“I don’t even have the right to a son?”
“To a daughter, she should say” — Virgínia would think without raising her eyes from the cup because in those very moments the neigh of some horse in the pasture would hurt like a sad and thoughtful daring. Esmeralda and Mother would talk at length in the bedroom, their eyes shining with quick understandings. Every once in a while the two would work on the cut of a dress as if defying the world. Father never spoke to Esmeralda and nobody ever mentioned what had happened to her except from a distance. Not even Virgínia had ever asked about it; she could live with an unrevealed secret in her hands without anxiety as if that were the true life of things. Esmeralda would clasp the long skirt she wore at home, climb the stairs, burn an angry, insistent, and solemn perfume in her room; you couldn’t stay in her room for more than a few minutes, suddenly the smell cloyed and stunned in a chapel-like queasiness. But she herself would stay absorbed before the bowl that served as a vase, seem to inhale the hot flame with her strong, feminine, and hypocritical eyes. All her underwear was embroidered by hand; Father didn’t look at Esmeralda as if she were dead. The last time he’d touched her had been precisely when she’d spoken once again of the journey that Daniel and Virgínia would one day make to the city in order to study languages, business, and piano — Daniel who had such a good ear and practiced sometimes on a piano in Upper Marsh. With the other daughter, he’d say, he wouldn’t do the same because “you only set loose a toothless animal.” Esmeralda would sit with Mother at mealtimes; she’d always come down a bit late and slow, but Father wouldn’t say anything. And she could also turn up pale and with bags under her eyes because she’d gone dancing in the house of a family in Upper Marsh. Mother would then come down invigorated by exhaustion, her body frightened, such was the excitement that would overtake her when she started going to parties again. Her eyes would go blank and she’d envision the salon again as she chewed. Sweet and shining the girls once again would spread across the balconies, the parlor, in calm and contained poses, waiting their turn to be entwined; then they’d dance, their faces almost serious; the more immoral ones would heave their bosoms with innocence, all of them coiffed and content, in their eyes a single and indecipherable thought; but the men, as always, were inferior, pale, and dashing; they’d sweat a lot; since they were few in number, some girls would end up dancing with other girls, excited, laughing, jumping, their eyes surprised. She was chewing, her gaze fixed, feeling the incomprehensible reality of the dance floating like a lie. Father would stare at them in silence. Before starting to eat and letting everyone begin, he’d agree with a certain sadness:
“Well then.”
Virgínia loved him so much at times like this that she’d want to weep into her plate out of hope and confusion. Mother would sigh with thoughtful eyes:
“Who knows, my God.”
But she’d spend the days like a guest in her own house, she wouldn’t give orders, taking care of nothing. Her flowery, worn-out dress would cover her floppily, allow a glimpse of her long breasts, fat and bored. She’d once been alive, with small decisions every minute — her tired and angry eye would shine. That’s how she’d lived, married, and caused Esmeralda to be born. And then a slow loss had supervened, she didn’t encompass her own life with her gaze, though her body kept living, separate from other bodies. She was lazy, tired, and vague, Daniel had been born and then Virgínia, shaped in the lower part of her body, uncontrollable — a little skinny, hairy, their eyes actually even beautiful. She was clinging to Esmeralda as to the remains of her final existence, from that time when she’d breathe forward telling herself: I’m going to have a daughter, my husband’s going to buy an upholstered living room set, today is Monday . . . From the days before she married she lovingly kept a nightgown thin from use as if the days without a husband or children were glorious. That’s how she’d protect herself from her husband, from Virgínia, and from Daniel — her eyes blinking. Her husband bit by bit had imposed a certain kind of silence with his cunning and still body. And bit by bit, after the heyday of prohibiting purchases and spending, she had found out with brooding joy, in one of the greatest urges of her life, that she wasn’t living in her own home, but in her husband’s, in her old mother-in-law’s. Yes, yes; before she’d connect with joyful threads to whatever was going on and now the threads were fattening stickily or breaking and she’d bump abruptly into things. Everything was so irremediable, and she was living so cut off, but so cut off, Maria — she’d turn her thoughts to one of her little schoolmates, one she’d lost touch with. She was simply going on, Maria. She’d look at Daniel and Virgínia, calmly surprised and haughty; they’d been born. Even the birth had been easy, she couldn’t even remember the pain, her lower parts were nice and healthy, she’d think while confusedly glancing
