The Young Bride by Alessandro Baricco, Ann Goldstein Read Free Book Online

sowing its effervescence, sure they could count on the usual abundant harvest. Therefore the servants, too, were sent home, and even Modesto was invited to have what others would have called a vacation and he interpreted as a pointless suspension of time. In general this happened around the middle of August: it could be deduced, therefore, that the procession of objects would stretch out for some fifty days. It was the middle of June.
    I don’t understand, is he coming or not? the young Bride asked the Daughter, when they were alone, after breakfast.
    He’s coming—every day he arrives a little bit, and he’ll finish arriving in a month or so, the Daughter answered. You know what he’s like, she added.
    The young Bride knew what he was like, but not so well, after all, or in detail, or in a particularly clear way. In truth she had liked the son precisely because he wasn’t comprehensible, unlike other boys of his age, in whom there was nothing to understand. The first time she met him she had been struck by the grace of his gestures, which were those of a sick man, and by his particular beauty, which was that of a dying man. He was perfectly healthy, as far as she knew, but someone whose days were numbered would have moved like him, dressed like him, and above all been excessively silent like him, speaking only occasionally, in a low voice and with an irrational intensity. He appeared marked by something, but that it was a tragic fate was a slightly too literary deduction that the young Bride quickly learned, instinctively, to ignore. In reality, in the network of those frail features and those convalescent’s gestures, the Son concealed a frightening avidity for life and a rare facility of imagination: both virtues that in that countryside were spectacularly useless. He was considered very intelligent, which in the common mind was equivalent to being anemic, or color-blind: an inoffensive and sophisticated malady. But the Father, from a distance, observed him and knew; the Mother, from closer up, protected him and guessed: they had a special child. With the instinct of a little animal, the young Bride also understood it, and she was only fifteen. So she began to hang around him, for no reason, whenever the occasion arose, and since over the years she had made herself into a kind of wild child, she became for the Son a faithful strange companion, younger, slightly feral, and as mysterious as he was. They were silent. The young Bride, especially, silent. They shared a taste for interrupted sentences, a preference for certain angles of light, and an indifference to malice. They were an odd couple, he in his elegance, she stubbornly unkempt, and if there was a feminine trait somewhere between them it would have been more readily distinguished in him. They began to speak, when they spoke, using
we
. They could be seen running along the embankment of the river, pursued by something of which there was no trace in the immensity of the countryside. They were seen at the top of the bell tower, back from copying the inscriptions written in the big bell. They had been seen in the factory, observing the workers’ actions for hours, without saying a word, but writing down some numbers in a little notebook. In the end, people got used to them, which made them invisible. When it happened, the young Bride remembered her grandmother’s words and, without thinking too much about it, recognized what she had foretold, or maybe even promised. She didn’t wash, she didn’t comb her hair, she wore the same dirty clothes, there was dirt under her nails and a bitter odor between her thighs; even her eyes, which she had long since given up, she continued to move without mystery, imitating the sly obtuseness of domestic animals. But one day when the Son, at the end of a silence the young Bride found of a perfect duration, turned to her and asked a simple question, she, instead of answering, used what for six