Ancient Tillage

by Raduan Nassar

  8

  where was my head? What kind of hay made up this bed, the softest, most sweet-smelling, restful hay where I laid my head, way at the back of the stables and corrals? Which hay was this that protected me while I rested, numbed by the thick tongue of a doting cow gnawing caressingly at my tingling skin? What sort of hay was this, carrying me off to calm dreams, buoying me up over my burning nettles, lulled by the breeze in this immense blanket of flowering pasture? What kind of light, youthful sleep was this, suckling upon only the most delicious orchard juices? What kind of luscious fruits were these, so softly resistant as my drowsy teeth bit and pulled at them? What were these white, angelic kernels shelling out placid smiles, if horseflies escaped my lips in my greenish dreams? Such a hidden, patient seed! Such a long hibernation! Such a forgotten sun, such an adolescent bullock, such abandoned slumber amidst fenceposts and lowing! Where was my head? That is my only question throughout the sleepless early morning hours when I open my window and feel like setting thick candles in rows and lighting them on the wings of the damp, silent blue breeze that soars like a scarf over the atmosphere at the same time every day; wasn’t my slumber, like old fruit, made up entirely of ripened hours? Which resins were dissolved in that furious air, slyly thrashing the delicate grasses of my nostrils? Which start­ling, hot breath suddenly opened my eyelashes? Which abrupt, restless colt was carrying my body off in galloping levitation? These are the questions I keep asking one after another, without knowing to whom I am speaking, carving up the earth in the early morning light from my window, like a laborer gone mad who, in the coldest hours of dawn, removes the blankets of the womb and, barefoot and on an empty stomach, starts lining up stone blocks on a shelf; the bed was not made of hay, it was a bed well hardened by compost, with a pillow made of manure, where a most improbable plant grows, a certain mushroom, where a certain poisonous flower blooms virulently, breaking through the moss of the elders’ texts; this primeval dust, the nuclear bud, engendered in underground furrows and bursting from soft, imaginative earth. “Such suffering, such suffering, such terrible suffering!” I confessed, gleaning from these words the useless liqueur I was distilling, yet what sweet bitterness it was to speak out, tracing the symmetry of a flower patch on to a bed of silence, the winding stone pathways of a garden lawn, driving eucalyptus stakes around seedbeds, digging the entrance to a brickyard with bare hands, building up a damp dung wall, and in this harmoniously fathomed silence, which smelled of wine, and of manure, to compose time, patiently.

  9

  the faces surrounding the table of our adolescence were so curdled: Father at the head, the wall clock behind him, each and every one of his words weighed by the pendulum, with nothing distracting us more at that time than the deep bells marking the passing hours: “Time is the greatest treasure available to man; although not consumable, time is our most valuable nourishment; even if immeasurable, time is still our largest gift; it has neither beginning nor end; it is an exotic apple that cannot be split in pieces, although it provides for the entire world equally; omnipresent, time is everywhere; time exists, for example, in this old table: first there was the generous earth, then the centennial tree born from the passing of calm years, and finally, the knotty, hard plank, worked day after day by the artisan’s hand; time is in the chairs on which we sit, in all our other furniture, in the walls of our house, in the water we drink, the plentiful earth, the sprouting seed, the fruit we harvest, the bread on our table, in the fertile dough of our bodies, in the light by which we are illuminated, in everything that goes through our minds, in the scattered dust, as in everything else that surrounds us; the man who collects money and measures his own worth by its weight is not rich, nor is the man who spreads himself out dissolutely over vast tracts of land; the only rich man is the man who has learned to live piously and humbly with time, approaching it gently, never contradicting its moods, never getting off course, nor disrupting its current, always aware of its tide, always welcoming it wisely to receive its favors, not its wrath; life is essentially held in balance by this supreme gift, and when seeking, those who find the right pace, know when to wait, and how much time to give things, never risk tripping up in error; that is why no one in our household ever oversteps himself: to overstep is to omit the time needed for our pursuit; and no one in our household ever puts the cart before the horse: to put the cart before the horse would be to withhold the amount of time the task requires; and furthermore, no one in our household would ever start building from the roof