The Chandelier

  “Ten is like Sunday. People think Sunday’s the end of the last week, right? but it’s already the start of the next. People think it’s the end of nine, right? but it’s already the start of eleven.”

  “No, I think ten’s like Sunday because they’re both round, they’re not broken.”

  “But Sunday’s not round, only ten is.”

  “Well I think Sunday’s round. I think it and see it.”

  They were laughing because they knew it was all wrong, wrong in a veiled way. She, more than he, liked being wrong. And faced with Mother’s almost repulsed gaze, Daniel said to her: poor lady . . . — Daniel sort of liked reading. Nobody understood them and that was as exciting as escape. Daniel had told her:

  “Why are you eating?”

  She listened with surprise and one day asked him:

  “Why are you going to sleep?” — both laughed a lot.

  Daniel said to her:

  “Think of the most beautiful color in the world.”

  She was looking at him lit up by the liberty he was giving her. In a fleeting and nearly audible mixture she was making out heavy colors, shining and dizzying, everything moving, running away, turning off before she could grasp a single one and describe it to Daniel.

  “But in the whole, whole world?” she was making sure.

  “Y-yes,” Daniel conceded with stinginess.

  Then, closing with difficulty her overly radiant eyes, she was searching so deeply that a nonexistent, invented, crazy color was rising to her lips: hm!, she was exclaiming sharply and immediately her voice was falling with disappointment.

  “What?” Daniel was asking, intrigued.

  She couldn’t explain. To bridge the moment she’d say quickly: purple that’s yellowish at the edges.

  “That’s a nice color,” Daniel would agree, “but not the nicest.”

  For Virgínia, however, anything you could say after that cry would be poor and worn out. Hm, hm, she was repeating without results. Hm, she’d say in a softer voice as if in order to surprise. Yet it was a word bursting with understanding as if from one moment to the next it would start to sing out its own meaning. Truly Mother was looking at them as if she’d nursed them without realizing it. Avoiding a suffocating feeling that she should call Mother over so that she might understand, Virgínia without words was trying to tell herself that after all she had a husband, the odd guest; when evening would fall she’d comb her thin womanly hair, live more slowly, look straight through the window. She wasn’t ugly, but her powerless features never wavered, warned of nothing, in a calm vulgarity that would hide even the unhappy and vital moments. Virgínia and Daniel were quickly delighted to avoid her:

  “What’s keeping on buying, buying and putting things away and opening everything one day and peeking at it?”

  Virgínia didn’t know: so hard to take the things born deep inside someone else and think them. She even had a certain kind of difficulty with reasoning. Sometimes it wasn’t by starting with any thought at all that she’d reach a thought. Sometimes it was enough to wait a little and she’d grasp it all. Until Daniel would say, victorious, his voice cold:

  “It’s collecting things, you grazing mare!”

  Virgínia would retort:

  “What’s keeping on walking, walking and then saying: oh, forget it, let’s take a stroll, shall we?”

  He’d guess immediately, offhand but deep down thrilled:

  “Why, it’s not going to school, who wouldn’t know that?”

  And then she’d said to him with serious ardor:

  “Look, someday, you know . . .”

  And he’d given her a look, accepting something she herself didn’t understand. But he’d rarely praise Virgínia’s discoveries, rarely be fascinated by her cleverness. When that would happen he’d usually say as if speaking to some absent person who might understand him better, as Virgínia attentive and curious would listen:

  “She’s so dumb that everything’s easy for her.”

  One time though — her face was swollen because of a toothache — they were leaning over the guest room balcony and looking at the night. Down below the darkness was stretching out uniformly and when the wind blew the bushes seemed to move in a sea. Fleeting waves of fireflies were lighting up faintly and going out.

  “Look, Daniel,” Virgínia had said, “look what I saw: the firefly disappears.”

  He looked at her, saw her swollen red chin through the sad light of the oil lamp placed in the room.

