The Young Bride (2 page)

So they would be married.

Since I'm here, and because tonight I feel a kind of illogical carelessness, brought on, perhaps, by the mournful light in this room they've lent me, I'd like to add something about what happened shortly after the announcement of the engagement, on the initiative, surprisingly, of the young Bride's father. He was a taciturn man, perhaps good in his way, but also irascible, or unpredictable, as if too close proximity to work animals had transmitted a sort of harmless impetuosity. One day he said tersely that he had decided to attempt an ultimate coup in his affairs by emigrating to Argentina, to conquer lands and markets whose every detail he had studied on shitty, fog-bound winter evenings. The people who knew him, vaguely bewildered, decided that such a decision must have something to do with the prolonged coldness of the marriage bed, along with, perhaps, a certain illusion of belated youth, and probably a childish intimation of infinite horizons. He crossed the ocean with three sons, of necessity, and the young Bride, for consolation. He left his wife and the other sons to watch over the land, promising that they would join him, if things went as they should, which in effect he then did, after a year, even selling all his property in his homeland and betting his entire patrimony on the gambling table of the pampas. Before leaving, though, he made a visit to the Father of the Son and affirmed on his honor that the young Bride would appear when she turned eighteen, to fulfill the promise of marriage. The two men shook hands in what was, in those parts, a sacred gesture.

As for the betrothed pair, they said goodbye in apparent tranquility and secret dismay: they had, I must say, good reasons for both.

Once the landowners had set sail, the Father spent some days in a silence unusual for him, neglecting routines and habits that he considered inviolable. Some of his most unforgettable decisions were born of similar personal suspensions, and so the whole Family was resigned to important news when, finally, the Father made a brief but very clear announcement. He said that each of us has his Argentina, and that for them, leaders in the textile sector, Argentina was called England. In fact he had for a while been looking across the Channel at certain factories that were optimizing production in a surprising way: head-spinning profits could be read between the lines. We have to go and see, said the Father, and possibly imitate. Then he turned to the Son.

You'll go, now that you're settled, he said, cheating a little on the terms of the matter.

So the Son had left, even quite happily, on a mission to study the secrets of the English and bring back the best of them, for the future prosperity of the Family. No one expected that he would return within a few weeks, and then no one realized that he wouldn't return even within a few months. But they were like that: they ignored the passing of the days, because they aimed at living only a single, perfect day, infinitely repeated: so time for them was a phenomenon with variable margins that echoed in their lives like a foreign language.

Every morning, from England, the Son sent us a telegram, always with the same text:
All is well
. He was referring, obviously to the trap that was night. At home it was the only news we truly wanted to know: for the rest, it would have been a struggle for us to doubt that during that prolonged absence the Son could do anything but his duty, laced at most with some mild, enviable diversion. Evidently the English factories were numerous and merited close analysis. We stopped expecting him, since he would return.

But the young Bride returned first.

 

Let us get a look at you, said the Mother, radiant, once the table had reassembled.

They all looked at her.

They picked up a nuance they wouldn't have known how to express.

The Uncle expressed it, waking from a sleep that he had been in for a while, lying in a chair—a champagne glass, full to the brim, in his hand.

You must have done a lot of dancing, signorina, over there. I'm glad of it.

Then he took a sip of champagne and fell asleep again.

The Uncle was a welcome, and irreplaceable, figure in the family. A mysterious syndrome, whose only known sufferer he was, kept him in a constant sleep from which he emerged for very brief intervals, for the sole purpose of participating in the conversation with a precision that we were all now used to considering obvious but that was, clearly, illogical. Something in him was able to register, even in sleep, any event and every word. Indeed, the fact that he came from elsewhere often seemed to give him such lucidity, or such a singular view of things, that his wakings and relevant utterances were endowed with an almost oracular, prophetic resonance. This reassured us greatly, because we knew we could count at any moment on the reserves of a mind so rested that it could completely untangle any knot that appeared in domestic discussion or daily life. In addition, we rather liked the astonishment of strangers encountering those singular feats, a detail that made our house even more attractive. Returning to their families, the guests often took with them the legendary memory of that man who could, while sleeping, be halted even in complex movements, of which holding a champagne glass full to the brim was but a pale example. He could shave in his sleep, and on occasion he had been seen to play the piano as he slept, although he took slightly slowed-down tempos. There were even those who claimed to have seen him play tennis in a deep sleep: it seems that he woke only at the change of sides. I refer to him out of necessity to the story, but also because today I seemed to glimpse a coherence in everything that is happening to me, and so for a few hours it's been easy to hear sounds that otherwise, in the grip of confusion, I would find inaudible: for example, often, the clattering of life on the marble table of time, like dropped pearls. The need of the living to be funny—that in particular.

Ah, yes, you must have danced a lot, the Mother affirmed, I couldn't have said it better, and besides I've never loved fruit pies (many of her syllogisms were in fact inscrutable).

The tango? asked the notary Bertini, agitated. For him, uttering the word “tango” was in itself sexual.

The tango? Argentina? In that climate? asked the Mother, though it wasn't clear whom she was addressing.

I can assure you that the tango is clearly Argentine in origin, the notary insisted.

Then the voice of the young Bride was heard.

I lived in the pampas for three years. Our neighbor was two days away by horseback. A priest brought us the Eucharist once a month. Once a year we'd set out for Buenos Aires, with the idea of attending the première of the Opera Season. But we never arrived in time. It was always much farther than we thought.

Definitely not very practical, the Mother observed. How did your father think he would find you a husband like that?

Someone pointed out to her that the young Bride was engaged to her Son.

It's obvious, you think I didn't know? I made a general observation.

But it's true, the young Bride said, they dance the tango over there. It's lovely, she said.