down: to start to build from the roof down would be to eliminate the time it would take to lay the foundations and construct the walls of a house; if you exceed the limits of time and rush anxiously and boldly ahead of yourself, you will never get your due, for only the true measure of time reveals the true nature of things; if you gulp down the entire glass, you will never taste the wine; and if you find the right balance, you will be spared ruin and disappointment, it is in the magical wielding of this scale wherein lies the mathematics of the wise, in one dish, a coarse, malleable mass, in the other, enough time to allow each and every one the perfect calculation, watch carefully, intervene quickly at the slightest imbalance; the crude hands of the fishmonger weighing his pungent catch are wise: firm and controlled, through concise calculation, they glean absolute repose from the two hanging dishes, the perfection of immobility; this rare result is achieved only by those who allow no malignant tremor to take over their hands, nor to rise and corrupt the blessed strength of their arms, nor to spread and reach throughout the pure regions of their bodies, nor to cause their heads to swell with pestilence, clouding their eyes with turmoil and darkness; we cannot get into our stirrups while they are still on the anvil, nor can we weave our bridles from flaming fiber, and to where, might we ask, is the rider on the wild colt rushing off? The world of passion is an unbalanced world, and it is against this world that we must stretch the wires of our fences, and on the barbs of these endless wires, tightly weave our netting wherein to entwine our dense, vigorous hedge that it may separate and protect the calm, bright light of our house, that it may cover and hide from our eyes the burning darkness on the other side; and let not one of us trespass this boundary, nor even cast our glance beyond, let none among us ever fall into this frenzied, boiling cauldron, where frivolous chemistry attempts to dissolve and recreate time; to abuse this transforming substance, destined to be used by time alone, will lead to sure punishment, and to challenge time will only result in its implacable blow; woe unto those who play with fire: their hands will fill with ashes; woe unto those who allow themselves to be sucked into the warmth of the flames: they will be cursed with insomnia; woe unto those who rest their backs on these tarnished logs: they will secrete pus daily; woe unto those who fall and let go: they will burn to the raw; woe unto those whose throats burn from so much screaming: they will be heard, for all their sobbing; woe unto those who rush through the process of change: their hands will be bloodstained; woe unto those who are lascivious, who yearn to see and feel everything intensely: their hands will be filled with plaster, or with bone dust, cold and white — who knows, maybe even deathlike — but at the very least, the absolute negation of so much color and intensity: they will end up seeing nothing from wanting to see so much; feeling nothing, from wanting to feel so much, atoning for wanting to live so much; and if you are passionate, you had better be careful, avert your eyes from the rust-red dust that they not be blurred, remove the scarabs from your ears, which cause confusion and turmoil, and purge the cursed, poisonous lime from the fluid in your glands; build a fence around your body, or simply shield it, these are the skills we must use to prevent the darkness on one side from invading and contaminating the light on the other, after all, what strength is there in the gale sweeping across the floor and prowling all over the house like a ghost if we do not expose our eyes to its dust? Through isolation we will escape the danger of passion, yet let no one understand by this that we should merely cross our arms, since the devil’s weeds flourish on i
dle land: no one in our household should cross his arms while there is land to be tilled, no one in our household should cross his arms when there are walls to be raised, and no one in our household should cross his arms when a brother is in trouble; we must be forthright in our dealings with time, for it is as capricious as a child, yet we must be humble and docile in confronting its will, abstaining from action when time calls for contemplation, acting only when it so requires, for time knows kindness, time is vast, time is great, time is generous, time is abundant, always bountiful with its deliverance: time soothes our afflictions, eases the tension of the worried, relieves the pain of the tortured, brings light to those who live in darkness, spirit to the indifferent, comfort to the mourning, joy to the sorrowful, consolation to the forsaken, relaxation to the writhing, serenity to the uneasy, rest to the restless, peace to the stricken, moisture to withered souls; time satisfies moderate appetites, quells thirst and hunger, gives lifeblood to those in need, and moreover, entertains everyone