  “What? . . . ,” he asked without pleasure.

  “It’s like this: when you see a firefly you don’t think it appeared, but that it disappeared. As if someone died and that were the first thing about them because they hadn’t even been born or lived, you know? You wonder: what’s the firefly really like? Answer: it disappears.”

  Daniel understood and they stayed silent and satisfied. She could sometimes tie a thing with one hand far from the other and make them dance startled, mad, sweet, dragging. Trusting and serene, she went on:

  “Would you want to be like that, kid?”

  “Like how?”

  “Like a firefly is for us . . . Without anyone knowing what you’re like, if you’re appearing or disappearing, without anyone’s knowing for sure, but you think we’re not living in the meantime? living, going about our business and everything like the firefly.”

  “For the first time you’re saying something that I think too: it would be good,” said Daniel and again they fell silent watching.

  When the afternoon was ending and the whispering and blurry serenity of dusk arrived Virgínia’s heart would fill with an expressionless sadness while her face would calm, deepen. Quiet, their souls maddened, taut, terrified, they seemed to enter irremediably into eternity. She and Daniel would lean more intimately on the guest room balcony and sit for a long while looking out at the purplish expanse of the farm, the black blue of the forest, the motionless dryness of the branches.

  “What do you like more: eating or sleeping?” she’d ask pensively.

  He’d hesitate.

  “Eating.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you fill your stomach. What about you?”

  “Sleeping . . . because you sleep, sleep, sleep . . .”

  A cold wind was rising from the ground and making the small plants fragrant mixed with the still-hot earth. Though the day had been joyful and busy it was then seeming to begin anew.

  “Rain is coming . . . look at the smell,” Daniel was saying.

  “I’d like to have an odd and sad life, you know,” Virgínia was saying.

  There was an impossible sliding in her truth, she was like her own error. She was feeling strange and precious, so voluptuously hesitant and strange as if today were tomorrow. And she couldn’t correct herself, every morning she’d let her error be reborn through an urge that would find its balance in an imponderable inevitability.

  “Well I’d like to be able to say what I think, the world would be amazed,” Daniel was saying. “Only if I could, but it wasn’t any trouble to find out!” he’d finish in despair.

  “I don’t want to sleep by myself, I’m scared.”

  “Bedtime isn’t for a long time,” he’d answer calmer and drier.

  “It feels like it’s soon.”

  He was aware she was asking for help. In a horrible act of kindness, as if feeling sorry for himself, he didn’t make his sister wait:

  “Then I’ll sit and read with the lamp on the stairs.”

  Sometimes he’d push her rudely, in a game that would give her the painful and surprised feeling of being hated. But that was just his strength. Playing with Daniel always wore her out, because she had to take care not to displease him. They’d grown too subtle and Daniel was strict, he didn’t allow a single stumble. Her answers had to be fast and he was smarter
than she was. Until once he woke up in a good mood and first thing in the morning said:

  “Good morning, human . . .”

  The illuminated surprise of seeing him start the day by letting her in, made her freeze for an instant, delight gave her excessive confidence and in a sharp and happy cry she answered:

  “Good morning, so-and-so . . .”

  He turned around surprised, almost ashamed, while inside her the smile was quickly dying. He stared with disgust as if she’d ruined everything, all his life:

  “You always have to say something stupid.”

  Because sometimes she’d think such slender thoughts that they’d suddenly break halfway before reaching the end. And since they were so thin, even without completing them she understood them all at once. Though she could never think them again, even point to them with a single word. Since she couldn’t transmit them to Daniel, he’d always win their conversations. In some mysterious way her fainting spells were connected to this: sometimes she’d feel a thin thought that was so intense that she herself was the thought and since it broke, she’d interrupt herself in a faint.

  “But there’s ab-so-lute-ly nothing wrong with her!” the old doctor of Upper Marsh was saying containing his impatience under his eyeglasses.

