repeated, "Today must be Sunday."
Apparently it must have been more an indirect testimony to
himself than to the day of the week, since without stopping for a
second, he ended the radiant and dry glance at what he had just
called "Sunday" with a listless feel through his pockets. For no
reason at all, if not because of his own fatigue, he kept walking
faster and faster. It was really getting harder now to keep up
with himself. And excited in that competition with his own pace
he looked around in innocent fascination, his head burning in
the sun.
Unless he had counted the days gone by there was no reason
to think it was Sunday. Martim stopped then, a little embarrassed by the need to understand from which he still had not freed himself.
But the fact is that the wasteland had a clean and foreign
existence. Every single thing was in its place. Like a man who
shuts the door and leaves, and it is Sunday. Besides everything
else, Sunday is a man's first day. Not even woman had been
created yet. Sunday was the wasteland of a man. And thirst,
freeing him, gave him a power of choice that made him drunk.
"Today is Sunday!" he decided categorically.
Then he sat down on a stone and, very stiff, kept on looking
about. His look did not run into any obstacle, and it wandered
about an intense and peaceful noontime. Nothing was stopping
( 1 8 )
How a Man Is Made
him from transforming his flight into a marvelous trip, and he
was set to take advantage of it. He was looking.
But there is something in the expanse of the countryside that
makes a man alone feel alone. Sitting on a stone, the final and
irreducible fact-the fact that he was there. Then, with a
sudden zeal, he carefully brushed the dust off his jacket. In an
obscure and perfect way, he himself was the first thing put into
that Sunday. It made him as precious as a seed; he picked a
thread off his jacket. On the ground the black outline of his
shadow delimited his favorable delusion to where he was. He
himself was his own first frame.
The truth was that in addition to trying to clean himself up,
as a mere matter of cleanliness, the man did not seem to have
the least intention of doing anything with the fact of existing.
There he was, sitting on the stone. Nor did he attempt to think
the least bit about the sun.
All this, then, was where freedom came from. His body
groaned with pleasure; his woolen suit was itchy in the heat.
Limitless freedom had left him empty; each one of his gestures
echoed like a distant applause : when he scratched himself, that
gesture rolled directly on toward God. The most dispassionately
individual thing can happen when a person finds freedom. In the
beginning you are a stupid man with greater loneliness than you
need. Then a man who gets a slap on the face and can still smile
beatifically, because at the same time the slap has revealed to
him a face he had not suspected. After a while you begin craftily
to build a house and take the first lewd intimacies with freedom;
The only reason you do not fly is because you do not want to,
and when you sit down upon a stone it is because instead of
flying you sat down. And after that?
After that, as now, what the sitting Martim experienced was
a mute orgy, in which there was the virginal desire to debase
everything debasable; and everything was debasable, and that
debasement would be a way of loving. To be content was a way
of loving; sitting down, Martim was very content.
And after that? Well, the only thing that would happen
( l 9 )
T H E A P P L E
I N T H E D A R K
after that is that he would say what would happen after that.
For the time being, the fugitive man kept sitting on the stone,
because if he had wanted to, he might not have been able to sit
down on the stone. All of that gave him the eternity of a
perching bird.
When that was all over, Martim stood up. And without
asking himself what he was doing, he knelt down in front of a
dried-up tree to examine its trunk : it did not seem that he had
to give any deep thought to the problem in order to resolve it; he
had disengaged himself from that too. Then he picked off a
piece of half-hung bark, rolled it between his fingers with an
attention that was a little affected, moving it about as if he were
in front of an audience. His study was done in the peculiar
fashion that comes when what is unknown becomes organized,
and Martim arose as if by command, and continued on his way.
It was farther along that he stopped short in front of the first
bird.
Set off against the great light there was a bird. Since Martim
was free, that was the question : a bird in the light. With the
minute care to which he had become accustomed, he immediately began to work on this fact greedily.
The black bird was perched on a low branch, at eye-level.
And, unable to fly, paralyzed by the bestial look of the man, she
moved about with less and less volition, trying to face up to
what was going to happen and shifting her weight nervously
from one foot to the other. There they were, the two of them,
facing each other-until the man grabbed her with a heavy and
powerful hand, which with the physical kindness of a heavy
hand did not hurt.
