Not without pain. In silence I was seeing the pain of her difficult joy. The slow fury of a snail. She ran her tongue slowly over her thin lips. (Help me, said her body in its arduous bifurcation. I’m helping, my immobility answered.) The slow agony. She was swelling all over, slowly being deformed. There were moments her eyes became all lashes, with the eagerness of an egg. And her mouth had a trembling hunger. She was nearly smiling then, as if laid out on an operating table saying it didn’t hurt that badly. She didn’t lose sight of me: there were the footprints she didn’t see, someone had already walked through there, and she guessed that I had walked a lot. More and more she was being deformed, nearly identical to herself. Do I risk it? do I let myself feel?, she was asking inside herself. Yes, she answered herself through me.
And my first yes intoxicated me. Yes, my silence repeated to hers, yes. As when my son was born I said to him: yes. I had the audacity to say yes to Ofélia, I who knew that we can also die in childhood without anyone noticing. Yes, I repeated intoxicated, because there is no greater danger: when you go, you go together, you yourself will always be there: that, that is what you will take along into whatever you shall be.
The agony of her birth. Until then I had never seen courage. The courage to be something other than what one is, to give birth to oneself, and to leave one’s former body on the ground. And without having answered to anyone about whether it was worthwhile. “I,” her fluid-soaked body was trying to say. Her nuptials with herself.
Ofélia asked slowly, wary of what was happening to her:
“Is it a chick?”
I didn’t look at her.
“Yes, it’s a chick.”
From the kitchen came the faint peeping. We sat in silence as if Jesus had been born. Ofélia was breathing, breathing.
“A little chick?” she confirmed doubtfully.
“Yes, a little chick,” I said guiding her carefully toward life.
“Oh, a little chick,” she said, considering it.
“A little chick,” I said without being hard on her.
For several minutes now I had found myself facing a child. The metamorphosis had occurred.
“It’s in the kitchen.”
“In the kitchen?” she repeated pretending not to understand.
“In the kitchen,” I repeated authoritatively for the first time, without adding anything else.
“Oh, in the kitchen,” Ofélia said in a very fake voice and looked up at the ceiling.
But she was suffering. Somewhat ashamed I finally realized that I was taking my revenge. She was suffering, pretending, looking at the ceiling. That mouth, those circles under her eyes.
“You can go in the kitchen and play with the chick.”
“Me . . . ?” she asked, playing dumb.
“But only if you want to.”
I know I should have ordered her to, so as to avoid exposing her to the humiliation of wanting to so badly. I know I shouldn’t have given her the choice, and then she’d have the excuse of being forced to obey. But right then it wasn’t out of revenge that I was giving her the torment of freedom. It was because that step, that step too she had to take on her own. On her own and now. She herself would have to go to the mountain. Why — I was confusing myself — why am I trying to breathe my life into her purple mouth? why am I giving her breath? how dare I breathe into her, if I myself . . . — just so she can walk, I am giving her these arduous steps? I breathe my life into her just so that one day, exhausted, she for an instant can feel that the mountain went to her?
It would be my right. But I had no choice. It was an emergency as if the girl’s lips were turning more and more purple.
“Only go see the little chick if you want to,” I then repeated with the extreme severity of someone saving another.
We sat face to face, dissimilar, bodies separate from each other; only hostility united us. I was harsh and inert in my chair so that the girl would cause herself pain inside another being, firm so she would struggle inside of me; getting stronger the more that Ofélia needed to hate me and needed me to resist the suffering of her hatred. I cannot live this for you — my coldness said to her. Her struggle was happening ever closer and inside me, as if that individual who at birth had been extraordinarily endowed with strength were drinking of my weakness. By using me she was hurting me with her strength; she was clawing at me while trying to cling to my smooth walls. Finally her voice resounded in soft and slow anger:
“I guess I’ll go see the chick in the kitchen.”
“Go ahead,” I said slowly.
She took her time, trying to maintain the dignity in her back.
She came back from the kitchen immediately — she was amazed, unabashed, showing the chick in her hand, and with a bewilderment in her eyes that wholly questioned me:
“It’s a little chick!” she said.
She looked at it in her outstretched hand, looked at me, then looked back at her hand — and suddenly filled with an anxiousness and worry that automatically drew me into anxiousness and worry.
“But it’s a little chick!” she said, and reproach immediately flickered in her eyes as if I hadn’t told her who was peeping.
