And would he no longer be ashamed of miracles? Would the constant threat cease that even the perfume might say “that there,” and that the shape of a hand might repeat it . . . Finally, finally wounded, mortally wounded, what peace.
He’d waited his whole life for the moment in which he’d finally be lost. What rotting in the wet leaves.
He stopped again. The lighthouse was scanning the dark sky. Lucrécia’s immobilized smile was passing through the clouds . . . My God, he mumbled gloomily. His stubborn head was needing to think about God in order to start thinking again. Fireflies were blinking, ironic, lighting up where he least expected them, encircling him like little devils.
But he didn’t go back. He went ahead tough, a conqueror, heading toward the city that was the shelter of his strength. The closer he drew to the lights, the more he was vanquishing Lucrécia. Because this man, who would wipe his lips with his handkerchief, was made of stone. Whereas Lucrécia Neves wouldn’t last long, Lucas knew it: she’d be substituted many times whereas he was whatever was permanent. She was so futile, so poor and obstinate. In fact five thousand lives wouldn’t even be enough for her first real idea to reach perfection inside her. She’d already begun however the work of those five thousand lives.
The next day the doctor had hardly worked, awaiting the moment in which he’d see if the woman was still waiting for him in front of his office or if she’d disappeared. But with sudden horror and sudden joy — he found her. Standing, modest, smiling with her animal patience.
Their sleepwalking strolls began anew. And when late at night they stopped upon the hill, she said:
“Fortunately everything is impossible,” and started scratching at the ground with the tip of her shoe. “Because I think I’d hurt the one I loved,” she added gently and without pride, and those presumptuous words, so distant from her confused way of speaking, had come a long way before reaching this moment.
“What do I care how you’d hurt me,” he said irritated.
She immediately halted her small kicks in the dirt.
Dazed, almost recoiling, she was wondering how it was possible for him to love her without knowing her, forgetting that she herself knew no more of the man than the love he was giving her.
Soon she was thinking quickly, seeking a way to show him the best of herself, to tell him about her life — with surprise she found nothing, turning over in vain the false pearls that seemed to have been her only jewels. In the urgency of the moment she remembered those nights in the living room . . . And though she rarely thought of them, and was hardly aware of their meaning — had they appeared to her as the only reality of her life? Eyes open in fright and watchfulness, she was tackling the memory of those nights that seemed to have been lost in her blood; forgetting was in fact her way of keeping something forever. In her affliction Lucrécia Neves was already wondering if she’d need to tell, what did it matter what form her days had taken? he too, everyone too seemed to be building around a forgotten thing . . . A delayed intelligence, having revealed the gesture to her, she thought she could describe it. But the moment of clairvoyance having passed, the lighthouse once again scanning other fields and leaving her in the dark — once again she wouldn’t know the truth except by reliving even the useless moments. Oh, and she wouldn’t even know how to use the necessary words.
Or did he understand. Because the doctor had spoken of São Geraldo in a tone that sometimes seemed stolen from her, and occasionally would say a word he only could have uttered if he knew what she knew . . . But if all that had happened without in fact Lucas’s knowing the world in which she’d lived, and the words he’d uttered, identical to hers, had belonged to his own world . . . — then how many endless sets could form indefinitely with whatever was “there”? though one as much as the other, for different reasons, had severely cut their freedom.
Now resigned, scratching at the dirt once again, it also seemed to her pointless to talk. Because all of a sudden on the hill beside him, calm love seemed to be pointing out all things like the gesture. Ever since she started loving him she’d found simply the sign of fate she’d sought for so long, that irreplaceable substance that you barely suspected in things, the irreplaceableness of death: like the gesture, love was being reduced until reaching the irreplaceable, with love you could point out the world. She was lost.
“Let’s stay friends,” said the man who also didn’t know how to speak and who for that reason needed to be forgiven.
“Friends?” mumbled the woman in soft surprise, “but we were never friends” — she breathed with pleasure — “we’re enemies, my love, forever.”
The doctor was suffering from the woman’s inflexibility. Two previous generations had been lost in dead courtesy; it was painful to let blood open a new path through dry veins; he was suffering as much as he could.
But Lucrécia seemed calm. The doctor looked at her: she was sweet and cruel. Her canines were appearing in an innocent smile of rapture. And the man seemed to see for the first time the face of voluptuousness and patience. How could she be so mean, he thought with repugnance. But she’s crazy, he was astonished shivering before the woman’s joy: so she’d had the courage to lose herself to that extent. One day Lucrécia had said that, looking at the back of someone’s neck, she’d sometimes be enraged.
The man wrinkled his eyebrows at this memory, joining it now to the sight of those sharp and happy teeth . . . from what perverse past had she emerged. To see her in her childish perdition made him inhale with delight, in blind freedom. And that freedom was so rich that its excess was kindness; he enveloped her with his gaze, a wing that might cover her nudity — as it had so often before covered a dead person’s shameless body. She didn’t even notice him. But, anonymous like guardian angels, he was protecting that woman’s joy.
That night Lucrécia didn’t want him to walk her home and stayed on the hill alone.
