“What’s going on? Virgínia’s crying?”
“No, singing,” the black woman would answer. “She’s been singing loud, loud ballads for hours, it’s awful.”
She was skinny and dirty, the long veins of her neck were trembling — she’d sing awfully, pure sound screaming, going beyond things on their own terms. What mattered were the realms her voice was reaching. First of all, she was still small while standing on the doorstep; meanwhile the notes were rising like soap bubbles, shining and full, and wander off into the brightness of the air; and meanwhile, those soap bubbles belonged to her, to her who was small while standing on the doorstep. That’s how it was. And it was also in her nature to know how to imitate the cries of animals, sometimes of animals that didn’t exist but could exist. They were guarded voices, round in the throat, howling, crazy, and rather small. She could also make sharp and sweet calls like those of lost animals. But suddenly things were rushing into a resistant reality. One day Father found her crying; she was almost a big girl looking distractedly at the clouds that were moving past. Stupefied he’d asked:
“But why? Why?”
Everything had grown difficult then, he’d come and was boring her. And since she didn’t know how to answer she made something up:
“Daniel and I can’t live here forever . . .”
Terrified her father heard this as if hearing a tree speak. And then in a strange and sudden understanding that scared her because she hadn’t understood a thing, he was filled with a rage that turned him red and tense, in an almost dangerous outrage.
“That’s a lie, fool! fool! fool!”
Since she looked at him surprised, her young face already shining without tears, he stared at her with furrowed brows, concluded more calmly shrugging almost with indifference:
“Fool.”
Daniel was a strange boy, sensitive and proud, hard to love. He didn’t know how to make an excuse for hiding. Even when he’d fall into fantasies these were cautious, familiar; he didn’t have the courage to make things up and she was always the one who with a surprising facility would lie for both of them; he was sincere and harsh, hating whatever he couldn’t see. With his clean and dry eyes he was living as if with Virgínia alone at the Farm. Ever since his sister was born he’d taken her and secretly she was his alone. When she was still very small, her long and dirty hair falling in her eyes, her short legs hesitating above her bare feet, she would grab with one of her hands the hem of Daniel’s pants and her brother, his face sunburned and without sweetness, his eyes sure of themselves, would climb the slopes of the mountains, with stubborn movements as if not feeling Virgínia’s weight, the resistant incline of the hills, the wind that was blowing firm and cold against his body. He didn’t even love her, but she was sweet and simple, easy to lead toward any idea. And even in the periods when he’d shut down severe and rude giving her orders, she’d obey because she felt him near her, paying attention to her — he was the most perfect creature she’d ever know. She would then spend days in a strange euphoria, like the wind, high, calm, and silent. My God, she didn’t even know that she was thinking, all she had was ardor, nothing more, not even a point. And he — all he had was fury, nothing more, not even a point. Despite everything Daniel would tread lightly, allow that unwieldy and watchful despair of his to live inside her, a sharp weakness, the possibility of perceiving with the nose, of foreseeing inside of silence, of living deeply without carrying out a movement. And of being shut inside a room while in danger. Yes, yes, little by little, softly, from her ignorance the idea was being born that she possessed a life. It was a feeling with neither fore- nor afterthoughts, sudden, complete, and united, which could neither be increased nor altered by age or wisdom. It wasn’t like living, living and then knowing that you possessed a life, but it was like looking and seeing all at once. The feeling didn’t come from facts present or past but from her own self like a movement. And if she died young or took the veil, the warning that she had a life was just as good as having lived a lot. That’s another reason she was a little tired perhaps, for as long as she could remember; sometimes only with an imperceptible effort did she manage to keep afloat. And above all else, she’d always been serious and false.
