The Young Bride by Alessandro Baricco, Ann Goldstein Page B

enchantment on the weaknesses of others. Two killed themselves, as everyone knows, one swallowing an excessive dose of poison, the other vanishing into the whirlpools of the river. But also a priest, who had a certain reputation, was a very good preacher, had died behind the walls of a convent, and an esteemed cardiologist had found shelter in the wards of a mental hospital. There were innumerable marriages in which wives lived, fairly comfortably, with men who were sure they had been born to love another, that is, the Mother. Analogously, at least three women, all of excellent family, all conventionally married, were known to have been so close to her, in youth, that they developed a perpetual disgust for the male body and its sexual needs. What she had granted, to each of these victims, to lead them to extremes, is information whose outlines are vague, but there are two irrefutable facts that can be trusted. The first, and apparently more obvious: the Father married a girl who was not a virgin. The second, which should be taken literally: when the Mother was a girl, she didn’t need to grant any favor to cause a person to go wild; her mere presence was generally enough. If this may not seem credible, I find that I’m compelled to give an example, choosing a detail, maybe the most significant, certainly the one that has been most widely disseminated. Everything about her was magnificent, but if we talk about the décolleté, or even about the promise hinted at by the décolleté—we’re talking about the bosom—then we are compelled to rise to a level that is hard to describe without resorting to terms like
spell
. Baretti, in his
Index
, to which we must inevitably refer if we wish to offer an objective outline of the situation, even hazards the term
sorcery
, but that was always a much discussed passage of his otherwise laudable work: if for no other reason than that the term
sorcery
suggests a malign intention that in no way reflects the well-known crystalline happiness that even the most fleeting glance at the Mother’s bosom produced in anyone who had had the courage to attempt it, or the privilege to be able to attempt it. In the long run, Baretti himself agreed. In later recitations of his
Index
, when he was already an old man, although very respectable, the reference to
sorcery
tended to disappear, witnesses say. I use the term
recitation
because, as is perhaps not universally known, Baretti’s
Index
was not a book, or a written document, but a sort of oral liturgy, at which he officiated, and which, besides, rarely took place, and was never announced in advance. On average it was biennial, it usually happened in summer, and only one thing was fixed: it started precisely at midnight. But on what day—this no one knew. It frequently happened that, because of this unpredictability, Baretti performed in the presence of only a few witnesses, if not just a pair, and one year—which turned out to be a drought year—in front of no one. It didn’t seem to matter to him, and this should allow us to understand how the discipline of the
Index
was for him a personal necessity, an urgency that concerned him intimately, and others only incidentally. He was, after all, a man of refined modesty, as one might logically deduce from his trade: he was a tailor, in the provinces.
    It all began one day when—maybe to display particular kindness, maybe compelled by a sudden need—the Mother had gone to him, to adjust an evening dress that, in the city, had evidently not received the proper attention. The neckline had, as a result turned out imperfectly.
    Baretti was thirty-eight at the time. He was married. He had two children. He would have liked a third. That day, however, he became old, and at the same time a child, and conclusively an artist.
    As he often had occasion to recount later, the Mother pointed out to him right at the start that if he persisted in looking in the