The Young Bride Read Online Free PDF Page A

it’s mysterious, it’s not easy to understand.
    Do you know the whole story?
    Not all of it.
    No one has ever died during the day, in this family, you know that.
    Yes. I don’t believe it, but I know it. Do you believe it?
    I know the story that they all died at night, one by one. I’ve known it since I was a child.
    Maybe it’s only a legend.
    I’ve seen three of them.
    It’s normal, many people die at night.
    Yes, but not all. Here even children who are born at night are born dead.
    You’re frightening me.
    You see, you’re beginning to understand—and just then the Daughter took off her nightgown, with a precise movement of her good arm. She took off her nightgown and turned onto one side, like the young Bride—naked, they looked at each other. They were the same age, and it was the age when nothing is ugly, because everything glows in the light of a new beginning.
    They were silent for a while, they had to look at each other.
    Then the Daughter said that when she was fifteen or sixteen it had occurred to her to rebel against that business of dying at night—she had seriously thought they were all mad—and she had rebelled in a way that she now recalled as very violent. But no one was frightened, she said. They let time pass. Until one day Uncle told me to lie down beside him. I did and waited for him to wake up. With his eyes closed he spoke to me for a long time, maybe in his sleep, and he explained that each of us is master of his life, but one thing does not depend on us, we receive it as an inheritance in our blood and there’s no sense in rebelling because it’s a waste of time and energy. Then I said to him that it was idiotic to think that a fate could be handed down from father to son, I said that the very idea of fate was a fantasy, a fable to justify one’s own cowardice. I added that I would die in the light of day, at the cost of killing myself between dawn and sunset. He slept for a long time, but then he opened his eyes and said to me no, of course fate doesn’t exist, and it’s not what we inherit—if only. It’s something much more profound and animal. We inherit
fear
, he said.
A particular fear
.
    The young Bride saw that the Daughter, as she spoke, had opened her legs slightly and then closed them, after hiding a hand there, which now rested between her thighs, and every so often she moved it slowly.
    So she explained to me that it’s a subtle contagion, and she showed me how in every gesture, in every word, fathers and mothers are merely
handing down a fear
. Even where they are apparently teaching solidity and solutions, and in the end
especially
where they’re teaching solidity and solutions, they are in reality handing down a fear, because they know that everything solid and solvable is only what they’ve found as an antidote to fear, and often a particular, circumscribed fear. So where families seem to teach children happiness, instead they are infecting children with a fear. And that’s what they’re doing every hour, during an impressive series of days, not letting up for an instant, with the most complete impunity, and a frightening efficiency, so that there is no way to break the circle.
    The Daughter spread her legs slightly.
    So I have a fear of dying in the night, she said, and I have a single way of going to sleep, mine.
    The young Bride remained silent.
    She stared at the Daughter’s hand, at what she was doing. The fingers.
    What is it? she asked again.
    Instead of answering the Daughter closed her eyes and turned on her back, seeking a familiar position. She rested one hand like a shell on her stomach, and with her fingers she searched. The young Bride wondered where she had seen that gesture and was so new to what she was discovering that finally she remembered, and it was her mother’s finger searching through a box of buttons for the small mother-of-pearl one that she had set