In the afternoon they put on clean clothes, wet and combed their hair and went with Father to the stationer’s. It was a good place to hang around, with a door and a window, almost dark and pleasant inside. They sold books, notebooks, saints, and religious medallions. For every birthday at Quiet Farm the present was a little medallion with a different saint, generally the one least sought after by the clientele of Upper Marsh. They also sold postcards with kissing lovers, angels and cupids, snowy landscapes. Esmeralda had brought one with a young man offering a flower to a girl who was thinking with a hand on her forehead, her elbow loose in space. The most popular items however were religious articles. The street where the stationer’s was rose narrowly and with effort to the Bom Jesus Church, with a white courtyard encircled by rusty fencing. People leaving church bought little medallions. Daniel and Virgínia, while they were waiting for their father, went into the church. It was squat and clean, dark; the exterior had been whitewashed. Inside the oil lamp was lit and a purplish and solitary stain was muffled in old carpets. “Pray for us,” they said quickly, peering at the small font of holy water and left hurriedly stepping without violence on the floor of damp tiles. A thunderclap was heard in the distance. It was already growing dark but Father’s store was full of men talking business. Virgínia and Daniel left again walking through the almost-dark streets; they’d look through the odd window someone had forgotten to close at the dusty interiors of the houses; the furniture, the bits of old and squat crockery seemed to be made of matter alive and expectant like trees. The tight streets went up or down lightly along with them. Between the stones the City Hall had forgotten weeds. Things at a certain point intensely took on some imprecise color, perhaps bluish without the air that was bathing them in tone and transparency appearing to exist and touch them. Their arms were translucent and wild, their faces vacant and softly awake. The low houses gave directly onto the sidewalk, one stuck to the next, with small iron balconies that didn’t stick out. The pink multi-story houses were wide and flat, the windows colored. They walked to the park, tired and hungry. They sat together on a bench. Through the slight fog in the park the lampposts were already turning on round lights, yellow and frightened. Across the calm and treeless expanse that surprising silence, a simple and roaring sound blinking serenely. Another thunderclap rolled, muffled, distant. A frog was jumping from the shadows, gilding itself for an instant in the brightness and plunging into the darkness of the shrubbery. Suddenly Daniel looking at her, got tired of Virgínia sharply, while she was nodding off from fatigue. He stood and sat on another bench without her protesting. There the fountain was spilling water that was always new and soft, noisy. The smell of the creeping plants was carried by the wind, the cold of the water was spreading through the air in drops. He started thinking with violence about nothing. A desire to kill, to conquer, while the slow and reddish ant was moving atop long legs across the cement of the bench. Daniel didn’t know what to do and the wet noise of the water was refreshing his enormous spirit. A great wish as if ironically was seizing him and he was already even almost fifteen. He grabbed a tall piece of grass, pulled it, chewed it, and in defiance swallowed it. But that wasn’t much. It seemed to him that he should die as an answer, yes as an answer. He needed wrath to live, it gave him an eloquence. He breathed with eagerness feeling the hard and inflexible greenness of life in his heart — the new vitality slipped a thought into him, he’d frighten her, tell her he was going to die! The little notion gave him a more hurried life as his eyes were rejoicing. He returned to the bench where a seated Virgínia was plunging her sleepy eyes into the ground. A thin woolen shawl was protecting her thin shoulders from the cold.
“You’re hunchbacked,” he said as an opening.
&nbs
p; She straightened her back for a second and went back to her old position with weakness. He was annoyed; but was wisely transforming his urge into the slow strength of patience. He said:
“Let’s walk.”
He made her run almost. Quickly a kind of joy overtook her, her drowsiness disappeared.
“I’m going to die,” he said in a blasé tone because he could no longer contain himself.
She blanched.
“No.”
Virgínia never disappointed him . . . He scrutinized her with curiosity, noted that she was moved, laughed out loud with disdain and vehemence, shimmied as if splashing in the water.
“I’ll die like . . .” — he made a face of a dead man but observed that right then his violence had fallen away and without interest he was looking at the garden. She wasn’t frightened. And he started getting tired as they walked. They remained quiet but maybe both were thinking slightly about the same thing. Could it be that everyone knows what I know? Virgínia was reflecting. Because she’d just thought almost certainly, without astonishment, about dying.
Daniel also knew about a game that started off calm and bright but then got scary for some reason or another. He’d dig into the ground, resistant and dried by the sun, until finding humid soil, new, crumbly but quite amenable to being gathered into a single mass. He’d dig a trench, Virgínia would get in. It was with a face of serious and painstaking pleasure that she’d feel the warm coolness of the earth on her body, that smooth, delicate, and heavy shelter. Through the soles of her feet a shudder of fear was climbing, the whisper that the earth could deepen itself. And from within certain butterflies were arising beating their wings through her whole body.
“You’re closed off,” Daniel was saying to her rudely, but she was laughing softly without feeling afraid. Slowly however, she did get scared, the wind bending weeds, scattering leaves. And they didn’t mention it again, they tried to forget and forgot forever without a sign. He was making a small feint forward as if about to jump: look, Virgínia, I’m going to jump off! Off the world is what he meant — and it had been hard to make her understand. When it had sunk in, a white and quavering dread had appeared on her suddenly diminished face as if it were shrinking backwards. Daniel’s eyes were shining in a hot, dark, and terribly exciting pleasure: look, Virgínia, I’m going to jump off! He feinted the jump that would fling him off the earth. No, no — she was saying hoarsely, the palms of her hands quickly becoming damp, she was grabbing her brother’s clothes with frozen fingers, feeling her own stiff movements on the rough cloth. He never kept going with the game, as if sparing Virgínia for another time. She’d open her dry lips in the difficulty of a smile of relief.
Back then Father would go early to the stationer’s. As soon as he’d headed to town the house would become less pinched, a large space with a few walls because they didn’t have to pay attention to their mother and Esmeralda would only come out of her room at lunchtime. She and Daniel. But she wasn’t like Daniel, so filled with thoughts you couldn’t guess at, so proud. He’d never apologized, he knew that was the sign of a power. Between son and father floated a cautious and disturbed sincerity. And he was so stubborn that, even when he was small, he wouldn’t speak a single word after the sun set, even breaking off a sentence or a laugh. He’d sit in a nook, his eyes glassy with fury and sadness. He’d only settle down the next day. They’d ask him with annoyance why and he’d say as if offended by someone:
“I like when it’s daylight.”
