The Chandelier

around worried and watchful as if seeking a position in order to live. It finally occurred to her for the first time that she’d see everyone from home, that she’d go back to her room. That Daniel would be at the Farm, his wife . . . no, his wife was spending six months with her own parents . . . Daniel tending to the stationer’s with their father? Since later she’d find the landscape lovely she started to notice it in a slightly distracted perception. After her coffee she smoked and while she was smoking she tried to focus, understand her life in that instant. She was seeking while observing herself — but was seeing nothing but the ashen sky as always happened whenever she tried to think with profundity. She was apparently seeking the connection that must exist between the elfin thing she’d been until her teens and the woman of reasonable, solid, and cautious body that she was now. She was going to see again the place where she was from and feared, a little nervous, impatient, and shy, her own judgment. I had my chance in adolescence, she wasn’t aware that she was thinking while blowing the smoke with the kind of prudence and awkwardness that she was deploying toward the cigarette. I lost my chance in childhood. Though her current body had a daily destiny. She remembered Vicente with a frightened yearning that was also surprise at the strange calm and joy of relief. She might not even return, she came to imagine. She observed at last that this had been her impression ever since she’d received the letter from her father. But she didn’t want to think and pushed away the thought closing her eyes quickly, moving her head and expelling the smoke with decisiveness. She was a little hungry and that promised to erase something. When I get to eat . . . , she was saying to herself in a vague threat, her lips dry, as if addressing a new day. It occurred to her in a first stirring joy that she’d see Daniel, that he’d repeat “your type is becoming more and more material . . .” and she’d blush at her lack of children. She felt pacified, expectant; even in a not very happy and comprehensible life the continuity of moments would result in some floating and nonetheless stable thing, which ended up meaning a balanced life. A little girl with a flannel tied around her neck, broken, brown teeth in a round face, serious and pale — was standing beside her. Looking at her. Virgínia gave her a quick smile. Her last experience with children had been tragic.

“You staying?” asked the girl.

Surprised, almost scared, Virgínia looked at her with more attention.

“You staying?” the other continued with patience and politeness.

“What . . .”

“You staying?” demanded the girl screaming.

“I’m staying, yes, I’m staying,” Virgínia hastened in alarm while looking at her with confusion. The girl was still standing, observing. The mother, sitting with her back turned, realizing that something was happening, turned around, looked quickly with her yellowish eyes, asked: were you chatting? Virgínia assented. “She doesn’t have her words straight yet,” said the woman in a strange tongue, smiling and turning back around. She seemed happy to see the child occupied. The girl was watching them while waiting with docility.

“You staying?” she asked after a pause.

“I’m staying. And are you staying?”

She seemed to fall into a great astonishment at that question; she drew back frightened without taking her eyes off Virgínia. Suddenly she went up to her mother:

“Am I staying?”

“Yes, yes,” said the woman with her back still turned, her expression impossible to guess.

She walked up to Virgínia, stopped a little ways off.

“I’m staying.”

“Ah, yes, great, great.”

“And you staying?”

“Staying where?”

Again the question terrified the child, she gazed in anguish, her face bright and round. Could she be an idiot? Her runny nose was shining damp in the sun, soft and short. Virgínia took advantage of her retreat to disappear. When she’d already arrived at the end of the car with horror she was reached by the girl.

“This is Conceição,” she said showing a rag doll. She was holding up the little face with anxiety and politeness, her dirty nose seeming to wait as if she were blind. Virgínia pursed her lips, her eyes suddenly hard to hide: My God, what did that little animal want?

“Ah she’s pretty, your Conceição is pretty,” she told her almost in a sob.

“You staying?”

Maybe she’d come back for good but nobody knew it and around her the instants weren’t connecting themselves to the future, just temporary and unattached — they were saying all the things to her and she was understanding. Her grandmother had died and her father was going up the stairs upright, the steps were creaking. Virgínia was putting off to the next day keeping the promise to find out if he was suffering and to help him. Her mother had dealt with a slight indisposition, her teeth were starting to look old and unwell. And as soon as she got out of bed everything could be ready for Virgínia to return. That period at Quiet Farm was so placid and unconquerable that she was allowing without surprise the possibility of going back without even walking through the fields a single time, without sitting for a moment peacefully beside the river.

She was looking. In vain she was seeking clues to her childhood, to the vague air of complicity and fear that she’d breathed. Now the mansion seemed to get more sun. The limestone chippings from the gnawed-at walls had lost their sad sweetness and were only showing a tired and happy old age. Her father, though still the same, had now inexplicably become a type, his own type. And her mother had transformed. Her skin had dried up, acquired a peevish tone; she was still well-preserved from her forehead to the beginning of her mouth, but after that old age was rushing in as if it had been hard to hold itself