watchful eyes, keeping her impressions to herself. She’d say good-morning like a postcard, smiling full of cold life. Was that it? She was picturing Rute again and thought strangely that she was calm and good — yes, that had been the sensation in the Grand Hotel, in the city, there where Daniel’s fiancée, her parents, and her two sisters were staying for a while and where Daniel had met her. But she’d hidden the sensation from herself and was then thinking lying to herself: she’ll make Daniel’s life something with lunchtime, dinnertime, bedtime, with sexual regularization, healthy, clean and almost noble, like in a sanitarium. Daniel had brought Virgínia to introduce her to the girl’s parents. In the vast hotel room they’d gathered for a great perplexing visit, without having anything to say. Rute was wearing a pearl-gray silk dress, her face without makeup, pale and peaceful. Yes, from that point on there was something in her that Daniel wouldn’t understand. And that she never would show him — smiling, looking at him, loving him, her head raised without any support. How had she not confessed to herself from that point on what she was seeing? Virgínia was thinking; maybe out of stinginess. She’d talked with Daniel’s future mother-in-law, a short little woman, lively, squeezed into a girdle, her tight breasts suffocating her neck; her grayish hair done by a hairdresser. Between frightened and almost pensive smiles and glances, they were gradually disclosing the family. Rute had always been a clean, careful, and studious child who lacked the courage to caress and please. And suddenly she’d chosen a boy and would have to live far away! that seemed to be what she’d always plotted against the family — her defenseless mother was looking at her from afar while the daughter was serving tea while smiling at what her father and Daniel were saying — but at the same time how to feel sorry for herself, the mother was saying still following her with her eyes, how could she feel sorry for herself if she also seemed to have plotted against Daniel? With surprise and almost disdain for her decision, so unfeminine — the mother was seeming to fear for her future as a woman — with surprise and almost disdain, with joy and emotion they heard her decide to live for six months at the Farm with her husband and six months with her parents and those sisters she seemed to love with proprietorship, severity, and tenderness. The sisters, dressed like rich girls, were getting bored beneath their curled hair enduring with almost comic eyes the visit of Virgínia and the “fiancé”; of such fast matter the girls were made. — She looked at Daniel, the fluctuating shadow of the branch darkening and lightening his face, she guessed without surprise that he had fallen in love with Rute. Love isn’t everything that produces children! The phrase came back to her again without meaning, nagging and tiresome. And then not just the phrase but moving itself, her own feelings, Rute’s smiling silence, difficulty, peace, everything mingling in the same slow and thick matter and she breathed the air, pure existence, with a vanquished sigh, almost enraged.
“Why didn’t you hold me back?” he said.
But . . . What? . . . what was he saying?! He hadn’t asked anything . . . what was he saying? what was he accusing her of . . . she hadn’t asked anything . . . Suddenly she understood, didn’t look, keeping in check her hard and tense face.
“Why didn’t you hold me back . . . you should have known that it was out of a kind of desperation. I’m so lost” — he was narrowing his eyes, his face calm, his hands on the back of his neck; his dark teeth inlaid in nearly white gums, because he was seeming to smile — “I’m so lost. Why did you let me make a mistake . . .”
The brazenness, that brutality in confessing. She found him truculent and voluptuous, that man to whom only ever happened things that he could understand. So that’s why I came, to face down an animal, she almost hated him, oh those friends of Irene’s were right to laugh at him, she looked at him with crudity feeling her own face red with perturbation. How old he was, his face sunburned, the wrinkles . . . she looked at him in desperation, gritted her teeth: but no, if he grows old what do I do? he can’t grow old, he can’t, he can’t.
“Why did you let me make a mistake?” he repeated suddenly, his monotonous voice frightened her.
Desperation? no, she didn’t know it. I swear, Daniel, I swear, how could that fool and egoist that I am ever guess — she saw herself once more in the apartment doing nothing, looking out the window, basely desiring some men, waiting, she hated herself profoundly surprised at having forgotten that Daniel was the most important thing. But at the same time how to forget that since they were small . . . her wanting to call out to him and not being able to, him not hearing . . . the hat . . . He’d never know how hard it was to give him a word to ask for assistance or to help him, how alone he was all along. Her heart hurting, she said:
“You make mistakes with a power that cannot be held back . . . I really think that making a mistake with that violence is lovelier than getting it right, Daniel, it’s like being a hero . . .” — Yes, she’d finally said it. As if hearing herself, she repeated with sweetness and tranquility — “You are a hero.”
He said nothing, he knew, was closing his eyes enduring his own life. She remembered how he’d say: I don’t want to be a boy. She looked at him with delicacy. He was a man. Boys and girls would have to change their names so much when they grew up. If somebody were named Daniel, now, he should have been Círil one day. Virgínia
