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

years she had kept in reserve for him, and kissed him.
    It wasn’t the Son’s first kiss, but in a certain sense it was. Earlier, and in different times, two other women had kissed him: consistent with the type of youth he was—ageless—they were adult women, friends of his mother. They had done it all, one in a corner of the garden and the other in a railway carriage. More than anything else, he remembered, in both, the obstacle of the lipstick. Not the first, out of delicacy, but the second, out of pure desire, had moved down to touch him and take him in her mouth for a long time, slowly, until he came. Nothing had followed from this; they were, after all, both cultivated women; but when he happened to meet them, the Son read in their eyes a long, secret drama, which, in the end, was the part that was most exciting to him. As for actual, so to speak complete, coupling, the Father, a good-natured and if necessary fierce man, had set a date for the right moment at the family brothel, in the city. Since the women there were quickly able to recognize each man’s preferences, everything happened in a way that the Son found comfortable and appropriate. He appreciated how quickly the first woman of his life understood that he would do it dressed and with his eyes open, and that she would have to be silent and completely naked. She was tall, she spoke with a southern accent, and she opened her legs solemnly. As she said goodbye she ran a finger over his lips—which were bloodless, like a sick person’s, but beautiful, like a martyr’s—and told him that he would have success with women because nothing excites them like mystery.
    So the Son had a past, and yet the virgin kiss of the young Bride left him stunned: because the young Bride was a boy, because it was an unthinkable thought, because it was a thought he had in fact always thought, and because now it was a secret he knew. Besides, she kissed in a way . . . So he was disturbed by it, and even months later, when the Mother, sitting next to him, asked him to explain to her, for pity’s sake, why the devil he wanted to marry a girl who, as far as she could tell, had neither bosom nor rear nor ankles, he had one of his interminable silences and then said only: her mouth. The Mother had searched in the index of her memories for something that linked that girl to the term “mouth,” but had found nothing. So she had heaved a long sigh, promising herself that she would be more attentive in the future, because evidently something had escaped her. Just then, perhaps, a curiosity was roused that, years later, would dictate on her part an instinctive and memorable act, as we’ll see. At the moment, however, she said merely: After all, it’s well known that rivers flow to the sea and not the opposite (many of her syllogisms were in fact inscrutable).
    After that first kiss, things had rushed ahead with geometrical precision first secretly, then in the light of day, until they produced the sort of slow marriage that is in effect the subject of the story that I am telling here; yesterday, an old friend asked me, candidly, if it had anything to do with the troubles that have been killing me these past few months, that is, the same period during which I am telling this story that, the old friend thought, might also have to do with the story of what’s killing me. The right answer—no—wasn’t difficult to give, and yet I remained silent and didn’t answer, because I would have had to explain how everything we write naturally has to do with what we are, or were, but as far as I’m concerned I’ve never thought that the job of writing could be resolved by wrapping one’s own affairs up in a literary package, employing the painful stratagem of changing the names and sometimes the sequence of events, when, instead, the more proper sense of what we can do has always seemed to me to be to put between our