She sat benumbed for breakfast at the deserted table. Everyone had already left. She interrupted herself with difficulty — the gate was creaking, somebody was crossing the garden. Virgínia entered the room with a bright and shining face. She was carrying enormous dry branches for the hearth.
“I broke everything . . . I scratched myself, look!” she almost shouted in a laugh, wounding the other woman’s fatigue.
“You’re cheerful,” said Esmeralda.
Yes, she was cheerful. She laughed while sighing: cheerfulness was lending an unfamiliar and awkward appearance to her long face. While she was depositing the branches in a corner of the room it seemed to her that that night she’d truly slept at the Farm. They’d laughed so much, Esmeralda, even Daniel had listened smiling, Mother chewing while blinking her eyes with love for Esmeralda. And then the wine . . . she was drinking it and remembering Irene’s dinner party — how happy she’d been then! she thought, dizzy. She’d said goodbye at the foot of the staircase but her desire was to go out and start walking until exhausting the power of the wine. She’d lain down sleepless, bright and light on the bed as if she’d never slept, as if she’d never sleep. Our family can be so happy! she was thinking. The world was spinning inside her chest gently and she couldn’t say whether sweet joy or smooth sadness was now circulating in her blood with the wine. They’d laughed so much . . . even Daniel had listened smiling . . . , she was going over the scene one, two, multiple times. Even Daniel had smiled, even he had smiled. She was tossing and turning in the bed. Ah, how she’d already lived . . . , she was burying her head in the pillow with an absurd feeling of happiness and disturbance, smiling without surprise. One more instant though and the sensation was vanishing, in its place an expectant darkness was lingering inside the pillow as if she were expecting to remember from one moment to the next some unusual and fleeting thing. She lifted her forehead, her big body leaning on her elbows, watchful like a dog that senses a stranger. Her tired head fell over again and she sat thinking for a long while about nothing. When she’d reopen her eyes she’d notice that she really had been thinking, thinking and rethinking with stubbornness, lightly and without noise, about this strange scene: a man walking and meeting another man, both stopping in the darkness, looking at each other peacefully and saying goodbye beside a white, tall wall; the men meeting, exchanging a glance, saying goodbye beside the white wall, the men meeting . . . An underlying tone was emerging and with it she was accentuating little meanings without words, dotting herself with emphasis or doubt and that after all was her attitude and “her way of being.” She was almost always feeling well. Water was running trembling in the interior of the house, vibrating in the air. Bit by bit distant and dry despair came from motionless well-being itself and from the void of the night without future, she was seeming to feel that she could never mix it with the following days, even with new insomnias. A useless clearing was opening, she was stopping in the middle of the journey without meaning to, perhaps forever. But the night was long like a life that falters. She fell asleep because some thing never would be reached with open eyes. She dreamed that she was lying in the field, her skin beneath the wind feeling a prolonged, high, rosy, deeply diffuse pleasure, a leisurely enjoyment in the powerless body as if she were living exactly the instant that was forming and fading away, that was forming . . . fading, that was forming . . . fading, breathing in and breathing out, marking time with the bright, full, and fresh beating of her heart. In the dream she possessed with abundance something that, when awake, would be an elongated and imponderable sensation, needing to vanquish so many impossibilities that it would only arise as a foreboding, in some forgetfulness, in a silence, almost the air all around her. What she’d dream so large at night, would be during the day just the flutter of an ant in the field. She was sleeping, her head sunken in the pillow; and from her pale-lipped abandon the face of a girl was emerging, the vacant and sharp features like the sound of a small bugle in the limpid distance.
At dawn she opened her eyes as if waking up were slowly taking shape inside her without her knowledge and then blossoming ripe, perfect, and incomprehensible. She saw around her the bedroom being born from the darkness in silence. A cold breeze was blowing. She pushed away the sheets with her legs, without impatience, in a movement so full and balanced that it was exhausting the limbs’ reason for being. The chamber was floating in the half-light and the frozen shadows were deepening their edges, distancing the white walls veiling them in a confusion that was promising a foggy abyss beyond it.