I laughed. Ofélia looked at me, outraged. And suddenly — suddenly she laughed. We both burst into laughter then, a bit shrill.
After we’d laughed, Ofélia put the chick on the floor to let it walk around. If it ran, she ran after it, she seemed to let it be autonomous just so she could miss it; but if it cowered, she’d rush to protect it, sorry that it was under her control, “poor thing, he’s mine”; and whenever she held it, her hand was crooked with care — it was love, yes, tortured love. He’s really small, therefore you have to be really careful, we can’t pet him because it’s really dangerous; don’t let them pick him up whenever they want, you can do what you like, ma’am, but corn’s too big for his little open beak; because he’s so fragile, poor thing, so young, therefore you can’t let your sons pet him; only I know how he likes to be petted; he keeps on slipping, therefore the kitchen floor isn’t the right place for a little chick.
For quite some time I’d been trying to go back to typing in an attempt to make up for all that lost time and with Ofélia lulling me, and gradually talking only to the little chick, and loving with love. For the first time she’d dropped me, she was no longer me. I looked at her, all golden as she was, and the chick all golden, and the two of them humming like distaff and spindle. And my freedom at last, and without a rupture; farewell, and I was smiling with nostalgia.
Much later I realized that Ofélia was talking to me.
“I think — I think I’m going to put him in the kitchen.”
“Go ahead.”
I didn’t see when she left, I didn’t see when she returned. At some point, by chance and distractedly, I sensed how long things had been quiet. I looked at her for an instant. She was seated, fingers clasped on her lap. Without knowing exactly why, I looked at her a second time:
“What is it?”
“Me . . . ?”
“Are you feeling sick?”
“Me . . . ?”
“Do you want to go to the bathroom?”
“Me . . . ?”
I gave up, went back to the typewriter. A while later I heard her voice:
“I’m going to have to go home.”
“All right.”
“If you let me, ma’am.”
I looked at her in surprise:
“Well, if you want to . . .”
“Then,” she said, “then I’m going.”
She left walking slowly, shut the door without a sound. I kept staring at the closed door. You’re the weird one, I thought. I went back to work.
But I couldn’t make it past the same sentence. Okay — I thought impatiently looking at my watch — and what is it now? I sat there interrogating myself halfheart
edly, seeking within myself for what could be interrupting me. When I was about to give up, I recalled an extremely still face: Ofélia. Something not quite an idea flashed through my head which, at the unexpected thought, tilted to better hear what I was sensing. Slowly I pushed the typewriter away. Reluctant, I slowly moved the chairs out of my way. Until I paused slowly at the kitchen door. On the floor was the dead chick. Ofélia! I called in an impulse for the girl who had fled.
From an infinite distance I saw the floor. Ofélia, I tried in vain to bridge the distance to the speechless girl’s heart. Oh, don’t be so afraid! sometimes we kill out of love, but I swear that some day we forget, I swear! we don’t love very well, listen, I repeated as if I could reach her before, giving up on serving the truth, she’d haughtily serve the nothing. I who hadn’t remembered to warn her that without fear there was the world. But I swear that is what breathing is. I was very tired, I sat on the kitchen stool.
Where I am now, slowly beating the batter for tomorrow’s cake. Sitting, as if for all these years I’ve been waiting patiently in the kitchen. Under the table, today’s chick trembles. The yellow is the same, the beak is the same. As we are promised on Easter, in December he will return. Ofélia is the one who didn’t return: she grew up. She went off to become the Hindu princess her tribe awaited in the desert.
BACK OF THE DRAWER
(“Fundo de gaveta”)
The Burned Sinner and the Harmonious Angels
(“A pecadora queimada e os anjos harmoniosos”)
Invisible angels: Behold us nearly here, coming down the long path that exists before you all. But we are not tired, such a road does not require strength and, were it to require vigor, not even that of your prayers would lift us. Dizziness alone is what makes us whirl round shouting with the leaves until the opening of a birth. Is dizziness all it takes, as far as we know? if men hesitate over men, angels know nothing of angels, the world is wide and may whatever is be blessed. We are not tired, our feet have never been washed. Screeching at this next diversion, we came so as to suffer what must be suffered, we who have yet to be touched, we who have yet to be boy and girl. Behold us in the web of true tragedy, from which we shall extricate our primary form. When we open our eyes to become those who are born, we shall remember nothing: babbling children we shall be and we shall wield your very weapons. Blind on the path that precedes footsteps, blind shall we push onward when we are born with eyes that already see. Nor do we know what we have come to. All we need is the conviction that what is to be done shall be done: an angel’s fall is a direction. Our true beginning precedes the visible beginning, and our true end will follow the visible end. Harmony, terrible harmony, is our only prior destiny.
