What you have between your legs—forget about it. It’s not enough to hide it. You have to forget about it. Not even you must know that you have it. It doesn’t exist. Forget that you’re a woman, don’t dress like a woman, don’t move like a woman, cut your hair, move like a boy, don’t look at yourself in the mirror, ruin you hands, burn your skin, don’t ever wish to be beautiful, don’t try to please anyone, you mustn’t please even yourself. You have to inspire disgust, and then they’ll leave you alone, they’ll forget about you. You understand?
I nodded yes.
Don’t dance, don’t ever sleep with them, don’t wash, get used to stinking, don’t look at other men, don’t become a friend of any woman, choose the hardest jobs, kill yourself with weariness, don’t believe in love stories, and never daydream.
I listened. My grandmother looked at me carefully, to be sure that I was listening to her. Then she lowered her voice, and you could see that she was about to come to the most difficult part.
But pay close attention to one thing: preserve the woman you are in your eyes and your mouth, throw away everything but keep your eyes and your mouth; one day you’ll need them.
She thought for a moment.
If you really have to, give up the eyes, get used to looking at the ground. But save your mouth, otherwise you won’t know where to start over from, when you need to.
The young Bride looked at her with eyes that had grown very large.
When will I need to? she asked.
When you meet a man you like. Go and get him, and marry him, it’s a thing you have to do. But you’ll have to go and get him, and then you’ll need your mouth. And hair, hands, eyes, voice, cunning, patience, and a skillful belly. You’ll have to learn everything again from the beginning: do it quickly, otherwise they’ll get there before him. You understand what I’m trying to say?
Yes.
You’ll see that everything will come back to you in an instant. You just have to be quick. Did you listen to me carefully?
Yes.
Then repeat it.
The young Bride did, word for word, and where she didn’t remember the right word she used one of her own.
You’re a smart woman, said the grandmother. She actually said “woman.”
She gestured in the air, maybe it was a caress not given.
Now go, she said.
She felt one of those bites, a moan escaped her, like an animal. She put her hands back under the covers, to press where death was eating her, in her stomach.
The young Bride rose and for a while stood without moving, beside the bed. She had something in mind to ask, but it wasn’t easy to find a way.
My father, I said. Then I stopped.
The grandmother turned to look at me, with the eyes of an animal in danger.
But I was a smart girl, so I didn’t stop, and I said, Was my father born like that?
Like what?
Was my father born from someone in our family, like that?
The grandmother looked at me and today I can understand what she thought: that we never really die, because the blood continues, carrying off for eternity all the best and the worst of us.
Let me die in peace, child, she said. Now let me die in peace.
For that reason, on that hot night, when the Daughter, staring at me with a gentleness that could also be malice, repeated “try,” which meant to remember what I had between my legs, I knew right away that it wasn’t an ordinary moment but the appointment my grandmother had told me about, while she was spitting out death all around herself: if to the Daughter it seemed a game, for me it was, instead, a threshold. I had systematically put it off, with fierce determination, because I, too, had inherited a fear, like everyone else, and had devoted a good part of my life to it. What they had taught me I had succeeded in doing. But since I’d met the Son, I knew that the last move was missing, maybe the most difficult. I had to learn everything from the beginning again, and now that he was coming I had to do it in a hurry. I thought that the Daughter’s gentle voice—the Daughter’s malicious voice—was a gift of fate. And since she told me to try, I obeyed, and I tried, knowing perfectly that I was taking a road of no return.
As happens sometimes in life, she realized that she knew very well what to do, although she didn’t know what she was doing. It was a début and a dance, it seemed to her that she had been working on it secretly for years, practicing for hours of which she now had no memory. She let go of everything without haste, waiting for the right gestures to arrive, and they emerged at the pace of memory, disconnected but exact down to the details. She liked when the breath begins to sound in the voice, and the moments when you feel like stopping. In her mind she had no thoughts, until she thought that she wanted to look at herself, otherwise of all this only a shadow made of sensations would remain, and she wanted an image, a real one. So she opened her eyes and what she saw stayed in my mind for years, an image whose simplicity could explain things, or identify a beginning, or excite the imagination. Especially the first flash, when everything was unexpected. It didn’t leave me. Because we are born many times, and in that flash I was born to a life that would later be my truer life, inevitable, violent. So, still today, now that everything is over, and we’re in the season of forgetfulness, it would be hard to remember if in fact the Daughter at a certain point had really knelt next to my bed and caressed my hair and kissed my temples, something that maybe I only dreamed, but still I remember with absolute precision that she pressed a hand over my mouth when, at the end, I couldn’t stifle a cry, and of this I’m sure, because I can still remember the taste of that hand and the strange instinct to lick it, as an animal would have.
