Alessandro Baricco - The Young Bride

Is it possible that it has to end like that? she asked, frightened.

I’m only eighteen, she thought, with fear.

So, in order not to die, she took refuge where she knew she would find the last line of resistance to disaster. She forced herself to think about the Son. But think is a reductive word to define an operation that she knew was quite complex. Three years of silence and separation were not easy to retrace. So much distance had accumulated that the Son had long since stopped being, for the young Bride, an easily accessible thought, or memory, or sentiment. He had become a place . An enclave, buried in the landscape of her feelings, which she couldn’t always find again. Often she set off to reach it, but got lost on the way. It would have been simpler for her if she could have had available some physical desire to hold onto, in order to scale the walls of oblivion. But desire for the Son — his mouth, his hands, his skin — was something it wasn’t simple to return to. She could distinctly summon to memory particular instants in which she had desired him even in a devastating way, but now, staring at them, it seemed to her that she was staring at a room in which, in place of colors, little pieces of paper were stuck to the walls with the names of the hues written on them: indigo, Venetian red, sand yellow. Turquoise. It wasn’t pleasant to admit, but it was so. And even more, now that circumstances had led her to know other pleasures, with other people, with other bodies: they weren’t enough to erase the memory of the Son, but certainly they had placed him in a sort of prehistory in which everything seemed mythical as well as inexorably literary. For that reason, following the traces of physical desire wasn’t often, for the young Bride, the best system for finding the road that led to the hiding place of her love. Occasionally, she preferred to dig out of her memory the beauty of certain phrases, or certain gestures — a beauty of which the Son was a master. She found this beauty intact, then, in memory. And for a moment this seemed to restore to her the spell of the Son and bring her back to the exact point at which her journey aimed. But it was an illusion more than anything. She found herself contemplating marvelous objects that still lay in the cabinets of distance, impossible to touch, inaccessible to the heart. So the agonizing sense of ultimate loss was mixed with the pleasure of admiration, and the Son grew even more distant, almost unapproachable, now. In order not to truly lose him, the young Bride had had to learn that in reality no quality of the Son — or detail, or marvel — was now sufficient to enable her to cross the abyss of distance, because no man, however loved, is enough by himself to defeat the destructive power of absence. What the young Bride understood was that only by thinking of the two of them, together, was she able to sink into herself to where the permanence of her love dwelt, intact. She went back then to certain states of mind, certain ways of perceiving, which she still remembered very well. She thought of the two of them, together, and could feel a certain heat, or the tone of certain nuances, even the quality of a certain silence. A particular light. Then it was given to her to find what she sought, in the definite sensation that a place existed to which the world was not admitted, and which coincided with the perimeter marked by their two bodies, kindled by their being together, and made unassailable by their anomaly. If she could reach that sensation, everything became harmless again. Since the disaster of every life around her, and even of her own, was no longer a danger to her happiness but, if anything, the counterpart that made still more necessary and invincible the refuge that she and the Son had created, loving each other. They were the demonstration of a theorem that refuted the world, and when she could return to that conviction, all fear abandoned her and a new, sweet confidence took possession of her. There was nothing more wonderful in the world.

As she lay on the carpet, curled up under that dusty sheet, this was the journey the young Bride made, saving her life.

So she still had her love entirely available when, two days later, at a table where nine settings remained, and just as she was preparing for another to vanish, she heard in the distance the sound of an automobile, dim at first and then increasingly clear — she heard it arrive at the house, stop, and finally turn off. She got up, left everything as it was on the table, and went to her room to prepare. She had long since chosen a dress for the occasion. She put it on. She brushed her hair and thought that the Son had never seen her so beautiful. She wasn’t afraid, she wasn’t nervous, she didn’t have questions. She heard the engine of the automobile start up again and then grow faint. Barefoot, she went down the stairs and through the house, her steps firm. When she reached the front door she broadened her shoulders, as the Mother had taught her. Then she opened the door and went out.

In the courtyard she saw a number of trunks, resting on the ground. She knew them. Sitting on the biggest — a large creature of dark leather, slightly scratched on one side — she saw the Uncle, dressed just as he had been when he left, and motionless. He was sleeping. The young Bride approached.

Did something happen?

Since the Uncle continued to sleep, she sat down next to him. She realized that he was sleeping with his eyes half open, and that occasionally he trembled. She touched his forehead. It was burning.

You’re not well, said the young Bride.

The Uncle opened his eyes and looked at her as if he were seeking to understand something.

It’s lucky to find you here, signorina, he said.

The young Bride shook her head.

You’re not well.

No, I’m not, said the Uncle. Would you mind very much doing a couple of things for me? he asked.

No, said the young Bride.

Then be so kind as to fill the tub with very hot water. Then would you open the yellow trunk, the small one, and find a sealed bottle, in it there’s some white powder. Take it.

It was a long sentence, and it must have tired him, because he sank back into sleep.

The Young Bride didn’t move. She thought of herself, of the Son, and of life.

When it seemed to her that the Uncle was about to wake, she got up.

I’m going to find a doctor, she said.

No, please, don’t, it’s not necessary. I know what it is.

There was a long pause and a nap.

That is, I don’t know what it is, but I know how to treat it. A hot bath and that white powder will be enough, believe me. Naturally it will do me good to sleep a little.

He did for three days, almost without interruption. He stationed himself in the second-floor hall, the one with the seven windows. He lay on the stone floor, his head resting on a shirt folded in four. He didn’t eat, he seldom drank. At regular intervals the young Bride went up and set beside him a glass in which she had dissolved the white powder: each time, she found him at a different point in the hall, sometimes curled up in a corner, other times lying under a window, composed, tranquil, but trembling: she imagined him crawling on the stone, like an animal whose paws had been crushed. Every so often she stopped to look at him, without saying anything. Under a suit dripping with sweat, she sensed a body that seemed to be all ages, scattered in the details, without a precise plan: the hands of a boy, the legs of an old man. Once she ran her fingers through his sodden hair. He didn’t move. Surprised, she was aware that she was thinking, without the least distress, that that man was perhaps dying: nothing seemed to her more inappropriate than to try to stop him. She went back downstairs and began waiting for the son again, with what seemed to her the same intensity and the same beauty as before. But that night, when she returned to the Uncle, he clutched her wrist, with strange energy, and, sleeping, told her that he was tremendously mortified.