Ardor Read Online Free Page A

eyes. If he turned his back for a moment, he could perceive a difference. If he went into town to run some errands, on his return he would see a fresh-formed inch of stalk, or a new little leaf unfurling its tender green flag.
    Arcadio Carnabuci was so excited he felt ready to explode. Truthfully, he was a time bomb waiting to go off. He couldn’t concentrate on any one thing. A sweat stood out perpetually on his brow. He kept doing stupid things, losing items, puttingthem in the wrong places. He spent hours looking for his socks only to find them in the refrigerator; the jug of milk stuffed into his coat pocket had curdled into yogurt. His taste buds were confused. He ate a slab of cheese only to discover later it was butter. The liver he fried for his supper was an old slipper.
    It was then, too, that the dreams started. Arcadio Carnabuci began to see Fernanda in dreams. The sweetest little ear would appear in the middle of a dream about something else entirely. Or a perfect nose. Just the kind of nose he desired her to have. Small, straight, narrow. Freckles. A scattering of fine freckles evenly distributed over the surface of her luminous skin. Eyes green, deep green, not pale, and ardent like a lake with splashes of sun on it. Her hair particularly distracted him, in dreams, and even when he knew he was awake, he saw it. Twisted into a corn plait, the color of the sunset on a field of wheat. It seemed so close, so real, he could almost reach out and touch it. He knew what it felt like, to the touch. Smooth, like a skein of silk thread warmed by the sun. Sometimes it was flung over his pillow, like a pool of molten gold. He could smell it, like a summer meadow when the grasses and the wildflowers were in bloom and their scent carried on the breeze. But when he reached out to it, it vanished.
    As the seedlings developed, the image of Fernanda also came into focus. Arcadio Carnabuci knew her name from the start. It did not come as a surprise. It seemed that he had always known it: Fernanda. It spoke to him from somewhere in a distant past that they had shared, long ago and far away fromhere. This reinforced his notion of the inevitability of it all. Their coming together at long last was their destiny.
    He took to repeating her name over and over like a mantra: Fernanda, Fernanda. Sometimes, when he was feeling a little tipsy after too much wine, or sometimes even without the wine, just when he was feeling joyful and irrepressible, he would couple her name with his own: “Fernanda Carnabuci. Signora Fernanda Carnabuci.” How good it sounded. And so right. So natural. He didn’t want to tempt fate by mentioning it to anybody else, but he wore it in his heart like a mascot.
    He knew all sorts of intimate things about her. He knew the curve of her thighs so well he could draw it with one unfaltering pencil line. His mind when at leisure would unconsciously trace that curve. He worshiped the pale blue network of veins on her inner arms, the tender place that, when he stroked along its length softly with the whisper of a fingertip, would gather her up into a endless line of pleats and make her mew and arch like a cat. Her skin was always cold to the touch, cold and smooth as marble. Just short of the place where her cheeks melted into her hairline, they were crosshatched with downy hair too fine to be described as hair, as delicate as the blush of felt on a ripe peach, and the sight of it made him want to weep. Her long, narrow feet—he loved every one of the tiny bones that composed them. He loved the part of her she was herself less familiar with: her back. The two hinted indentations either side of the base of her spine, the freckles that flecked across her shoulders, the adorable vertebra that became pronouncedwhen she bent over, the aspect her back bore of being younger than her front because it was less looked at. Her succulent breasts startled him every time they came into his mind, tinged with guilt