In the palm of his hand the bird trembled and dared not
make a peep. The man looked at her with vulgar and indiscreet
curiosity, as if he had imprisoned a handful of living wings. In a
little while the bird's small, dominated body stopped trembling,
and she closed her minute eyes with feminine softness. Now
only a faint, rapid heartbeat against the man's extremely sensitive fingers showed that the bird had not died and that the snugness had at last lulled her to rest.
( 2 0 )
How a Man Is Made
�tartled by the irrevocable perfection of what was happening
to him, the man snorted and looked at the little creature. The
satisfaction made him laugh aloud, his head turned back, his
face looking at the great sun. Then he stopped laughing, as if
that had been a heresy. And deeply concerned with his task and
with his hand half-closed, he let just the hard, sharp head of the
bird show; the man began to walk again with greater strength,
aware of his companion. The only thing he thought about was
the noise his own shoes made echoing softly in his sun-fired
head.
And soon, in cadence with his steps, the physical pleasure of
walking once more started to take hold of him-and also a
pleasure faintly sensed, as if he had taken some aphrodisiac that
made him desire not a woman, but a response to the thrill of the
sun. He had never been so close to the sun, and he was walking
faster and faster holding the bird in front of him as if he were
running to the post office with it before it closed. The vague
mission was getting him drunk. The lightness born of thirst had
suddenly put him into a
n ecstasy.
"That's it, yes ! " he said aloud and without meaning, and it
seemed more and more glorious, as if he were going to fall down
dead.
He looked around at the perfect circle of light that the
heavens were holding in an awe-inspiring horizon; an horizon
which drew closer to the land, softer and softer, softer and
softer, softer and softer . . . The softness upset the man with
the pleasure of a tickle. "That's it, yes!" and he was free, freed
by his own hands-he had suddenly realized that this was what
had happened two weeks before.
Then he repeated with unexpected certainty, "That's it, yes! "
Every time he said those words he was convinced that he �as
referring to something. He even made a gesture of generosity
and largess with the hand that held the bird, and he thought
magnanimously, "They don't know what I'm talkin� about."
Then-as if thinking had been reduced to seeing, and that
the confusion of the light had quivered in him as it does on
water-it occurred to him in a confused refraction that even he
( 2 1 )
T H E A P P L E
IN
T H E D A R K
had forgotten what he was talking about. But he was so obstinately convinced that it was something of the greatest importance, something so vast that it was no longer conceivable even to him, that he haughtily respected his own ignorance and gave
himself savage approval, "That's it, yes."
"Can't you say anything else?"
The man stopped short, surprised. As if she had been put
before him, he saw again the face of that impatient woman, who
once before had asked him that just because he had not answered. From the very first, the phrase had sounded like so many others-as streetcars dragged along and the radio kept right on
playing without interruption and the woman listened to the
radio without interruption and hope, and one day he would
break the radio as streetcars dragged along, and meanwhile the
radio and the woman had nothing to do with that careful rage of
a man who most likely already held within himself the fact that
someday he would have to begin at the exact beginning. He was
now beginning with Sunday.
But this time the simple irritating phrase, ringing in the red
silence of the wasteland, made him stop short, so perplexed that
the bird woke up and wiggled its imprisoned wings inside his
hand. Martim looked at it bewildered, frightened at having a
bird in his hand. The sun's drunkenness was suddenly over.
Sober, he looked with modesty at the thing in his hand.
Then he looked at the Sunday wasteland with its silent stones.
He had been sound asleep as he had been walking, and for the
first time he was now waking up. And as if a new wave from the
sea were breaking against the rocks, clearness took over.
Calmly the man looked at the bird. Without any command
his now innocent and curious fingers let themselves obey the
lively movements of the bird, and passively they opened. The
bird flew off in a flash of gold, as if the man had flung it. And it
perched anxiously upon the highest stone. From there it looked
down at the man and peeped incessantly.
Paralyzed for a moment, Martim looked up at it and then
down at his own empty hands, which looked back in astonishment. Recovering, however, he ran furiously toward the bird and ( 2 2 )
How a Man Is Made
�ollow.ed it for so.me. time, his heart beating with anger, his
impatient shoes tnpp1ng over stones, his hand grasping out in a
fall that made a small stone bounce along with several dry jumps
until it was quiet . . .
The silence that followed was so hollow that the man still
tried to hear the last thud of the stone so he could calculate the
depth of the silence into which he had knocked it.
