The Chandelier

wider, lightly peek out, then cringe horrified. She finally awoke. A clock was striking closed in a faraway apartment, shadow and dust. She half-stood. From the awakened and newly anxious fatigue, like that of agitated matter, a tenuous urging was seeming to exude, disoriented at first, then sharp, almost shouting with the contained power of blooms — she stood. But am I mad? but no, she kept repeating radiant and weak, but no . . . , she kept repeating unawares, what does it matter what’s to come . . . it was so simple . . . a shudder of life ran through her fast, intolerable, she almost vomited. In a bewildered impression she was feeling that there was no wretchedness too great for her body . . . yes, that she could stand anything, no, not out of courage but because vaguely, vaguely, because the initial thrust had already been given and she’d been born; she was thinking the very sensation of inevitability that after all was her final certainty of being alive, the impossibility of in the deepest part of her flesh admitting that in that same instant she could be killed. Yes, and afterward she kept seeming to have reached her own limits, there where joy, innocence, and death commingled, there where in a blind transubstantiation sensations were tumbling into the same pitch . . . and since she’d reached her own limit, she sat again, quiet and white and lightly glanced at the things without waiting, without memory; she smoothed the strap of her slip, one of her big pale breasts, suddenly reduced to the beginning. From the construction sites the voices were coming. She’d reached a rare instant of solitude in which even the body’s most truthful existence was seeming to waver. She didn’t know which would be the next instant — as for the first time life was faltering thinking about itself, reaching a certain point and awaiting its own order; destiny had worn itself out and what she was still seeking was the primary sensation of living — the theme interrupted and the rhythm throbbing dry. The moments were resounding free from her existence and her being detached from the time atop which it was gliding. She pressed her hand to her chest — actually what she was feeling was just a difficult taste, a hard and persistent sensation like that of insoluble tears too quickly swallowed. From the construction sites voices were coming. She seemed to reflect an instant and set to listening.

“The little girl answered: go on, that’s right!”

“But did she?”

“Well then, man! . . .”

The ending was rounded out with a mean, low guffaw penetrated by another brighter laugh mixed with a deep long one; in a higher tone a young man laughed so calm and virile that she perked up her ears and before he finished they all started back up together dissonant and violent. They stopped and the scraping of the shovel on the ground could be heard, followed by resounding thumps upon hollow wood. She quickly sighed, lowered her head looking at the dusty floor. The idea came to her fatigued that things were awaiting continuation, that she should move and set them in motion. The train, the suitcases, Vicente. And since she was quite removed from herself and from her own power, she tried, without even knowing the nature of her urge, to connect herself to a more sensitive and more possible pain, the kind that might set off a solution; she got up confusedly thinking that she was going to separate from everything and cried fakely. But there was no sadness, there was fatigue and indifference while she was looking at the dark floorboards with resignation. After this she could at last live as far as the suitcases and the train were concerned, as far as her daily destination and the future days that seemed to need her to exist. Behind everything, almost undetected, there was horrible like a yellow and desperate light the danger of herself, the fear of repeating yet again that sensation she’d just had, a foreboding of beginning in which she was suspecting the approach of death, dizzying and calm. She lived a rude day and without light. In a single burst she arrived at the time of departure; the sun was still illuminating the city full of trams and people.

With her two suitcases already placed in the baggage car, she was watching other people’s farewells. The brown hat was trimmed with blue matching the dress beneath the gray mantle. She was especially dreading the moment when the train would give the first start, the first whistle and the first pain. She entered the narrow toilet that was stinking, took off the small hat, started to wash her face pointlessly, to put on her make-up, to comb her hair, arranging her clothes, fooling the instant. She was applying lipstick when the train got moving, jostled her arm, left a violent mark of lipstick on her pale and glum face, farewell! Her heart squeezed breathing only on the surface, her face darkened and dead. The worst had passed. She went amidst bumps, sat brusquely among those strange people. She was looking around the train, dust in her eyes, her lips dried out from water and soap. A blondish child was crying in the lap of a young, fat lady. The final cutting brightness of the windowpane was shuddering amidst deaf noises; her heart was hardening small and blackened. She got up to have coffee smoothing her already wrinkled skirt; her chest was contracting rough like an eye reddened and dry from dust. A hoarse and frightened retching was pushing her with jerking movements in the train toward the back of the car while she was forcing her body forward trying to reach the buffet car — the whistle rang out sudden and long, the locomotive shook even faster, no, my God, no, she was saying to herself in a whole and stubborn despair looking coldly ahead and reaching with difficulty the stages of the