“If I need anything I’ll call.”
She went up with effort, closed the curtains and in the narrowness of the compartment lay down. The rolling of the train was vibrating in her brain and lulling it to sleep; she closed her eyes deeply.
Maybe she opened them with slowness much later, but they unclosed as if in the same instant . . . It was dark night, the train was fleeing. The curtain over the window was moving sluggish and soft to a mild wind. And she thought or saw a shadow that was that of an extraordinary woman, slim and peaceful, mobile and lively as the air itself, looking at her like someone bending over in silence. Virgínia really opened the eyes she’d closed so long ago and in a fright rose slightly on the narrow and shadowy berth that the curtain was veiling. The train was running without obstacles through the calm and perfumed night. How much time had elapsed around the rueful woman? she smiled without knowing why, her head pensive; she was having a foreboding with a serene and absorbed pleasure of how new, naive, and undecipherable existing was, how she herself could one day be figured out by a stranger on a railway without saying a word. She closed the windows, the curtain, lay her heavy and pale head upon the pillow that was shaking along with the whole sleeping car. She lost consciousness and only every once in a while would feel the weak and nauseating light that was on without really shining above her head, within reach. She’d turn over and forget once again. Then she opened her eyes and without understanding herself sat staring, heard the snoring of a man near her body, behind the curtain rough with dust, in the contiguous compartment. Now the whole car was wheezing darkly, the lights had been turned off, the rolling of the train was intimate, fantastic. A compact darkness was pressing on her open eyes. She removed the curtain that was covering the outside window of the berth and a bluish moonlight sliced her body with surprise . . . The train was running violently through the night and the meadows were stretching wan, bloodless . . . behind in the past, never managing to reach the moment in which she was living. Her eyes were passing in a run over a tree and the tree was motionless, without a breeze to threaten its leaves. Yet it was cold. The green of the silent cornfields was stretching out purplish blue and shimmering in the mysteriously bright landscape; but the depths of the vision were hiding, black and reserved, an arm hiding eyes with the secret. She could make out a telegraph pole in the distance and the train was nearing it in the same rhythm of watchful puffing; when her window was reaching it and both were the present, the post was flung back all at once with violence and the train was moving off forgetting it brusquely. She sought a feeling in herself and was just bright, sleeplessly bright. She didn’t try to sleep, the decision calmed her face — with her head on the raised pillow she was watching the plains go by one after the next, hearing the train’s alert whistle lift itself toward the sky; the odd spark would whirl by the window, a small painless scream, dragged along. Water would sometimes shine quietly out there and immediately disappear forever, until the end of her life. She was floating in the deep vacancies of sleep with her senses lax and lost. Rarely, like the silent scratching of a comet, she’d emerge quiet from the waves to the surface, lifted by a simple urge, by the same absence of power that would inspire an unclosing of eyelids. Slightly awake she was hovering far from the world, wavering atop her own dormancy, surrounded by the dark past moment and by the one that was already being drawn up; being awake was at that point of the same matter as sleeping, but purified in a single veil and she was seeing through it sleepwalking and meek. As long as the long second lasted she was thinking and her lucidity was the raw brightness of the moonlight itself; but she didn’t know what she was thinking; she was thinking as a line departs from one point prolonging it, thinking like a bird that just flies, simple pure direction; if she looked at the colorless void she couldn’t make anything out because there was nothing to make out, but she would have looked and seen. In that way she’d have another kind of sleep on days of confusion and martyrdom; she’d then gather herself into sleep as if she’d been poked with a lance and she shriveled up her existence leaving the waking life empty. Much of her past hadn’t been carried out on the surface of day but in the slow movements of dreaming, though she could rarely remember them. She heard muffled sounds of suitcases and footsteps, understood that she’d slept. It was dawn, night was evaporating; a foggy light was hovering in halos above the things. Through the lowered window she could see that the sun had still not risen but was noticing the freshness and the new life trembling delicately in every leaf. She sat on the bed, raised the thick glass and a sudden cheerful cold surrounded her; she hadn’t suspected that the night had ended so completely. She combed her tangled hair, went down to drink something. To her relief the blind woman had disappeared. She drank coffee with dust, tried dark and greasy sweets. A fat man was looking at her from inside eyes with his chin parked on his chest. She was drinking the warm liquid; maybe she was sad but had just then the firm feeling that she couldn’t live off her own sadness, off her joy, or even off whatever was going on; off what then? she was spinning
