Near to the Wild Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

she would slip on her nightdress and go to bed. In the morning, coffee with milk and biscuits. Her aunt always baked large biscuits. But without salt. Like someone dressed in mourning watching from the tram. She would dip her biscuit into the sea before eating it. She would take a bite, then dash home to swallow a mouthful of coffee. And that is how she would go on. She would play in the yard, where there were sticks and bottles. But where, above all, there was that old chicken-coop without any chickens. The place smelled of lime and excrement and of things drying out. But she could sit in there, right down on the ground, looking at the soil. Soil formed from so many bits and pieces that it gave you a headache trying to guess just how many. The chicken-coop had netting and everything, and this would be her home. And there was still her uncle's farm which she scarcely knew, but where she would spend her holidays from now on. There were lots of nice things to look forward to, weren't there? She buried her face in her hands. Oh, such fear, such fear. But it wasn't only fear. It was like someone who has finished something and says: Please, Miss, I've finished. And the teacher says: Just sit there and wait for the others. And you sit there quietly as if you were in church. Inside a tall church and without saying a word. Those slender, fragile saints. When you touch them they feel cold. Cold and divine. And everything remains silent. Oh, such fear, such fear. However, it was not simply fear. I don't have anything to do and I don't know what to do. Like looking at something pretty, a fluffy chick, the sea, a lump in one's throat. But it wasn't only that. Open eyes blinking, and confused with the things behind the curtain.
     

Joana's Pleasures
    The freedom she often experienced did not come from lucid reflections, but from a state that seemed to consist of perceptions, much too organic to be expressed in thoughts. Sometimes at the heart of that sensation there was the glimmering of an idea which made her vaguely aware of her species and colouring.
    The state she slipped into when she murmured: eternity. The very thought acquired the nature of eternity. It deepened as if by magic and expanded, without any proper content or form, but also without dimensions. She had the impression that if she could manage to retain that sensation for a few more seconds she would experience a revelation — effortlessly, like seeing the rest of the world simply by leaning away from the earth and out into space. Eternity was not only time, but something akin to the deeply-rooted certainty of not being able to hold it in one's body because of death; the impossibility of suppressing eternity; just as an almost abstract feeling of absolute purity was eternal. But the clearest suggestion of eternity stemmed from the impossibility of knowing how many human beings would succeed her own body, which would one day distance itself from the present with the velocity of a shooting-star.
    She defined eternity and explanations were inevitably born like the pulsations of the heart. She would not change a single word for they were her truth. They no sooner appeared, however, than they became devoid of any logic. To define eternity as a quantity greater than time and greater even than the time the human mind can sustain thought, would not permit her, even so, to perceive its duration. Its essential quality was not to have any quantity, not to be measurable and divisible because everything which could be measured and divided had a beginning and an end. Eternity was not that infinitely great quantity that exhausted itself; eternity was succession.
    Then Joana suddenly understood that the greatest beauty was to be found in succession, that movement explained form — there was something so elevated and pure when one cried out: movement explains form! — and in succession one also discovered sorrow because the body was much slower than the movement of uninterrupted