Yes, he’d always been manly in a way that irritated the family. I don’t want to be a boy, he’d say quietly while shaking his body briskly while his eyes would sharpen dark and ferocious. Virgínia wouldn’t answer, they both knew that he was screaming from emotion, he’d have to wait so long, with eyes squinting, his face mobile as if in response to an approaching murmur, that’s how long he’d have to wait to grow up. His anger was also directed at the family that would watch his development with pleasure and pride, making this into a domestic celebration and since he wanted to grow up alone, watchful. He had a collection of downy gray spiders, caught in the forest.
“Papa can’t know.”
“Why?” inquired Virgínia, curious.
“He might think they’re poisonous, you idiot.”
“But are they?”
“How should I know? how should I?” his useless hands.
“But I’m scared . . .”
“So?” he’d answer.
He’d threaten to open the box of spiders if she ever disobeyed him. And suddenly, without her knowing why, he called her over, his eyes intense, showing her the little box:
“Just look . . .”
She refused, nauseated. But she ended up sticking an eye into the hole of the little box and seeing nothing but slow movements in the darkness. She was saying:
“I saw, I saw it, I saw it all!”
He’d laugh:
“You’d almost be less idiotic if you weren’t so idiotic.”
One day the little box of spiders drowned in the rainwater that invaded the hiding place. A sharp smell, purple and nauseous, was coming from inside it. Suffering, tough and calm, Daniel ordered Virgínia to throw it away.
“No, don’t push it with your feet. Grab it with both hands and put it outside.”
The eye with which she’d peered at the spiders was hurting. For days it had watered, droopy and askew and in the morning she couldn’t open it until the heat of the sun and her own movements would awake it. It swelled later, numb and bloodless. When it was all over, it was no longer the same, it had become imperceptibly squinty and less alive, slower and more moist, more deadened than the other. And if she hid the healthy eye with her hand, she’d see things separated from the places where they lay, loose in space as in an apparition.
“The spider didn’t spit on you, you always liked to lie. What happened with your eye was foolishness. You and Aunt Margarida are made of almost nothing, a sneeze and that’s it! you two ache all over, crippled, so just drop dead.”
She was feeling a certain fear in his voice. It wasn’t the fear of being told on, he knew his sister would never tell. Regret? — that was making her love him with a love full of crazy joy, an excited willingness for the two of them to run off, to ramble, hearts glowing. Her noble ardor was growing in mystery and seriousness when Father was saying:
“The Bay was spooked today on the way home.”
Nobody was saying a word. Sometimes he’d go silent as if the phrase already said it all. Sometimes he’d go on:
“And there was nothing on the road to scare the animal. The weather was clear, the only noise the wagon wheels. I had to say: quiet down, Bay, God is with us. He quieted down.”
And when night arrived, in the middle of dinner, he breathed, said:
“Daniel.”
Daniel lifted his head, paused and stared at him with resistance and disdain. Bemused and scared everyone was waiting. Father said slowly looking him straight in the eye, as if taking his son’s strength:
“You are forbidden to stand in the road making disgraceful . . . gestures at passing ladies” — a deep pallor was making his face shapeless and opaque. Daniel seemed stuck in his own body. Everyone was waiting, contrite, interrupted for a long moment that would never culminate. Then Daniel looked away. Mother sank into her chair, softening her eyelids in a fainting of relief. Their father added, hoarse and low, as if exhausted:
“They complained to me.”
The next morning a leaf came loose from a tall tree and for enormous minutes glided in the air until coming to rest on the ground. Virgínia did not understand where the sweetness came from: the ground was black and covered with dry leaves, so where did the sweetness come from? a desire was taking shape in the air, fluttering about intently, dissolving and had never existed. She cleared off the leaves and with a stick wrote in crooked letters Empire of the Ris
ing Sun. Then she erased them with her foot and wrote Virgínia. She sharpened her being as you sharpen a pencil and made a light scratch on the ground with the stick. She erased it again and wanted to draw a thing with greater intensity, with a seriousness full of fire. She concentrated and a nervous wave ran through her like an omen. In an extraordinary serenity, eyes closed, she drew roughly as if screaming intently — then opened her eyes and saw a simple, strong, rough, common circle. (Today I fell apart) — that was the impression and she’d known it since she was little. I am unhappy, she thought slowly, almost stunned — she was almost a big girl. She let herself slide down the big rock in the middle of the garden. Just a second to reach the ground. But while that second lasted, eyes closed, her face cautious and moving, she scrutinized it at length, longer than the second itself, feeling that it was empty then, big as an unpopulated world. Suddenly she reached the ground with a crash. She opened her eyes and from the darkness to the light her heart opened toward the morning. The sun, the icy sun. And certain places in the garden were so secret, so almost with your eyes closed, secret as if they had hidden water. The air was humidly shining like almost shining dust. And anyone who ran forward without strength would feel invisible, fragile, and frigid arrows breaking imperceptibly, and the air was vibrating in their ears low, nervous, inaudibly sonorous. She was trying to close her eyes again and grasp the surprise once more. But the vision from the morning had only wanted to sparkle inside her and it would be useless to try to make out the emptiness of another moment. Yet if Daniel would agree they could speak a difficult language. The two had grown used to speaking.