didn’t snore in a straight sharp line but on a pair of wings. The sound would start off broadly, gather in a narrow center and flare out again. Her satisfied and strange snore was a flying wing. Virgínia would enter her room with closed eyes, feel surrounded by a flutter of tender, hoarse, and rapid wings, as if the old lady were releasing a scared little bird with each breath. And when she’d awaken — she’d always awaken suddenly, look around terrorized as if they could have transported her to another world while she was sleeping, and look at Virgínia with spite — when she’d awaken the sound would snap in a straight line, a little bird half-free in a mouth would hesitate trembling and luminous and was swallowed in a murmur. Grandmother no longer left the bedroom where the black servant she’d raised would bring her meals. She only came down when the relatives from the south were visiting. Esmeralda, Daniel, and Virgínia were required to go into her room at least once a day to receive her blessing and give her a sort of quick kiss on the face. And they’d never visit her more than that one time. When the black servant would get sick they’d send Virgínia to stay in her room and attend to her. She’d go in good spirits. Her seated grandmother wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t laugh, would hardly even look as if now living was enough for her. Sometimes she’d be reborn in a quick expression of a cunning and indecent face. Virgínia would speak to her in a low voice so she wouldn’t hear and get annoyed. Her greatest gesture of rage or contempt was spitting to the side; with her dry mouth, she had trouble mustering enough saliva; and by then, distracted from her anger, all she tried to do was spit — propped against the door, her face deeply still and thin, Virgínia would peek. The old lady would seem to meditate for a second, her head bent to the side, in the position to which her rage had brought her; then she’d back down with a satisfied and agile look as if she’d saved up enough saliva for everyone; she’d freeze up again, her shining eyes blinking in their slits every once in a while. Virgínia would shake from distaste and fear. She’d watch her move her hand leisurely and with a shaky slowness scratch her dry nose. “Don’t you die, damned old woman,” she’d repeat the servant’s phrase angrily to herself. But her grandmother would suddenly let out a sneeze of a cat in the sun and something would mix with Virgínia’s fear, an ashamed and irritated pity would weigh on her chest. “Don’t die, darling little old lady,” she’d repeat. The bedroom would darken in her open and staring eyes while she’d press her whole body against the door. And suddenly a movement of life would seem to hurry and fall onto the same level — the feeling of falling when you go to sleep. Immutable, immutable.
But sometimes her life was so fast. Lights wander around, Virgínia peers at the sky, colors shine beneath the air. Virgínia wanders around, the brightness is the air, Virgínia breathes brightness, leaves shake unawares, Virgínia isn’t thinking, the lights wander around, Virgínia peers at the sky . . . Sometimes her life was so fast. Her small girlish head was dizzy, she was staring at the field in front of her, peering at Quiet Farm already lost in the distance and looking without trying to understand. In Upper Marsh there was no sea, yet a person could look quickly at the broad meadow, then close her eyes, clutch her own heart and like a child, like a child being born, smell the sweetly rotten odor of the sea. And even if just then the day were hard and new, the plants dry with dust, red and hot summer clouds, the rough sunflowers shaking against space at the end of their thick stalks, even without the happy moistness of the lands beside the waters . . . once a bird blossomed from the meadow to the air in sudden flight, made her heart beat quickly in a pale fright. And that was free and light as if someone were walking along the beach. She had never been near the sea but knew what the sea was like, neither would she force her life to express it in thoughts, she knew, that was enough. When you least expected it night arrived, the owl would cry, Daniel could at any moment call her to take a walk, someone could show up at the door delivering some message, she and Daniel would run to find out what it was about, the servant could fall ill, she herself might wake up once a bit later — she was so finely simple during that time. The unexpected didn’t exist and the miracle was the revealed movement of things; had a rose blossomed in her body, Virgínia would have plucked it with care and with it adorned her hair without smiling. There was a certain amazed and tenuous joy without comic notes — where? ah, a color, the cold plants that seemed to give off small, vacant, and bright sounds in the air, tiny breaths, tremulously alive. Her life was painstaking but at the same time she was living just a single streak sketched without strength and without end, flat and terrified like the trace of another life; and the most she could do was cautiously follow her glimpses of it. Could everyone know what I know? she would wonder with the stubborn and unintelligent look that was a shared characteristic of the family, her head drooping. She’d stop for an instant at the edge of the field and grow still lying in wait paying close attention to her own possibilities. A long minute would unfurl, of the same color and on the same level as a point emerging from itself in a
