She got up, took off her shoes, tossed them behind the tree, went off walking, walked, walked, walked. She crossed the meadow beyond the Farm, walked, walked. She entered the narrow, long road and her gaze got used to the green shadows, the solid and claylike earth. Now she was wandering distractedly, her bare feet creaking in the warm dust of the late afternoon. She walked, walked. Once she raised her eyes and then they opened and filled with sweet moist surprise . . . Because from the twilight where they found themselves they were sprouting toward the blue-green of an enormous meadow with open arms and from the sad confusion of the intertwined branches on the road, they were now floating in extensive lines of light, long, peaceful, almost cold . . . joyful. It was a plateau of free, green land, open beyond what her gaze could contain. From the low road where she was stopping, Virgínia was seeing at the beginning of the ravine the odd tall weed flutter in the wind where it met the sky, almost getting mixed up with its colorless luminosity. And those vertical, pale strokes were so thin and their rhythm under the wind was so fast and light that her eyes clenched by the light would occasionally stop making them out, just feeling them like a delicate tingle in the air. How could she have forgotten the plateau, how could she have forgotten . . . , she was reproaching herself shaking her head. She abandoned the vine that her fingers were torturing and waited with her eyes vacant, anxious. Slowly silence fell over the murmur of her final steps and a hushed stillness rose. She didn’t know what she was doing standing waiting and hesitated. She also wasn’t familiar with that soft prostration in her heart, smooth and successive drops down to something like a calm weakening like that of the afternoon. Thus she stayed counting with astonishment the seconds by the smooth beating of the arteries somewhere in her body. Until slowly but then in a single instant she understood, she had to go up. She drew back for a moment intimidated by the discovery that wasn’t connected to the whole day, that wasn’t united to old desires and that was arising free like an inspiration. She hesitated, it was getting so late. But in a light urge she leapt over the plain and her body was moving ahead of her thought. A single golden and pale color was covering the grass weightlessly. Yes . . . somewhere a doe was softly opening and closing its eyelids licking a smiling and still tired newborn, her hair was trembling finely like fragile weeds while with half-opened senses opened she with difficulty and attention was conquering the land. No tree, no rock, nakedness up to the horizon of erased mountains; her heart was beating superficially and she was hardly breathing as if in order to live it was enough to look.
It was then that she experienced all the way to the end whatever it was whose foreboding had already worried her at the edge of the plateau. With a contained joy, flashing and fine, she felt almost ignorantly that, but yes, but yes, somehow there she was in the meadow . . . you understand? she was asking herself confused, her dark eye watching to the rescue of the whitened mountains. With her lips parted, dried by the wind that was blowing ceaselessly she continued her hard and humble glory with lighter feet, her body sharpened in movements. Smiling she imagined that behind her, while she was climbing and never reaching, terrified eyes of many men were following her as if she were an escaped vision . . . yes, yes, that’s how it was getting easier and easier to move her big white body forward . . . she smiled coyly behind her and then, as if she’d really believed in what she’d imagined, saw that she was alone. But a man, a man, she implored frightened . . . who understood her just then in the field, who surprised her almost with pain. But nobody could see her and the wind was blowing almost cold. She was feeling so pretty, she furrowed her eyebrows, grab it, grab it in order to be seen, loved, love! Nothing would