with its playthings; it attends to our every need, but our painful desire will only find blessed relief through obedience to this implacable law: absolute servitude to the incontestable sovereignty of time, bowing down in this remarkable worship; our purification comes through patience, we must bathe ourselves in gentle waters, soaking our bodies in placated minutes, religiously enjoying the intoxication of waiting, while tirelessly partaking of this abundant, universal fruit, absorbing the juice contained in every last grape to the point of exhaustion, for we can only mature through this exercise, building our own immortality with discipline, and, if we are wise, in so doing we will forge a paradise of gentle fantasies where other­wise there would have been a wretched universe, filled with hope and all its pain; wisdom is found in the sweetness of old age and the empty chair at the opposite end of this very table is our example: our roots are found in Grandfather’s memory, in the patriarch who fed on salt and water in order to provide us with the cleansed Word, in the patriarch whose mineral cleanliness of thought was never disturbed by the convulsions of nature; not one of us should ever erase the memory of his handsome, aged features, nor the memory of his gaunt discretion as he pondered away the time in his wanderings about the house; nor the memory of his delicate leather boots, the squeaking of the floorboards in the hallways, and perhaps most important of all, the slow, measured steps that halted only when Grandfather, reaching with two fingers into his vest pocket, would carefully remove and calmly read his watch, placed in his hand as if in prayer; the patience earnestly cultivated by our forebears must be the first law of this household, the austere beam sustaining us in both adversity and hope, and this is why I say there is no room for blasphemy in our home, not on account of a joyful day which has been long in coming, not for a precipitant day of calamity, not because of late rains, nor for terrible droughts that set our crops ablaze; no matter what the setback, there will be no blasphemy; if the litters do not thrive, if the cattle waste away, if the eggs do not hatch, if the fruit shrivels, if the earth delays, if the seeds do not sprout, if the stalks do not swell, if the cluster drops, if the corn does not flower, if the grains decay, if the harvest goes to weed, if the crops wither, if voracious locust clouds darken our fields, if storms wield their wrath on the family labors; and if some day a pestilent gust of wind invades our carefully sealed boundaries, reaching the surroundings of our home, seeping slyly through the slits in our doors and windows, catching a member of our family unawares, no hand in our household will clench into a fist against the stricken brother: each one of us will look more sweetly than ever upon the suffering brother, and each of us will offer the brother in need a kindly hand, each of us will inhale his virulent odor, and the gentleness of each heart will anoint his wounds, and our lips will tenderly kiss his disturbed hair, for love within the family means extreme patience; the father and mother, the parents and children, the brother and sister: the culmination of our principles is found in the union of the family; and every once in a while, each one in the family should take time from more urgent tasks to sit down on a bench with one foot planted squarely on the ground, and bending over, your elbow resting on your knee and head resting on the back of your hand, with gentle eyes, you should observe the movement of the sun, the wind and the rain, and with these same gentle eyes, observe time’s mysterious manipulation of the other tools it wields to effect all transformations, and you must never once question its unfathomable, sinuous designs, just as upon observing the pure geometry of the plains, you would never question the winding trails shaped by the trampling of the herds out to pasture: for the cows always head for the trough, the cows always head for the watering pit; and we should be able to say the same about the ways of the family: we count on strongly built foundations, strongly erected walls and a strongly supported ceiling: patience is the virtue of all virtues, he who despairs is not wise, he who does not submit is foolish.” Then Father, at the head of the table, would pause with his customary curtness and intensity, so that we could measure his majestic, rustic posture in silence: his wooden chest beneath the thick, clean cotton, his solid neck supporting his grave head, and his broad hands holding the edge of the table firmly as if they were holding the edge of a pulpit; then, drawing the light nearer, his face now coated in a slab of copper light, with his solid fingers, he would open the old booklet of texts gathered together and written out in his large, angular, hard handwriting, and he would begin, solemnly and steadily, “Once upon a time, there was a starving man.”

