The Chandelier

of slight difference of sexes like a muffled smell of face powder — while he with small gestures of his eyelids, teeth, lips, kept affirming his free discreet masculinity that, though it truly existed, had something fake and excessive about it — Virgínia and the walls were watching. She was remembering in a second how he’d change clothes in front of her. It was one of the inner events of their shared life. When he was going to change clothes, as if somebody pressed a button, life would fall into a familiar framework and they’d carefully repeat their gestures in every detail: she’d freeze with big eyes as in a classroom, her lips touching each other in innocent watchfulness of herself because she really was interested; he’d seem to interrupt his thoughts while changing clothes, his eyes focusing on a spot on the ceiling or the wall according to whatever movements were imposed on him. In the moment of transition between one article to the next, his body unwrapped in the cool air of the bedroom, she would stare at him quickly but without harshness, smile at him with her eyes while lightly squeezing her mouth. Right as a new piece dressed him, the event ended and the moments were carrying on scarring all around him. The fact was so tenuous that she’d remember all of him in a slight second, in a movement of the eyelids — the recollection would actually reduce itself to the throwing of a shirt on the chair, while seeing that movement again she’d stay for an instant in the air listening, her body living in its own insides as in the velvety, shady, and fresh insides of a fruit. He’d been terribly well-disposed lately; in such clear health that it depressed her; how naturalness would shock; she only felt good among shy people and nothing bothered her as much as self-assurance. Watching Esmeralda’s life now it seemed to her so frightening and wide to have a man as if he’d been born from her desire. And sometimes even that desire would seem extraordinarily wrong. To have a man who could die from one instant to the next but who high, high, in a tension of balance, seemed to live eternally. She was leaning on the column of the balcony, looking at the full stars, so shining and without blinking, wrapped in a vague sheet of fog, milky way! she was looking as if she and Vicente were seeing together. Without remembering that when they were together she wanted almost outraged to be by herself in order to look better. She was seeing the hard, calm stars, thoughtful before going to sleep — reflecting things so high that not even by living every life could she accomplish her thought: Vicente was a man; he was living far away. I feel you somewhere and I don’t know where you are — she was managing to think in words. Her love was so delicate that she smiled uncomfortable, pierced by a frigid sensation of existing. It seemed to her extremely strange that in that same night he was living in that same world, that they weren’t together and that she wasn’t seeing what he was doing, so much stronger than the distance was her thought of love. Love was like that, separation couldn’t be understood — she was concluding with docility. But she also didn’t know whether she wanted to have at her side on that night that pale unshaven doctor, the only man from whom she’d felt the inexplicable, anguished, and voluptuous need to have a child; she felt her life press down with love for him, her heart was thinking with strength, with shyness and blood, come to me, come to me, for a long swift instant. How she’d passed through whatever could be without managing to touch it . . . What she loved in him couldn’t be accomplished like a star in the chest — she’d so often felt her own heart like a hard ball of air, like an untranslatable crystal. Above all what she loved in him, so pale and mischievous, had an impossible quality, pungent like a sharp ridiculous desire; she was feeling sweetly able to belong to both. And Vicente was perfect, he was a calm man. She thought with surprising clarity, using for herself nearly words: I love him as I love something that’s good for us, that gives well-being but not like something outside of the body and that will never pacify it and that we want to reach even with disillusionment; my heart isn’t inflamed by that love, my most intimate tenderness isn’t worn out; her love was almost a conjugal dedication. It hurt her however to think that way, it was so tender, keen, and full of bristling life for him to exist inside her, to breathe, eat, sleep and not know that she could think that way of him. She was forcing herself severely to a fidelity whose secret species only she understood. My love, my love — she was saying and with a certain effort love was finally trembling so much in her interior that for the first time it was rising to an unreality and an unconquest, seeming not to exist melding with the most ravishing part of the dream. And to get still closer to Vicente she was reflecting that the doctor, along with Arlete and the guard at the zoo, was still out there waiting and that she, out of impatience and lack of time, hadn’t absorbed him. She was also feeling unhappy, leaning on the balcony, on the lookout for the noise of a distant carriage — and suddenly, out of pure volatility, she was desiring something perfect, something like whatever would kill her. A certain ardor overtook her, Vicente, not even he knew how he could be almost perfect, not even he knew how hungry he was and would ask to go to a restaurant and hesitate between the dishes