“Just that?” Esmeralda interrupted.
“Just that: orange and it’s sour.” They stopped for a moment looking at each other — “They kept looking at each other, then she said: you’re fat! He laughed narrowing his eyes, said nothing, but then said: yes, yes . . . They both then started laughing. I was scared they’d see me and left.”
“Ah . . .” — Esmeralda was observing her and adding in a smile in which there was some pleasure — “I would’ve stayed.”
Virgínia shrugged tired and distracted. The boardinghouse where she’d lived was close to a street with some suspicious vacant houses. One Sunday afternoon a few women, two thin ones with dark rings under their eyes and two more or less fat ones, ruddy, with intense eyes — came to stroll down the good street, passing the boardinghouse where, on the sidewalk chairs, a few wives were choking: the thought of looking for man here! . . . They weren’t saying “looking for a man” or “looking for men,” but “looking for man.” But no, Virgínia was confusedly understanding, they weren’t looking for man. Their hair was wet from the shower, in bright and calm dresses, and arm in arm they were coming toward the decent street to take a walk on other people’s Sunday. If a man recognized them and spoke to them, they’d have to give in because they’d no longer allow their own desire, they might give in immediately, surprised and thoughtful, with melancholy and brutality, laughing and having fun. Virgínia was understanding them so well that she amazed herself, suddenly reserved and severe; she was avoiding Esmeralda’s questions with irritation and reproach. Esmeralda was peering at her watchfully, her eyes focused. She was allowing slowly and with difficulty Virgínia’s existence and couldn’t quite accept that her sister really was another woman. She was leaning toward her, listening with a certain disdain and a bit of irony, despite her interest. As for Virgínia, for the first time she was experiencing a conversation between women. Even without love or understanding it was good to talk to Esmeralda. Between women you didn’t have to talk about certain things, the main thing was already spoken as if before they were born and all that was left to tell were gentle, fresh intimate notions, little variations and coincidences. It was a familiar and silly conversation, somehow a lament, somehow a defense; a hope mixed with advice full of a long experience while eyes would dive into eyes with depth, rapt and almost distracted, heavy with distant thoughts; her voice was growing softer, slower and lower. Virgínia was ending up leaning on the chair with vacant eyes, in silence, while the other woman was propping her cheek on the hand that her elbow was supporting atop the table. Not among the women of Vicente’s group; they seemed to be specialized in men; they’d feel superior and cheerful about having them as just friends, forming a heroic and vaguely perverted group, astonished at itself.
“Is there a lot of noise when you’re trying to sleep?” asked Esmeralda. “And the cinemas? And that guy, that Vicente, where’d you meet him? what’s he like?”
“Daniel took me one day and introduced me at a party . . . He . . . he . . . he’s just a normal person . . . I don’t know, there’s nothing really special about him. He wears glasses.” — She wouldn’t be able to tell anyone and not even herself what he was like. Yet how well she knew him inside herself, engraved in the reactions of her own body. She was feeling him clearly, refreshing by an effort of desire and memory the slight aversion that her flesh would experience in his presence; like the quick and immediately fleeting perception of a perfume: a light tightening beneath her skin; less than repulsion, a deep certainty of the man inside her blood as if he were connected to her in an excessively intimate way, almost wretched. Through Esmeralda who knew nothing, she got a different and more intense liking for the city. And looking at that beautiful woman who’d never known a man she felt insultingly rich, straightening her body with pride, surprise, and disillusionment. She was remembering Vicente clearly just then . . . seeing him walking as if inside of her. And her feeling was so real that she was discerning him walking through a shadowy and smooth atmosphere because her own interior must be shadowy and smooth — that had always been the air of her thoughts and dreams. But if deliberately she wanted to remember his face, surprised she’d see emerge before her eyes an outline of Adriano. And one night she had a dream with Adriano — a dream that filled her with surprises, shame, and mystery; she deeply forbade herself any joy and dreamed nothing more. With disdain she however could not refuse herself, confused: yes, certainly Adriano was a person, yes; the little man; after being with him she’d sometimes want to fill the vacant urge of power that would be born with a clear and lively exclamation: yes! even if no. She pushed him off with a wave of her head; yet he lived on holding himself in at her brink. She was forcing some memory that by blossoming would bring Vicente into her presence. What she’d most recall about him however was some thing you couldn’t say or think; a certain condition that would arise between them as soon as she thought of him, establishing the connection . . . and that would solidify in the vision of Virgínia herself watching Vicente’s serious taste for walking around the room knowing that she was present, in some thing that would fill the air of both of them, a watchful reserve of both — an atmosphere
