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your mouth; one day you’ll need them.
    She thought for a moment.
    If you really have to, give up the eyes, get used to looking at the ground. But save your mouth, otherwise you won’t know where to start over from, when you need to.
    The young Bride looked at her with eyes that had grown very large.
    When will I need to? she asked.
    When you meet a man you like. Go and get him, and marry him, it’s a thing you have to do. But you’ll have to go and get him, and then you’ll need your mouth. And hair, hands, eyes, voice, cunning, patience, and a skillful belly. You’ll have to learn everything again from the beginning: do it quickly, otherwise they’ll get there before him. You understand what I’m trying to say?
    Yes.
    You’ll see that everything will come back to you in an instant. You just have to be quick. Did you listen to me carefully?
    Yes.
    Then repeat it.
    The young Bride did, word for word, and where she didn’t remember the right word she used one of her own.
    You’re a smart woman, said the grandmother. She actually said “woman.”
    She gestured in the air, maybe it was a caress not given.
    Now go, she said.
    She felt one of those bites, a moan escaped her, like an animal. She put her hands back under the covers, to press where death was eating her, in her stomach.
    The young Bride rose and for a while stood without moving, beside the bed. She had something in mind to ask, but it wasn’t easy to find a way.
    My father, I said. Then I stopped.
    The grandmother turned to look at me, with the eyes of an animal in danger.
    But I was a smart girl, so I didn’t stop, and I said, Was my father born like that?
    Like what?
    Was my father born from someone in our family, like that?
    The grandmother looked at me and today I can understand what she thought: that we never really die, because the blood continues, carrying off for eternity all the best and the worst of us.
    Let me die in peace, child, she said. Now let me die in peace.
    For that reason, on that hot night, when the Daughter, staring at me with a gentleness that could also be malice, repeated “try,” which meant to remember what I had between my legs, I knew right away that it wasn’t an ordinary moment but the appointment my grandmother had told me about, while she was spitting out death all around herself: if to the Daughter it seemed a game, for me it was, instead, a threshold. I had systematically put it off, with fierce determination, because I, too, had inherited a fear, like everyone else, and had devoted a good part of my life to it. What they had taught me I had succeeded in doing. But since I’d met the Son, I knew that the last move was missing, maybe the most difficult. I had to learn everything from the beginning again, and now that he was coming I had to do it in a hurry. I thought that the Daughter’s gentle voice—the Daughter’s malicious voice—was a gift of fate. And since she told me to try, I obeyed, and I tried, knowing perfectly that I was taking a road of no return.
    As happens sometimes in life, she realized that she knew very well what to do, although she didn’t know what she was doing. It was a début and a dance, it seemed to her that she had been working on it secretly for years, practicing for hours of which she now had no memory. She let go of everything without haste, waiting for the right gestures to arrive, and they emerged at the pace of memory, disconnected but exact down to the details. She liked when the breath begins to sound in the voice, and the moments when you feel like stopping. In her mind she had no thoughts, until she thought that she wanted to look at herself, otherwise of all this only a shadow made of sensations would remain, and she wanted an image, a real one. So she opened her eyes and what she saw stayed in my mind for years, an image whose simplicity could explain things, or identify a beginning, or excite the