mischief that they’d started off more than a year before seemed very much to have ended. The conversation had been spinning, spinning, they’d said goodbye without regret as if forever, with a certain unease. And two days after that meeting, they, who before hadn’t seen each other for so long, ran into each other again with surprise as they were crossing the street, he was grabbing her arm avoiding a car, whisking her away pulling her by the elbow as if hoisted onto the sidewalk, she was looking like a scared chicken whose wing someone was trying to tear off, they were laughing a little at the coincidence and looking at each other attentively while laughing. He’d walked with her through the streets, they’d sat down in a garden. With a certain irony toward himself and with a daring lacking great pleasure he’d invited her back to his apartment, she’d accepted, came quickly, returned another day without his having invited her, the conversation was spinning on, spinning without much point. And afterward when he’d think about her his eyebrows would furrow, his eyes would drift amused, comfortable, and cheerful. The way she’d say while looking out the window: there’s a smell of swimming in the sea, at first didn’t make him lose patience. He’d try to correct her: swimming in the sea doesn’t smell, if you really want to say sea smell instead of salt air, which would be correct. But she, though she didn’t answer back, took on a silent and impenetrable expression. And now, for example, why wasn’t she coming? He thought that actually he’d never come looking for her, that he could have gone to her building, asked the doorman; he shrugged with a curious gaze. He wanted to see her face again and since before he’d thought of Adriano, he saw a mixture of Adriano with others and in the background just a vacant fleeting face of Virgínia’s, a plea whisked off by memory. Could it be that for me she’s a “person”? How glum and untidy she was at Irene’s dinner. With Vera, everything so brief, yet she wasn’t even “she” inside him when he’d remember her. He’d think about Vera with a small internal signal, with something that pointed her out without wounding her with a word. And when he’d speak of her with someone he’d do so with difficulty and repugnance, pronouncing: Vera, with hardness, coldness. Virgínia was always Virgínia — he felt as if they’d robbed her, saw her then with clarity, her brown eyes, her delicate nose, that indecision in her face as if she might be frightened; almost with emotion as if he were staring at an old portrait. He felt sympathy for Virgínia, that feeling that was making him a bit ashamed of himself, that same sympathy that made his sister say to him: you’re so good, Vicente! When she’d come today with big open eyes, smiling without power, he’d have to get up very quickly and — not stretch out his arms, of course — but say: darling, you took forever! which was true. Yes, yes, it was true. He was already seeing her looking right at him pleased. Pleased? would she be pleased? or surprised . . . or what? Virgínia . . . she’d laugh. No. Right now he was wanting her to come in also to see her reacting, living. He paced a little excited: why didn’t she just come? That was when an instant of astonishment and raw solitude attacked him, ah, he squeezed his flank bending over, the feeling of amazed tang when biting into an unripe fruit — ah, that side, for an instant life was losing its careful everyday meaning, his singed face was spinning showing a fresh, new, terribly incomprehensible surface — he clenched with one of his hands and with his whole life his right side where the pain had developed into a moving arrow; he tolerated it with closed eyes, his pale mouth shut: that’s where death would come from one day: his grandmother had died from the same side, his father had died from the same side, he’d die from the same, something shrinking into an unknown liver. Gradually the pang faded. He slackened his lips, cracked his eyes; took off his glasses, his whole physiognomy transformed without them, he acquired an innocent and silly look like a child’s; blinking he wiped his wet forehead with a handkerchief, gave a sigh of relief that recalled a gasp; in that instant father, mother, siblings, and women were lost, he was looking around his naked body at the nascent world. A few moments more and a calm and inexplicable power would overtake him again; he was lighting another cigarette, his replaced glasses giving him with the familiar sensation the old train of thought. He vaguely noted it, thought: what would I be without them. But why wasn’t she coming — the longer she took the harder it would be because he would have lost the urge. The reborn impatience tired his heart — once again that sharp certainty that today was the anniversary of something difficult and heavy. He was astonished that he’d agreed to spend the day so alone . . . When he was small he’d answer: I am too lazy to be alone. So if she wasn’t coming yet also demanding . . . yet also expecting him to say . . . Oh yes, he drove her off quickly. That was it. No, no, not quite that either . . . He smiled inexplicable, lighting another cigarette.
Later then she came in the white party dress . . . the hat with the wide brim atop her long face . . . she was halting for an instant with pleasure trying watchfully to arise in a vision . . . for what? as if commemorating the day . . . Vera popped up in his memory dressed in white. Something bristled inside his body. And when he looked at Virgínia’s pale cheeks, her as if childlike lips, that calm manner, he felt that it would be
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