The Young Bride by Alessandro Baricco, Ann Goldstein Page B

statement at all, tolerating every sort of intolerable gossip, and being charged, without particular interest, with assault. Understandably, since then I’ve shut myself in the house, limiting my outings to the strictly necessary and sinking slowly into a solitude by which I’m frightened and, at the same time, protected.
    I have to admit that, judging from the photos that came to me from my lawyer, it would seem that I really did strike the Doctor in the head. What aim.
    The road was already dark when they returned, the Daughter with her Cubist gait, the young Bride with her mind on certain vague thoughts of her own.
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    They pretended not to notice, but the truth is that the deliveries began to become less frequent, leaving empty, nameless days, according to rhythms that seemed irrational and so somewhat inconsistent with the mind of the Son as they had known it. An Irish harp arrived, and the next day two embroidered tablecloths. But then nothing, for two days. Sacks of seeds one Wednesday, and nothing until Sunday. A yellow tent, three tennis racquets, but in between four days of nothing. When an entire week passed without a single ring from the post office by which to measure the time of the wait, Modesto decided to ask, respectfully, for a meeting with the Father. He had prepared his opening sentence with care. It was in line with the Family’s deep-rooted inclinations, which were historically alien to any sort of pessimism.
    You must surely have noted, sir, a certain slowing down of the deliveries recently. I wondered if it might not be the case to deduce from that the imminent arrival of the Son.
    The Father looked at him silently. He was coming from distant thoughts, but he registered on some peripheral edge of his mind the beauty of loyalty to a style, often more visible in servants than in masters. He ratified it with an imperceptible smile. But since he remained silent, Modesto went ahead.
    I happened to notice, on the other hand, that the last morning telegram is from twenty-two days ago, he said.
    The Father, too, had noticed it. He wouldn’t have been able to fix an exact day, but he knew that at a certain point the Son had stopped reassuring the Family about the outcome of his nights.
    He nodded yes, with his head. Yet he remained silent.
    In the strict interpretation that he gave to his work, Modesto considered being silent in the presence of a master to be an excessively intimate practice, and so he avoided it systematically by resorting to a couple of elementary operations: asking permission to leave, or continuing to speak. Usually he preferred the first. That day he risked the second.
    So, if you will allow me, I would begin to plan the preparations for his arrival, to which I would like to devote all my attention, given the affection I have for the Son and considering the joy that seeing him again will bring to the whole household.
    The Father was almost moved. He had known that man forever, so at that moment he was perfectly able to understand what he was
really
saying, in the reverse of his words, with an irreproachable generosity and elegance. He was saying that something was going wrong with the Son, and he was there to do everything necessary to see that the rule that in those rooms did not permit anyone to give in to sorrow was not broken. Probably he was also reminding him that his devotion to the Son was such that no task would have seemed to him inappropriate if the purpose was that of tempering his fate.
    So the Father remained silent—touched by that man’s proximity. By the intelligence, by the control. He was, just that afternoon, measuring his own solitude and, looking at Modesto, was aware of seeing in him the only person who in those hours inhabited with dignity the open landscape of his distress. And in fact, at moments like those, when we are called on to endure secret, or not easily expressed, sorrows, it’s secondary characters, of programmatic modesty,