. His fingers were colliding with the halo of the objects and the people. God, give genius to those who need genius — there are so few who need it; he smiled with thin lips, with his bright and delicate health, shaking in his laughter a quality that had never attained the loss of his own being. He was taking pleasure. He looked at Vicente and placed him with his eyes next to Virgínia: above all the gazes of both were of a female and a male of two different species; yet he would never speak to Vicente, that was the quality of friendship that he was dedicating to him with open eyes. His head sharpened, intelligent, fresh, and empty: yes, he might even be able to love her despite her clear insignificance, he thought with a lively air and again was seeking a small sea snail among the sands of the beach. To take her from Vicente would be easy for Vicente, he was reflecting with swiftness and interest as if about a curled and subtle problem, yet she must have the stubbornness of a child. He looked at her with a certain limpid precision as if to compare what he was thinking with the model. What turned him on about her was the vulgarity as the vice is a turn-on in a prostitute, in some way she seemed made of her resemblance to others. Staring at her for a second with wisdom he saw her profile, silly again, a little vain, her chin resting on her chest, and straightening the flowers at her cleavage with both hands. Reality was seeming to laugh at all of them. He was taking pleasure. Her clothes made her ridiculous, recalling a tree covered with fabric, a fruit pricked by a brooch. She didn’t seem to be a woman but to imitate women with care and worry. And she would irritate; but not him, not him — he was laughing with silent and sharp pleasure. Reality was laughing at all of them. She was arranging the flowers with all her fingers. Her barely-present lips were hiding in shadows born from the position of her head. Her breasts were growing congested squeezed by her clothes, her hips were widening with fatigue, without beauty. He looked at her, her thin head forward, her eyes mobile and swiftly interested with coldness. He closed his lips; with a small effort as in an experiment he could feel a sincere fake cruelty toward her, a certain scorn. Virgínia turned her face and looked at him. He tensed up in his ivory color, surprised in the middle of the game. Both looked at each other for a long time, without interest; the man’s heart rang out heavy, unknown.
“Have you noticed, Adriano, that a lot of people together in a room and spending a while together end up thinking the same way? at least at the outset . . . Just now that fat man over there said a thing that I almost said just now . . . It seems that we end up guessing, right? But not always because after all” — she was seeming to get a grip on herself and after a small hesitation added with a certain force — “because after all everything’s relative . . . I always thought everything, everything’s relative, don’t you think? not always because naturally there’s an exception to every rule . . . of course, that goes without saying . . .”
He laughed, all his teeth appeared in silence. She turned her face in another direction looking at something new. She headed to the armchair and sat down. All night she’d watched the armchair from afar desiring undetectedly to sit on it. In truth she had always lived as if on the verge of things. The armchair was tall, narrow, and green but not a leaf green nor even an old leaf; it was a green filled with resentment and peacefulness, gathered in itself over the years; on the armrests the color had retreated with reserve and an almost brownish base was poking through sweet and martyred by the constant friction; in truth it was a fine armchair where you could have a dark, opalescent sleep — she felt fatigue and sadness. All of Irene’s living room was dizzyingly greenish, pale, mortal — Vicente was laughing. She was smiling at everyone, Vicente was talking, a cynical air of someone who’s been alive a long time.
“He’s got something feminine about him or at least something that’s very common among women. He thinks with movements, his thoughts are so primal that he acts them . . . You remember, Adriano” — how he pronounced the word “Adriano” . . . — “he came in the room that night and since he saw us all together he found himself excessive and left. All that reached him with little abstraction, a small gesture, a tiny sign came with each phase reached by thought. Daniel” — he turned suddenly toward Virgínia frightening her and she quickly looked at everyone — “Daniel would say in that case: I can’t stand people whose convulsions of intelligence I have to watch . . .”
Everyone laughed, she smiled as if she were Daniel’s mother and had the right to be shy. But from one moment to the next she thought that
