The Young Bride by Alessandro Baricco, Ann Goldstein Page A

Bride thought again about the inscrutable syllogisms and began to understand where they came from.
    And when does she do it?
    In the afternoon, in her room.
    I thought she received visitors.
    Not always.
    The Mother reads. Incredible.
    Naturally, signorina, I never told you and you don’t know it.
    Of course.
    But if I were you I would go to the Mother. Venture to ask her for an interview.
    Knock on her door, without too many formalities—does that seem to you impossible?
    Modesto stiffened.
    I beg your pardon?
    I mean, I could just go and knock on her door, I imagine.
    Modesto was bending over the garden. He straightened.
    Signorina, you know who we’re talking about, right?
    Of course. The Mother.
    But in the same tone she might have said “in the cellar” to someone who had asked her where the broken chairs to be taken away were, and so Modesto understood that the young Bride didn’t know, or at least didn’t know everything, and he deeply regretted it, for at that moment he realized that he had failed in the ambition with which he awoke every morning—to be perfect—because he had granted that girl the privilege of trust without having measured the circumference of her ignorance. He was distressed by this and, for a long instant, held hostage by a hesitation that was not intrinsic to either his duties or his habits. To the young Bride it seemed, for a moment, that Modesto was actually vacillating—a mere hovering in space—and on the other hand
vacillate
is exactly what happens when we unexpectedly perceive the profound gap that is produced, unknown to us, between our intentions and the evidence of the facts, an experience I’ve had repeatedly, recently, as a natural consequence of my choices and others’. As I try to explain sometimes to those who dare to listen to me, I have the not especially original sensation of being nowhere, but so intensely that not even God, if, on a whim, he decided at that instant to cast an eye on creation, would be able to detect my presence, I’m so provisionally nonexistent. There are drugs, naturally, for situations of the sort, and we all have our systems for passing the time during these intermittent deaths; I, for example, tend to put things in order: objects, sometimes thoughts, very occasionally people. Modesto confined himself to inhabiting the void for a handful of seconds—many, considering it was him—and one of the privileges of my profession is to know in detail what passed through his mind, that is to say the surprising quantity of things that the young Bride, evidently, didn’t know. And what the young Bride didn’t know was, evidently, the Mother. The legend of the Mother.
    That she was beautiful I must already have said, but I must now specify that her beauty was, in the common view, and in that circumscribed world, something mythological. Its origins were rooted in her adolescence, which was spent in the city, hence in the countryside people were aware only of distant echoes, legendary tales, details of unfathomable origin. Yet it was known that the Mother had assumed her beauty very early and, for a time, had made spectacular use of it. She was twenty-five when she married the Father; much had already happened, and yet she regretted nothing. There’s no point in hiding the fact that the marriage made no apparent sense, the Father being a physically negligible man and chained sexually to obvious precautions, but it will all become clearer in the afternoon, or more likely at night, when I’ll feel in my fingers the sharpness suitable to describing exactly how things went, and so not now, on this sunny day when, rather, I feel capable of the softness needed to summarize what Modesto knew and the young Bride didn’t, that is to say, for example, how the trail of madness that the Mother left behind was heterogeneous, as she simply glided through the life of the city, trying out the force of her