She broke off when the young Bride entered the room, not so much because the young Bride had entered the room but because she was introduced by an alarming cough from Modesto. Maybe I haven’t said that in fifty-nine years of service the old man had refined a laryngeal communication system that everyone in the family had learned to decipher as if it were cuneiform. There was no need for the violence of words, for a cough — or, rarely, two, in the most articulated variants — accompanied his gestures like a suffix that clarified their meaning. At table, for example, he did not serve a single dish without adding a qualification from the epiglottis that encapsulated his own very personal judgment. In the specific situation, he introduced the young Bride with a just noticeable, distant hiss. It indicated, everyone knew, a very high level of vigilance, and that is the reason that the Mother broke off, something that she didn’t usually do, since announcing a guest, under normal circumstances, was no different from the filling of her glass with water — she would then calmly drink it. She broke off, therefore, turning toward the new arrival. She registered her youth and, with the automatic politeness of her class, said
Darling!
She hadn’t the least idea who it was.
Then a chink must have opened in her habitually muddled mind, because she asked
What month is today?
Someone answered May, probably the Pharmacist, whom champagne rendered unusually precise.
Then the Mother repeated Darling! but conscious, this time, of what she was saying.
It’s incredible how quickly May arrived this year, she was thinking.
The young Bride made a slight bow.
They had forgotten, that was all. It was what had been agreed to, but so long ago that a precise memory of it was lost. One mustn’t deduce from that that they had changed their mind: it would have been, in any case, too much work. Once a decision was made in that house, it never changed, for obvious reasons of economy of emotions. Simply, the time had passed with a velocity that they hadn’t needed to register, and now the young Bride was there, probably to do what had long ago been agreed to, with the official approval of alclass="underline" marry the Son.
It was annoying to admit that, strictly speaking, the Son wasn’t there.
Yet it didn’t seem urgent to linger on that detail, and so what they readily offered was a happy chorus of greeting, veined variously with surprise, relief, and gratitude: the last for the way life proceeded, seemingly heedless of human distractions.
Since I’ve now begun to tell this story (this, in spite of the distressing series of troubles that have hit me, which would have counseled against such an undertaking), I can’t avoid clarifying the geometry of the facts, just as I’m remembering it, little by little, noting, for example, that the Son and the young Bride had met when she was fifteen and he eighteen, and had gradually recognized in each other a magnificent corrective to the hesitations of the heart and to the boredom of youth. At the moment it’s premature to explain by what singular course, but it’s important to know that they quickly reached the happy conclusion that they wanted to get married. To their respective families the thing seemed incomprehensible, for reasons that I will perhaps be able to explain if the vise of this sadness will loosen its grip: but the unusual personality of the Son, which sooner or later I’ll have the strength to describe, and the pure determination of the young Bride, which I’d like to find the clearheadedness to communicate, advised a certain prudence. It was agreed that it was better to put up with it, and they moved on to untying some technical knots, first among them the imperfect alignment of their respective social positions. It should be remembered that the young Bride was the only daughter of a rich animal breeder who had five sons, while the Son belonged to a family that for three generations had been reaping profits from the production and sale of wools and fabrics of a particular quality. There was money on both sides: but undoubtedly it was money of different types, one produced by looms and ancient elegance, the other by manure and atavistic hard work. This fact led to an open space of placid indecision that was crossed when, on impulse, the Father communicated solemnly that the marriage between agrarian wealth and industrial finance represented the natural development of the entrepreneurialism of the North, tracing a distinct path of transformation for the entire country. From this he deduced the need to overcome social hierarchies that by now belonged to the past. Given that he formalized the thing in those exact terms, lubricating the sequence with a couple of big, deliberately placed curses, the reasoning seemed convincing to everyone, in its irreproachable mixture of rationality and genuine instinct. We decided to wait just until the young Bride became a little less young: we had to avoid possible comparisons between such a carefully considered marriage and certain peasant unions, hurried and vaguely animallike. Waiting, besides being undoubtedly convenient, seemed to us the seal of a superior moral attitude. The local clergy did not hesitate to confirm, oblivious of the curses.
So they would be married.
Since I’m here, and because tonight I feel a kind of illogical carelessness, brought on, perhaps, by the mournful light in this room they’ve lent me, I’d like to add something about what happened shortly after the announcement of the engagement, on the initiative, surprisingly, of the young Bride’s father. He was a taciturn man, perhaps good in his way, but also irascible, or unpredictable, as if too close proximity to work animals had transmitted a sort of harmless impetuosity. One day he said tersely that he had decided to attempt an ultimate coup in his affairs by emigrating to Argentina, to conquer lands and markets whose every detail he had studied on shitty, fog-bound winter evenings. The people who knew him, vaguely bewildered, decided that such a decision must have something to do with the prolonged coldness of the marriage bed, along with, perhaps, a certain illusion of belated youth, and probably a childish intimation of infinite horizons. He crossed the ocean with three sons, of necessity, and the young Bride, for consolation. He left his wife and the other sons to watch over the land, promising that they would join him, if things went as they should, which in effect he then did, after a year, even selling all his property in his homeland and betting his entire patrimony on the gambling table of the pampas. Before leaving, though, he made a visit to the Father of the Son and affirmed on his honor that the young Bride would appear when she turned eighteen, to fulfill the promise of marriage. The two men shook hands in what was, in those parts, a sacred gesture.
As for the betrothed pair, they said goodbye in apparent tranquility and secret dismay: they had, I must say, good reasons for both.
Once the landowners had set sail, the Father spent some days in a silence unusual for him, neglecting routines and habits that he considered inviolable. Some of his most unforgettable decisions were born of similar personal suspensions, and so the whole Family was resigned to important news when, finally, the Father made a brief but very clear announcement. He said that each of us has his Argentina, and that for them, leaders in the textile sector, Argentina was called England. In fact he had for a while been looking across the Channel at certain factories that were optimizing production in a surprising way: head-spinning profits could be read between the lines. We have to go and see, said the Father, and possibly imitate. Then he turned to the Son.