The Chandelier

or down lightly along with them. Between the stones the City Hall had forgotten weeds. Things at a certain point intensely took on some imprecise color, perhaps bluish without the air that was bathing them in tone and transparency appearing to exist and touch them. Their arms were translucent and wild, their faces vacant and softly awake. The low houses gave directly onto the sidewalk, one stuck to the next, with small iron balconies that didn’t stick out. The pink multi-story houses were wide and flat, the windows colored. They walked to the park, tired and hungry. They sat together on a bench. Through the slight fog in the park the lampposts were already turning on round lights, yellow and frightened. Across the calm and treeless expanse that surprising silence, a simple and roaring sound blinking serenely. Another thunderclap rolled, muffled, distant. A frog was jumping from the shadows, gilding itself for an instant in the brightness and plunging into the darkness of the shrubbery. Suddenly Daniel looking at her, got tired of Virgínia sharply, while she was nodding off from fatigue. He stood and sat on another bench without her protesting. There the fountain was spilling water that was always new and soft, noisy. The smell of the creeping plants was carried by the wind, the cold of the water was spreading through the air in drops. He started thinking with violence about nothing. A desire to kill, to conquer, while the slow and reddish ant was moving atop long legs across the cement of the bench. Daniel didn’t know what to do and the wet noise of the water was refreshing his enormous spirit. A great wish as if ironically was seizing him and he was already even almost fifteen. He grabbed a tall piece of grass, pulled it, chewed it, and in defiance swallowed it. But that wasn’t much. It seemed to him that he should die as an answer, yes as an answer. He needed wrath to live, it gave him an eloquence. He breathed with eagerness feeling the hard and inflexible greenness of life in his heart — the new vitality slipped a thought into him, he’d frighten her, tell her he was going to die! The little notion gave him a more hurried life as his eyes were rejoicing. He returned to the bench where a seated Virgínia was plunging her sleepy eyes into the ground. A thin woolen shawl was protecting her thin shoulders from the cold.

“You’re hunchbacked,” he said as an opening.

She straightened her back for a second and went back to her old position with weakness. He was annoyed; but was wisely transforming his urge into the slow strength of patience. He said:

“Let’s walk.”

He made her run almost. Quickly a kind of joy overtook her, her drowsiness disappeared.

“I’m going to die,” he said in a blasé tone because he could no longer contain himself.

She blanched.

“No.”

Virgínia never disappointed him . . . He scrutinized her with curiosity, noted that she was moved, laughed out loud with disdain and vehemence, shimmied as if splashing in the water.

“I’ll die like . . .” — he made a face of a dead man but observed that right then his violence had fallen away and without interest he was looking at the garden. She wasn’t frightened. And he started getting tired as they walked. They remained quiet but maybe both were thinking slightly about the same thing. Could it be that everyone knows what I know? Virgínia was reflecting. Because she’d just thought almost certainly, without astonishment, about dying.

Daniel also knew about a game that started off calm and bright but then got scary for some reason or another. He’d dig into the ground, resistant and dried by the sun, until finding humid soil, new, crumbly but quite amenable to being gathered into a single mass. He’d dig a trench, Virgínia would get in. It was with a face of serious and painstaking pleasure that she’d feel the warm coolness of the earth on her body, that smooth, delicate, and heavy shelter. Through the soles of her feet a shudder of fear was climbing, the whisper that the earth could deepen itself. And from within certain butterflies were arising beating their wings through her whole body.

“You’re closed off,” Daniel was saying to her rudely, but she was laughing softly without feeling afraid. Slowly however, she did get scared, the wind bending weeds, scattering leaves. And they didn’t mention it again, they tried to forget and forgot forever without a sign. He was making a small feint forward as if about to jump: look, Virgínia, I’m going to jump off! Off the world is what he meant — and it had been hard to make her understand. When it had sunk in, a white and quavering dread had appeared on her suddenly diminished face as if it were shrinking backwards. Daniel’s eyes were shining in a hot, dark, and terribly exciting pleasure: look, Virgínia, I’m going to jump off! He feinted the jump that would fling him off the earth. No, no — she was saying hoarsely, the palms of her hands quickly becoming damp, she was grabbing her brother’s clothes with frozen fingers, feeling her own stiff movements on the rough cloth. He never kept going with the game, as if sparing Virgínia for another time. She’d open her dry lips in the difficulty of a smile of relief.

Back then Father would go early to the stationer’s. As soon as he’d headed to town the house would become less pinched, a large space with a few walls because they didn’t have to pay attention to their mother and Esmeralda would only come out of her room at lunchtime. She and Daniel. But she wasn’t like Daniel, so filled with thoughts you couldn’t guess at, so proud. He’d never apologized, he knew that was the sign of a power. Between son and father floated a cautious and disturbed sincerity. And he was so stubborn that, even when he was small, he