  In fact she’d never suffered. Yet her head would sometimes spin, though rarely. Suddenly the ground would threaten to rise to her eyes, without violence, without hurry. She’d wait for it quietly but before she could understand, the floor had already sunk to somewhere she couldn’t make out, falling to the bottom of an abyss, far off like a stone thrown from a height into the sea. Her feet would dissolve into air and the space would be crossed by luminous threads, by a cold and nervous sound like violent wind escaping through a crack. Then great calm would envelop the light world. And then there was no world. And then, in a final and fresh reduction, there was no her. Just air without strength and without color. She’d think about a long shaky line — I’m fainting. A pause would be born without color, without light, without strength, she was waiting. The end of the pause would find her abandoned on the floor, the bright wind piercing the motionless window, the sun staining her feet. And that weightless silence, buzzing and smiling, of a summer afternoon in the country. She’d get off the ground, vaguely start taking shape, everything was waiting around her meekly inorganic; then she’d walk and keep living, spending hours and hours drawing straight lines without the help of a ruler, just with the weight of her hand, sometimes as if only with the spur of her thought; she’d slowly manage to trace pure and plain lines, deeply amused. It was such refreshing, such serious work; it would smooth her face and open her eyes.

  Sitting in the shade of a tree, she’d soon be surrounded by empty instants because nothing had happened for a while and future seconds would bring nothing — she’d foresee. She’d calm down — she couldn’t quite disguise the broad inexplicable well-being that would sink her deep into her own pensive body, the being leaning toward a delicate and difficult sensation — but she’d hide herself for some reason trying to see the stones on the ground, her eyebrows furrowed, deceitful, all of her sly and stupid. Some curious and cold thing was happening to her, something a bit smiling with contempt but careful to go to the end, making her almost think in a futile and ironic urge: if thou art as thou sayest a living creature, bestir thyself . . . and she’d almost want to stand and pluck a slightly tender bright weed. Within her face notions were whispering liquefying in decomposition — she was a girl resting. She was looking, looking. She’d close her eyes observing all the impenetrable points of her narrow body, thinking all over herself without words, recopying existence itself. She was looking, looking. Slowly, from the silence, her being was starting to live more, an abandoned instrument that started making sound all by itself, her eyes discerning because the first matter of the eyes was looking. Nothing would inspire her, she was isolated inside her capacity, existing through the same weak energy that had caused her to be born. She was thinking simply and clearly. She was thinking small and clear music that was stretching a single thread and unfurling bright, fluorescent and moist, water in water, meditating a silly arpeggio. She was thinking untranslatable sensations distracting herself secretly as if humming, profoundly unaware and stubborn, she was thinking a single swift streak: in order to be born things must have life, for birth is a movement — if they said that movement is necessary only for the thing giving birth and not for the thing that is born that’s not right because the thing that gives birth cannot give birth to something outside its nature and thus always gives birth to a thing of its own kind and so it is with movements too — in this way stones were born that have no power of their own but were once alive otherwise they wouldn’t have been born and now they’re dead because they don’t have movement in order to give birth to another stone. No thought was extraordinary, words are what would be. She was thinking without intelligence about her own reality as if discerning and could never use what she was feeling, her meditation was a way of living. It was coming to her without a shape of its own yet at the same time within it was chiming some precise and delicate quality like thin numbers entangled with thin numbers and suddenly a new light number ringing polished and dry — while the true sensation of her whole body was expectant. And finally something was happening so far away, ah so far away and maybe reduced to a yes that she was growing tired to the point of annihilation, thinking now in words: I am very, very tired, you know. Go, go, something profoundly satiated and already known in her body was murmuring with a certain anguish, go, go. But where? The wind, the wind was blowing. Barely hushed and on the lookout, as if facing the north or the east she seemed to be headed toward some true thing through the great incessant taking-shape of tiny dead events, leading the delicateness of being in the direction of an almost exterior feeling as if by touching the earth with her bare and watchful foot she might feel inaccessible water flowing. She was traversing long distances simply by assigning herself a direction, immobile, sincere. But she couldn’t quite be sucked in, as if it were her own fault. She’d help herself by feeling a vague notion of travel, of the day she’d leave for the city with Daniel, a bit of hunger and fatigue, barely touching her lunch. Sometimes she’d almost approach a thought but she never reached it though everything around was breathing its beginning to her; she’d look with astonishment at the space devoid of mystery, the breeze would raise shivers of understanding on her skin; an instant would yet penetrate the silence seeking in its depths a thread to grab on to. And if a bird were flying or the cry of a winged creature gushing from the nearby forest, she was wrapped by a cold whirl, the wind spinning dry leaves and dust, vague unfinished beginnings, in a vortex of her and of whatever no longer was her. The moment had arrived to let climb to her outermost nerves the wave that was taking shape on the near side of her weakness and that could die of its own urging. From particle to particle, however, the indistinct thought was coming down violently mute until opening in the middle of her body, on her lips, complete, perfect, incomprehensible because it was so free from its own shaping — I need to eat. She took from it then nothing more than its softness, barely alighting on her being; she could go forward without being pushed, without being called, going along simply because moving was the quality of her body. That was her impression and her stomach was plunging deeper, joyful, famished. But she was still seated. She didn’t seem to know how to stand up and actually guide herself, distressingly she was lacking a direction. She stretched into the distance as if slowly she could lose her shape — she thought she could hear the voices and the sounds from the mansion and leaned forward to try to make them out. She leaned back against the tree, rubbing one of her dusty feet, going beyond her understanding and with a kind of irrepressible force attaining misunderstanding like a discovery. Now unsettled, motionless, reality seemed to bother her. She was thinking with her mother’s languid voice: I’m nervous. In a misgiving without sweetness, she was fluttering aridly in the fanciful an
d hysterical immobility. Until the tautest rope would snap, as if a presence were abandoning her body and she was getting closer to her own ordinary existence. Pushed, extraordinarily indifferent and no longer very hungry, she was forgetting everything forever like a person who’s forgotten.

