The Chandelier

breathing; it was a deep, blind possibility that would finally conclude with a sigh and in a quick well-being, in a pale sleep full of exhaustion and scrambled dreams in which she’d seem to want to scream freeing herself from the sheets: my fruitfulness suffocates me. If she had a child she’d always be in panic. Every second she’d expect to see him put beans in his ears with mischief and wisdom, put his little finger in the electric socket. And every second she’d be thankful, skinny, and nervous, for the miracle of nothing happening — because she’d be skinny and nervous. Until, accustomed to the gentleness of events, she would find peace, drinking tea with cakes and embroidering. And then the child would head straight for the electric socket. Only her fear would prevent tragedies, only her fear. She put on her gray wool cloak, went to the zoo. The monkeys weren’t doing anything, grooming themselves, watching, hanging from the bars blinking, making signs, watching like sweet prostitutes. She was approaching the tiger breathing in the heat and the vice of the smell of the cage; conquering her own destiny she was forcing herself to look alone in the world into the eyes of the tiger, at its rolling walk, raising herself above the terror, until from it a kind of truth was emerging, something that was pacifying her like a thing, she was sighing while wrinkling her eyes. That repugnant smell of fatigue was doing her good, she was closing her woman’s teeth. The head guard said to her:

“Some people I have to kick out or arrest. Imagine, madam, that some men light a cigarette, take a drag, and stick it in the animal’s snout.”

She said: how horrible, but her body stirred quietly inside, hurried and dark. The rheas were laughing silent, full of joy and silliness but there was a sign warning that they were dangerous. They didn’t look it, the thin and sinuous neck directly stuck to the voluminous hips, full of calm movements. She was walking slowly, sinking the heels of her shoes into the mud, it was winter, the hush of the empty garden, only the occasional murmur of the animals, the slight cry of a bird. Her steps in the wide squares surrounded by cages, were cautious. She would pass the immobile and cold cobra with her heart dry with courage. One day it started to rain, she was looking, wet, at the animals pacing worried in the cages, the puddles of water were singing. The black velvet jaguar was moving its legs, its paws were touching and leaving the ground in a soft, fast, and silent step. The female, with her face raised above her reclined body, was panting rapt with satiation, her green eyes wild. The guard showed her the open cut in the palm of his hand, the jaguar had made it. But there was a docile tiger, he’d show you, madam.

“I’m going to wash my hand because I touched meat, otherwise with the smell she’ll attack.”

He told her that he always went into the cage with a knife, don’t tell the director, okay? That secret made her slightly dizzy, she closed her eyes for an instant. He held out the knife for some reason she didn’t understand: touch it! But why? she wondered scared, she touched the cold and shining blade that the raindrops were seeming to avoid and that was leaving the taste of blood in her mouth, while with her open eyes, her face almost in a grimace of nausea and horror, she was smiling. Water was running down the umbrella. And if she told Vicente . . . She was feeling the need to tell him. But what could she say about that, she was learning as much as she could learn in herself about sensations while looking at length at a clear glass of water; the sensation would seem to be in the glass of water itself. Thus was the need to confess the only feeling that existed, the only restless reality. What to tell? She was also remembering, as if right on time, that Vicente’s sympathy was almost a disappointment. No, she wouldn’t tell him anything, not even about the Farm. And as she was thinking: the Farm, like bells chiming in the distance, she was feeling that near the mansion in that same instant the meadow was stretching out dead and flat and that atop it were living long unstable abandoned weeds. He wouldn’t have sympathy for that but that was exactly what she couldn’t tell him either. She hadn’t yet managed to tell him how her life had lost its intimate nobility, how now she was acting according to a destiny. The presence of a man in her blood or the city had dissolved her power of directing her own search. Where, where was the power that she possessed when she was a virgin. She’d lost her indifference. Sometimes on the way back from the movies, grasping Vicente’s arm, she’d see the night pale with moon, the trees in the darkness of a faint, feel that some thing was approaching inside of her and want then to attain it, have a moment of engrossed sadness. She knew however that the man would keep her from suffering, dragging her to the fluctuating and balanced half-sensation of their bodies. He’d force her not to despair, summon her insistent and inaccessible toward a demotion, who knows why. There was a struggle between them that wouldn’t be resolved either by words or by gazes — and she was also feeling, surprised and stubborn, that she was trying to destroy him, that she was afraid of the man’s moments of pureness, she couldn’t stand his instants of solitude as if there were something unpleasant and dangerous to her in them. It was an unnoticed struggle that nevertheless connected them in a same instrument of attraction, misunderstanding, repulsion, and complicity. Despite everything he’d taught her a lot. Listening to him