She had said it. She closed her eyes for a second with fatigue
and relief. When she opened them she saw that Ermelinda had
stopped with the shears in the air, and her face-her face once
more had taken on an extremely sharp and tender tone, as if a
face would have to be invented in order for it to attain that
expression some day. "And I," Vit6ria thought, "I know everything, and everything I know has grown old in my hand and turned into an object." She muffled her voice as best she could.
"What's the matter? What did I say that was so extraordinary to make you stop like that?"
Ermelinda trembled.
"You didn't say anything strange. You said there's a man in
the woodshed ! " she obeyed quickly.
"Well, then, if you're going to prune the rosebush, which is a
useless job with the drought coming on, keep on pruning! " she
exclaimed without holding back. "And don't look so radiant ! "
And not being able to stop herself anymore she went on.
"Radiant, yes ! " she said with pain. "You're thinking again that
today is a great day! Just a clap of the hands and you get happy;
and it all scares me! He's a man who came to work. If he doesn't
How a Man Is Made
do a good job he leaves, and if he thinks that just because he's an
engineer he's going to run things he's very much mistaken! And
that's all there is to it, nothing beyond that!"
Ermelinda pretended to be so surprised that she looked at
the other one with her mouth half-open-or was she really
surprised; one could never tell. "I was very abrupt," Vit6ria
thought. Ermelinda gave her a fleeting side-glance and went
back to her vague work next to the rosebush-and it was if she
wished to be so discreet that she would not let the other one see
that she understood. Vit6ria caught it and blushed. A few
moments passed. They remained silent, feeling the soft swirl of
the breeze around them. Darkness was coming on little by little.
For an instant the scent of roses gave the two women a moment
of softness and meditation.
"The flowers," Ermelinda said as the half-light made her
slightly anxious. "The flowers," she said.
"Do the flowers frighten the garden?" Vit6ria asked attentively.
"Isn't that just what it is, though," exclaimed Ermelinda,
surprised and pleased. "You always say everything so well! " she
said flatteringly.
Vit6ria was calm. She looked at her deeply, once more
immune from everything that the girl was.
"I never would have said that myself. But now that we're
living together I've had to learn your language."
"Why does he say that he's an engineer?" the other one
asked very carefully.
"Ah, I knew it. I saw that question coming."
"But what did I say wrong now?" and an innocence that was
almost real gave a childlike quality to the imploring face; but
they both knew that it was all a lie.
"Ermelinda," Vit6ria said, closing her eyes fiercely, "for
three years now you've been saying : 'I'm afraid of birds.' For
three years you've been saying: 'How strange it is the way that
tree sways.' For three years I've even been listen�ng to Y?ur
silences. And I can't stand any more of your bed-ndden child-
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T H E A P P L E
I N T H E D A R K
hood. That doesn't give you any rights over me. Wait a minute-let me finish. I'm quite aware that from your bed you had lots of time to see the birds and develop a fear of them! We're
living together, fine, you had to live somewhere; I also know that
you took care of my father once, but I know too that it was only
for the three days that I needed you! I know everything. But let
me tell you quite plainly that-that I wanted peace. I wanted-
1 wanted peace. If not, why do you think I didn't sell this place
when Aunty died? Answer me! Why didn't I sell it and why did
I come here without knowing anything about the place? And if I
had sold it I could have had money in my pockets and could
have kept on living in the city. That's how it would have been,"
she added in surprise. "And I would have stayed right where I
had always been living . . ." Vit6ria had recovered with a
sudden violence, "What I forgot to ask was whether you wanted
peace too when you came here. This place, Ermelinda, is just
right for a quiet person like me. No, don't say anything. It's all
right. You've been annoying me for three years now; I have to
tell you that. And today I'm telling you something else : I've had
enough. You've changed my life with all your-with your waiting. I can't stand it. It's been a long time since it could be called peaceful around here. It's just as if I had rats breeding in my
house; they run around and I can't see them-but I can feel
them, you hear? I can feel their feet-their feet, Ermelindamaking the whole house shake."
"What do you want peace for?" Ermelinda changed the tack
maliciously, trying to soothe her with a mask of grace.
"I want quiet, I want order, I want stability," and while she
was speaking it seemed more and more absurd to her to have
taken on a complete stranger as a hired hand. "And for the love
of God don't tell me that today you have a presentiment just
because the man was hired on a Thursday. You have presentiments every day. It used to be your parrot and his rasping squawks that seemed to be scratching my throat-but luckily he
died. Your parrot, your presentiments, your gentility, your fear
of death ! That's it right there! Your fear of death."