  But what she loved more than anything was making clay figurines, which no one had taught her. She’d work on a small cement path in the shade, next to the last window of the basement. When she wanted to with great strength she’d go down the road to the river. On one of its banks, which was slippery but scalable, she found the best clay that one could desire: white, supple, sticky, cold. Just by touching it, feeling its deliciously joyful and blind delicateness, those timidly alive bits, a person’s heart would warm and soften, almost ridiculous. Virgínia would dig with her fingers that pale and washed earth — in the can tied to her waist the amorphous segments would be collected. The river in small gestures wet her bare feet and she’d wiggle her damp toes with excitement and brightness. With her hands free, then, she’d carefully leap over the bank to the flat surface. In the small cement courtyard she would deposit her riches. She would mix the clay with water her eyelids fluttering at attention — concentrated, her body on the lookout, she could obtain an exact and nervous proportion of clay and water with a wisdom that would be born in that same instant, fresh and progressively created. She’d get a clear and tender material from which she could shape a world. How, how to explain the miracle . . . She’d grow scared, thoughtful. She said nothing, she didn’t move but inside without any words she repeated: I am nothing, I have no pride, anything can happen to me, if - - - they want they can stop me from mixing the clay, - - - if they want they can crush me, ruin me entirely, I know that I am nothing. - - - it was less than a vision, it was a sensation in the body, a frightened thought about whatever let her accomplish so much with the clay and the water and before which she had to humble herself with seriousness. She would thank it with a difficult joy, fragile and tense, she felt in - - - some thing like one you cannot see with closed eyes — but one you cannot see with closed eyes has an existence and a power, like darkness, like darkness, like absence, she would contain herself consenting, ferocious and mute with her head. But she knew nothing of herself, she would travel innocent and distracted through her reality without recognizing it, like a child, like a person.