A Heart So White Read Free

reached an end, or rather (since the days continue implacably to pass and there is no end), that the time has come to devote yourself to something else. I know that this feeling is both pernicious and erroneous and that giving in to it or accepting it is the reason why so many promising marriages collapse no sooner have they begun. I know that what you should do is to overcome that initial feeling and, far from devoting yourself to something else, you should devote yourself to the marriage itself, as if confronted by the most important structure and task of your life, even if you're tempted to believe that the task has already been completed and the structure built. I know all that but, nevertheless, when I got married, even during the honeymoon itself (we went to Miami, New Orleans and Mexico, then on to Havana), I experienced two unpleasant feelings, and I still wonder if the second was and is just a fantasy, invented or dreamt up to mitigate or combat the first. That first feeling of unease is the one I've already mentioned, the one which—judging by what one hears, by the kind of jokes made at the expense of those getting married and by the many gloomy proverbs about it in my own language — must be common to all newlyweds (especially men) at the beginning of something which, incomprehensibly, you feel and experience as if it were an ending. This unease is summed up in a particularly terrifying phrase: "Now what?" and I have no idea what other people do to overcome it.
    As with an illness, this "change of state" is unpredictable, it disrupts everything, or rather prevents things from going on as they did before: it means, for example, that after going out to supper or to the cinema, we can no longer go our separate ways, each to his or her own home, I can no longer drive up in my car or in a taxi to Luisa's door and drop her off and then, once I've done so, drive off alone to my own apartment along the half- empty, hosed-down streets, still thinking about her and about the future. Now that we're married, when we leave the cinema our steps head off in the same direction (the echoes out of time with each other, because now there are four feet walking along), but not because I've chosen to accompany her or not even because I usually do so and it seems the correct and polite thing to do, but because now our feet never hesitate outside on the damp pavement, they don't deliberate or change their mind, there's no room for regret or even choice: now there's no doubt but that we're going to the same place, whether we want to or not this particular night, or perhaps it was only last night that I didn't want to.
    On our honeymoon, when this change of state came about (and to say that it "came about" makes it sound too gradual, for it's a violent change, one that barely gives you time to catch your breath), I realized that I found it very difficult to think about her and utterly impossible to think about the future, which is one of the greatest conceivable pleasures known to anyone, if not the daily salvation of us all; to allow oneself to think vague thoughts, to let one's thoughts drift over what will or might happen, to wonder without too much exactitude or intensity what will become of us tomorrow or in five years' time, to wonder about things we cannot foresee. On my honeymoon it was as if the future had disappeared and there was no abstract future at all, which is the only future that matters because the present can neither taint it nor assimilate it. That change, then, means that nothing can continue as before, especially if, as usually happens, the change has been preceded and foreshadowed by a joint effort, whose main visible manifestation is the unnatural process of creating a home for you both, a home that had no prior existence for either of you, but which must, unnaturally, be inaugurated by you both. In that particular custom or practice, which is, I believe, widespread, lies the proof that, when they contract