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

life and what we write a magnificent distance that, produced first by the imagination, then filled in by craft and dedication, carries us to a place where worlds, nonexistent before, appear: worlds in which what is intimately ours, unmentionably ours, returns to existence, but almost unknown to us, and touched by the grace of the most delicate forms, like fossils or butterflies. Certainly my old friend would have had difficulty understanding, and that’s why I remained silent and didn’t answer, but now I realize that I might, more usefully, have burst out laughing, asking him, and asking myself, what the fuck the story of a family that has breakfast until three in the afternoon, the story of an uncle who sleeps all the time, could have to do with the sudden disintegration that is removing me from the face of the earth (or at least that’s the feeling I have). Nothing, absolutely nothing. If I didn’t do that, however, it’s not only because it costs me a lot to laugh these days, but also because I know, for certain, that in a subtle manner I would have been telling a lie. Because fossils and butterflies exist, and you begin to discover them while you’re writing; sometimes you don’t even have to wait years, to reread in the cold light of day—every so often you sense them while the furnace is red-hot and you’re bending the iron. For example, I should have reported to the old friend how, writing about the young Bride, I more or less abruptly change the narrative voice, for reasons that at the moment seem to me exquisitely technical, or at most blandly aesthetic, with the obvious result of complicating the life of the reader; that in itself is negligible, yet it has an irritating effect of virtuosity that at first I even tried to fight, before surrendering to the evidence that I simply couldn’t hear those sentences unless they slipped out that way, as if the solid basis of a clear and distinct narrative voice were something that I no longer believed in, or that had become impossible for me to appreciate. A fiction for which I’d lost the necessary innocence. In the end it would be up to me to admit to the old friend that, although I don’t have a sense of the details, I would go so far as to believe in an assonance between the occasional slip of the narrative voice in my sentences and what I’ve discovered in these months, concerning myself and others, that is to say, the possible appearance in life of events that don’t have a direction, hence aren’t stories, hence are impossible to tell, and ultimately are enigmas without a form, intended to make us lose our minds, as my case demonstrates. It occurs to me now to say to my old friend, if belatedly, that I echo the dismaying absurdity of it almost involuntarily in the handiwork I do to earn my living, and to beg him to understand, that, yes, I’m writing a book that probably has to do with what’s killing me, but I ask him to consider it a rash and very private admission, completely pointless to remember, since, finally, the solid reality of the facts—which in the end surprises even me, I swear—is that, finally, in spite of everything that is happening around, and inside, me, what now seems to me most urgent is to refine the story of when, in the logical flow of their passion, the Son and the young Bride ran into that unexpected variant, that emigration to Argentina, born in the fervid imagination of a restless—or mad—father. The Son, for his part, wasn’t all that upset by it, because he had inherited from the Family a rather fleeting sense of time, in the light of which three years was not essentially distinguishable from three days: it was a matter of provisional forms of their provisional eternity. The young Bride, on the other hand, was terrified of it. From her family, she had inherited a precise fear, and at that moment understood that if her grandmother’s precepts had