Yes. I don’t believe it, but I know it. Do you believe it?
I know the story that they all died at night, one by one. I’ve known it since I was a child.
Maybe it’s only a legend.
I’ve seen three of them.
It’s normal, many people die at night.
Yes, but not all. Here even children who are born at night are born dead.
You’re frightening me.
You see, you’re beginning to understand — and just then the Daughter took off her nightgown, with a precise movement of her good arm. She took off her nightgown and turned onto one side, like the young Bride — naked, they looked at each other. They were the same age, and it was the age when nothing is ugly, because everything glows in the light of a new beginning.
They were silent for a while, they had to look at each other.
Then the Daughter said that when she was fifteen or sixteen it had occurred to her to rebel against that business of dying at night — she had seriously thought they were all mad — and she had rebelled in a way that she now recalled as very violent. But no one was frightened, she said. They let time pass. Until one day Uncle told me to lie down beside him. I did and waited for him to wake up. With his eyes closed he spoke to me for a long time, maybe in his sleep, and he explained that each of us is master of his life, but one thing does not depend on us, we receive it as an inheritance in our blood and there’s no sense in rebelling because it’s a waste of time and energy. Then I said to him that it was idiotic to think that a fate could be handed down from father to son, I said that the very idea of fate was a fantasy, a fable to justify one’s own cowardice. I added that I would die in the light of day, at the cost of killing myself between dawn and sunset. He slept for a long time, but then he opened his eyes and said to me no, of course fate doesn’t exist, and it’s not what we inherit — if only. It’s something much more profound and animal. We inherit fear, he said. A particular fear.
The young Bride saw that the Daughter, as she spoke, had opened her legs slightly and then closed them, after hiding a hand there, which now rested between her thighs, and every so often she moved it slowly.
So she explained to me that it’s a subtle contagion, and she showed me how in every gesture, in every word, fathers and mothers are merely handing down a fear. Even where they are apparently teaching solidity and solutions, and in the end especially where they’re teaching solidity and solutions, they are in reality handing down a fear, because they know that everything solid and solvable is only what they’ve found as an antidote to fear, and often a particular, circumscribed fear. So where families seem to teach children happiness, instead they are infecting children with a fear. And that’s what they’re doing every hour, during an impressive series of days, not letting up for an instant, with the most complete impunity, and a frightening efficiency, so that there is no way to break the circle.
The Daughter spread her legs slightly.
So I have a fear of dying in the night, she said, and I have a single way of going to sleep, mine.
The young Bride remained silent.
She stared at the Daughter’s hand, at what she was doing. The fingers.
What is it? she asked again.
Instead of answering the Daughter closed her eyes and turned on her back, seeking a familiar position. She rested one hand like a shell on her stomach, and with her fingers she searched. The young Bride wondered where she had seen that gesture and was so new to what she was discovering that finally she remembered, and it was her mother’s finger searching through a box of buttons for the small mother-of-pearl one that she had set aside for the cuff of her husband’s only shirt. Obviously that was another region of existence, but certainly the gesture was the same, or at least until it began to be circular, moving too fast, or too violently, to be a way of searching, when it had become, rather, a way of hunting — she thought of hunting an insect, or of killing something small. And in fact, now and then, the Daughter suddenly started to arch her back, and breathed strangely — a kind of agony. But graceful, thought the young Bride, even attractive, she thought: whatever the Daughter was killing in herself, her body seemed born for that crime, it was so perfectly arranged in the space, like a wave, even her deformities as a cripple disappeared, disappeared into nothing — which was the damaged arm you couldn’t have said, which of the spread legs you couldn’t remember.
She stopped the killing for a moment, but without turning, without opening her eyes, and said: You really don’t know what it is?
No, answered the young Bride.
The Daughter laughed, in a nice way.
You’re telling the truth?
Yes.
Then the Daughter began that sonorous song, nearly a lament, that the young Bride knew but didn’t know, and returned again to that small killing, but as if in the meantime she had decided to cast aside a sort of prudence that she had been holding onto. She moved her hips now, and when she let her head fall back her mouth opened slightly, in a way that seemed to me the crossing of a border and sounded like a revelation: in a flash I thought that the Daughter’s face, although it came from far away, was born to end up there, in that open wave that was now turned to the pillow. It was so true, and final, that all the Daughter’s beauty — with which she charmed the world, during the day — seemed to me suddenly what it was, that is, a mask, a subterfuge — or little more than a promise. I wondered if it was that way for everyone, and for me, too, but then the question I asked aloud — in a low voice — was different and again the same.
What is it?
The Daughter, without stopping, opened her eyes and turned her gaze toward the young Bride. But she didn’t really seem to be looking, her eyes were fixed elsewhere, and her mouth was softly open. She continued with that sonorous song, she didn’t stop her fingers, she didn’t speak.
Do you mind if I watch you? asked the young Bride.
The Daughter shook her head no. She continued to caress herself without speaking. She was somewhere, within herself. But since her eyes were on the young Bride, to the young Bride it seemed that there was no longer any distance between them, physical or immaterial, and so she asked another question.
Is that how you kill your fear? You hunt it and kill it?
The Daughter turned her head again, stared at the ceiling for a moment, and then closed her eyes.
It’s like detaching yourself, she said. From everything. You mustn’t be afraid, go all the way to the end, she said. Then you are detached from everything, and an immense weariness carries you into the night, giving you the gift of sleep.
Then that last expression returned to her features, the head thrown back and the mouth half open. She resumed the sonorous song, and between her legs the fingers moved rapidly, every so often disappearing inside her. Gradually she seemed to lose the capacity to breathe, and at a certain point she seemed in such a hurry that the young Bride would have taken it for desperate if she hadn’t just learned that it was, rather, what she sought, every night, when the light went out, descending to a point within herself that in some way must be resisting her if now I saw her exhausted, digging up with her fingertips something that the handbook of life had evidently buried in the course of a long day. It was a descent, no doubt about that, and it appeared to become at every step steeper, or more dangerous. Then she began to tremble, and she continued to tremble until the sonorous song broke off. She closed up like a clam, turning on her side, hugging her legs and pulling her head down between her shoulders — I saw her transformed into a child, all curled up, her hands hidden between her legs, her chin resting on her chest, her breath returning.