Miss

Translated by Jenny McPhee

Twenty-three years old seemed ancient to her, as if the sun were already setting on her life. Other people, however, didn’t see it that way. So for decorum’s sake, and because she was well mannered, she acted as if she were still eighteen, her laughter disguising how terribly old she truly felt. She had already been quite alarmed when, as soon as she turned twenty, her name – the one she had been baptized with and used in childhood – was replaced, both at home and elsewhere, by ‘Miss’. It was the toga praetexta worn by unmarried girls until … she shrugged off the alternative, but knew, at least in the eyes of others, that she would be unable to avoid her candidature for this ‘promotion’. And it greatly disturbed her.

Her ally was a troubled passion: desired, consented to, abstractly imperious. One does not love in order to dominate and conquer life – life being just a silent sequence of woes, interrupted, but not mitigated, by ephemeral sparks of distressing exaltation. Miracles were rare, yet they did happen – the approaching step of her Beloved seemed to be one. In fact, here he is, deigning to exist. For an hour – or for a few minutes – they take a walk together, words flowing between them, but then perhaps he’s a bit thoughtless and his words hit her straight in the heart, stab her even, but it doesn’t matter, blood coagulates. Like a terrified soldier pretending to be brave, she grows rigid with reserve.

It could not, and did not, last. What are three years of a rapidly beating heart, of abandoned hopes, of constant disillusionment? A flash of lightning. Her bitterest ordeal, very nearly unbearable, was when convalescing she’d hoped that by appearing so delicately beautiful to him, with her feverish eyes and wan complexion, he would become tender towards her. Before going out, she had looked at herself in the mirror – a shepherdess, wearing an aquamarine dress that made her seem transparent, and a broad-brimmed straw hat blooming with violets. A fiasco. The Adored One was frowning and impatient. It’s over, she said to herself, fighting back stinging tears; her voice – a violin, according to university friends – babbling away in an attempt to casually avoid the ever-present and catastrophic threat of a permanent goodbye. But apparently today he is in a hurry, so the the goodbye is quick but not definitive. Her parched lips refuse to open even to utter a timid ‘See you tomorrow’; and then she is alone, the light silk of her dress weighing upon her like lead, her fever back.

A slow summer of separation, a rare letter now and again, then final exams, graduation (‘Ah, yes, I had forgotten I graduated’). This display of indifference to academic affairs is de rigueur. He stops to light a cigarette, inhales: ‘Congratulations.’ Why bother taking another walk together? Ah, here it is: ‘You must do me a favour. I have been given a Maltese puppy and promised him to my friends as a Christmas present. Would you look after him for a couple of months? You might even have fun. He’s cute.’