Kneeling beside her with his face buried in her body. She was looking straight ahead, dry, almost severe. Almost without understanding herself she turned her head a bit brusquely toward outside the window making the brim of the hat that she hadn’t had time to take off vibrate. With her eyes hard and unmoving, her face was hiding from itself a slowly difficult expression that was taking shape with effort and attention, an expression of wildness and brightness struggling with that flesh used to waiting with patience, haughtiness and coldness for a moment that wouldn’t arrive. And that now was bursting in her heart with such inevitability. The minutes were going by. She suddenly felt pain commingle with flesh, intolerable as if each cell were being stirred and shredded, divided in a mortal birth. Her mouth abruptly bitter and burning, she was horrified, tough and contrite as if in the face of spilled blood, a victory, a terror. So that was happiness. The wounded splendor was bumping in her chest, insufferable; a sack of light had burst in her poor heart. She never could have gone ahead; weak and terrified, she’d reached the limp and fecund point of her being itself. She was waiting. Then with difficulty she moved her sweet hands through the hair of the redeemed man, gave him everything through her trembling fingers, she who’d never managed to introduce the contact of her life into the clay figurines. She spoke the first word of her new experience:
“Vicente.”
He raised his head, looked at her, was astonished, she existed above Adriano. And since she was strong in that moment, calm and full like a woman he surrendered as he’d already surrendered to the other women. She clasped the man’s head with her hands; in a precious and fresh gesture she kissed his light eyelids. The pleasure in the man was luminous and intense; he raised his eyes wanting with a silence to give both of them the certainty that he was a man and she a woman. And flinched in an irresistible movement pressing his right eye with the palm of his hand.
“But you stuck your finger in my eye,” he was saying lost from himself, drying the tears that were pouring out.
A joyful and deaf drum had been attacked in the middle of the room, an empty pavilion. Some thing had been concluded with sun and brightness! the drum was rolling in the middle of the room; and then never had a silence been so mute, calm, final in the hollow precinct. Vicente removed his hand from his eye, seemed to awaken for a slight instant; he saw her peaceful and erect beneath the tough hat, looked at her almost with curiosity; thought indistinctly: my God, if I were the world I’d regret having hurt a woman so much. Vera; could he have wounded her so much. But Virgínia strangely already seemed cured and simple, not having stopped more than the instant itself in that instant; she’d put down her hands, placed them on her lap, led them to the book atop the little table, rested them on her lap once more. Suddenly she brought them to her head and finally took off the hat, placed it on the table, smoothed her hair that was damp. She was remembering that she’d once had a classmate and that she’d simply loved her, as much as she could love Maria Clara. The girl — how could she ever remember her name? the girl had long golden hair and blue eyes, small, wicked. As long as Virgínia stayed inside her fear and shyness everything was light and delicate between them; afterward she started gaining confidence and one day amid the laughter of a game — everything was so loose, so natural, and so happy . . . really, how could she ever have guessed . . .? she’d grasped her friend’s treasure, her long hair and a few shaking and frightened strands broke, stayed in her hands; the other had screamed in pain, turned to Virgínia who was still bearing the excessive smile of joy on her already alarmed lips, and to her guilty, closed, and dumbfounded hand in the air; had screamed: big brute! Yes, yes, it had been exactly that. And one day she’d grabbed the neighbor woman’s daughter and held her in her arms until between them there was only intimacy; the whole child smelled like her own mouth, like the bedroom of a little girl sleeping. She wanted to hug her and the girl cried, the mother came with watchful eyes, the little girl said: she gave me a booboo, the mother had taken her daughter back saying that it was nothing. Yes, that had all happened.
“Are we going out?” said Vicente with tact.
He had stopped wrinkling his eyes, he was running his refined and masculine hand across his face as if needing to feel the hardness of his own features; he was disturbed; and on his cheek a certain smooth line was highlighted that was revealing so well that brand of attentive kindness of which he was capable. She stared at him as if awakening, as if she shouldn’t forget him ever.
“No,” she said.
No, she didn’t want to go out, she didn’t want to erase anything and was looking peacefully out the window. Just then she really was lovely — Vicente looked at her while lighting a cigarette, offering her one. She accepted; and then truly there had never been anything to erase and forget; the stretch of life was mixing with all of life and in a single current everything was moving along incomprehensible, essential, without fear and without courage. Carried by the imponderable power of the minutes that followed one another in time united to the instants that blood itself was beating. The afternoon was fine and calm. Virgínia was remembering that she was going on a journey, saying nothing and intensifying her contact with the existence around her. He himself went so far as to
