The Young Bride

I don’t understand, is he coming or not? the young Bride asked the Daughter, when they were alone, after breakfast.

He’s coming — every day he arrives a little bit, and he’ll finish arriving in a month or so, the Daughter answered. You know what he’s like, she added.

The young Bride knew what he was like, but not so well, after all, or in detail, or in a particularly clear way. In truth she had liked the son precisely because he wasn’t comprehensible, unlike other boys of his age, in whom there was nothing to understand. The first time she met him she had been struck by the grace of his gestures, which were those of a sick man, and by his particular beauty, which was that of a dying man. He was perfectly healthy, as far as she knew, but someone whose days were numbered would have moved like him, dressed like him, and above all been excessively silent like him, speaking only occasionally, in a low voice and with an irrational intensity. He appeared marked by something, but that it was a tragic fate was a slightly too literary deduction that the young Bride quickly learned, instinctively, to ignore. In reality, in the network of those frail features and those convalescent’s gestures, the Son concealed a frightening avidity for life and a rare facility of imagination: both virtues that in that countryside were spectacularly useless. He was considered very intelligent, which in the common mind was equivalent to being anemic, or color-blind: an inoffensive and sophisticated malady. But the Father, from a distance, observed him and knew; the Mother, from closer up, protected him and guessed: they had a special child. With the instinct of a little animal, the young Bride also understood it, and she was only fifteen. So she began to hang around him, for no reason, whenever the occasion arose, and since over the years she had made herself into a kind of wild child, she became for the Son a faithful strange companion, younger, slightly feral, and as mysterious as he was. They were silent. The young Bride, especially, silent. They shared a taste for interrupted sentences, a preference for certain angles of light, and an indifference to malice. They were an odd couple, he in his elegance, she stubbornly unkempt, and if there was a feminine trait somewhere between them it would have been more readily distinguished in him. They began to speak, when they spoke, using we. They could be seen running along the embankment of the river, pursued by something of which there was no trace in the immensity of the countryside. They were seen at the top of the bell tower, back from copying the inscriptions written in the big bell. They had been seen in the factory, observing the workers’ actions for hours, without saying a word, but writing down some numbers in a little notebook. In the end, people got used to them, which made them invisible. When it happened, the young Bride remembered her grandmother’s words and, without thinking too much about it, recognized what she had foretold, or maybe even promised. She didn’t wash, she didn’t comb her hair, she wore the same dirty clothes, there was dirt under her nails and a bitter odor between her thighs; even her eyes, which she had long since given up, she continued to move without mystery, imitating the sly obtuseness of domestic animals. But one day when the Son, at the end of a silence the young Bride found of a perfect duration, turned to her and asked a simple question, she, instead of answering, used what for six years she had kept in reserve for him, and kissed him.

It wasn’t the Son’s first kiss, but in a certain sense it was. Earlier, and in different times, two other women had kissed him: consistent with the type of youth he was — ageless — they were adult women, friends of his mother. They had done it all, one in a corner of the garden and the other in a railway carriage. More than anything else, he remembered, in both, the obstacle of the lipstick. Not the first, out of delicacy, but the second, out of pure desire, had moved down to touch him and take him in her mouth for a long time, slowly, until he came. Nothing had followed from this; they were, after all, both cultivated women; but when he happened to meet them, the Son read in their eyes a long, secret drama, which, in the end, was the part that was most exciting to him. As for actual, so to speak complete, coupling, the Father, a good-natured and if necessary fierce man, had set a date for the right moment at the family brothel, in the city. Since the women there were quickly able to recognize each man’s preferences, everything happened in a way that the Son found comfortable and appropriate. He appreciated how quickly the first woman of his life understood that he would do it dressed and with his eyes open, and that she would have to be silent and completely naked. She was tall, she spoke with a southern accent, and she opened her legs solemnly. As she said goodbye she ran a finger over his lips — which were bloodless, like a sick person’s, but beautiful, like a martyr’s — and told him that he would have success with women because nothing excites them like mystery.

So the Son had a past, and yet the virgin kiss of the young Bride left him stunned: because the young Bride was a boy, because it was an unthinkable thought, because it was a thought he had in fact always thought, and because now it was a secret he knew. Besides, she kissed in a way… So he was disturbed by it, and even months later, when the Mother, sitting next to him, asked him to explain to her, for pity’s sake, why the devil he wanted to marry a girl who, as far as she could tell, had neither bosom nor rear nor ankles, he had one of his interminable silences and then said only: her mouth. The Mother had searched in the index of her memories for something that linked that girl to the term “mouth,” but had found nothing. So she had heaved a long sigh, promising herself that she would be more attentive in the future, because evidently something had escaped her. Just then, perhaps, a curiosity was roused that, years later, would dictate on her part an instinctive and memorable act, as we’ll see. At the moment, however, she said merely: After all, it’s well known that rivers flow to the sea and not the opposite (many of her syllogisms were in fact inscrutable).