If you cry out they’ll discover you, the Daughter said to her, taking her hand off her mouth.
Did I cry out?
Yes.
How embarrassing.
Why? It’s only that then they’ll discover you.
What a weariness.
Sleep.
And you?
You sleep, I’ll sleep.
How embarrassing.
Sleep.
The next morning, at the breakfasts table, everything seemed simpler to her and, for incomprehensible reasons, slower. She realized that she was sliding into the conversations and slipping out with an ease she would never have thought possible. It wasn’t only her impression. She sensed a veil of gallantry in a small gesture of the Mail Inspector, and she was convinced that the Mother’s eyes truly saw her, even with a second’s hesitation, when they passed over her. Her gaze sought the bowl of cream, which she had never dared to aspire to, and even before she found it Modesto was offering it with the gloss of two unmistakable coughs. She looked at him, without understanding. He, offering her the cream, made a slight bow in which he hid a barely perceptible but very clear sentence.
Shine today, signorina. Be careful.
The Son began arriving in mid-June, and it seemed clear to everyone, after a few days, that the thing would take its time. The first item to be delivered was a Danish player piano, disassembled, and up till then it was possible to think that a deranged fragment had escaped the logical thought that the Son had surely given to the transport of his possessions, and was preceding, with a certain comic effect, the bulk of the consignment. But the next day two Welsh rams of the Fordshire breed were delivered, along with a sealed trunk bearing the legend “Explosive Material.” There followed, day by day, a drafting table produced in Manchester, three still lifes, a model of a Scottish stable, a worker’s uniform, a pair of toothed wheels whose purpose was obscure, twelve very light wool kilts, an empty hatbox, and a panel with the train schedule for London’s Waterloo Station. Since the procession had no obvious end, the Father felt bound to reassure the Family by explaining that it was all under control and that, as the Son had taken care to inform him by letter, the return from England was proceeding in
the ways most suitable for avoiding useless overlaps and harmful complications. Modesto, who had had his difficulties finding a place for the two Fordshire rams, allowed himself a dry cough, and then the Father had to add that a minimum of discomfort had to be taken into account. Since Modesto seemed not to have resolved his laryngeal problems, the Father concluded by declaring that it seemed reasonable to predict that the Son would arrive in time for vacation.
Vacation, in the family, was an irksome tradition that was reduced to a couple of weeks in the French mountains: it was generally interpreted as an obligation and was endured by all with gracious resignation. In the event, it was customary to leave the house completely empty, and this owing to a peasant instinct, which had to do with the rotation of crops: it was thought that the house should be left to rest, so that the Family, upon returning, could go back to successfully sowing its effervescence, sure they could count on the usual abundant harvest. Therefore the servants, too, were sent home, and even Modesto was invited to have what others would have called a vacation and he interpreted as a pointless suspension of time. In general this happened around the middle of August: it could be deduced, therefore, that the procession of objects would stretch out for some fifty days. It was the middle of June.
I don’t understand, is he coming or not? the young Bride asked the Daughter, when they were alone, after breakfast.
He’s coming—every day he arrives a little bit, and he’ll finish arriving in a month or so, the Daughter answered. You know what he’s like, she added.
