Free The Young Bride by Alessandro Baricco, Ann Goldstein Page A

decided, as the smile vanished.
    Comandini didn’t move.
    That wasn’t what I asked you, the Father said then, and Comandini knew the exact meaning of the words, because he remembered very well when, three years earlier, sitting in that same chair, like a pawn in F2, he had heard the Father give some polite orders whose essence was: let’s be sure to keep on eye on the Son, with some discretion, during this English sojourn, and possibly offer him, invisibly, appropriate occasions for deducing by himself the pointlessness of a marriage so without prospects, or sound motives, or, ultimately, good sense. He had added that a bond with an English family, especially one in the textile sector, was to be hoped for. Comandini had not discussed it then, but had tried to understand how far he could go in diverting the Son’s destiny. He had in mind different degrees of violence, in the act that was to change a life, in fact two. The Father had then shaken his head, as if to get rid of a temptation. Oh, no more than a steady escort, he had explained. I would find it gracious enough to preserve a minimal
chance
for the young Bride, he had explained. And those were the last words he had uttered on the subject. In which, for three years, he had almost lost interest.
    But the things keep arriving here, he objected, thinking of the rams and all the rest.
    He has a series of agents, Comandini explained, scattered around England. I tried to investigate, but they don’t know much about it, either. They have the orders for shipping, that’s all. They’ve never seen the Son, they don’t know who he is. He paid in advance and gave very precise, almost maniacal orders.
    Yes, it’s like him.
    But it’s not like him to disappear in this way.
    The Father remained silent. He was a man who, if only for medical reasons, couldn’t allow himself to indulge in anxiety: moreover, he believed firmly in an objective tendency of things to settle themselves. Yet at that moment he felt a slippage of the soul that he had seldom known, something like the opening of a clearing somewhere in the thick forest of his tranquility. He got up from the chair, and for a moment stood waiting for things to resettle themselves inside him by mechanical means, as usually happened in the case of certain discomforts he felt, especially after lunch. All he got from it was an urge to fart, which he controlled. Whereas he did not lose the sensation that he could now focus better, and review the absurd idea that the Son was disappearing not in England but somewhere inside of him, that where there had been the solid mass of a sojourn there was now the void of a silence. It didn’t seem illogical, because, even though the style of the times provided for a vague, distant, and restrained role for fathers, it hadn’t been that way for him, with that Son, whom he had wanted, against all logic, and who, for reasons whose every nuance he knew,
was the origin of his sole ambition
. So it seemed to him reasonable to register that in the disappearance of that youth something of himself was also disappearing: he could perceive it like a tiny hemorrhage, and mysteriously he knew that, neglected, it would expand without respite.
    When was he last seen? he asked.
    Eight days ago. He was in Newport, buying a cutter.
    What’s that?
    A small sailboat.
    I imagine that we’ll see it unloaded in front of the gate one of these days.
    It’s possible.
    Modesto won’t be too enthusiastic.
    Yet there might be another possibility, Comandini ventured.
    What?
    He might have taken it out on the ocean.
    Him?
    Why not? If one hypothesizes a certain wish to disappear . . .
    He hates the sea.
    Yes, but . . .
    A certain wish to disappear?
    The desire to become unfindable.
    But why in the world?
    I have no idea.
    I beg your pardon?
    I have no idea.
    The Father felt a crack opening up somewhere inside him—another one. The idea that