After that first kiss, things had rushed ahead with geometrical precision first secretly, then in the light of day, until they produced the sort of slow marriage that is in effect the subject of the story that I am telling here; yesterday, an old friend asked me, candidly, if it had anything to do with the troubles that have been killing me these past few months, that is, the same period during which I am telling this story that, the old friend thought, might also have to do with the story of what’s killing me. The right answer — no — wasn’t difficult to give, and yet I remained silent and didn’t answer, because I would have had to explain how everything we write naturally has to do with what we are, or were, but as far as I’m concerned I’ve never thought that the job of writing could be resolved by wrapping one’s own affairs up in a literary package, employing the painful stratagem of changing the names and sometimes the sequence of events, when, instead, the more proper sense of what we can do has always seemed to me to be to put between our life and what we write a magnificent distance that, produced first by the imagination, then filled in by craft and dedication, carries us to a place where worlds, nonexistent before, appear: worlds in which what is intimately ours, unmentionably ours, returns to existence, but almost unknown to us, and touched by the grace of the most delicate forms, like fossils or butterflies. Certainly my old friend would have had difficulty understanding, and that’s why I remained silent and didn’t answer, but now I realize that I might, more usefully, have burst out laughing, asking him, and asking myself, what the fuck the story of a family that has breakfast until three in the afternoon, the story of an uncle who sleeps all the time, could have to do with the sudden disintegration that is removing me from the face of the earth (or at least that’s the feeling I have). Nothing, absolutely nothing. If I didn’t do that, however, it’s not only because it costs me a lot to laugh these days, but also because I know, for certain, that in a subtle manner I would have been telling a lie. Because fossils and butterflies exist, and you begin to discover them while you’re writing; sometimes you don’t even have to wait years, to reread in the cold light of day — every so often you sense them while the furnace is red-hot and you’re bending the iron. For example, I should have reported to the old friend how, writing about the young Bride, I more or less abruptly change the narrative voice, for reasons that at the moment seem to me exquisitely technical, or at most blandly aesthetic, with the obvious result of complicating the life of the reader; that in itself is negligible, yet it has an irritating effect of virtuosity that at first I even tried to fight, before surrendering to the evidence that I simply couldn’t hear those sentences unless they slipped out that way, as if the solid basis of a clear and distinct narrative voice were something that I no longer believed in, or that had become impossible for me to appreciate. A fiction for which I’d lost the necessary innocence. In the end it would be up to me to admit to the old friend that, although I don’t have a sense of the details, I would go so far as to believe in an assonance between the occasional slip of the narrative voice in my sentences and what I’ve discovered in these months, concerning myself and others, that is to say, the possible appearance in life of events that don’t have a direction, hence aren’t stories, hence are impossible to tell, and ultimately are enigmas without a form, intended to make us lose our minds, as my case demonstrates. It occurs to me now to say to my old friend, if belatedly, that I echo the dismaying absurdity of it almost involuntarily in the handiwork I do to earn my living, and to beg him to understand, that, yes, I’m writing a book that probably has to do with what’s killing me, but I ask him to consider it a rash and very private admission, completely pointless to remember, since, finally, the solid reality of the facts — which in the end surprises even me, I swear — is that, finally, in spite of everything that is happening around, and inside, me, what now seems to me most urgent is to refine the story of when, in the logical flow of their passion, the Son and the young Bride ran into that unexpected variant, that emigration to Argentina, born in the fervid imagination of a restless — or mad — father. The Son, for his part, wasn’t all that upset by it, because he had inherited from the Family a rather fleeting sense of time, in the light of which three years was not essentially distinguishable from three days: it was a matter of provisional forms of their provisional eternity. The young Bride, on the other hand, was terrified of it. From her family, she had inherited a precise fear, and at that moment understood that if her grandmother’s precepts had defended and saved her so far, everything would be more difficult in that foreign land, faraway and unknown. Her condition as a fiancée apparently made her safe, but it also brought to the surface what she had for years managed to bury, that is, the obvious truth that she was a woman. She greeted with dismay her father’s decision to take her there with him immediately, openly useless as she was, and went so far as to wonder if in her father’s sudden decision an oblique intention was concealed. She left for Argentina with a light suitcase and a heavy heart.