It was dark but the constellations were blinking wet. Standing, as if on the only spot from which that view could be had, Lucrécia was looking at the darkness of the earth and of the sky. That movement infinitely spherical, harmonious and great: the world was round. Nun or murderess, she was discovering for a moment the nudity of her spirit. Nude, covered in fault as in forgiveness — and that’s where the world was becoming the threshold of a leap. The world was the orb.
She was stroking her ear with her shoulder, cleaning herself. Sometimes she would peer into the dark with slight glances. The body so miserable. So proud. And everything so perishable. The trees planted all around. The wind low. It was intolerable. And precisely she was keeping this all in place. Why she precisely? each person she was seeing was precisely the person she was seeing. So many privileges.
The little woman’s face looked scratched by the claws of a bird — could this be her expression of love. She’d reached a moment in which she didn’t have the slightest freedom of action. Contradictorily in this instant when she’d act without any possible choice is when she’d become responsible. It even seemed to her, with impartiality and fairness, that she’d only sinned when it became impossible not to sin. Which wasn’t making her faint of heart. She was as impassive as if she were the one who had scratched her face forever with the claws of an eagle. Even flapping, before fleeing, the dark wing against her cheek — with that hilarity that things contain before shining . . .
So this was love for people, she recognized. This love too was bright and inexplicable. But good — bread and wine and kindness. Yes, yes, she was quite lost. Though it had always seemed to her that first and foremost you had to get lost. She was well aware that, trying through the living room to look at the things that exist, she’d lacked the courage to be led by the objects: she’d fallen, yes, but had been afraid and clung to whatever she could. If she’d fallen all the way to the end, would she know what end of the fall it was to be under the starry sky? and to see that the world is round, and that the void is the plenit
ude, and that corn growing is spirit.
The whistle of the night ferry came from the sea, just more pained than that of a locomotive. The little woman bent over and stayed like that, laughing like a fool, ancient, with an almost recognizable demeanor. She herself recognizing the earth at last? marking it with her fleeting hoof like the fleeting place of life and death. Which was more than the imagination could aspire to.
The following night Lucas was the one who was waiting for her, and Lucrécia set out slowly, smiling.
Lucas no longer feared her face. And, in this moment in which they looked at each other naked, they saw without fright that in their nakedness he was a king and she a queen. Soon the darkness dotted with lights was enveloping them, the two were walking. Near a willow, for the thousandth time, for the first time, the doctor said: why didn’t we know each other before? though they had known each other before. Passing through the thicket and giving him a kick, for the first time, for the thousandth time, aspiring to a rite, she wanted to die with him. Ah, to die of love, she said, wicked, leaning against the stone eagle. Looking at her, that was how Lucas saw her and remembered her later: humble, guarded by stone eagles.
And now they were calm looking at the hills.
Everything that would be impossible had taken the final form of mountains in the distance, and a delicateness of curves. While Lucas was staring at the already-erased horizon, Lucrécia started to examine him with such sweetness that she forgot herself. She was seeking in that face, where a singular perfection was transcending the obvious imperfection — seeking a spot through which to breach it. Which was making her feel so bad and so good as if seeking within herself the final resistance. The first light of the lighthouse revealed him nicely every once in a while but would blind the finer details of his face. Only in the dark would she see him.
Each feature would present separately a judgmental impersonality. In none of them did Lucrécia Neves find the love that she was giving him. Eventually she no longer would know what she was seeking, she was moving ahead held back only by the vertigo of a face.
It was between his mouth and nose — not in that space but in a possibility of selfish and blameless movement that could be sensed there, in that part that didn’t even have a name — that she discovered where she loved him and where Lucas could be wounded. She imagined how much blood would spurt from that spot if through it the man were struck. And she saw, with a shock of pain and rapture, that a creature was only murderable in its beauty. She herself wounded by the chisel.
Impossible love piercing her with joy, she who belonged to a man as she had belonged to things — wounded in the trunk of her species, standing, jubilant, rigid . . . Feeling on the surface of her skin thick horse veins. And Lucas, turning around to look at her: seeing her standing, isolated, in her equestrian grace. They finally touched.
In the morning Lucrécia Correia shut the house and crossed the gangplank over the mud. Birds in fast flight were making the water throw sparks. The sweetish smell of the dirty ferryboat at sea. And so many sunlit people, sitting with packages. The wind was batting their hair, the land far from view. Then an old man spat on the floor and there was the light gleaming on the floor: everyone was looking, empty with brightness. Lucrécia couldn’t open her eyes without the day’s striking them as blind lakes. Sitting in the bow with her parcels on her lap.
11 The First Deserters
Perseu had taken shelter from the rain in the waiting room of the station, placing his suitcase on the bench. The day before he’d cut his hair. On his more naked face his ears seemed separate from his head; his slightly bony cheeks were making him look stubbornly weak and, despite this, tranquil.
His appearance had changed considerably since the days when he went out with Lucrécia. He was much thinner, less handsome. Now he had a way of being sweet that no longer resided in sweetness; with the raincoat loose on his body he looked like a foreigner who was entering a city.
