Recalling the episode of that afternoon, I noted first of all that the vision of the woman in Saavedra had suddenly bedazzled me, as happens when one perceives the light of beauty. As I contemplated her image now, it seemed beyond doubt that her beauty alone could be responsible for the dazzling effect. Moreover, I said to myself, there can be no bedazzlement unless some “splendour” causes it, and I remembered that all beauty was defined as a certain “splendour.” Next, I made two parallel observations. On the one hand, I told myself, all splendour implies a source of the resplendence, which raised the question, What was resplendent in The One? Whence the splendour of her beauty? On the other hand, I observed, her beauty did not dazzle my eyes as material light does, but rather my soul as does intelligble light. Now, given that her beauty was a light I attained through my mind, I reasoned, and that the mind is a power that tends toward the truth, then her beauty could be nothing other than the splendour of something true. To be sure, this last conclusion told me very little, for though I was certain her beauty revealed the presence of something true, I was still in ignorance of the truth being revealed to me by The One. And now I understood the double meaning of the word “revelation,” since her beauty raised a corner of the veil that covered her truth and then let it fall again, as if at once wanting and declining to manifest the truth.
But the beauty before me was not a matter for my mind alone, for it also invited my will, through an appeal in the mode of love I knew so well and so distrusted; and, for that to happen, it was necessary that what my mind knew as true must also appear as good to my will. Surely it was one and the same thing, which showed a different aspect, according to which of the soul’s powers were considering it. However, just as I had not uncovered the intimate nature of her truth, neither had the inner nature of her goodness been revealed to me: I only knew that, faced with her image, my mind operated through light, my will through love; and that they did so in a simultaneous act, such that, in contemplating her image, I knew not whether I loved her now because I knew her, or whether I knew her now because I loved her.
Nevertheless, prudence still clamoured within my being, telling me that an equivalent beauty with similar effects had many times inclined me toward deceptive love. But upon evoking my former loves, I recalled that they had been precipitate, lunging headlong toward creatures, whereas now my soul seemed to move with another rhythm in which I observed two movements: one of transport in slow revolutions around the exceedingly sweet woman, my soul surveying and studying the woman with loving care; the other of rotation on my soul’s axis, thanks to which my soul continued in her self-observation, studying herself in the mode and effects of her contemplation.
IX
The next day and the two or three that followed are vivid in my memory, thanks to the delight I experienced, as if I’d just woken up from a frightening dream. I’ve already described, in another part of my Notebook, the desolation my soul had come to know and the sterile flight of my intelligence above its own ruin. I’ll say now that, under the sole influence of the creature revealed in Saavedra, my whole being seemed to surrender to the rhythm of a nascent life and to a feeling of astonishment, a rising-up from ashes. I remember the brand new emotions, the old wariness, and the conflicting ideas; feeling cooped up in my room, I felt driven to go out in search of light and the open air, and took long walks which, far from pacifying the tumult in my heart, only accentuated it. I’ve already said that springtime in Buenos Aires and the woman of my sleepless nights had manifested themselves at the same time; so, during my walks it happened that my soul’s inward euphoria joined the outward elation of the earth, whose fervent awakening goaded creatures onto paths of exaltation. I preferred to walk in humble neighbourhoods, especially the sun-drenched streets of my Villa Crespo. There, the springtime sky, clear and moist, shone like a look of great tenderness. In the foliage of the trees along the streets, a green light heralded the sprouting buds. A prelude of incipient flowers played in intimate gardens and cordial patios. And my eyes, open like never before, devoured the signs of springtime and feasted on the sky’s blueness, round and smooth as a fruit. Everything had meaning: the hot laughter of the children, a woman’s voice in the distance, a bird swaying on a branch, the colour of a stone. Sympathy of some unknown lineage overflowed in my breast before all that was humble and silent: a delicious intelligence of love was one with a desire to press the living sheaf of creatures tightly to my soul.
One night (the third after the encounter), when I was out wandering, either chance or my longing for the woman of my adventure — I still don’t know which — led me to Saavedra. Never had the weight of any night seemed so light as it fell upon my shoulders; nor had Saavedra ever seemed so close to heaven. I was ambling along nocturnal streets, by grates and walls plumed with wisteria, their blossoms caressing my brow and bringing to mind the familiar taste of springtimes that had arisen and fallen back there, in Maipú, or perhaps yonder, in an orchard where angels now stand watch. The night air, sweet as wine, and the silence, disturbed only by rustling leaves or a bird stirring and singing between dreams, made me experience a serenity I had never known before. In that atmosphere my mind no longer worked with a tiresome web of inner words, but rather through a sure intuition of things, arrived at — it seemed — solely by opening the eyes and ears of my soul. I exercised that delicious form of knowing for the first time. And since all that light came to me through the mirror of The One, I began to suspect that a mystery was both hiding her and revealing her: she was hidden in its essence and revealed in its operation.
I cannot say if it was the glimpse of her mystery that made my heart beat faster and slowed my steps as I approached her place of residence. All I know is that when I got close to her garden my knees wobbled and I had to rest against a tree. The garden of The One was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence; among its bars heavy with years, the honeysuckle had woven its thick tangle and built up a fragrant wall between the privacy of the house and the indiscretion of outside eyes. I remember that my hands, plunging into the denseness, managed to break through the wall of leaves and open up a hole, which allowed me to take in the garden cloaked in darkness, in the centre of which rose the solid architecture of the house. I stood watching for a long time: agile silhouettes crossed the luminous rectangular windows; to my ears came the murmur of family conversations that now and then were cut into by the blade of youthful laughter or by abrupt gaps of silence swooping down on the house like birds of prey. If the air circulating round the house seemed lighter, it was no doubt crowned by a more benign sky. At that moment, all my vitality was concentrated in my eyes and ears. They tried to pick up the subtlest pulse of the house, in their desire to catch even a trace of the admirable woman who had been revealed to me in that same garden. How long I stood thus, clinging to the bars like a thief in the night, I do not know: little by little the intimate voices fell silent; one after another the lights in the windows went out. A deep chord was still resonating in the dark, as if some careless hand had suddenly fallen upon the keys of a piano and its vibrations were wandering away into the silence until they were finally lost.
Only then did I abandon my observation post and sit down at the threshold of the house. There I began to think about the feelings my nocturnal espionage had aroused. And above all it amazed me to think that The One moved within a family circle whose eyes beheld her at all hours; they had seen her birth, given her a name by which they called her; they followed her every gesture, but were unaware of her inner essence, such as it had been revealed to me in a brief instant of contemplation. And I asked myself then, in that soliloquy on the threshold: What was it that I saw in The One and others could not see? My answer, as at the first encounter, was that I saw her in her harmonious number, or better, in the set of singing numbers that formed her from head to foot and exalted her above nothingness through the creative virtue of numbers, in the same way that through numbers a piece of music is constructed and sustained within silence. And here I experienced a sudden start: that womanly cipher, that harmonious number, had not sprung from nothingness. How, then, to think about that number without thinking about the mind that had formed it and about the voice that had proferred it?