Perseu put her suitcase in a taxi, she got in. Seated, already comfortable, she hesitated a bit, and ended up offering him a ride; he refused ceremoniously, she lightly sighed with relief. When the young man shut the door, however, the woman felt some remorse seeing him standing in the light of the streetlamp, in the rain: tall with his raincoat, pleasant. Very pleasant, she thought. So easy to find with him some common ground, with that short hair . . . Some remorse and a franker camaraderie — and also surprise: because under the streetlamp, friendly, skinny, was the same perfect being she’d spared, the marvel. A certain duty too, habit more than anything else: it wasn’t hard to understand him somewhat, give him a bit, not too much. She brought her head closer to the window, smiled with command, with a somewhat professional appearance that was momentarily removing the age from her face:
“You’re a student . . . “
“No, a doctor,” he said lowering himself to the height of the window and looking at her with distrust.
“That’s what I thought . . .” — He too smiled, his attention awakened. She suddenly seemed like a friend, and this was removing her danger as a woman. He smiled more and without noticing was grasping the handle of the door delaying the car’s departure. The enemy from the bar had disappeared.
“You’re working, Perseu.”
“I am, I’m starting out at the hospital here.”
“Ah, so you work at a hospital.” — The two looked at each other. She in a social situation, he on the lookout. — “Look, Perseu, I’m sure you’ll be a good doctor.” — He faced her suspicious. — “The kind you call even when you’re healthy, just to be sure you’re really alive,” she smiled wittily.
Yes, he hoped so, he answered bending over more, smiling.
Maybe she . . . ; but no. Yes, maybe? . . . anyway what could she do? Foolishness. But she was no longer a stranger. And that same look you could find in the friend you awaited without impatience . . . The lady in black was giving the address to the driver, and saying from the back of the car, where Perseu could no longer see her intelligent and disturbing face, and once again with the same voice from the bar:
“Thanks for everything.”
The car drove off. He remained standing on the sidewalk.
Since the rain was getting worse he adjusted his cloak and finally crossed the deserted flagstones. He’d be a good doctor, she’d said it with such assurance. “It’s because there are things you can see right away,” he thought, happy.
Could it have been the woman’s words that were giving him a slightly stifling hope? and also disgust. He was well aware that certain things, even good things, should never be touched, not even with thought. He never spoke of the already slightly anxious certainty that he’d become a good doctor. Giving him the hope of being a good doctor, the woman hadn’t allowed him anything more . . . Yet if he himself should talk, he’d say that this was his desire. But he simply didn’t talk, that’s the difference. A little bitterness. Tired; the perfect being for an instant struck.
I’m of the opinion that people talk too much, he thought stubbornly.
But his strength was greater than that of a word spoken by a disturbed woman. Soon, walking in the wet streets, he was recovering the vague right born in the train and that even if nebulous was enough; he’d reacquire the peace of a man from before the accidents, not sharing his hope, and above all not talking; people talk too much. He turned up his collar seeking the house numbers in the weak light.
Neither Lucrécia Neves’s innocence, nor the damnation of the woman in black, neither of these avid female beings who’d fade in the presence of reality could touch him because he was reality: a silent young man tucked into a raincoat. That’s how they’d see him from a window, the curious hand drawing back the curtain; and he was no more than that. Avoiding the puddles. Moreover he was free: he wasn’t asking for proof.
He walked looking at the buildings in the rain, impersonal and omniscient again, blind in the blind city; but an animal knows its forest; and even if it gets lost — getting lost is a path too.
12 End of the Construction: The Viaduct
In the last days of his life Mateus Correia had seemed abashed in the face of the gravity of what was happening to him and even irritated as if he didn’t deserve so much. The closer a certain hour approached, the more he smiled with modesty at his wife, in a sorrow that until then certainly hadn’t had the chance to show itself. Though the minute before dying could have, because of its urgency, lasted long enough to give him time to have been absolutely happy, like a crystal.
His face seemed proud. What would such an inexperienced soul do without the solution that the body had been. Lucrécia was crying shocked.
And now alone, she’d sit at night listening to the silence of Market Street.
Some thing kept working noiselessly, she in the prow of the ship — down below the machines functioning almost without a sound. For a moment she’d see Mateus again. And in a slap to the face, maybe he hadn’t even had wide hips! he’d just been pale, with a mustache.
Dying of a heart attack had come to explain that thick calm and choosing so many dishes: okay then, I’m going to see a little star. Mateus had gone to see a little star — which made her start crying again.
Why hadn’t she seen him in the loveliest way to be seen? He’d been good like every man who’d end up dying, and she’d loved him. She just hadn’t understood in time that ordering the sink pipes to be cleaned or lunching with the whole weight of his body — was his form of joy. What had she wanted from him? the widow was blaming herself: that he apply his joy to flowers, as in the Association? No, when he’d embraced her and she’d been good to him, Mateus would say: if the sink breaks again the one who’ll pay next time is the plumber. Even his death, she’d tried to destroy. She’d tried to console him, the only way of reducing the event to something recognizable: at least you’re not dying in someone else’s house. But this the man hadn’t allowed; without speaking he’d looked at her smiling with embarrassment: you fool, as if dying weren’t always in someone else’s house. Oh, if she could see him again and give him her best gaze, not even that: she’d give him what her husband had hoped for from her, her humble life and not desires. The widow was weeping full of regret.
