When will I need to? she asked.
When you meet a man you like. Go and get him, and marry him, it’s a thing you have to do. But you’ll have to go and get him, and then you’ll need your mouth. And hair, hands, eyes, voice, cunning, patience, and a skillful belly. You’ll have to learn everything again from the beginning: do it quickly, otherwise they’ll get there before him. You understand what I’m trying to say?
Yes.
You’ll see that everything will come back to you in an instant. You just have to be quick. Did you listen to me carefully?
Yes.
Then repeat it.
The young Bride did, word for word, and where she didn’t remember the right word she used one of her own.
You’re a smart woman, said the grandmother. She actually said “woman.”
She gestured in the air, maybe it was a caress not given.
Now go, she said.
She felt one of those bites, a moan escaped her, like an animal. She put her hands back under the covers, to press where death was eating her, in her stomach.
The young Bride rose and for a while stood without moving, beside the bed. She had something in mind to ask, but it wasn’t easy to find a way.
My father, I said. Then I stopped.
The grandmother turned to look at me, with the eyes of an animal in danger.
But I was a smart girl, so I didn’t stop, and I said, Was my father born like that?
Like what?
Was my father born from someone in our family, like that?
The grandmother looked at me and today I can understand what she thought: that we never really die, because the blood continues, carrying off for eternity all the best and the worst of us.
Let me die in peace, child, she said. Now let me die in peace.
For that reason, on that hot night, when the Daughter, staring at me with a gentleness that could also be malice, repeated “try,” which meant to remember what I had between my legs, I knew right away that it wasn’t an ordinary moment but the appointment my grandmother had told me about, while she was spitting out death all around herself: if to the Daughter it seemed a game, for me it was, instead, a threshold. I had systematically put it off, with fierce determination, because I, too, had inherited a fear, like everyone else, and had devoted a good part of my life to it. What they had taught me I had succeeded in doing. But since I’d met the Son, I knew that the last move was missing, maybe the most difficult. I had to learn everything from the beginning again, and now that he was coming I had to do it in a hurry. I thought that the Daughter’s gentle voice — the Daughter’s malicious voice — was a gift of fate. And since she told me to try, I obeyed, and I tried, knowing perfectly that I was taking a road of no return.
As happens sometimes in life, she realized that she knew very well what to do, although she didn’t know what she was doing. It was a début and a dance, it seemed to her that she had been working on it secretly for years, practicing for hours of which she now had no memory. She let go of everything without haste, waiting for the right gestures to arrive, and they emerged at the pace of memory, disconnected but exact down to the details. She liked when the breath begins to sound in the voice, and the moments when you feel like stopping. In her mind she had no thoughts, until she thought that she wanted to look at herself, otherwise of all this only a shadow made of sensations would remain, and she wanted an image, a real one. So she opened her eyes and what she saw stayed in my mind for years, an image whose simplicity could explain things, or identify a beginning, or excite the imagination. Especially the first flash, when everything was unexpected. It didn’t leave me. Because we are born many times, and in that flash I was born to a life that would later be my truer life, inevitable, violent. So, still today, now that everything is over, and we’re in the season of forgetfulness, it would be hard to remember if in fact the Daughter at a certain point had really knelt next to my bed and caressed my hair and kissed my temples, something that maybe I only dreamed, but still I remember with absolute precision that she pressed a hand over my mouth when, at the end, I couldn’t stifle a cry, and of this I’m sure, because I can still remember the taste of that hand and the strange instinct to lick it, as an animal would have.
If you cry out they’ll discover you, the Daughter said to her, taking her hand off her mouth.
Did I cry out?
Yes.
How embarrassing.
Why? It’s only that then they’ll discover you.
What a weariness.
Sleep.
And you?
You sleep, I’ll sleep.
How embarrassing.
Sleep.
The next morning, at the breakfasts table, everything seemed simpler to her and, for incomprehensible reasons, slower. She realized that she was sliding into the conversations and slipping out with an ease she would never have thought possible. It wasn’t only her impression. She sensed a veil of gallantry in a small gesture of the Mail Inspector, and she was convinced that the Mother’s eyes truly saw her, even with a second’s hesitation, when they passed over her. Her gaze sought the bowl of cream, which she had never dared to aspire to, and even before she found it Modesto was offering it with the gloss of two unmistakable coughs. She looked at him, without understanding. He, offering her the cream, made a slight bow in which he hid a barely perceptible but very clear sentence.
Shine today, signorina. Be careful.
The Son began arriving in mid-June, and it seemed clear to everyone, after a few days, that the thing would take its time. The first item to be delivered was a Danish player piano, disassembled, and up till then it was possible to think that a deranged fragment had escaped the logical thought that the Son had surely given to the transport of his possessions, and was preceding, with a certain comic effect, the bulk of the consignment. But the next day two Welsh rams of the Fordshire breed were delivered, along with a sealed trunk bearing the legend “Explosive Material.” There followed, day by day, a drafting table produced in Manchester, three still lifes, a model of a Scottish stable, a worker’s uniform, a pair of toothed wheels whose purpose was obscure, twelve very light wool kilts, an empty hatbox, and a panel with the train schedule for London’s Waterloo Station. Since the procession had no obvious end, the Father felt bound to reassure the Family by explaining that it was all under control and that, as the Son had taken care to inform him by letter, the return from England was proceeding in the ways most suitable for avoiding useless overlaps and harmful complications. Modesto, who had had his difficulties finding a place for the two Fordshire rams, allowed himself a dry cough, and then the Father had to add that a minimum of discomfort had to be taken into account. Since Modesto seemed not to have resolved his laryngeal problems, the Father concluded by declaring that it seemed reasonable to predict that the Son would arrive in time for vacation.
Vacation, in the family, was an irksome tradition that was reduced to a couple of weeks in the French mountains: it was generally interpreted as an obligation and was endured by all with gracious resignation. In the event, it was customary to leave the house completely empty, and this owing to a peasant instinct, which had to do with the rotation of crops: it was thought that the house should be left to rest, so that the Family, upon returning, could go back to successfully sowing its effervescence, sure they could count on the usual abundant harvest. Therefore the servants, too, were sent home, and even Modesto was invited to have what others would have called a vacation and he interpreted as a pointless suspension of time. In general this happened around the middle of August: it could be deduced, therefore, that the procession of objects would stretch out for some fifty days. It was the middle of June.