Continuing his caresses, the man looked at me: maybe he was trying to figure out if any of what I was saying mattered to me. I was silent, only I stared at him with a charm that hinted of challenge. I felt his hand under my dress, between my legs, and it occurred to me, suddenly, that I could do with that hand what I wanted. It’s incredible how uttering a truth kept hidden for too long makes one arrogant or confident, or — I don’t know — strong. I bent my head back very slightly, closed my eyes, and felt the hand go up between my legs. A small sigh was enough to push it to where the stockings ended and feel it on my skin. I wondered if I was really able to stop it. So I opened my eyes and said in a ridiculously gentle voice that my father, at night, made exactly that gesture, with his rough, woody hand — he sat beside me and while my brothers silently left the room he slid just like that under my skirt, with his hand of weary wood. The man stopped. He pulled his hand back toward the knee, but not brusquely, simply as if he had been thinking about it for a while. He was no longer the father I had known, said the young Bride, he was a broken man. We were so alone that the flight of a falcon was a presence, the arrival of a man from the crest of the hill an event. She was enchanting as she spoke, her eyes were lost in a dim distance, and her voice was firm. So the man leaned toward her, to kiss her mouth, a gesture in which not even he could have distinguished the urgency of desire from the courtesy of a protective gesture. The young Bride let him kiss her, because at that moment she was climbing back up the slope of truth, and any other gesture was indifferent to her — it was somewhere else that she was going. She barely felt the man’s tongue, it didn’t matter to her. She felt, but peripherally, that that hand, under her dress, was approaching her sex. She pulled away from the man’s mouth and said that in the end the only solution that could be found was to come to an agreement with certain people, down there, and this meant that she would have had to marry a man she scarcely knew. He wasn’t even an unpleasant man, the young Bride smiled, but I was engaged to a youth I loved, here in Italy. Whom I love, I said. I barely opened my legs and let the man’s fingers find my sex. So I said to my father that I would never do it, and that I would leave, as it had long since been decided, to marry here, and nothing could keep me from going. He said that I would ruin him. He said that if I left he would kill himself the next day. The man opened my sex with his fingers. I said that I ran away at night, with the help of my brothers, and that I didn’t turn around until I had crossed the ocean. And when the man put his fingers in my sex I said that my father, the day after I fled, had killed himself. The man stopped. They say he was drunk and fell into a river, I added, but I know that he shot himself in the head with his gun, because he had described to me exactly how he would do it, and had promised me that, at the last moment, he would have neither fear nor regrets. Then the man looked me in the eyes, he wanted to know what was happening. I took his hand gently and drew it out from under my dress. I brought it to my mouth and took his fingers between my lips, for a moment. Then I said that I would be infinitely grateful if he would be so kind as to leave me alone. He looked at me without understanding. I would be infinitely grateful if you would now be so kind as to leave me alone, the young Bride repeated. The man asked a question. Please, said the young Bride. Then the man rose, an instinct made reflexive by his upbringing and without understanding what had happened to him. He uttered some civility, but then he stood there, to prolong something he didn’t know. Finally he said that that wasn’t the most suitable way to entertain a man in that place. I can’t say you’re wrong and I beg you to accept my apologies, said the young Bride: but calmly, without the shadow of a regret. The man left with a bow. Many times, in his life, he would try to forget that encounter, without being able to, or to describe it to someone, without finding the right words.
They look nice, said the Father, indicating the long red gloves.
The young Bride adjusted a fold of her dress.
They’re not mine, she said.
Too bad. Shall we go?
They returned on the train, again alone, sitting opposite each other, in the light of a long sunset, and, thinking back on it now, I can recall in detail, despite all the years that have passed, the purpose with which, my back straight, not even leaning against the seat, I was proud of fighting an immense weariness. It was pride, but of a type that the blood generates only in youth — coupling it, mistakenly, with weakness. The jolting of the train kept me awake, along with the suspicion that a defining infamy had, all in one day, been poured into the hollow of my life, as into a cup that now seemed impossible to empty: I managed to tip it just enough to see the opaque liquid of shame drain from the edges — I felt it running slowly, without knowing what to think. If I had been clearheaded, if I had had a thousand lives more, I would have known instead that that strange day, of confessions and bizarre events, had offered a lesson that took me years, and many mistakes, to learn. In every detail, what I had done in those hours — and heard, and said, and seen — was teaching me that it’s bodies that dictate life: the rest is a result. I couldn’t believe it, at that moment, because, like every young person, I expected something more complex, or sophisticated. But now I don’t know any story, mine or anyone else’s, that did not begin in the animal movement of a body — an inclination, a wound, an obliqueness, at times a brilliant move, often obscene instincts that came from far away. It’s all written there already. The thoughts come afterward, and are always a belated map, to which, out of convention and weariness, we attribute some precision. Probably it was what the Father intended to explain to me, with the apparently absurd act of taking a girl to a brothel. At the distance of years, I have to acknowledge in him a courageous exactness. He wanted to take me to a place where it was impossible to protect oneself from the truth — and inevitable to hear it. He had to tell me that the weave of destinies that the loom of our families had worked on for years had been made with a primitive, animal thread. And that, however we might strive to seek more elegant or artificial explanations, for all of us our origin was written in our bodies, in characters engraved with fire — whether it was the imprecision of a heart, the scandal of reckless beauty, or the brutal necessity of desire. Thus we live in the illusion that we are putting back in order what the humiliating or marvelous act of a body has thrown into disarray. In a final marvelous or humiliating act of the body, we die. All the rest is a useless dance, made memorable by wonderful dancers. But I know it now, I didn’t know it then — and on the train I was too tired to understand it, or proud, or frightened, I don’t know. I sat with my back straight and that was everything. I looked at the Father: the features of a good-natured man, a secondary character, had returned — he sat with his hands entwined, resting in his lap, and stared at them. Every so often, he raised his eyes to the window, but briefly. Then he went back to staring at his hands. A performance. The young Bride realized that she found that man, suddenly, irresistible, putting together what she had learned about him and the unassuming figure now facing her. She noted for the first time the Father’s spectacular ability to hide the strength he had available, the illusions he was capable of, and the boundless ambition to which he was devoting his life. A professional gambler, who won with invisible cards. A fantastic cardsharp. She saw in him a beauty that not for an instant had she suspected, before that day. She liked that solitude, in the moving train, and the fact of having been the two of them, for a day. She was eighteen: she got up, went to sit next to him, and when she realized that he wouldn’t stop staring at his hands, she leaned her head on his shoulder and fell asleep.