  10

  (fusing together the glass and metals in my cornea, and tossing out a handful of sand to blind the atmosphere, sometimes I embark on slumber already slept, and through this blurry filter, I discern rudimentary dust, a grindstone, a wooden mortar, an aged masher, extended clotheslines, troughs, ulcerous and worm-eaten from the endless strain of drudgery, a dented cup, in the shadows, a clay jug, perpetually chipped at the spout, and a coffee roaster, cylindrical, smoky, darkened and lamentable, still lethargically cranking away in my memory; I keep on drawing from the well: clay pots, a gourd salt cellar on the windowsill, a diligent milk churn on the doorstep, a clothes iron out in the wind, trying to recover its fever, an agate jug, a woodburning stove, an enormous, shallow bowl, a taciturn, iron tea pot brooding all day long over the stove; and, from the same bag, I could also take a goat-hide at the foot of the bed, a simple china dish adorning the parlor, a “Last Supper” hanging on the wall, the white covers on the backs of the cane chairs, a curvaceous hat rack, an old picture frame, a brownish wedding photograph taken with an imaginary background, and I still could draw on many other tiny, powerful fragments that I save in the same trench, as the zealous guardian of the family possessions.)

  11

  “i hadn’t left home yet, Pedro, but Mother’s eyes already reflected her suspicion of my departure,” I said to my brother, when the initial turmoil of his presence in that boardinghouse room had subsided, “when I went to her, I wanted to tell her, ‘Mother, say your good-byes now without knowing me, and it occurred to me that I could also say, all I did was nestle in your straw womb for nine months and be touched sweetly with your hands and mouth for many years, it was no more than that’; I wanted to say, this is the reason I’m leaving home, this is why I’m going away; so many things, Pedro, I could have told her so many things, but at the time, I could already see old artisans’ prudent hands pointing toward stones and strange, charred landscapes that calloused and thickened the soles of my clay feet; of course, I could have said a lot of things to Mother, but I thought it useless to say anything, it makes no sense, I thought, to leave an exasperated carnation stem in those poor, flour-coated hands, it makes no sense, I thought again, to stain her apron by cutting the cord, slashing the bloody noonday sun, it makes no sense, I thought once again, to tear up sheets and petals, to burn hair and other leaves, filling my drastically carved mouth with the exposed ashes of the family, and that’s why, instead of saying, ‘Mother, you don’t know me,’ I thought it better to stay on that limestone trail, e
ven though I was thirsty, my mouth, dry and salty, I thought it was better to remain locked up before her, like someone with nothing, and in fact I had nothing to say to her; she wanted to say something, and I thought, ‘Mother has something to say that I might listen to, something to say, perhaps, that should be carefully stored away,’ but all I could hear, even without her saying anything at all, were the cracks in the old china of her womb, I heard from her eyes the lacerating cries of a mother in labor, I felt her fruit drying with my hot breath, but I couldn’t do anything, perhaps I could have said something, my eyes were dark, but even so it would have been possible for me to say, for example, ‘Mother, you and I began to demolish this house, the time has come to throw everything out of the larder window, with all the plates and flies, scrape the wood, shake the foundations, make the vigorous walls vibrate, and, with our bluster, make the roof tiles and our flurrying feathers tumble, like falling leaves’; it would have been possible for me to say, ‘Let us chip away the bloodstains from our stones with gentle hands, let us add wailing to this rite, the broken lament of the wooden shaker over in the chapel isn’t enough’; it would have been possible, but I’ve already told you, Pedro, my eyes were darker than they’d ever been before, how could I take up the hammer and saw and rebuild the silence of the house and its corridors? But don’t misunderstand me, Pedro, even though my eyes were dark, I, the wayward son, the cause of so much suspicion and fear throughout the family, never dreamt of roads, it never crossed my mind to leave home, it had never occurred to me to travel great distances in search of sensual thrills; understand this, Pedro, from the very