The Young Bride Read Online Free PDF

aside for the cuff of her husband’s only shirt. Obviously that was another region of existence, but certainly the gesture was the same, or at least until it began to be circular, moving too fast, or too violently, to be a way of searching, when it had become, rather, a way of hunting—she thought of hunting an insect, or of killing something small. And in fact, now and then, the Daughter suddenly started to arch her back, and breathed strangely—a kind of agony. But graceful, thought the young Bride, even attractive, she thought: whatever the Daughter was killing in herself, her body seemed born for that crime, it was so perfectly arranged in the space, like a wave, even her deformities as a cripple disappeared, disappeared into nothing—which was the damaged arm you couldn’t have said, which of the spread legs you couldn’t remember.
    She stopped the killing for a moment, but without turning, without opening her eyes, and said: You really don’t know what it is?
    No, answered the young Bride.
    The Daughter laughed, in a nice way.
    You’re telling the truth?
    Yes.
    Then the Daughter began that sonorous song, nearly a lament, that the young Bride knew but didn’t know, and returned again to that small killing, but as if in the meantime she had decided to cast aside a sort of prudence that she had been holding onto. She moved her hips now, and when she let her head fall back her mouth opened slightly, in a way that seemed to me the crossing of a border and sounded like a revelation: in a flash I thought that the Daughter’s face, although it came from far away, was born to end up there, in that open wave that was now turned to the pillow. It was so true, and final, that all the Daughter’s beauty—with which she charmed the world, during the day—seemed to me suddenly what it was, that is, a mask, a subterfuge—or little more than a promise. I wondered if it was that way for everyone, and for me, too, but then the question I asked aloud—in a low voice—was different and again the same.
    What is it?
    The Daughter, without stopping, opened her eyes and turned her gaze toward the young Bride. But she didn’t really seem to be looking, her eyes were fixed elsewhere, and her mouth was softly open. She continued with that sonorous song, she didn’t stop her fingers, she didn’t speak.
    Do you mind if I watch you? asked the young Bride.
    The Daughter shook her head no. She continued to caress herself without speaking. She was somewhere, within herself. But since her eyes were on the young Bride, to the young Bride it seemed that there was no longer any distance between them, physical or immaterial, and so she asked another question.
    Is that how you kill your fear? You hunt it and kill it?
    The Daughter turned her head again, stared at the ceiling for a moment, and then closed her eyes.
    It’s like detaching yourself, she said. From everything. You mustn’t be afraid, go all the way to the end, she said. Then you are detached from everything, and an immense weariness carries you into the night, giving you the gift of sleep.
    Then that last expression returned to her features, the head thrown back and the mouth half open. She resumed the sonorous song, and between her legs the fingers moved rapidly, every so often disappearing inside her. Gradually she seemed to lose the capacity to breathe, and at a certain point she seemed in such a hurry that the young Bride would have taken it for desperate if she hadn’t just learned that it was, rather, what she sought, every night, when the light went out, descending to a point within herself that in some way must be resisting her if now I saw her exhausted, digging up with her fingertips something that the handbook of life had evidently buried in the course of a long day. It was a descent, no doubt about that, and it appeared to become at every step steeper, or more dangerous. Then she began to tremble,