of this nebulous and dark examination she would rush into a confused sweetness, in the understanding of the impossibility and bewildered for a second she would lose her daring footsteps. She would seek with patience to remember more clearly her girlhood without events; some fact would arise in her memory like pillars spread out in a lucidity without foundation. As soon as she got close to them she would feel them dissolve at her touch. What had she lived off back then? she was gathering some poor facts that weren’t really dug up on her own but by the remembered word of others or by the recollection of already having managed to remember, she was assembling them, organizing them but she lacked a fluid that might solder their extremities into a single principle of life. Events were aligning spaced out, solid, hard; while the way of living was always imponderable. A certain effort would cause the memory to return, a certain attitude that she couldn’t quite figure out as if not finding a good sleeping position on a night of insomnia. Ah, if only I had time, she’d shake her head in reproach and pity. She knew she’d never quite have it. The place where she had been born — she was vaguely surprised that it still existed as if it too belonged to what is lost. She herself was now living on her feet like a raised column — what was left behind was the world before the column, a warm and intimate time, yet if she’d think about it trying to revive it, suddenly an impersonal time, fresh air coming from an abyss of sluggish clouds. She was trying to feel her past like a paralytic who uselessly gropes the unfeeling flesh of a limb, but naturally she knew her history as all people do. She was seeing herself separate from her own birth and yet was feeling diffusely that she must be somehow prolonging childhood in a single uninterrupted line and that without knowing herself developing something initiated in forgetting. The Society of Shadows . . . — she was all of a sudden smiling palely while her eyes were shining for an instant and were extinguished in the effort of reconstruction. The Society of Shadows . . . She was remembering that she and Daniel lived in little secrets, frightened; little secrets . . . was that it? no, no. Above all she had always possessed an extraordinary memory for inventing facts. Yes, and that they would meet in the clearing, yes, in the clearing. How they must have experienced fear . . . one is so courageous as a child; is that it? after they’d agreed to tell Father about Esmeralda’s meetings in the garden. Poor Esmeralda, but why? she didn’t know, the truth is that she’d told, Father had shouted, she herself had pretended to faint or really had fainted . . . so sly! life had changed then, she was sure of that, certainly because she was no longer a girl at all; then she’d sew, go on walks, visit some houses in Upper Marsh, serious, silent, Daniel would help their father at the stationer’s. Though she didn’t remember that period with clarity — she was living so much each day — she now felt she was being impatient with herself. Except what she didn’t forget — she was smiling — was that someone had drowned himself in the river . . . it might have just been a hat but they’d been frightened. In any case she was keeping the secret. Ah, she’d gone into the basement, the basement! and was that important? her memory was dissolving into shadow, the splendor going out in sweet and poor silence. A profound fatigue, a certain befuddlement was taking her over, anyway nothing had ever happened to her . . . and so why that awareness of a mystery to preserve, that gaze that meant having existed ineffably. She was vaguely aware that she’d already once lived going beyond the moments in a happy blindness that was giving her the power to follow the shadow of a thought over the course of a day, a week, a year. And that mysteriously was living perfecting oneself in the darkness without obtaining so much as a reward for that imponderable perfection. Later she’d try to tell Vicente things about her childhood and about Daniel and surprised would hear him say laughing: I already know more or less what you two were like, but what did you actually do? So she hadn’t told him anything? she’d stay quiet and scared. You could wear yourself out just being; every minute that had passed she had been, she had been. She couldn’t tolerate talking about herself, she gathered herself up insoluble, anguished — in short the essential thing would escape words spoken and that was in the end the feeling of having lived whatever she’d recounted; the delicate incessant indecision of a life seemed to be in its relationship with whoever was living it, in the intimate awareness of its contact. Sometimes she’d manage some thing similar to herself. It was however an easy and almost skilled freedom, a process of freedom — a power being used and not something moving forward while still creating itself; the difference that might exist between something that had been flung into the air and something that could fly on its own. Every once in a while however the imitation would manage to be more truthful than the thing imitated and would almost reveal it for an instant. What she was reaching was a form of memory.
Ah yes, she would have liked to move into the future so that the present might already be past and she again might try to understand it as if this game of losing were summoning her to a vice or a mystery. She was trying to be sincere as if that were the way of seeing reality; never could she then sum up her current life without joining facts to facts and
Вы читаете The Chandelier