beginning of my puberty I knew how much disappointment awaited me beyond the limits of our home,” I told him, almost drowning in this certainty, taking a deep breath of the spirit of the wine, trying to pull myself together, and between insatiable swigs, I staggered over to a tall, cautious armoire and brought down a box, which I immediately set down near my brother, by that time lost in the hothouse atmosphere of my room, which made the brownish shades of his contemplative gaze drop to the floor, and when I startled him in mid-gesture by opening the box, I thought of saying feverishly, “Pedro, Pedro, what I need now is your silence, lift those blinds, expose your eyes, give them free rein, but restrain from exercising the characteristic family strength and caution, and curb the harsh impetus of your tongue, for I shall only revive in your damp silence, only to the accompaniment of that elusive concert, so moisten your lips, mouth and rotting teeth, along with that probe dipping into the pit of your stomach, fill the leather bag held in by your belt, allow the wine to seep out through your pores, for it’s the only way to idolize the obscene,” is what I meant to say with the voluptuousness of a women’s garter collector, but I ended up saying nothing at all, nor did he, as he abruptly checked his vague gesture, and when I saw my brother nearly finish off his full glass in one large gulp, I thought of saying, “Oh, brother, we’re beginning to understand each other, since I can now see your mouth unclogging and, in your eyes, the sweet effect of the wine stimulating the flow of the blue milk spurting from your pupils, the same poisonous milk that at one time irrigated swollen, cancerous nipples,” but there was no point in admonishing him in that rundown room of mine, the two of us were almost sloshed already, stuffed with grapes, our damp eyes, our glassy beads assiduously glued to the box I’d flipped over, and in so doing, had turned over time itself, going back to the surreptitious nights when I would sneak my burning wrath away from the fazenda, when I would exchange my soft bed at home for the hard road leading to the village, disregarding the wandering nocturnal superstitions along that short route, my flames frightening off both the silent roadside cross and the shady stories barely concealed behind the iron bars of the ceme­tery gate I would pass, encouraged and steadily strengthened on my outing by my profane adolescent thoughts, “Go ahead, Pedro, feel the weight of this most vile object,” I said, handing him a tacky piece of thin purple velvet ribbon, a choker necklace; “this remnant, given to me by my first prostitute, is no more than the unfolding, the subtle prolongation of her sulfurous fingernails, the same nails that scratched my back, exalting my yielding skin, sweet paws running over my most intimate parts, ‘It’s a crazy shame to see this quivering boy, with such a pure face and such a clean body,’ she said to me, ‘it’s a crazy shame to see a boy with peach fuzz like yours, with a smooth, bare chest, burning in bed like kindling; take what you want from me, keep this grimy little ribbon with you and come back to your nook, little saint,’ she said caressingly, laughing and whispering luridly, but that is where I used to go, Pedro, that’s where I went when I slipped away from the fazenda on the hottest nights, to bathe in that insolent faith, I would take communion almost in my sleep, hiding myself from the gentlemen customers, and from the confident ease of all the other boys that also went there, I was awkward in the slimy comfort of those houses and would hide my white feet, clean nails, chalk teeth, neat clothing and smooth, childish face in shame; oh, brother, didn’t I lie down on the blazing tanger­ine earth, in that drosophila-infested kingdom, didn’t I surrender like a young boy to that orgy of assassin berries? And wasn’t it perchance a precarious peace, the peace that befell me as my body was stretched out on a mattress of poison weeds? Wasn’t it perchance temporary, that other slumber wherein my fingernails were dirty, my feet, numb, lice cut trails through my hair and my armpits were visited by ants? Wasn’t this second slumber perchance temporary, my head crowned with butterflies, fat larvae escaping my belly button, my cold forehead covered with insects, and my inert mouth kissing scarabs? Such drowsiness, such a stupor, such a nightmare of an adolescence! What rock is this, after all, that weighs so heavily on my body? There is a