The Father interpreted it as a gesture of summing up, the compendium of everything that the young Bride might have thought about what she had learned that day. It seemed to him even to have a particular, unexpected precision. So he let her sleep and went back to what he was doing, staring at his hands. He was considering the actions that had been accomplished that day, drawing from them the placid satisfaction of a general who, in altering the disposition of troops on the battlefield, had obtained an arrangement more suited to the terrain and less vulnerable to the inventions of the enemy. There were naturally some details to work out, first among them finding the Son who had disappeared, but the harvest of that day of grand maneuvers inclined him to optimism. Having reached these conclusions, he stopped staring at his hands and, looking out the window, allowed himself a ritual of the mind that he had been unable to perform for some time: reviewing his own certainties. He had a number, and of different types. He mixed them up with childish pleasure. He started from an idea, about which he had no doubts, that in summer it was advisable to use shaving cream perfumed with citrus. Then he continued with the conviction, developed over the years, that cashmere does not in fact exist, and continued by repeating the obvious evidence of the nonexistence of God. When he realized that it was time to get off, he jumped to the last certainty on the list, because it was the one that he cared about most, the only one that he had never confided to anyone, and for which he reserved the most heroic part of himself. He never thought it without uttering it aloud.
I won’t die at night, I will die in the light of the sun.
The young Bride raised her head from his shoulder, coming from distant dreams.
Did you say something?
That we have to get off, signorina.
When they left the station the young Bride still hadn’t said anything, caught in the spiderweb of a complicated awakening. Modesto had come to get them in a carriage and he drove them home, noting the little news of the day with a shade of lightness in his voice: it was standard in the Family, in fact, for any return, even the most predictable, to bring joy to manners and relief to gestures.
Only when they had got out of the carriage, and just a few steps divided them from the threshold of the house, the young Bride took the Father by the arm and stopped. Infallible, Modesto continued, without turning, and disappeared into a side door. The young Bride clutched the Father’s arm but without shifting her gaze from the broad pale façade that was about to swallow them up.
And now? she asked.
The Father was unruffled.
We’ll do what has to be done, he said.
Which is?
What a question. We’ll go on vacation, my dear.
Not when I wrote it but days later when, lying on the sofa, I reread it, I noticed that sentence I had written, and started looking at it more closely. If you wanted, you could even try to refine it a bit. For example, It will be day, in the light of the sun, when I die sounded more sonorous. Also, I wish to die in the light of the sun, and I will might work. When it’s like that I try to read the sentence out loud — after all, the Father said it out loud — and repeating it, then, I listened to it, and suddenly it was as if I hadn’t written it but received it, right at that moment, as if it had drifted here from some unknown distance. It happens. The sound was clear, the posture correct. I will not die at night, I will die in the light of the sun. It didn’t come from me, it was there, that’s alclass="underline" so I realized that it said something that I wouldn’t have been able to formulate but that I now recognized with assurance. It had to do with me. I read it again and understood, in all simplicity, that what was left for me to desire, since my bewilderment is a given, was in fact to die in the light of the sun, although die was undoubtedly a rather hasty term — let’s say disappear. But not at night, that was now clear to me. In the light of the sun. I was lying on the sofa, I repeat, and was engaged in the only activity that I’ve been able to do lately with confidence and with control, that is to say, write a book: but suddenly I was no longer writing, I was living—the very thing that I’ve neglected to do for some time, or at least whenever it’s possible — if living is the name of that rapid return to oneself that I experienced, without warning, while, lying on the sofa, I was reading aloud a sentence that I had written some days earlier and that now appeared to me, as if coming from afar, in the convincing light of a voice that was no longer mine.
I looked around. The things, the orderliness, the half-light. The lair of a maniac, L. had said. A little exaggerated, as usual. And yet.
Is it possible that it has to end like this?
Occasionally — as has surely been noted — I happen to think: is it possible that it has to end like this?
For my part, it was a while since I’d thought it. I had stopped interrogating myself. We slide down, without noticing much, deafened by grief, and that’s all.
But at that moment I thought—Is it possible that it has to end like this? — and it was clear to me that, whatever the destination of my life, the light in which I was waiting to know it was certainly inappropriate, as the landscape in which I allowed it to approach was absurd, and the rigidity that I had reserved for the wait was demented. It was all unfair.
On the turn that my affair had taken I didn’t dare to pass judgment. But as for the décor, I had something to say.
I will not die at night, I will die in the light of the sun.
That was what I had to say.
Honestly, I would never have expected such a burst of determination and I’m still amazed that what generated it was a sentence read in a book (that it was a book of mine is undoubtedly a rather painful detail). What I can say is that I took the thing literally — I will not die at night, I will die in the light of the sun — since I had long since lost the energy, or the imagination, to elaborate the thing symbolically, as no doubt the Doctor would have demanded of me (among other things, it has been determined that I owe him twelve thousand euros), surely pushing me to translate the term “light” into a new disposition of the spirit and the term “night” into the projection of my blind fantasies: bullshit. I resolved, more simply — and not having available, as I said, the energy and imagination needed for a different solution — to go to the sea. No, not really — I’m not so lacking in energy and imagination, after all. But it’s true that, instead of imagining who knows what, I was able only to go back to a morning years ago and a ferry that, in winter light, carried me to an island. It was in the south. The speed was slow, the sea calm. If you sat on the proper side of the bridge, you would travel with the sun in your eyes, but since it was a morning in February you were just bathed by the light. The muffled sound of the engines was a comfort.