The Chandelier

on offer and suddenly calling the waiter with a loose gesture to impress her and impress himself. And at the same time the world was existing around us without menace. Especially all those thoughts were also the lie. Leaning on the balcony, she was wanting some thing with more vehemence than she’d ever wanted — and she didn’t have the nerve; it’s just nerve, that’s it. But it was also sweet to fail — she leaned forward, rested her face on the column, smiled because it was strange and exciting to smile by yourself in the darkness — deep down she was confusing the vanity of feeling new desires with the taste for possessing the things that they represented and was mixing with everything the faraway despair of ignorance. Yet it was perfect to live alongside that instant as if both were forming some thing that ought to be looked at by someone who was a stranger to the moment and to her — she was taking for a second the shape of the stranger and thinking it was perfect to live in that moment. She went to bed, it was a cozy cold. She’d still experience the best things in sleep. She liked more than anything when it was raining and she’d feel the warmth of the bed and the windowpane shining; she’d try not to fall asleep in order to live the wait for sleep while she was blinking with comfort, with sweet and panting mischief — it was so good, so much more sensual than moving, than breathing, even than breathing, than loving a man. She’d have so much hope for what she might dream. You didn’t even have to think about it, going to sleep happened all by itself, smooth like smooth falling, like the body’s insides living without awareness, without purpose.

“With a steady job a woman who has a brain manages to put off her husband, not live with him all the time, oh you can,” their mother was saying as she came to embroider with the two of them.

“What do you mean ‘put off’?” Virgínia was asking confused.

“Oh, honey, every woman knows that a man is a big bother.”

Virgínia was mutely astonished.

“I don’t think it’s right to meddle much in my daughters’ lives. Apparently only Daniel wanted to get married: the girl’s very nice, a little quiet, but seems to be a good match for him, at least that’s my impression, and you know, everybody makes mistakes. Even we should be happy with whatever happens. I actually think you two are right not to marry” — she was stopping the embroidery, looking ahead with squeezed eyelids. “Basically things are inconvenient,” she was saying with wisdom, blinking her eyes a bit and that, she was confusedly feeling, was the highest point she’d reached in her understanding of whatever was surrounding her.

Hearing her, Esmeralda’s eyes were sparkling in her hardened face. Just now she ought to blame her mother. Virgínia asked her, in the half-intimacy that was floating between them:

“When I was small I heard hints about something that happened to you . . . some boy, I’m not sure . . . Papa mentioned it again when I did that foolishness of telling about your other affair in the garden.”

Esmeralda was blushing, her face was being disturbed in a delicate smile.

“Just nonsense,” she was trying to look unconcerned. “You know how ‘he’ is, from a bit of nonsense he makes a world and invokes God. I hadn’t wanted it to be nonsense, I wanted it to be a serious sin and now at least I’d be free,” she concluded with a muffled violence as if this were an old thought she’d decided to surrender out of fatigue.

“But you can start to be free now or whenever you like.”

“I don’t know,” she said with her face tight and red.

“Why not?”

“Why?” she mimicked with rage. “You think it’s simple for people to get rid of everything they have, end up without a home, without anything . . . just to be free?” — she stopped for an instant, face suspended, understanding vaguely that she was blundering against herself . . . — “Just to be free?” she repeated hearing with growing despair the sound of her voice. “Why speak of those things? the hell with you!” she screamed irate. — In a delicate slightly astonished pleasure she felt the hardness of the very heart of life, her reborn body breathing with a vibrant warmth, in legitimate rage; a sharp urge to movement rose up through her legs, spread hot and painful through her chest, found its balance in her face, held back and then freed itself through her suddenly shining and tender eyes. Her figure slightly extinguished in a shadow of uncertainty and melancholy. So, then she was living just off herself, off herself . . . off her own solitude . . . off her anger . . . so . . . No, what happened? she was getting mixed up.

Virgínia shrugged.

“Either it’s worth it or it’s not,” she said without pleasure. But she was also feeling that she couldn’t fight, even if her path forward could only be chosen by fighting. Something above fighting was making its way slowly and reaching a goal. She was feeling, they were just two women. She stayed quiet for an instant looking out the window at the bright and exasperated air of two o’clock. When she turned her head, Esmeralda was observing her. She looked at her too, thought about how the other woman was pretty and calm with her thoughtful, wide eyes, her whole body abandoned and pale, that tired strength.

“You didn’t learn much in the city, Virgínia,” Esmeralda said to her again.

“Yes . . .”

Again they fell silent without waiting, without fright. The living room was large and deep, the table was stretching out darkly with one of Mother’s small embroideries in the center.

“I found everything so changed . . . ,” said Virgínia as if in a sigh.

Esmeralda looked around slowly. Virgínia got up, went to the window.

“I’m going upstairs,” said Esmeralda and Virgínia didn’t turn around.

Esmeralda