Priest: In love for the Lord I have not lost my way, always secure in Thy day as in Thy night. And this simple woman lost her way for so little, and lost her nature, and behold her possessing nothing more and, now pure, whatever remains to her they will yet burn. The strange paths. She sealed her fate with a single sin to which she surrendered entirely, and behold her on the threshold of being saved. Every humble path is a path: crude sin is a path, ignorance of the commandments is a path, lust is a path. The only thing not a path was my premature joy at taking, as a guide and so easily, the sacred path. The only thing not a path was my presumption of being saved halfway through. Lord, grant me the grace to sin. It weighs heavily, the lack of temptation in which thou hast left me. Where are the water and fire through which I never passed? Lord, grant me the grace to sin. This candle I was, burning in Thy name, was always burning in the light and I saw nothing. Yet, ah hope that will open the doors of Thy violent heaven to me: now I see that, if thou hast not made of me the torch that will blaze, at least thou hast made the one who fans the flames. Ah hope, in which I can still see my pride in being chosen: in guilt I beat my breast, and with joy that I would like to mortify I say: the Lord sought me out to sin more than she who sinned, and at last I shall seal my tragedy. For it was my wrathful word that Thou didst employ so I might perform, more than the sin, the sin of punishing the sin. So that I might descend so far beneath my dangerous peace that the total darkness — where neither candelabras nor papal purple exist and not even the symbol of the Cross — the total darkness might be Thee. “The darkness shall not blind thee,” it was said in the Psalms.
People: For days we have gone hungry and here we are in search of food.
Enter sinner and two guards.
Priest: “She took her delight in the slavery of the senses,” by the sign of the Holy Cross.
People: Behold her, behold her, and behold her.
Sleepy child: Behold her.
Woman of the people: Behold her, she who erred, she who in order to sin required two men and one priest and one people.
1st guard: We are the guardians of our homeland. We suffocate in airless peace, and of the last war we have already forgotten even the bugles. Our beloved King dispatches us to posts of extreme responsibility, yet while our useless virility keeps watch we nearly fall asleep. Created to die in glory, behold us ashamedly living.
2nd guard: We are the guardians of a lord, whose domain seems rather confusing to us: sometimes extending to the borders established by habit and use, and our spears then rise at the cries of the heralds. At other times this domain penetrates into lands where there exists a much older law. So behold us this time guarding something that on its own will always be guarded, by the people and by fate. Under this sky of strangled tranquility, bread may be lacking, but the mystery of achievement never will. For what are we imaginarily watching over? if not the destiny of a heart.
1st guard: How your last words recall the longed-for thundering of a cannon. What desire to keep watch at last over a smaller world, where our spears deal the death-blow to whatever is going to die. But here we are guarding a woman who in a manner of speaking has already been set afire of her own accord.
Invisible angels: Set afire by harmony, bloody sweet harmony, which is our prior destiny.
Enter the Husband.
People: Behold the husband, he who was betrayed.
Husband: Behold her, she who will be burned by my wrath. Who spoke through me, giving me such fatal power? I was the one who incited the word of the priest and gathered this troop of people and roused the spears of the guards, and granted this public square such an aspect of glory that crumbles its walls. Ah still-beloved wife, I would like to be relieved of this invasion. I dreamed of being alone with you and reminding you of our past joy. Leave her alone with me, for since yesterday I live and do not live, leave her alone with me. Before you all — strangers to my former happiness and to my present wretchedness — I can no longer see in this woman she who was and was not mine, nor in our past celebration she who was and was not ours, nor can I taste the bitterness that is mine and mine alone. What will happen to this heart of mine that no longer recognizes the offspring of its Vengeance? Ah remorse: I should have brandished the dagger with my own hand, and then I would have known that, as the one betrayed, I took vengeance myself. But this spectacle no longer belongs to my world, and this woman, whom I took in modesty, I lose to the sound of trumpets. Leave me alone with the sinner. I want to regain my former love, and then be filled with hatred, and then murder her myself, and then worship her again, and then never forget her, leave me alone with the sinner. I want to take possession of my disgrace and my vengeance and my loss, and you are all preventing me from being lord of this fire, leave me alone with the sinner.
Complete Stories Page 32