The young Bride knew what he was like, but not so well, after all, or in detail, or in a particularly clear way. In truth she had liked the son precisely because he wasn’t comprehensible, unlike other boys of his age, in whom there was nothing to understand. The first time she met him she had been struck by the grace of his gestures, which were those of a sick man, and by his particular beauty, which was that of a dying man. He was perfectly healthy, as far as she knew, but someone whose days were numbered would have moved like him, dressed like him, and above all been excessively silent like him, speaking only occasionally, in a low voice and with an irrational intensity. He appeared marked by something, but that it was a tragic fate was a slightly too literary deduction that the young Bride quickly learned, instinctively, to ignore. In reality, in the network of those frail features and those convalescent’s gestures, the Son concealed a frightening avidity for life and a rare facility of imagination: both virtues that in that countryside were spectacularly useless. He was considered very intelligent, which in the common mind was equivalent to being anemic, or color-blind: an inoffensive and sophisticated malady. But the Father, from a distance, observed him and knew; the Mother, from closer up, protected him and guessed: they had a special child. With the instinct of a little animal, the young Bride also understood it, and she was only fifteen. So she began to hang around him, for no reason, whenever the occasion arose, and since over the years she had made herself into a kind of wild child, she became for the Son a faithful strange companion, younger, slightly feral, and as mysterious as he was. They were silent. The young Bride, especially, silent. They shared a taste for interrupted sentences, a preference for certain angles of light, and an indifference to malice. They were an odd couple, he in his elegance, she stubbornly unkempt, and if there was a feminine trait somewhere between them it would have been more readily distinguished in him. They began to speak, when they spoke, using we. They could be seen running along the embankment of the river, pursued by something of which there was no trace in the immensity of the countryside. They were seen at the top of the bell tower, back from copying the inscriptions written in the big bell. They had been seen in the factory, observing the workers’ actions for hours, without saying a word, but writing down some numbers in a little notebook. In the end, people got used to them, which made them invisible. When it happened, the young Bride remembered her grandmother’s words and, without thinking too much about it, recognized what she had foretold, or maybe even promised. She didn’t wash, she didn’t comb her hair, she wore the same dirty clothes, there was dirt under her nails and a bitter odor between her thighs; even her eyes, which she had long since given up, she continued to move without mystery, imitating the sly obtuseness of domestic animals. But one day when the Son, at the end of a silence the young Bride found of a perfect duration, turned to her and asked a simple question, she, instead of answering, used what for six years she had kept in reserve for him, and kissed him.
It wasn’t the Son’s first kiss, but in a certain sense it was. Earlier, and in different times, two other women had kissed him: consistent with the type of youth he was—ageless—they were adult women, friends of his mother. They had done it all, one in a corner of the garden and the other in a railway carriage. More than anything else, he remembered, in both, the obstacle of the lipstick. Not the first, out of delicacy, but the second, out of pure desire, had moved down to touch him and take him in her mouth for a long time, slowly, until he came. Nothing had followed from this; they were, after all, both cultivated women; but when he happened to meet them, the Son read in their eyes a long, secret drama, which, in the end, was the part that was most exciting to him. As for actual, so to speak complete, coupling, the Father, a good-natured and if necessary fierce man, had set a date for the right moment at the family brothel, in the city. Since the women there were quickly able to recognize each man’s preferences, everything happened in a way that the Son found comfortable and appropriate. He appreciated how quickly the first woman of his life understood that he would do it dressed and with his eyes open, and that she would have to be silent and completely naked. She was tall, she spoke with a southern accent, and she opened her legs solemnly. As she said goodbye she ran a finger over his lips—which were bloodless, like a sick person’s, but beautiful, like a martyr’s—and told him that he would have success with women because nothing excites them like mystery.
So the Son had a past, and yet the virgin kiss of the young Bride left him stunned: because the young Bride was a boy, because it was an unthinkable thought, because it was a thought he had in fact always thought, and because now it was a secret he knew. Besides, she kissed in a way . . . So he was disturbed by it, and even months later, when the Mother, sitting next to him, asked him to explain to her, for pity’s sake, why the devil he wanted to marry a girl who, as far as she could tell, had neither bosom nor rear nor ankles, he had one of his interminable silences and then said only: her mouth. The Mother had searched in the index of her memories for something that linked that girl to the term “mouth,” but had found nothing. So she had heaved a long sigh, promising herself that she would be more attentive in the future, because evidently something had escaped her. Just then, perhaps, a curiosity was roused that, years later, would dictate on her part an instinctive and memorable act, as we’ll see. At the moment, however, she said merely: After all, it’s well known that rivers flow to the sea and not the opposite (many of her syllogisms were in fact inscrutable).
