Collected Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

Death had squeezed her into lifelike aspider, biting her in a rage, ready to make her succumb. But the final moment was taking its time. Her hands, those hands that men squeezed like imbeciles with manifest animal nervousness, were motionless, paralyzed by fear, by that irrational terror that came from within, with no motive, just from knowing that she was abandoned in that ancient house. She tried to react and couldn’t. Fearhad absorbed her completely and remained there, fixed, tenacious, almost corporeal, as if it were some invisible person who had made up his mind not to leave her room. And the most upsetting part was that the fear had no justification at all, that it was a unique fear, without any reason, a fear just because.
    The saliva had grown thick on her tongue. That hard gum that stuck to her palate andflowed because she was unable to contain it was bothersome between her teeth. It was a desire that was quite different from thirst. A superior desire that she was feeling for the first time in her life. For a moment she forgot about her beauty, her insomnia, and her irrational fear. She didn’t recognize herself. For an instant she thought that the microbes had left her body. She felt that they’dcome out stuck to her saliva. Yes, that was all very fine. It was fine that the insects no longer occupied her and that she could sleep now, but she had to find a way to dissolve that resin that dulled her tongue. If she could only get to the pantry and … But what was she thinking about? She gave a start of surprise. She’d never felt ‘that desire.’ The urgency of the acidity had debilitated her, renderinguseless the discipline that she had faithfully followed for so many years ever since the day they had buried the ‘boy.’ It was foolish, but she felt revulsion about eating an orange. She knew that the ‘boy’ had climbed up to the orange blossoms and that the fruit of next autumn would be swollen with his flesh, cooled by the coolness of his death. No. She couldn’t eat them. She knew that underevery orange tree in the world there was a boy buried, sweetening the fruit with the lime of his bones. Nevertheless, she had to eat an orange now. It was the only thing for that gum that was smothering her. It was foolishness to think that the ‘boy’ wasinside a fruit. She would take advantage of that moment in which beauty had stopped paining her to get to the pantry. But wasn’t that strange?It was the first time in her life that she’d felt a real urge to eat an orange. She became happy, happy. Oh, what pleasure! Eating an orange. She didn’t know why, but she’d never had such a demanding desire. She would get up, happy to be a normal woman again, singing merrily until she got to the pantry, singing merrily like a new woman, newborn. She would even get to the courtyard and …
    Her memorywas suddenly cut off. She remembered that she had tried to get up and that she was no longer in her bed, that her body had disappeared, that her thirteen favorite books were no longer there, that she was no longer she, now that she was bodiless, floating, drifting over an absolute nothingness, changed into an amorphous dot, tiny, lacking direction. She was unable to pinpoint what had happened.She was confused. She just had the sensation that someone had pushed her into space from the top of a precipice. She felt changed into an abstract, imaginary being. She felt changed into an incorporeal woman, something like her suddenly having entered that high and unknown world of pure spirits.
    She was afraid again. But it was a different fear from what she had felt a moment before. It was nolonger the fear of the ‘boy’’s weeping. It was a terror of the strange, of what was mysterious and unknown in her new world. And to think that all of it had happened so innocently, with so much naïveté on her part. What would she tell her mother when she told her what had happened when she got home? She began to think about how alarmed