The Young Bride

It was a torrid summer, that year. Horizons vaporized tremulous dreams. Clothes stuck to the skin. Animals dragged themselves along insensibly. It was hard to breathe.

It was even worse in the house, which the young Bride kept closed up, with the idea of letting it seem deserted. The air stagnated lazily, sleeping in a kind of damp lethargy. Even the flies — usually capable, it should be noted, of inexplicable optimism — seemed unconvinced. But to the young Bride it didn’t matter. In a certain sense, she liked moving slowly, her skin shining with sweat, her feet seeking the comfort of stone. Since no one could see her, she often went through the rooms naked, discovering strange sensations. She didn’t sleep in her bed, but around the house. It occurred to her to use the places where she had seen the Uncle sleeping, and so she inhabited them one after the other, in sleep. When she slept in these places naked, she felt a pleasant agitation. She had no schedule, because she had decided to let the pace of the days be dictated by the urgency of her desires and the pristine geometry of her needs. So she slept when she was sleepy, she ate when she was hungry. But don’t think that it made her wild. For all those days she took meticulous care of herself — after all, she was waiting for a man. She brushed her hair repeatedly, she spent long moments at the mirror, she stayed in the water for hours. Once a day she dressed with the utmost elegance, in the Daughter’s or the Mother’s clothes, and in her splendor she sat in the big room, reading. Occasionally she felt oppressed by the solitude, or by an uncontrollable anguish, and then she chose a corner of the house where she recalled having seen or experienced something noteworthy. She would crouch down, open her legs, and caress herself. As if by magic, everything resettled itself. It was a strange sensation to touch herself on the chair in which the Father had asked to die with her. It was also remarkable to do it on the marble floor of the chapel. When she was hungry she got something from the pantry and then went to sit at the big table for breakfasts. As noted, it was traditional to leave twenty-five places, flawlessly set, as if at any moment a horde of guests were to arrive. The young Bride decided that each time she would eat at one of those places. When she finished eating, she took everything away, washed, cleaned, and left the place at the table empty, the place setting gone. So her meals were like a slow hemorrhage through which the table lost meaning and purpose, progressively emptied of every jewel and any ornament: the blinding white of the tablecloth advanced, naked.

Once, having inadvertently fallen asleep, she was wakened by the sudden certainty that waiting for a man, alone, in that house, was a tragically vain and ridiculous act. She was sleeping, naked, on a carpet she had unrolled in front of the door of the living room. She looked for something to cover herself with, because she felt cold. She pulled a sheet that was covering a nearby chair over herself. Mistakenly, she went back over her life in her mind, to find something that would break that strange, sudden fall into emptiness. All she did was make things worse. Everything seemed to her wrong or horrible. The Family was crazy, her trip to the brothel grotesque, any phrase uttered with a straight back absurd, Modesto cloying, the Father mad, the Mother ill, those places ignoble, her father’s end disgusting, the fate of her brothers desperate, her youth wasted. With a lucidity one has only in dreams, she understood that she no longer possessed anything, that she wasn’t beautiful enough to save herself, that she had killed her father, and that, little by little, the Family was robbing her of her innocence.

Is it possible that it has to end like that? she asked, frightened.

I’m only eighteen, she thought, with fear.

So, in order not to die, she took refuge where she knew she would find the last line of resistance to disaster. She forced herself to think about the Son. But think is a reductive word to define an operation that she knew was quite complex. Three years of silence and separation were not easy to retrace. So much distance had accumulated that the Son had long since stopped being, for the young Bride, an easily accessible thought, or memory, or sentiment. He had become a place. An enclave, buried in the landscape of her feelings, which she couldn’t always find again. Often she set off to reach it, but got lost on the way. It would have been simpler for her if she could have had available some physical desire to hold onto, in order to scale the walls of oblivion. But desire for the Son — his mouth, his hands, his skin — was something it wasn’t simple to return to. She could distinctly summon to memory particular instants in which she had desired him even in a devastating way, but now, staring at them, it seemed to her that she was staring at a room in which, in place of colors, little pieces of paper were stuck to the walls with the names of the hues written on them: indigo, Venetian red, sand yellow. Turquoise. It wasn’t pleasant to admit, but it was so. And even more, now that circumstances had led her to know other pleasures, with other people, with other bodies: they weren’t enough to erase the memory of the Son, but certainly they had placed him in a sort of prehistory in which everything seemed mythical as well as inexorably literary. For that reason, following the traces of physical desire wasn’t often, for the young Bride, the best system for finding the road that led to the hiding place of her love. Occasionally, she preferred to dig out of her memory the beauty of certain phrases, or certain gestures — a beauty of which the Son was a master. She found this beauty intact, then, in memory. And for a moment this seemed to restore to her the spell of the Son and bring her back to the exact point at which her journey aimed. But it was an illusion more than anything. She found herself contemplating marvelous objects that still lay in the cabinets of distance, impossible to touch, inaccessible to the heart. So the agonizing sense of ultimate loss was mixed with the pleasure of admiration, and the Son grew even more distant, almost unapproachable, now. In order not to truly lose him, the young Bride had had to learn that in reality no quality of the Son — or detail, or marvel — was now sufficient to enable her to cross the abyss of distance, because no man, however loved, is enough by himself to defeat the destructive power of absence. What the young Bride understood was that only by thinking of the two of them, together, was she able to sink into herself to where the permanence of her love dwelt, intact. She went back then to certain states of mind, certain ways of perceiving, which she still remembered very well. She thought of the two of them, together, and could feel a certain heat, or the tone of certain nuances, even the quality of a certain silence. A particular light. Then it was given to her to find what she sought, in the definite sensation that a place existed to which the world was not admitted, and which coincided with the perimeter marked by their two bodies, kindled by their being together, and made unassailable by their anomaly. If she could reach that sensation, everything became harmless again. Since the disaster of every life around her, and even of her own, was no longer a danger to her happiness but, if anything, the counterpart that made still more necessary and invincible the refuge that she and the Son had created, loving each other. They were the demonstration of a theorem that refuted the world, and when she could return to that conviction, all fear abandoned her and a new, sweet confidence took possession of her. There was nothing more wonderful in the world.

As she lay on the carpet, curled up under that dusty sheet, this was the journey the young Bride made, saving her life.

So she still had her love entirely available when, two days later, at a table where nine settings remained, and just as she was preparing for another to vanish, she heard in the distance the sound of an automobile, dim at first and then increasingly clear — she heard it arrive at the house, stop, and finally turn off. She got up, left everything as it was on the table, and went to her room to prepare. She had long since chosen a dress for the occasion. She put it on. She brushed her hair and thought that the Son had never seen her so beautiful. She wasn’t afraid, she wasn’t nervous, she didn’t have questions. She heard the engine of the automobile start up again and then grow faint. Barefoot, she went down the stairs and through the house, her steps firm. When she reached the front door she broadened her shoulders, as the Mother had taught her. Then she opened the door and went out.