“Virgínia’s quiet tonight,” said Irene smiling, awakening quickly. Her role seemed to be to nudge them. Everyone pulled themselves together with a light movement of sighing.
“Oh, it’s not just today,” Vicente answered in a falsely happy tone, “she is, how can I put it?, a serious creature . . .” — Everyone laughed and thus he repudiated her in public extricating himself clearly from the responsibility of her existence. They made the record play in a shady corner of the living room and she felt the music unfurl above the sounds, she who never thought about music. Suddenly the sounds were rising, harmonic, high, chaste, without sadness. They were sounds so connected to themselves, they would sometimes fall into a richness almost heavy but not complex, only comparable to the smell of the sea, to the smell of dead fish — she closed her eyes stricken, tolerating something sweet, sharp, and full of joy: no, it wasn’t like love, not spinning helplessly in the nausea of desire, not loving meanly its own agony. Pain, but a pain that was not the kind that would appear on those interrupted and impossible paths — how things were falling into themselves, becoming true, finally true, oh God, God, help me. That was the sensation: oh God, help me. Her despair was mysteriously going beyond the bitterness of life and her most secret joy was escaping the pleasure of the world. That intimate impression of astonishment. How new it all was, how she was freeing herself from all of them, from her own love of life, calm and without ardor.
“Now I’ll put it on a second time . . .”
She opened the eyes she had closed for an instant, saw herself sitting in the armchair in a quiet posture, her body closed inside itself. Several people were moving, passing one another luminous. Her back curved, she couldn’t pose for a Greek sculpture but was profoundly a woman, a sensation of unreality overtook her. It suddenly seemed to her — as if she were watching something disappear in silence — it seemed to her that she was erring herself, mystified and fluctuating; and how high the error was, and unattainable, even the error. She looked with vacant eyes at a certain immobile and light life around her while her lips were parting in a scared smile — she touched with the palm of her hands the thin railing of the shelf next to her and upon the rough contact returned to the surface of the occasion and the dinner party, Maria Clara walked over to her and as if giving her a quick flower said smiling:
“Virgínia come one day to my house . . . I’m not just saying that,” she repeated . . . “Come . . . I live alone . . . We’ll have a good conversation just between us girls, we’ll talk about bras, menstrual cramps . . . whatever you want . . . all right?”
Virgínia was laughing confused, charmed, laughing too much animating her body: yes, yes . . . all right . . . The circle formed tight and noisy beside the door and Virgínia stayed beyond it having in front of her fat and dark backs shaken by movements of laughter that she couldn’t follow. Being expelled belonged to her own nature. She tried to squeeze between two men but suddenly realized her gesture and retreated, she remained a few steps away from the noise, looked around, free. She finally slid her eyes toward the window, toward the black and shapeless night that was stretching beyond the pale and vivid light of the living room. Wherever she was she could always look at the night, there was time — the branches were hovering suspended in the frozen darkness and each leaf encrusted itself in the air as if forever. The city below was shimmering and cold, from afar it seemed motionless, calm and dangerous. And since nobody saw her she took one more glass from the tray, drank, coughed a little, nothing was noticed, things were wavering shining and suffocated. Everyone was extending a hand to a woman, she too offered hers and indeed it wasn’t long before she felt it lightly crushed with a certain dampness, an unpleasant insistence and several words. Irene. The car was gliding smoothly, in the tepid interior the motor was breathing like a heart. With extreme comfort and yearning she shrank between Vicente and Adriano. With eyes shining and hard from whiskey they were talking while coming closer to Virgínia feeling the heat of her body, staring eyes dissimulating, brief words. Amid her sleepiness she felt a bit unhappy and abandoned, heavy eyelids, lips numb and cynical. In a fluctuating and fleeting crisis she wanted to be protected, for someone to defend her, consider her excessively pure to be touched like that, erring and stirring her — between the two men comfort was deepening her. From the street sounds of solitary horns were coming, her pupils dampened with sleep she was peering at the shadow. Without realizing it she dozed a little clutching with vigor in her lap the wide hat that was swimming white atop the half-light, seeing as in a dream the lights blinking in the empty city. The trip was so fast that soon she was undoing the sheets from the bed, opening her lips saying a name full of softness and darkness: vicente. The flowers were shuddering vivid in the darkness. As if she were dissolving and plunging into