( 7 4 )
How a Man Is Made
The other one twitched her nervous face :
"Do you think another drought is coming?" she cut in
quickly, pale.
Vit6ria stopped short, thrown off balance by the interruption. "Drought?"
The poor woman looked at the softness with which night
was coming on, damp and full-in that way that the world loves
us at certain times. It was March and a dizzying paleness was
stretching out the distances. Upset, she smelled the rotten odors
coming up from the ditches. In the growing darkness the ditc}les
looked like precipices and they resolutely drew her look away
into an empty and unwillingly soft meditation. The land
stretched out limitless, restful . . . And she noticed with a
slight start that in the woodshed the lantern was being lit.
First the light rose up; then it almost went out. With an
intensity in which there was anxiety and aspiration the woman
joined in the struggle with the lantern as if it was some obscure
struggle of her own. Finally, just at the point of going out, the
light survived. Tremulous at first, dim. The darkness all around
had become total.
"Drought?" the woman repeated, looking at the woodshed as
if she was not seeing it. "Maybe not," she said, absorbed. "What
has to be is very powerful."
Chapter 6
WHILE all that was happening, Martim felt almost as big as the
woodshed itself as he held the lantern over his head. Damp
wood was piled up next to the cot, and he looked at the bed with
such sensuality that one would have thought he had not slept
for
years.
The clarity into which he had forced himself in order to
answer Vit6ria's questions had already disappeared, and the
agility he had needed to hang the door had vanished from his
hands. Wobbling and stumbling with the abrupt swaying of the
light against the walls, he inhaled deeply the woodshed's smell
of wet leather and shook his head hard in an effort not to go
under. Even though he did not need himself for anything, he
was aware of an internal struggle against submergence. The
menacing feeling that he was losing important connections was
making him force himself to be aware of everything. When the
smoky light of the lantern passed over the cot, he noticed the
useless detail of the strap hanging motionless on a rusty spike
and the frameless cardboard picture.
With a face drugged from sleep the man brought his lantern
submissively over to the picture. Beneath the engraving in huge
and femininely designed letters, as if it were the work of fine
embroidery, was written "St. Crispin and St. Crispinian." The
man's bloodshot eyes regarded the two saints at their shoemaker's trade. He liked the picture very much. The hands of the saints were suspended for a moment over the sandals in the
perfect silence the artist had chanced to create. Above the haloes
of the saints and inside a smoky circle ( a conventional way of
showing the distant future time of an event ) were the same St.
Crispin and St. Crispinian, this time being boiled in a cauldron.
"Jesus," the man grunted, "I wonder what their crime was?"
How a Man Is Made
But underneath the cauldron, outside the smoky future of
the cauldron, the saints were green, blue, and yellow ( colors
which, instead of violence, gave the picture the great spaciousness that can fill a church ) . The saints had the look of peaceful concentration that repairing sandals calls for, as if Man's task
were sandals.
In his dull stupidity, which showed itself in a smile of submission, the man insisted on bringing the lantern close again.
Still wound up by the need for care that his flight had given him,
it seemed to him that there was something that was eluding
him. And so with timid fingers he touched the cardboard faces
of the martyrs like one who furtively approaches something that
possibly might get enraged. Then, listlessly, he put on his
glasses. But the truth is that the thing still eluded him, and his
eyes, strengthened by the glasses, could see only what they had
seen before without understanding. Inside the smoky circle was
the boiling cauldron. Beneath it were the shoes calmly being
repaired. The man had not managed to advance one single step.
The mute scene of the picture gave the shed perspective, however, and the woodshed itself had a shoemaker smell about it.
If that man still remembered what the world was like, in
that picture there was something to which he certainly would
have responded if he still had been a man. That thing the man
had learned and had not completely forgotten still bothered
him; it was difficult to forget. Symbolic things had always
bothered him a great deal. But he was just as sluggish as the
food that was lying heavy in his stomach. When he blew out the
lantern the darkness was filled by the breeze that was coming
through the window. And as if shadows were meeting other
shadows, with some pity, fatigue dropped him into sleep.
At last a pale dawn began to move about. And the breeze
blew the first frail life into that shed that had been warmed by
breathing, leather, and intestines. Without yet knowing what ?e
was doing the man sat on the cot. Then, person of strong habits
that he was, he stood up.
