“Thank you . . .”
“But Virgínia . . .” — Vicente was making his teeth shine odiously — “how many glasses have you had already . . .”
She didn’t smile, Vicente averted his eyes, Adriano looked at them, taking pleasure, people were talking and smoking, she was drinking. It was anise liquor. The thick liquid like something warm, anise was what she’d been given in candies in childhood. Still the same taste sticking to her tongue, to her throat like a stain, that sad taste of incense, someone swallowing a bit of burial and prayer. Oh the calm sadness of memory. Both wild and domesticated, purple, solitary, vulgar, and solemn flavor. Father was bringing anise candies from town! she’d suck on them alone in the world with her love for Daniel, one per day until she finished them, nauseated and mystical, so miserly, so miserly as she was. She drank the liquor with pleasure and melancholy — trying once again to think about her childhood and simply not knowing how to get near it, since she’d so forgotten it and since it seemed so vague and common to her — wanting to fasten the anise the way one looks at an immobile object but almost not possessing its taste because it was flowing, disappearing — and she only grasped the memory like the firefly that does nothing but disappear — she liked the notion that occurred to her: like the firefly that does nothing but disappear . . . and she noted that for the first time she was thinking about fireflies in her life even though she’d lived near them for so long . . . she reflected confusedly on the pleasure of thinking of something for the first time. That was it, the anise purple like a memory. She surreptitiously kept a mouthful in her mouth without swallowing it in order to possess the anise present with its perfume: then it inexplicably withheld its smell and taste when it was stopped, the alcohol numbing and warming her mouth. Defeated she was swallowing the now-old liquid, it was going down her throat and in a surprise she was noticing that it had been “anise” for a second while it ran down her throat or after? or before? Not “during,” not “while” but shorter: it was anise for a second like a touch of the point of a needle on the skin, except the point of the needle gave an acute sensation and the fleeting taste of anise was wide, calm, still as a field, that was it, a field of anise, like looking at a field of anise. It seemed she had never tasted anise but had already tasted it, never in the present but in the past: after it happened you’d sit thinking about it and the thought . . . was the taste of anise. She moved in a vague victory. She was coming to understand more and more about the anise so much that she could almost no longer relate it to the liquid in the crystal bottle — the anise did not exist in that balanced mass but when that mass divided into particles and spread out as a taste inside of people. Anise, she was thinking distracted and seeing through the open door a sliver of the dining room and in that sliver a quadrilateral of the china cabinet and atop the china cabinet the plate of artificial fruit, radiant, smooth and stupid with lacquer. Now she was starting to follow an almost-silent feeling, so unstable that she carefully shouldn’t be aware of it. At those same instants her body was living fully in the living room such was she divining the need to surround with solitude the beginning erected in the half-light. Beneath an appearance of calm and hard brightness she was addressing herself to nobody and abandoning herself watchful as to a dream she would forget. Behind secure movements she was trying with danger and delicateness to touch the same light and elusive, to find the nucleus made of a single instant, before the quality came to rest on things, before what really came unbalanced in tomorrow — and there’s a feeling ahead and another falling away, the tenuous triumph and the defeat, perhaps nothing more than breathing. Life making itself, the evolution of the being without the destiny — the progression from the morning not aiming for the night but attaining it. Suddenly she was making an almost harsh interior gesture or was seeing Maria Clara’s sleepwalking and luminous smile and everything inside her was muddled in submerging shadow, the diffuse movements resounding. She wanted to go back down her sinuous path in the darkness but had forgotten her steps with the dizziness of a white rose. She’d forgotten in what part of her body she’d arranged herself in order to wonder. An indecisive feeling lingered like a promise of revelation . . . some day in which she wanted with real true strength . . . ah if she had time. But when would she have in life such a potent care that it would make her grasp through desire the same thing that had come to her mysteriously spontaneous. All that had remained to her was a sensation of the past. Suddenly she was only aware that something had happened because she herself in a material proof was existing now seated in the armchair. She started living again off the fact of being seated in the armchair in front. She remained absorbed staring with an almost terrorized insistence at the beyond of a