Until a great wave of light unwound the waiting tension, and
Martim could look down at his hand. It was burned, and there
was a trickle of blood. He had forgotten about the chase and was
very much involved with himself now; his dry lips sucked on the
scratch with the loving voracity of a lonely person. At the same
time thirst had awakened him and the blood in his mouth had
given him a warlike attitude that quickly went away.
When the man finally lifted up his eyes the frightened bird
was waiting for him, as if it had been resisting only because it
had wanted to give up. Martim held out his injured hand and
took it up with forceless firmness. This time the bird wiggled
less, and recognizing its old shelter, snuggled up to sleep. Carrying its light weight, the man continued on his way among the stones.
"I can't say anything else," he said to the bird, trying out of a
certain sense of shame not to look at it.
Only afterwards did he seem to understand what he had said,
and then he looked the sun in the eye. "I have lost the speech of
other people," he then repeated slowly, as if the words were
more obscure than they were, and in some way more praiseworthy. He was serenely proud; his eyes clear and satisfied.
Then the man sat down upon a stone, straight, solemn, and
empty-keeping the bird firmly secure within his hand. Some
thing was happening to him, and it was something that had
meaning.
Even so he had no words for what was happening.
A man was sitting down. And he had no words for anything.
Therefore he was sitting down. That is how it was. The best part
is that it was indisputable. And irreversible.
The truth is that what had been happening to him had a
( 2 3 )
T H E A P P L E
IN
T H E D A R K
weight that had to be borne. It was easy for him to recognize the
familiar weight. It was like his own weight, even though it might
be something quite the opposite something he could not seem
to balance on a scale. He was vaguely aware of that. Sometimes
in his old apartment, he would get that uncomfortable feeling
that was a mixture of pleasure and anxiety; it had always ended
up in some decision that had nothing to do with his troublesome
feeling. True, he had never felt it with that final, clean feel that
the wasteland gave-the wasteland where he was aided by the
very shadow which unmistakably delimited him upon the
ground.
That thing that he was feeling must have been, in the last
analysis, himself and nothing else-the pleasure that the tongue
has of being in its own mouth, and the lack of a name, like the
name of pleasure the tongue has in its mouth. That is all it was,
after all.
But a person was always a little aware of what was, and being
aware was to be. That is how, then, that on his first Sunday, he
was.
In the meantime he had become fairly intense. He moved
about uncomfortably upon his stone with a physical answer to
the immateriality of his own tension, the way a person does who
is disturbed. And if he did that it was because, even if he had not
known himself, he knew enough about himself for a reply. That
was not enough, however. He looked about, like a person lo
oking for a woman's counterpoint, but there was no synonym, unless it was a man sitting down with a bird in his hand.
Then he waited, patient and upright, for the thing to pass
away without its even touching him.
The fact was that the man had always had a tendency to fall
into profundity, which some day still would lead him to an
abyss : that is why he wisely took the precaution to abstain. His
contention, superficial and easily separated from the depth, gave
him the pleasure of a contention. His had always been a difficult
balance, one of not falling into the voraciousness with which
every new wave awaited him. A whole past lay just a step away
( 2 4 )
How a Man Is Made
fr.om the c�ution with w?ich that man was merely trying to keep
himself ahve, and nothing more-the way an animal will light
up only in its eyes, keeping behind it that vast, untouched
animal soul. Then, without touching it, he set himself to wait
impassively until the things should go away.
Before it went away he involuntarily recognized it. That
thing-that thing was a man thinking . . . Then, with infinite
displeasure, physically confused, he remembered in his body
what a man thinking was like. A man thinking was that thing
which, when it saw something yellow, would say with dazzling
elan, "Something not blue." Not that Martim had really arrived
at thought-he had recognized it in the way one recognizes the
possible movement in the shape of motionless legs. And he had
recognized more than that: that thing had really been with him
all through his flight. It had only been through neglect that just
now he had almost let it spread itself out.
Then, startled, as if in alarm, he had recognized the insidious
return of a vice; he had such a repugnance for the fact that he
had almost been thinking that he clenched his teeth in a painful
mask of hunger and abandonment-he turned around restlessly
toward all sides of the wasteland, looking among the stones for a
means by which he could regain his former powerful stupidity,
which for him had come to be a source of pride and command.
But the man was disturbed. Why should he not be then a
person able to take two free steps and not fall into the same fatal
error? Because the old system of useless thinking and of even
delighting in thinking had tried to return? Sitting on the stone
The Apple in the Dark Page 4