Forgetting him more and more.
To tell the truth she’d only remember Mateus objectively when she’d see him again in his coughing fits, which were almost silent from so much violence without escape: he’d cough shaking the house in silence. Or when her husband would appear in her dreams. Smiling, good as the root of his life had been: oh, she hadn’t understood that each person was the utmost and there was no need to seek another: that’s how she was trying to think in order for Mateus to hear, and in her dreams he would hear her. As always, without understanding very well.
So she wrote to Ana: “Mother dear, Mateus passed away, only another woman can understand a widow’s despair! Yet I think that” . . .
While writing she was relying more and more on connective words, on various “howevers” and “thens,” buying herself time. Because it was enough to have to express herself, and the stubborn woman would fall mute, and almost have to create some feeling to say. She lifted her head biting the tip of her pencil: the sun was disappearing red and hot, each object was keeping itself within a golden thread. And in the door the key as lit up as the horizon — Lucrécia was pushing her hair away from her fatigued forehead. Atop the vanity the perfumes were trembling in their bottles: “only another woman can understand,” she finished.
Then the house brightened, the windows opened, and everything, washed by tears, was going well, her health now stable.
In the streets, then, people were moving in scattered light and without effort; whatever had been mortal had been reached, and the rest was eternal, without danger. Once again Lucrécia Neves’s life was opening with a certain majesty, doors slamming, that brightness of
air that has no name, the house again full of material security: such were her bright days of widowhood, the trinket playing the flute.
When she’d go out she was shocked by São Geraldo’s leap of progress, terrified in the traffic like a hen who’d fled the yard. The streets no longer smelled of the stable but of a weapon fired — steel and gunpowder.
And how the tires would explode! Countless offices had been opened with typewriters, installations of iron filing cabinets and automatic pens. Copies and copies were typed out in mimeographs and signed. The filing cabinets were bursting, full of the immediate registry of whatever was going on. The men from Municipal Hygiene were superficially sweeping the sidewalks, hiding the debris in the gutters. Which in the afternoon would sparkle in the final rays of sunlight in dust and luster, like treasures.
The widow too had been transformed. These days her face was weak and bore measured expressions. If she’d fought her habit of lowering the corners of her mouth, now she’d let herself go, and this gesture had given her an even more impersonal way of facing things. When she went to the dentist and put in two gold teeth — she finally had her first foreign look.
She also noticed that by opening her eyes wide she’d look younger. So she’d open her eyes in continual astonishment, which accentuated her appearance of an outsider passing through. If she didn’t gain youthfulness, she reached some beauty of form, so that if she could be regarded as an object, she’d be thought pretty. But if seen as someone who could speak . . . — nobody had time to see her in any way at all.
Which didn’t stop her: she’d take tea with astonished eyes above the teacup, ready to be photographed. Suddenly — the snapshot taken — moving on, picking up a cookie with her fingertips: what a perfect afternoon, thought Lucrécia Neves Correia looking out from the new confectionery on Market Street, now Silva Torres Avenue.
Next she’d head to the garden with her reading under her arm: the pamphlet “Spiritual Cancer.” She’d hardly descended the steps of the park, and was whirled by her eyes — how many weeds had been torn out! how many weeds coming up, how much order, young children whose parents she didn’t know — and what a sun, how hard to climb, so easy to find things lost on the ground, in the spoils of the old São Geraldo — she found a patron saint prayer card — so easy to find what others had lost but never, never finding what lost itself: that’s what she thought and opened the pamphlet to the first chapter: “Cursing Is Cancer Too.” She was trying to be dignified with elevated thoughts. And, if she didn’t find any, at least she was nodding her head, outraged by the baseness of our day and age.
That day she saw two boys fighting. The young fighters were striking each other in the face, white with anger and silence. Because it was so intense, the scene had lost its sonority. Only a little bird was singing in the tree above. The widow was blanching with horror. An older man separated them and said if they kept fighting he’d pull them by the ears. Which, even to Lucrécia, sounded strange: in São Geraldo children’s ears were no longer being pulled. The boys stopped, looked at him in silence. One was cross-eyed. The little bird was singing. One of the kids finally spat on the ground in defiance and fled jeering him . . . the other ran, looking back and laughing. They were enemies but were uniting against the great common adversary, in this case, that man from another time who embarrassed was looking at Lucrécia.