mysterious chill in this fire; where will I be taken, one day? Such white stone, such anemic dust, such a silent field, such lilies, such tall cypress trees, such long laments, so many ringing wails tolling away at my adolescent body! Very often, Pedro, very often I used to say that there is a funereal silence in everything that goes on, a virtuous alchemy in this unusual mixture, how can this movement be so restful? Often I thought that I should not think at all, that I had already had my fill of this business of thinking, floundering in the saintly witchcraft of the infinite, that’s why I often thought I shouldn’t take the pensive route, that this should not be my chosen vice in the scheme of things, that I should at most, lay my head down on a pillow of foam, lean back on a mat of leaves, close my eyes and let myself flow with the current, my busy hands skimming aimlessly through algae forests, through floating excrement and thick mud; but every once in a while I would allow myself to escape frivolously from this sleep and ask myself, where will I be taken one day? Pedro, my brother, feast your eyes on these buried memories, on these purple mysteries, on the most playful collection from this dark well: these wilted cloth flowers, this crumpled orchid, this pair of pink garters, this bracelet, these baubles, on all of these trinkets that I always paid for with change stolen from Father; come hither into these objects that lulled me to sleep, saved only so that I could spread them out one day, objects kept buried away in this box so that one day I might dig down and spread them all over the dirt and think to myself, looking back, it was a long, long, but a very long adolescence! Pedro, Pedro the blots in my eyes led me to those denigrated houses, by restoring myself there I could rid myself of my venom, this obscure slime, this excessively panted-after, feebly blasted yolk, but I never once, spying persistently through the doors and windows, I never once, peering through the beaded curtains and red glow of the lamps, caught sight of the salt, the Host, the love of our cathedral! Take this with you, Pedro,” I screamed, “take all these scraps home and, tempered with looks of astonishment, tell them how you pieced together the story of the son, the story of the brother; then place an order for a very warm night, or simply a very full moon; spread aromas throughout the yard, create aphrodisiac balms; then assemble our sisters, have them dress up in revealing muslins, and have them wear strappy sandals on their feet; paint their placid cheeks in crimson,
their eyelids in green, and their lashes in dark charcoal; adorn their pale, misty arms, their bare necks and their pious fingers, place a few of these simple beads on those ivory statues; see to it that the most subtle of earrings nibble at their earlobes and that carefully designed supports stimulate their breasts; and don’t forget their gestures, have them develop a languorous carriage, lay open their cleavage, expose portions of their thighs, create fatal fetishes for their ankles; revolutionize the mechanics of the body, have thick, pestilent bodily fluids flow from those newly red, debauched lips; take these gifts with you and when you get there, announce solemnly, ‘From the beloved brother for his sisters,’ and say, this is important, say, ‘Be very careful, very careful in taking these things out of the bag, for, along with the presents, in payment for Father’s sermons, our wayward brother also sends heavy, scornful laughter,’ come on, Pedro, put it in the bag,” I screamed in gratified rage, witnessing the sudden change coming over him, a rust-red spark flashing through his eyes, his hand flailing through the air frighteningly, the same hand that had been so confident, so prepared to succeed our father’s hand, but all at once everything went blank, suddenly I felt his eyes shattering, my brother was discreetly lamenting my dementia, far from realizing that thus perceived I was twice blessed: before I’d journeyed only halfway into lucid darkness, but now I was fully liberated in my insanity; I wanted to tell him: “Temper that hand with a strong voice, restrained tenderness and the right words, run it caressingly through my hair, protect my neck, under these circumstances, this is what Father would do, severely’; it also occurred to me, as I refilled our glasses, that I could aptly encourage him by saying, for example, “Dilate your pupils, set your eyes agog, take my hand in yours, brother, and let’s go.”