After that first kiss, things had rushed ahead with geometrical precision first secretly, then in the light of day, until they produced the sort of slow marriage that is in effect the subject of the story that I am telling here; yesterday, an old friend asked me, candidly, if it had anything to do with the troubles that have been killing me these past few months, that is, the same period during which I am telling this story that, the old friend thought, might also have to do with the story of what’s killing me. The right answer—no—wasn’t difficult to give, and yet I remained silent and didn’t answer, because I would have had to explain how everything we write naturally has to do with what we are, or were, but as far as I’m concerned I’ve never thought that the job of writing could be resolved by wrapping one’s own affairs up in a literary package, employing the painful stratagem of changing the names and sometimes the sequence of events, when, instead, the more proper sense of what we can do has always seemed to me to be to put between our life and what
we write a magnificent distance that, produced first by the imagination, then filled in by craft and dedication, carries us to a place where worlds, nonexistent before, appear: worlds in which what is intimately ours, unmentionably ours, returns to existence, but almost unknown to us, and touched by the grace of the most delicate forms, like fossils or butterflies. Certainly my old friend would have had difficulty understanding, and that’s why I remained silent and didn’t answer, but now I realize that I might, more usefully, have burst out laughing, asking him, and asking myself, what the fuck the story of a family that has breakfast until three in the afternoon, the story of an uncle who sleeps all the time, could have to do with the sudden disintegration that is removing me from the face of the earth (or at least that’s the feeling I have). Nothing, absolutely nothing. If I didn’t do that, however, it’s not only because it costs me a lot to laugh these days, but also because I know, for certain, that in a subtle manner I would have been telling a lie. Because fossils and butterflies exist, and you begin to discover them while you’re writing; sometimes you don’t even have to wait years, to reread in the cold light of day—every so often you sense them while the furnace is red-hot and you’re bending the iron. For example, I should have reported to the old friend how, writing about the young Bride, I more or less abruptly change the narrative voice, for reasons that at the moment seem to me exquisitely technical, or at most blandly aesthetic, with the obvious result of complicating the life of the reader; that in itself is negligible, yet it has an irritating effect of virtuosity that at first I even tried to fight, before surrendering to the evidence that I simply couldn’t hear those sentences unless they slipped out that way, as if the solid basis of a clear and distinct narrative voice were something that I no longer believed in, or that had become impossible for me to appreciate. A fiction for which I’d lost the necessary innocence. In the end it would be up to me to admit to the old friend that, although I don’t have a sense of the details, I would go so far as to believe in an assonance between the occasional slip of the narrative voice in my sentences and what I’ve discovered in these months, concerning myself and others, that is to say, the possible appearance in life of events that don’t have a direction, hence aren’t stories, hence are impossible to tell, and ultimately are enigmas without a form, intended to make us lose our minds, as my case demonstrates. It occurs to me now to say to my old friend, if belatedly, that I echo the dismaying absurdity of it almost involuntarily in the handiwork I do to earn my living, and to beg him to understand, that, yes, I’m writing a book that probably has to do with what’s killing me, but I ask him to consider it a rash and very private admission, completely pointless to remember, since, finally, the solid reality of the facts—which in the end surprises even me, I swear—is that, finally, in spite of everything that is happening around, and inside, me, what now seems to me most urgent is to refine the story of when, in the logical flow of their passion, the Son and the young Bride ran into that unexpected variant, that emigration to Argentina, born in the fervid imagination of a restless—or mad—father. The Son, for his part, wasn’t all that upset by it, because he had inherited from the Family a rather fleeting sense of time, in the light of which three years was not essentially distinguishable from three days: it was a matter of provisional forms of their provisional eternity. The young Bride, on the other hand, was terrified of it. From her family, she had inherited a precise fear, and at that moment understood that if her grandmother’s precepts had defended and saved her so far, everything would be more difficult in that foreign land, faraway and unknown. Her condition as a fiancée apparently made her safe, but it also brought to the surface what she had for years managed to bury, that is, the obvious truth that she was a woman. She greeted with dismay her father’s decision to take her there with him immediately, openly useless as she was, and went so far as to wonder if in her father’s sudden decision an oblique intention was concealed. She left for Argentina with a light suitcase and a heavy heart.
The Young Bride Page 4