The Chandelier

and telling herself disturbed: later, later I’ll think it over, later, I promise to stop everything, not to go back to the city, yes, that’s what they were wanting, they, “they” were wanting her not to return to the city, to stay here. She remembered that when she was small she’d walk around the cemetery in Upper Marsh, where thick fruit trees arose, heavy, calm, and she’d say to herself wounded like an instrument that frees a sound, she’d say to herself: don’t eat those fruits, don’t eat! she’d say it to herself as if something had previously inspired her: eat, steal, eat — and she could only manage to say frightened: don’t eat the fruits!, she was distracting herself by thinking, distracted herself by walking . . . There! there was the end of the road! all she had to do was run and reach the field, then the fence . . . the gate . . . home. She started to murmur words in a low voice in a deep prayer, speaking to herself intensely, maddened, hurting herself with hard words of purification while with eyes shining with extraordinary firmness she was gradually reaching the meadow . . . the gate was creaking. She was on the grounds of the Farm, started running while raving tears were flowing from her eyes and she was sobbing without even trying to understand herself, running ahead, surrendered to the stream of life.

Still crying, fumbling, she was seeking her shoes behind the tree. She grabbed them with dirt in her nails, sat on the great rock in the garden lifting her skirt and blowing her nose on the cotton slip. She looked at the old construction half-covered by the tree beside which she had sat: weak light was shining yellowish and somber in the tall windows, nothing could be heard, noises were being born and getting lost even inside the mansion. The house seemed to her hushed, supernatural, distant — as if she’d died and was trying to remember, as if the house could vanish a few seconds from now and the ground would stay behind smooth, empty, dark. Who would know if death really was reality — as if her entire life had been a nightmare and she finally woke up dead. But moments later a kind of calm buzzing started coming from the center of the house as if noises, movements, and conversations crushed together in a single sound. It was her house, her house — she possessed a place that wasn’t the forest or the dark road, nor tiredness and tears, that wasn’t even joy, that wasn’t raving and pointless fear, a place that belonged to her without anyone ever having said so, a place where people would accept without surprise that she was coming in, sleeping and eating, a place where nobody would ask her if she’d been afraid but where they’d greet her while continuing to eat beneath the lamp, a place where in the most serious instants people could wake up and maybe suffer too, a place you could run to frightened after rapture, where you could return after the experience of laughter, after having tried to surpass the limit of the possible world — it was her, her, her house. She wiped her eyes, sought with trembling and such weak hands to clean the dirt from her feet, put on her shoes, got up. Standing on her tall heels she found herself in a slightly familiar sensation, felt some assurance, ran her dirty hands over her face trying to erase the expression of the tears, lifted her skirt, once again blowing her swollen nose. Nearing the mansion she was wanting to have a thought that thanked the vague salvation she was feeling in her chest, she halted looking at the white old walls immersed in shadow and silence, the windows blinking all lit up. She’d live at the Farm, she then thought in a beginning and it seemed to her that she might have lived her whole life in search of that thought, just as some would live leaning through confusion toward love, glory, or themselves. She smiled biting her lips with shame and pride in already laughing — to live her whole life at the Farm — for an instant she herself vibrating inside her smile with an unmixed joy, for a quick instant. She went straight to the staircase without looking at the family already sitting at the table.

“I’ll be back in a minute . . .”

She washed her face, her feet, her hands, put iodine on the scratches on her body. She wet her hair, combed it trying to smooth it, every once in a while a kind of little sob as a reminiscence. She looked at herself in the mirror — in the dark and dizzy light her face was seeming big, fresh, blossoming and shining, her dark eyes were moist and intense, she was looking like a monstrous flower open in the water — she went down the stairs feeling extraordinarily young and shaky. They were eating, nobody asked her anything; after all night had hardly fallen and she’d come back on time. She served herself black beans, peas, meat, rice, and cornbread, started eating slowly, eating everything painstakingly, guilty and happy, holding back the odd sob. The black countryside seemed impotent to her, she was sometimes remembering the almost mad pleasure she’d felt in the meadow, but recalling with nausea and fear, with hatred and flight, like a thing that hurt so, so badly, like a vice, she who had been expelled from pleasure, she who had been expelled from paradise. Mother said:

“Potatoes?”

She handed over her plate with docility and got potatoes. Her mother looked at her with approval and harshness:

“When you were a girl you got in a lot of trouble with your father for eating potatoes.”

Virgínia laughed feeling her eyes shining wet and flickering in front of her own vision.

“You have a cold,” the old woman asked.

“I don’t know, Mama . . .”

“Take some cough syrup before going to