It was a very pretty dawn; the time when there is still no
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T H E A P P L E
I N T H E D A R K
light, and the only light is the air, and one does not know
whether he is breathing or seeing. From far off there came to
him the smell of cows, which always fills a person with delight:
the smell of waking cows came mingled with the great distance
he could see. Martim, with eyes heavy-lidded from the long
night looked out with surprise at the empty plot which the halflight of sleep revealed to him through the window in the back of the woodshed. He had apparently forgotten that he had gone to
sleep in the country. Here, in these surroundings he looked
through the low fog at a dry and dirty land hardened by the
dawn with a childish curiosity. The man had expected nothing
and he saw what he saw, as if he had not been made to draw
conclusions but just to look.
One more second of that real freedom and his head was also
touched by the incomprehensibility of what he saw. And in a
deception which he certainly needed, a deception as certain as
the certain fall of an apple, he had a sense of empathy : it
seemed to him that in the great silence he was being greeted by
a landscape out of the Tertiary Period when the world and its
dawns had nothing to do with a person, and when all that a
person could do was look. Which is what he was doing.
It is true that it was hard for his eyes to understand the thing
that was, was doing nothing but happening. That it was only
happening. That it was just happening. The man was "opening
the curtains."
The plot had probably been an attempt at a garden or a
nursery that had been ultimately abandoned. One could see the
remains of work and of a will. Certainly at some time there had
been an attempt to establish an intelligible order. Afterwards
nature, previously banished by the scheme of that order, had
surreptitiously returned and installed herself there. But on her
own terms.
Because, whatever its period of glory and lushness might
have been, the plot now had the silence of a person wrapped up
in himself. There were some hard, ash-gray stones, a piece of
fallen trunk. The exposed roots of a tree that had been cut down
How a Man Is Made
long ago; for no moisture now oozed out of its oblique cut.
Weeds were growing straight up; some had reached such a
height that now they were waving, sensitive to the compelling
breeze of dawn. Others crept out very close to the ground, and
only death would get them away from it. Thick earth lay
crumbled alongside an ant hill; it was a peaceful disorder.
The man kept on looking until the life which had been put
into the plot began to awaken. Mosquitoes shimmering as if they
were bringing in the first cargo of light. The cautious bird among
the dried leaves. Rats and mice crossing from one stone to
another. But in the brotherhood-producing silence, as in a working spindle, one movement was indistinguishable from another.
That was the restful confusion into which Martim had fallen.
It was only with a stupid effort that the man was able to bear
the intense light of the countryside during the confusing days
that followed ( all ties eluding him, his first orders from Vit6ria
dully received, Ermelinda examined from a distance, and hearing
&nb
sp; the mulatto woman's repressed laughter ) as if he were not yet
ready to understand clarity-
But day by day, having finished the arduous work that he
would not have known enough to do if Vit6ria had not told
him, he would come down from the high and open light of the
countryside. And he came blind with incomprehension. Guided
by the stubbornness of a sleepwalker, as if the uncertain tremble
of a compass needle were calling him, he would finally go to that
Tertiary plot where life was only fundamental-on a par with
his own. And with the sigh of someone regaining consciousness,
he would find the wavering shadow, the movement of the rats,
the thick plants. In that vegetative pit, which the light at best
made hazy, the man would take refuge, silent and brutish, as if
the thing he was could find its place only in the crudest beginnings of the world-in that pit, that crawling plot of land, the harmony made up of so few elements did not transcend him, not
even its silence. The silence of the plants was his own diapason
and he grunted approvingly-he who did not have a word to say
and who never wanted to talk again; he who had gone on strike
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T H E A P P L E
IN
T H E D A R K
against being a person. Sitting there in his plot he was enjoying
his own vast emptiness. That way of not understanding was the
primeval mystery and he was an inextricable part of it.
The Tertiary plot had great perfection about it. Not even
when the light came close did it change the atmosphere of
silence. There clarity, coming after ages and ages of silence,
became reduced to mere visibility, which is all eyes need. Much
more had always been given to that man than he had neededat least that was how it seemed to him now sitting in his territory which satisfied him so much-and if visibility did reach the plot of ground, it revealed dead leaves rotting, sparrows blended
into the earth as if they had been made of dirt, and little black
mice that had made their nests in that rudimentary world.
Since Martim had never known anything about plants or
animals he found there plants and animals of new and rare
species. A rat was a large creature of a rare and hairy species,
with a long tail. A plant had a mouth sticking to the ground. A
bird flying low warned the man that he, too, followed with his
The Apple in the Dark Page 11
