“Yes?” she asked with her face tilted in expectation and vague distress, “yes?”
“I . . . ,” Virgínia attempted.
“Yes?” — but suddenly the old lady’s eyes lit up and in a little muffled shout she flinched: “come in, come in, your suitcases! ah, the man with the car has to be paid, come in Virgínia, come in, your suitcases, right? Arlete . . . ,” she said turning toward the dark and silent interior, “Arlete, our cousin is here . . .”
Her voice had changed imperceptibly and through it Virgínia penetrated into the relationship between the two old maids. Nobody answered from within and the two women were standing for an instant in the doorway waiting. Henriqueta suddenly approved with her head as if she’d heard some answer.
“Come in, my child,” she said with more resolve. — And as Virgínia was moving ahead she seemed to remember in a fright, stopped short, extended an arm halting her with haste and unexpected power, murmured blinking her eyes with difficulty and trying to repeat: “you have to pay the car, you have to pay the car . . . the luggage charge too . . . the expense was yours . . .”
“Yes . . . ,” Virgínia stammered.
Henriqueta was tall, ruddy, and slow. Her face of smooth very silky skin was stained with big, shiny freckles; her neck united itself to her body in curves as on a porcelain doll; she was bald, used a wispy toupee held in place by a ribbon, wore a skirt made of brown cloth turned black, long all the way to her swollen and freckled feet. She was moving slowly hesitating as if her thoughts were always being interrupted by new ideas and she were still mute and confused — but her face was made of surprise and goodness. They entered the long living room with wooden floorboards. In the near-darkness, at a large oval table, Arlete was sitting. She raised her head from her sewing, examined Virgínia with an attention that was trying hard to stay present.
“Good morning, Virgínia,” she said at last.
Arlete was small, her face narrowed into an attentive and distracted needle. Her back was broken, her chest was sticking out in a point beneath her tired and sickly eyes. She seemed weak and caustic, she sewed for children. Virgínia dragged her suitcases up the old stairs to the moldy attic. She halted an instant. Her appearance recalled dust that once shaken was slowly returning to its place. Through a single glazed window that couldn’t be opened gray and deaf light was entering, without shadows. She lay down for a bit on the hard bed, inhaling that indefinable smell of old age in which she’d been wrapped ever since she’d entered the small dry garden before ringing the bell. Her eyes burning and tired, she was feeling an unchangeable and calm pain in her chest as if she’d swallowed her own heart and could hardly stand it — she was pressing her fingers over the eyes that were stubbornly opening staring and absent, she managed to contain them, scrutinizing the small conquered darkness and as if she were connecting for a few instants to her so-disappeared self, to the secluded and watchful silence, she sighed at last and slowly, looking around wounded and pensive, began to live with the cousins.
The house was so old that its previous inhabitant had moved because he was afraid it would collapse. Below Virgínia’s attic, which topped the triangular construction, was a room where the cousins had installed the sewing atelier. This dark and dusty chamber seemed even more decayed than the rest of the house. The light came scant through a grated window almost flush to the roof. Because in the attic the wooden floorboards didn’t quite come together, Virgínia would crouch down, place one eye on the ground and see in a strange and deep tableau the two old maids sewing, the long naked table, the coffeepot beneath a quilted cosy, the dirt, the scattered cuttings — the sewing machine activated by Henriqueta’s sluggish foot would buzz in the air, seem to shake the dust and soft light all around it. Virgínia would get up in a thrust pressing her angry lips with the back of her hand and the room would ring out with the power of her steps. Henriqueta was shouting from downstairs in a voice that always seemed agitated by a constant tremor:
“The house is falling, Virgínia . . .”
One morning — the day had begun rainy and the drops of water were flowing behind the windowpane — she went down late for breakfast, pale and inexpressive, with that resigned and haughty look that the days with the cousins had lent her. Arlete looked at her for an instant. And suddenly for no reason as if with effort she’d hardly been able to contain herself, she said to her in a low voice, roughly:
“And why don’t you sew with us?”
Henriqueta stopped short, frightened, coffeepot in hand:
“Arlete, Arlete . . .”
Virgínia was looking at them mute . . . So . . . so . . . they . . . , she was saying to herself dizzy with rage, so they were wanting to drag her, subject her . . . wanting . . .
“I don’t know how to sew!” she shot at them with smothered violence.
Arlete and Henriqueta looked at each other with exaggerated surprise and immediately as if they couldn’t disguise how comical it was.
“But teach yourself!” screamed Arlete raising her crippled chest.
Virgínia went pale, narrowed her darkened eyes. My God,