It was raining a lot. The rain on the still-deserted tracks had a clandestine meaning to which he seemed to belong.
Since he had time, he turned on the radio that was soon popping picking up the distant storm — the thread of music however could be detected through the crackling of electricity. Perseu was listening while standing, without dreams and without anything you might call understanding. The musical phrase, very noble, was as visible to him as the radio. He was grasping the effort of the music with the same agreeable effort, and taking pleasure in this vague rivalry. When people would ask him if he liked music, he’d say smiling charmingly that he liked it well enough, but didn’t understand it, hearing a knock at the door amounted to almost the same thing as hearing music.
The radio was crackling. Perseu was listening with peaceful strength, stroking the paperweight on the small table. If he’d lived in his own time he’d be tempted to think that the music was making him suffer. But this insignificant young man hadn’t had real influences or left any mark. Maybe he really was out of step with his time, and so much freedom was making him fall short of what he could have done if he’d been held back. But he always seemed to get by in silence. If he didn’t understand the obscure notes, he was following them with a small enigmatic part of himself that was enjoying itself inside the clarity of the mystery. When the music ceased, he turned off the radio. The raindrops were falling from the gutters and the jug that the station manager had left outside was filling with water.
Perseu was resting standing up. He was tired and tranquil. Near his mouth two slight descending lines were foreshadowing a man’s wrinkles. Since he wasn’t particularly of his time, which would have made him suffer, nor had a culture from which to pick out feelings — he was standing, caressing the glass paperweight, with the two wrinkles taking shape: intact, pensive, a bit fatigued. Without being a father, he was already no longer a son. He found himself at a luminous and neutral point. And he wouldn’t transmit this reality to anyone. Especially not to any woman. As he’d never give his harmony or the shape of his body. He could pacify a woman. But his strange peace, he wouldn’t communicate.
The station bell was announcing the departure. Perseu entered the compartment, placed his suitcase under the seat. When the train left, he swayed happily looking side to side.
Soon they were leaving the metropolitan area and entering the countryside. It kept raining, the soaked land looking sad with such dark trees. Within the sleeping noise of the wheels and of the rainy wind, the car was proceeding calmly at this end of the afternoon. Perseu had drunk two glasses of port so as not to catch cold since he was still meticulous about his health and exercise. With the alcohol in his heart he was feeling a bit too good, almost anxious. He was applying his uneasiness to concrete things: looking at every object of the coach lending them somber contentment.
In the compartment each person had a face, extremely visible in the transmuted afternoon light. A face was like a name, he thought with pleasure and disquiet. His thought was just the rhythm of the wheels. Perseu had no more than the shape for an extraordinary thought, and not the thought, and that was exciting him — face is one thing, body something else, wine in the body something else. Though he felt fully complete with his raincoat in a train.
He began by looking at a common girl, with large features. “She looks like a flower,” he thought agitated. She had round eyes. Empty because she was alone. You couldn’t say if they were happy, thoughtful or alert — merely physical eyes, and someone might doubt they could see. Yet her eyelids were blinking with sparse lashes and eating the air with delicacy. Suddenly Perseu started to like them with stubbornness and pleasure. They were perched above a large nose that was breathing with effort: the girl had a cold, and was slightly opening her thick lips. The whole face was exterior, a flower to be taken. Desire even came to him. The type of heavy head you might grasp with both hands and look at with useless sincerity — before you knew it thinking about some other thing, except with that tedious o
bject in your hands, because it would be impossible to concentrate on that corolla face. He began to imagine how hard it would be to get to know her because she’d lie — as soon as she was touched, she’d close up completely in lies and dreams, she’d get “interesting,” say she had so many suitors, her family so well-off, she thank God in good health, and even how she was a virgin — Perseu had a murmur of satisfaction seeing how far his experience had reached and imagining himself pretending to believe her, kissing her while she lied — which would be very indecent and very tender.
Meanwhile she showed that she’d foreseen the young man: she seemed to think faster and, almost without transforming her immaculate face, had become interesting: Perseu averted his gaze.
It seemed to him immodest to attract attention. That however was what always happened to him. His calm insignificance would make people lift their eyes and stare at him inquisitively, which was strangely mixed with a bit of insolence. Which would bother him. But most of the time he was noticed only unconsciously, the way you look at the day. In fact the silent couple looked at him quickly, in no time, as if he were the only passenger. The flushed woman had a sensitive chin and small eyes. The man was weak, disoriented: his face shaved and greenish, green eyes, ashen and well-made hands.
“The cattle.”
The train was running warm in the rain.
“Alfredo, the cattle,” said the woman in a hoarse voice.
Perseu stared at a dusty corner of the floor and then at the suitcase belonging to a woman in black — with his mouth full of saliva, the thickest vein in his heart having burst, he had the first painful feeling of passion and mercy.
“People,” he thought feeling ashamed. In the fields the wet cows were hot, sluggish. “Folks,” he said. A sensibility within him was becoming a man. And that would be his most interior life.
The Besieged City Page 17
