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.As if her deceased aunt had come back to life and were speaking to her, Joana imagined the old woman's alarm, felt those open eyes — or were they her own eyes that she denied any surprises? Had Otávio returned to Lídia, despite Joana? -her aunt would say.Joana ran her fingers through her hair, absorbed the cold blade resting against her warm heart, she smiled once more, oh, simply to gain time.But of course, why not continue with Lídia — she answered her dead aunt.This lucid thought caused the icy blade to press on her lungs, mocking her.Why refuse to accept events? To possess many things at the same time, to feel in various ways, to recognize life from different sources.Who could prevent someone from living expansively?Afterwards she plunged into an odd state of mild excitement.She wandered aimlessly through the house, she even wept a little, without much suffering, just for the sake of weeping — she persuaded herself- nothing more, just like someone waving their hand, like someone looking.Am I suffering? — she sometimes asked herself and once more the one who was thinking filled her with surprise, curiosity and pride and there was no room left for the other to suffer.But this subtle exaltation did not permit her to continue on the same plane for very long.She passed at once to another tone of behaviour, she played a little piano music, forgot Lídia's letter.When she remembered her, vaguely, a bird flying to and fro, she couldn't decide whether to be sad or happy, calm or anxious.She kept thinking of the previous night, of the tall window pane shining serenely in the moonlight, of Otávio's bare chest, of Joana who had fallen into a deep sleep.Almost for the first time in her life, entrusting herself to the man who lay asleep at her side.In fact, she had not distanced herself from the Joana full of affection from the night before.Ashamed, humble and rejected, the latter had wandered until returning and Joana was increasingly more cruel, more absorbed and closer to herself — she thought.So much the better.Except that the cold steel was constantly being renewed, never became warm.Especially at the core of any thought there hovered yet another, perplexed, almost bewitched, as on the day her father died: things happened without her inventing them.In the afternoon she could at last observe Lídia and she realized that she was as remote from her as from the woman with the voice.They looked at each other and could not bring themselves to hate or even spurn each other.Lídia had raised, pale and discreet, various topics of no interest to either of them.Her nascent pregnancy floated throughout the entire room, saturated her and penetrated Joana.Even those sombre pieces of furniture with their crocheted mats, appeared to be protected by the same secret soon to be revealed, by the same waiting for a child.Lídia's eyes were wide open and shadowless.Such a beautiful woman.Her lips full but impassive, without the slightest tremor, the lips of someone who is not afraid of pleasure, who receives it without remorse.What poetry supported her existence? What was that murmuring trying to say which she could divine inside Lídia? The woman with the voice multiplied into countless women.But where was their divinity to be found? Even in the most vulnerable of those women there lurked the shadow of that knowledge you don't acquire through intelligence.The intelligence of blind things.The force of the stone which, on falling, pushes another which will finally drop into the sea and kill a fish.Sometimes the same strength could be found in women who were only superficially mothers and wives, the timid mistresses of men, like her aunt, like Armanda.Meanwhile that strength, that unity in weakness.Oh, perhaps she was exaggerating, perhaps the divinity of women was not specific, it was only in the fact that they existed.Yes, yes, there was the truth: they existed more than men, they were the symbol of the thing in the thing itself.And woman was the mystery in itself, she discovered.There was to be found in all women a quality of primary matter, something that might define itself but never came to be realized, for its very essence was that of 'becoming'
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