The mysterious oscillation of space that always heralded the Uncle's imponderable awakenings could be felt.

The tango gives a past to those who don't have one and a future to those who don't hope for one. Then he fell asleep again.

While the Daughter, on the chair next to the Father, watched, silently.

She was the same age as the young Bride—it's many years, incidentally, since I was that age. (Now, thinking back, I see only a great confusion, but also—what seems to me interesting—the waste of an unprecedented and unused beauty. Which, moreover, brings me back to the story that I intend to tell, if only to save my life, but certainly also for the simple reason that telling it is my job.) The Daughter, I was saying. She had inherited from the Mother a beauty that in that region was aristocratic: for the women of that land enjoyed only limited flashes of splendor—the shape of the eyes, two good legs, raven black hair—never that complete and full perfection (apparently the product of improvements made over centuries in the procession of countless generations) which the Mother retained and which she, the Daughter, miraculously replicated, with the gilding, moreover, of youth. And up to there everything was fine. But the truth appears when I emerge from my graceful immobility and move, shifting irreparable amounts of unhappiness, owing to the unalterable fact that I am a cripple. An accident, I was around eight. A cart out of control, a horse shying suddenly on a narrow city street, houses close on either side. Renowned doctors, called from abroad, did the rest—maybe it was bad luck, not even incompetence—but in a complicated, painful way. When I walk I drag one leg, the right, which although perfectly shaped is unreasonably heavy and has no idea how to harmonize with the rest of the body. The foot lands heavily and is partly numb. The arm isn't normal, either; it seems capable of only three positions, none very graceful. You might call it a mechanical arm. Thus, seeing me get up from a chair and come toward you, in greeting, or as a gesture of courtesy, is a strange experience, of which the word disappointment can give a pale idea. Unspeakably beautiful, I disintegrate at the slightest movement, in an instant turning admiration into pity and desire into unease.

It's something I know. But I have no inclination for sadness, or talent for suffering.

While the conversation had moved on to the late flowering of the cherry trees, the young Bride went over to the Daughter and leaned over to kiss her on the cheeks. She didn't get up, because at that moment she wished to be beautiful. They spoke in low voices, as if they were old friends, or perhaps out of the sudden desire to become so. Instinctively, the Daughter understood that the young Bride had learned distance, and would never discard it, having chosen it as her own inimitable form of elegance. She'll always be innocent and mysterious, she thought. They'll adore her.

 

Then, when the first empty champagne bottles were being carried off, the conversation had an almost magical moment of collective suspension, and in that silence the young Bride asked politely if she could pose a question.

But of course, darling.

Is the Son not here?

The Son? said the Mother, to give the Uncle time to emerge from his elsewhere and help out, but since nothing happened, Ah, the Son, of course, the Son, obviously, my Son, yes, it's a good question. Then she turned to the Father. Dear?

In England, said the Father, with complete serenity. Do you have an idea of what England is, signorina?

I think so.

There. The Son is in England. But temporarily.

In the sense that he'll be back?

Certainly, as soon as we summon him.

And you'll summon him?

It's definitely something we ought to do as soon as possible.

This very day, the Mother specified, unfurling a particular smile that she kept for important occasions.

So that afternoon—and not before he had exhausted the liturgy of breakfast—the Father sat down at his desk and undertook to record what had happened. He did this, usually, with some delay—I refer to the recording of the facts of life, and especially those that involved some disorderliness—but I wouldn't want this to be interpreted as a form of sluggish inefficiency. It was, in reality, a reasonable precaution, on doctor's orders. As everyone knew, the Father was born with what he liked to define as “an imprecision of the heart,” an expression that should not be placed in a sentimental context: something irreparable had torn in his cardiac muscle when he was still a hypothesis under construction in his mother's womb, and so he was born with a heart of glass, which first the doctors and later, in consequence, he was resigned to. There was no cure, except for a prudent and slowed-down approach to the world. If you believed the books, a particular shock, or an unprepared-for emotion, would carry him off immediately. The Father, however, knew from experience that this should not be taken too literally. He had understood that he was on loan to life, and he had drawn from that a tendency toward caution, an inclination to order, and the confused certainty of inhabiting a special destiny. To this should be attributed his natural good humor and occasional ferocity. I would like to add that he didn't fear death: he had such familiarity, not to say intimacy, with it that he was absolutely certain he would sense its arrival in time to use it well.

So, that day, he wasn't in a particular hurry to record the appearance of the young Bride. Yet, with the usual tasks taken care of, he didn't avoid the job that awaited him: he bent over his desk and without hesitation composed the text of the telegram, conceiving it with respect for the elementary requirements of economy and the intention of achieving the unequivocal clarity that was necessary. It bore these words:

Young Bride returned. Hurry
.

The Mother, for her part, decided that, no question, the young Bride, having no home of her own, and in a certain sense not even a family since every possession and every relative had moved to South America, would stay with them to wait. Since the Monsignor didn't seem to offer any moral objection, despite the Son's absence from the family roof, she asked Modesto to get the guest room ready, which they didn't know much about, since no one ever stayed in it. They were moderately sure that it existed, however. It had the last time.

There's no need for any guest room—she'll sleep with me, the Daughter said tranquilly. She was sitting down, and at those moments her beauty was such that no one could refuse her.

If you'd like to, naturally, the Daughter added, seeking the young Bride's gaze.

I would, said the young Bride.

 

So she joined the Household, which she had imagined that she would enter as a wife, and now instead found herself sister, daughter, guest, pleasing presence, decoration. Doing so turned out to be natural to her, and she quickly learned the habits and tempos of an unfamiliar way of life. She noted its strangeness, but seldom went so far as to suspect its absurdity. A few days after her arrival, Modesto approached and respectfully let her understand that if she felt the need for any explanations it would be his privilege to enlighten her.