The Wide and Sunny Terrace

The day after her operation she felt sick. She didn’t get to hear those signature sounds of the break of day: the milk cart, the metal shutters rolling up to open the shops, the lone streetcars that didn’t stop at the intersections at such an early hour.

When she woke up to the sounds of morning, the day coming into her window was already old. The house where she lived stood on the slope of a hill where the cobblestone road propelled the cars bumpily down the slope as they shifted gears, and those changes of speed made her think of a hotel in France at the foot of a mountain where she had once spent the days complaining, days that now seemed the happiest of her life. The hotel was surrounded by sugar pines, and the pine cones would pile up on the branches, plump and gray like huddled sparrows. It was a landscape like the provinces here but where the plants were less fragrant and weren’t spiny, rather like fish prepared by a skilled chef. Plants with extraordinary aromas grew in the provinces: she recalled one plant that used to smell like something poisonous frying in a pan, another like a recently waxed floor, and yet another that had an odor like a guaranga.

She was propped up by the window, her forehead pressed against the vibrating glass, which gave her electric massages each time a carriage with three or four horses drove by on the street. She couldn’t move or change position, because the only way to change positions would have been to do a somersault, making all the furniture and paintings in the room spin with the intensity of an earthquake. . . . Her body seemed to have drifted away while her eyes dissolved like sugar cubes, fixed on an imprecise point vaguely surrounded by others, like in a sky full of stars.

It comforted her to think of a very wide and sunny terrace where she had once stretched out on a white wicker lounge chair. The house was pink, in the shape of a horseshoe. Three terraces surrounded a grassy yard blooming with African lilies that were either strikingly blue or strikingly violet depending on the color of the wall behind them, among the hoops of an abandoned game of croquet. It was as if she had been born in that house, awash in silence, where she’d go out to the fields wearing a rough leather jacket and ride a stubborn horse that balked furiously, galloping along the twists and turns of the roads. She had been born in that house, even though they had only invited her there for the day. She knew the house by heart before entering it: she could have sketched it with the same ease she had once portrayed her bridegroom’s face, in a notebook, before she had even met him. She remembered, as if emerging from a vast oblivion, from a previous life where she’d had to pass through days of anguish before arriving at that face that commanded all of her affection, before arriving at that terrace, so wide and warm with sunlight. Her thoughts turned again to the hotel in France, because the linoleum in the hotel bathroom was the same as in that country house. She moved her long swimmer’s arms gently, her hands searching for a book on the table. She would have been able to swim, because swimming is just lying down, moving over dense mattresses of water, and the sun would have cured her, but the trees were bare against a gray sky and the awnings over the windows flapped in the wind. It was useless; her hands couldn’t grab the book. She could hear the sound of spoons clinking through the slightly opened door, which signaled the arrival of a tapioca rice soup that tasted like childhood on a tray decorated with tiny stars.