You’ll go, now that you’re settled, he said, cheating a little on the terms of the matter.
So the Son had left, even quite happily, on a mission to study the secrets of the English and bring back the best of them, for the future prosperity of the Family. No one expected that he would return within a few weeks, and then no one realized that he wouldn’t return even within a few months. But they were like that: they ignored the passing of the days, because they aimed at living only a single, perfect day, infinitely repeated: so time for them was a phenomenon with variable margins that echoed in their lives like a foreign language.
Every morning, from England, the Son sent us a telegram, always with the same text: All is well. He was referring, obviously to the trap that was night. At home it was the only news we truly wanted to know: for the rest, it would have been a struggle for us to doubt that during that prolonged absence the Son could do anything but his duty, laced at most with some mild, enviable diversion. Evidently the English factories were numerous and merited close analysis. We stopped expecting him, since he would return.
But the young Bride returned first.
Let us get a look at you, said the Mother, radiant, once the table had reassembled.
They all looked at her.
They picked up a nuance they wouldn’t have known how to express.
The Uncle expressed it, waking from a sleep that he had been in for a while, lying in a chair — a champagne glass, full to the brim, in his hand.
You must have done a lot of dancing, signorina, over there. I’m glad of it.
Then he took a sip of champagne and fell asleep again.
The Uncle was a welcome, and irreplaceable, figure in the family. A mysterious syndrome, whose only known sufferer he was, kept him in a constant sleep from which he emerged for very brief intervals, for the sole purpose of participating in the conversation with a precision that we were all now used to considering obvious but that was, clearly, illogical. Something in him was able to register, even in sleep, any event and every word. Indeed, the fact that he came from elsewhere often seemed to give him such lucidity, or such a singular view of things, that his wakings and relevant utterances were endowed with an almost oracular, prophetic resonance. This reassured us greatly, because we knew we could count at any moment on the reserves of a mind so rested that it could completely untangle any knot that appeared in domestic discussion or daily life. In addition, we rather liked the astonishment of strangers encountering those singular feats, a detail that made our house even more attractive. Returning to their families, the guests often took with them the legendary memory of that man who could, while sleeping, be halted even in complex movements, of which holding a champagne glass full to the brim was but a pale example. He could shave in his sleep, and on occasion he had been seen to play the piano as he slept, although he took slightly slowed-down tempos. There were even those who claimed to have seen him play tennis in a deep sleep: it seems that he woke only at the change of sides. I refer to him out of necessity to the story, but also because today I seemed to glimpse a coherence in everything that is happening to me, and so for a few hours it’s been easy to hear sounds that otherwise, in the grip of confusion, I would find inaudible: for example, often, the clattering of life on the marble table of time, like dropped pearls. The need of the living to be funny — that in particular.
Ah, yes, you must have danced a lot, the Mother affirmed, I couldn’t have said it better, and besides I’ve never loved fruit pies (many of her syllogisms were in fact inscrutable).
The tango? asked the notary Bertini, agitated. For him, uttering the word “tango” was in itself sexual.
The tango? Argentina? In that climate? asked the Mother, though it wasn’t clear whom she was addressing.
I can assure you that the tango is clearly Argentine in origin, the notary insisted.
Then the voice of the young Bride was heard.
I lived in the pampas for three years. Our neighbor was two days away by horseback. A priest brought us the Eucharist once a month. Once a year we’d set out for Buenos Aires, with the idea of attending the première of the Opera Season. But we never arrived in time. It was always much farther than we thought.
Definitely not very practical, the Mother observed. How did your father think he would find you a husband like that?
Someone pointed out to her that the young Bride was engaged to her Son.
It’s obvious, you think I didn’t know? I made a general observation.
But it’s true, the young Bride said, they dance the tango over there. It’s lovely, she said.
The mysterious oscillation of space that always heralded the Uncle’s imponderable awakenings could be felt.
The tango gives a past to those who don’t have one and a future to those who don’t hope for one. Then he fell asleep again.
While the Daughter, on the chair next to the Father, watched, silently.
She was the same age as the young Bride — it’s many years, incidentally, since I was that age. (Now, thinking back, I see only a great confusion, but also — what seems to me interesting — the waste of an unprecedented and unused beauty. Which, moreover, brings me back to the story that I intend to tell, if only to save my life, but certainly also for the simple reason that telling it is my job.) The Daughter, I was saying. She had inherited from the Mother a beauty that in that region was aristocratic: for the women of that land enjoyed only limited flashes of splendor — the shape of the eyes, two good legs, raven black hair — never that complete and full perfection (apparently the product of improvements made over centuries in the procession of countless generations) which the Mother retained and which she, the Daughter, miraculously replicated, with the gilding, moreover, of youth. And up to there everything was fine. But the truth appears when I emerge from my graceful immobility and move, shifting irreparable amounts of unhappiness, owing to the unalterable fact that I am a cripple. An accident, I was around eight. A cart out of control, a horse shying suddenly on a narrow city street, houses close on either side. Renowned doctors, called from abroad, did the rest — maybe it was bad luck, not even incompetence — but in a complicated, painful way. When I walk I drag one leg, the right, which although perfectly shaped is unreasonably heavy and has no idea how to harmonize with the rest of the body. The foot lands heavily and is partly numb. The arm isn’t normal, either; it seems capable of only three positions, none very graceful. You might call it a mechanical arm. Thus, seeing me get up from a chair and come toward you, in greeting, or as a gesture of courtesy, is a strange experience, of which the word disappointment can give a pale idea. Unspeakably beautiful, I disintegrate at the slightest movement, in an instant turning admiration into pity and desire into unease.
It’s something I know. But I have no inclination for sadness, or talent for suffering.
While the conversation had moved on to the late flowering of the cherry trees, the young Bride went over to the Daughter and leaned over to kiss her on the cheeks. She didn’t get up, because at that moment she wished to be beautiful. They spoke in low voices, as if they were old friends, or perhaps out of the sudden desire to become so. Instinctively, the Daughter understood that the young Bride had learned distance, and would never discard it, having chosen it as her own inimitable form of elegance. She’ll always be innocent and mysterious, she thought. They’ll adore her.
Then, when the first empty champagne bottles were being carried off, the conversation had an almost magical moment of collective suspension, and in that silence the young Bride asked politely if she could pose a question.