So, in order not to die, she took refuge where she knew she would find the last line of resistance to disaster. She forced herself to think about the Son. But think is a reductive word to define an operation that she knew was quite complex. Three years of silence and separation were not easy to retrace. So much distance had accumulated that the Son had long since stopped being, for the young Bride, an easily accessible thought, or memory, or sentiment. He had become a place. An enclave, buried in the landscape of her feelings, which she couldn’t always find again. Often she set off to reach it, but got lost on the way. It would have been simpler for her if she could have had available some physical desire to hold onto, in order to scale the walls of oblivion. But desire for the Son—his mouth, his hands, his skin—was something it wasn’t simple to return to. She could distinctly summon to memory particular instants in which she had desired him even in a devastating way, but now, staring at them, it seemed to her that she was staring at a room in which, in place of colors, little pieces of paper were stuck to the walls with the names of the hues written on them: indigo, Venetian red, sand yellow. Turquoise. It wasn’t pleasant to admit, but it was so.[…] For that reason, following the traces of physical desire wasn’t often, for the young Bride, the best system for finding the road that led to the hiding place of her love. Occasionally, she preferred to dig out of her memory the beauty of certain phrases, or certain gestures—a beauty of which the Son was a master. She found this beauty intact, then, in memory. And for a moment this seemed to restore to her the spell of the Son and bring her back to the exact point at which her journey aimed. But it was an illusion more than anything. She found herself contemplating marvelous objects that still lay in the cabinets of distance, impossible to touch, inaccessible to the heart. So the agonizing sense of ultimate loss was mixed with the pleasure of admiration, and the Son grew even more distant, almost unapproachable, now. In order not to truly lose him, the young Bride had had to learn that in reality no quality of the Son—or detail, or marvel—was now sufficient to enable her to cross the abyss of distance, because no man, however loved, is enough by himself to defeat the destructive power of absence. What the young Bride understood was that only by thinking of the two of them, together, was she able to sink into herself to where the permanence of her love dwelt, intact. She went back then to certain states of mind, certain ways of perceiving, which she still remembered very well. She thought of the two of them, together, and could feel a certain heat, or the tone of certain nuances, even the quality of a certain silence. A particular light. Then it was given to her to find what she sought, in the definite sensation that a place existed to which the world was not admitted, and which coincided with the perimeter marked by their two bodies, kindled by their being together, and made unassailable by their anomaly. If she could reach that sensation, everything became harmless again. Since the disaster of every life around her, and even of her own, was no longer a danger to her happiness but, if anything, the counterpart that made still more necessary and invincible the refuge that she and the Son had created, loving each other. They were the demonstration of a theorem that refuted the world, and when she could return to that conviction, all fear abandoned her and a new, sweet confidence took possession of her. There was nothing more wonderful in the world.