She, still a bit undone, smiled at him. He said: excuse me, ma’am, and sat respectfully on her bench. Happy to be together, they made themselves comfortable and chatted about kids nowadays. He pleasantly surprised to find her so sensible despite being young, without knowing that São Geraldo had been the one that left her behind. And she beside him able to look with another assurance at the new monument to the Union of Posts and Telegraphs.
Returning home in a better mood, sitting down to knit on the back terrace; looking at the dark rooftops and the factory towers, dry extremities of the world. They weren’t mature like the living room where small pieces of furniture, pitchers, shadows, trinkets were piling up; merely renewed by another day that might bring a new position to the things. Looking at the towers of the power plants with serene eyes, satisfied. For having been in spite of everything prudent, warding off illnesses, avoiding the greater danger of things, keeping with care whatever was hers — this being the only explanation she’d found to justify her passion for the house and the trinkets: “so then! you’d kept with care whatever was yours!” If seeing the way she’d spared herself made her nervous with a certain shame, the answer would occur to her: yes, but there she was. Finally seated. She interrupted her knitting, inhaled with sweet ardor.
The house too had managed to reach the present moment. Old, low, full of the broad and virginal chorus of that afternoon. The woman was peering with pleasure at a smokestack that the air was surrounding with insistent brightness. If she’d lost the reason for her habits, she still kept them and, if she’d forgotten the true turning toward the living room, she kept her way of looking at the room — which filled her days with surveillances without explanations, with small interrupted beginnings between clearings of her throat and useless rushing. Meeting her “commitment” was no longer creating it. It was inquiring whether in the life lived some thing had been fulfilled.
And indeed, it had been. It was a very difficult thought to see that indeed it had been. Oh, nothing important, just irreplaceable. It had been fulfilled much more mutely: from object to object, a certain daily ascension always independent of thought, time moving ahead. In what moment and in the face of what object had she said, for example: “I am Lucrécia. My soul is immortal” — when?
Well, never. “But let’s suppose I’d said it.” That’s how the woman felt she had to reason. Because from real life, lived day to day, there had remained for her — if she didn’t want to lie — just the possibility of saying, in a conversation between neighbor women, in a mixture of long experience and last-minute discovery: yes, yes, the soul is important too, don’t you think?
Telling her “story” was even harder than living it. If only because “living now” was just a car driving in the heat, some thing advancing day by day like whatever ripens, today it was the ship on the high seas.
She herself feeling the way others would call her by her name, and see her as a widow, and the way the fishmongers would scheme to sell her cheaper fish.
And some haughtiness. From being so patient, she’d finally reached a certain point, a dog barking far off, the hill in the pasture now accessible thanks to the viaduct, the gaze continuing to be her utmost reflection, and the proliferated things: scissors on the table, wings, cars constantly shaking the second floor that one day would be demolished, the shadow of airplanes over the city. At night the Southern Cross above the rooftops and the woman snoring tranquil, nautical.
Up to this moment when she was knitting on the terrace.
The luminous dust encircling her, happy machine that would function in quick silence. From the continuous movement of hands a spirit and an ease being born — and, without surprise, clairvoyance within clairvoyance like darkness within darkness: for this was the afternoon light.
As for her herself — aware, simply aware. For whom all this was insurmountable even by the imagination — that hard truth of sun and wind, and of a man walking, and of things set down. And a person didn’t even know how to limit himself. For she couldn’t even refrain from taking pride in seeing time pass — but is it February already? — as if this development were her own. And it was. And Perseu had made her so fulfilled. And so often she “had said” because — over there was an open window. A person was Olympic.
A person was Olympic and empty. Seated with legs spread, hands crossed over her belly.
Oh, she’d lived from a story much greater than her own. How to limit yourself to your own story if right over there was the tower of the power plant? That truth made from being able to look. She’d never really thought; thinking would be si
mply inventing.
The corn growing in the field had been her greatest thought. And the horse was the beauty of man. That’s how things were. Her peace had been the beauty of a horse. Could that be the story of an empty life?
Suddenly, in the middle of her knitting, just for glory, the woman standing up and beating somber wings over the finished city — somber as animals were somber, morose and free; somber without pain being suffering; whatever there’d been of the impersonal in her life was making her fly.
The afternoon had darkened and the widow took advantage of the dusk to curl up; in the silence they’d opened abundant water, so she leaned over in order to spot the bucket that the water was filling with a sound ever more level and singing, her heart curious like an old woman’s. Sensitive, sensitive. Everything she’d had that was most precious was outside her: the water in the bucket? they’d poured it all on the dry lot of the store. From the soaked land was rising the suffocating smell of dust — the widow Correia faked a cough, just in order to express herself too.
She’d reached without any doubt a certain point of glory.
São Geraldo too had reached a certain point, ready to change its name, according to the newspapers. This was all that could be said anyway, this was all you could see, and she was seeing.
Her face had taken on an almost physical dignity, finally possible to be transmitted to a child — except this child would go through life trying to justify his inheritance, carrying blindly forward the obscure race of builders. Who possessed courage as a tradition.
The Besieged City Page 19
