not reaching the feelings themselves. Three times a week she could go to Vicente’s house and love him because three times a week he would hand in to the magazines whatever he was working on three times a week. The other days were a great white pause. She would wake up, drink water, sit down in the living room deposited in the flowery robe that stretched across her breasts and behind — Mother, Mother arising through her. She’d pace back and forth without knowing what to do with herself as if she had more body than she needed. She’d hardly feed herself. But suddenly something in her would break down and her being would eat with great gusto, violently, miserly, bonbons, sweets, very spicy dishes — she who had always been frugal like a plant. After thinking for an entire day about a food that was for sale very far away, she’d decide to go out and buy it and gained in life. She’d bring it home shuddering with impatience and devour it. With empty, tired, slightly dumbfounded eyes, she’d fall asleep heavily. After Vicente she’d grown fatter, and since she was somewhat tall, her body was now existing with twice the power, more firm. Her waist had grown more pronounced, her skin had lost its dryness and the gilding of the sun and stretched out smooth and white — her hips had broadened and now she was a woman. But her face had lost its vague fire. She’d keep calm with a slightly outmoded appearance like a recent arrival. Only in white did she acquire an urbane tone and as if she felt it she chose that color for her best attire. But without the outings, without space for a broad life, she was always tired. Her hands playing distractedly on the table, she’d even imagine that it wouldn’t be long now before she died because a constant force was attracting her toward the earth and sleep was useless, inside it she did not find repose. She was getting the impression that she’d already lived everything despite not being able to say in which moments. And at the same time her whole life appeared able to be summed up in a small gesture forward, a light daring and then in a soft wince without pain, and no path then to head down — without landing straight on the ground, suspended in the atmosphere almost without comfort, almost comfortable, with the tired languor that precedes sleep. Yet around her things were living so violently sometimes. The sun was fire, the earth solid and possible, plants were sprouting alive, trembling, whimsical, houses were made so that in them bodies could be sheltered, arms would wrap around waists, for every being and for every thing there was another being and another thing in a union that was a burning end with nothing beyond. In reality however she possessed a harmony of her own, yes, yes, yes, like a flower that makes up a whole from its petals. Which didn’t stop the despair of the things that she was not from at times being born from her heart and stopping her from getting too filled with whatever she had never possessed, so ambitious and envious she had always been.
She’d returned from Vicente’s house feeling ill, her body was aching, she’d vomited with wide, sad eyes. On the second day of illness the fever rose. She was no longer feeling especially envious. She looked at herself in the mirror, saw her sparkling and motionless eyes, her parted lips. Her breathing was burning her chest, it was wheezing and superficial. She was going to go back to the table and sit but in a sudden movement of almost unexpected rage entered her bedroom, got dressed and went out, the gestures united in one single push by the fever that didn’t let her pay attention to the time that was elapsing. The fresh wind was pacifying the heat of her body and her face — and that was connecting itself almost immediately to the instant of rage. She felt so weak that her limbs were giving out at times; then she would lean on a tram post pretending to await transport. She finally sat on a garden bench and lost for long and hollow minutes the awareness of herself and of the place where she found herself. When understanding returned like a heart that starts beating again with power, she was in the middle of a thought whose beginning she couldn’t remember: so it’s preferable to give . . . so it’s preferable to give . . . Children were playing ring-around-the-rosy, their shouts sparkling in the garden, resplendent drops of the water from the fountain filling the air with fine glitter. She couldn’t look at it, lowering her injured eyes and fixing them to the dark earth, to the grass pacifying and tender as in a cold balm. The clean children with bows in their hair were now playing badminton living extraordinarily. The cries were piercing her with effort and one of the stranger ones was freezing inside her, she was gnawing on it astonished still hearing it almost as if touching it with her fingers, crystallized in dark scarlet, running with a vacant shimmering along a sinuous ribbon . . . she was growling it without understanding it, without understanding the world, horrified and calm. The birdie crashed at her feet. One of the children shouted at her:
“Throw it!”
She looked at them in silence without a movement. They came near, peered at her with attention and curiosity, the little intelligent eyes examining her face, approaching like trusting rats. They formed a semicircle of waiting and silence. The skinny girl who was waiting for the birdie howled from far off with the veins of her neck bulging:
“Come back!”
Since nobody was answering, she herself came over, put her hands on her waist, her body hitched up, extended her neck forward. She furrowed her face as if the sun were out and set
