second they had looked at each other in the eyes.
When was it that Martim had first heard the professor
mentioned? It must have been during his first days on the farm,
when his dull eyes could barely tell Vit6ria from Ermelinda. "As
good as the professor" -had he heard that phrase? And if he had
heard it, which one of the women had said it? Martim suddenly
remembered another phrase : "It's the last Sunday of the month,
but the professor can't come, he's ill."
Who had said it? Martim cursed himself for not having paid
attention to everything now that he needed every detail so that
he could understand. He had had only the impression of links
escaping him-but which ones? Could the professor be the same
person as the German? And in that case the son-would the son
be the one he had thought was the German's servant? No,
because Vit6ria had referred to him as the "German," but she
called tomorrow's visitor the "professor" . . .
And suddenly Martim managed to find no danger in the
visit. The professor, as far as he could make out, was accustomed
to visiting them on the last Sunday of the month, except that
( 2 I 3 )
THE APP L E
IN
THE
D A R K
through coincidence he had not been able to make it until now.
And the following day was precisely the last Sunday of the
month! There was no reason to suspect, then. It was just a
visit . . .
The only thing to suspect was the unexpected break in
Vit6ria's way of life; she had stopped giving orders, and the only
time she had spoken to him she had withdrawn like a timid
woman.
At the same time Martim could not be sure whether the
change in Vi6tria was real or whether she seemed different only
because she was wearing feminine clothes and had let her hair
down, as if it were the first time she had had those graying hairs.
Yes, it must have been just a superficial transformation in
appearance. But then it wisely occurred to Martim; "And why
has Vit6ria suddenly changed her way of dressing? what's the
reason?" Since he could find no logical explanation he became
susp1c1ous again.
On that Saturday, with no work being done on the farm
"Why had Vit6ria wanted to stop it? Oh, maybe just because in
her dry way she wanted to celebrate the sale of the produce?" -
with no work being done the farm became even vaster. As if it
were already a Sunday, a soft wind was running along without
hindrance across the fields. Martim walked around, turned loose,
the sequence of the days suddenly cut off. It was raining close to
Vila, and the news that the drought was going to end had left
them all calm and idle. On the silent Saturday the afternoon
came on rapidly and tamely. Martim did not even see Ermelinda. And that worried him too. They had given him a sudden freedom. He felt a lack of the encirclement by women which
had previously hemmed him in. The mulatto woman no longer
seemed to leave the kitchen. No one was looking for him.
Martim wandered through the countryside not knowing from
which direction the danger would come.
It was then, with his heart pounding, that he saw the child
playing near the cowshed. The drums had suddenly stopped.
His first avid impulse was to run over and grab her before she
( 2 1 4)
The Apple in the Dark
too could slip away. But he reined himself in so as not to startle
her. He could barely contain the suspicion that she too would
refuse him. With a casual walk, his heart pounding with thirst,
he approached. And next to her, out of fear and softness of
feeling, he did not look at her.
But the girl, the girl lifted up her eyes from the bricks she
was playing with. She looked at him-and smiled. The man's
heart contracted with an affliction of joy : she was not afraid of
him !
"Perhaps she never had been !" he then thought. For an
instant a suspicion crossed his mind. Had he been imagining all
that time the danger in Vit6ria's meeting with the German and
had he invented that emptiness on the farm-just as it was now
clearly proved that he had only been imagining that this child
was afraid of him? Because the girl was smiling at him, and now
she was pointing her small finger at the unstable structure she
had managed with the bricks . . .
In the meantime there was another possibility: that the child
really had been afraid of him and only had stopped because she
had become used to his presence around there. If that last
hypothesis were true, and if he had not just imagined the fear or
the rebuff of the girl, then the danger of the German too could
still be a reality! Fearing that he would get the proof that he had
been right, he looked at the girl without daring to speak to
her.
The girl was peacefully piling up bricks. And standing there,
he soon began to be moved by the charming indifference with
which she had admitted him, pleased that she was treating him
as an equal in that same obvious way that children have when
playing with one another.
"In this funny house," the girl said suddenly, pointing at the
bricks-"a funny man lives. His name is Funny because he's
funny."
"Oh, please forgive me," the man said muttering to himself,
timid, happy. A child is the arrow we shoot off, a child is our
investment-he needed her so, that he took care not to look at
( 2 l 5 )
T H E A P P L E
IN
T H E D A R K
her. He remained still, his heart pounding because it had received human kindness. He was big and clumsy, and feeling himself abandoned did not help his awkward situation. He
remained still, afraid he would make a mistake. He wanted so
much to be right, and he did not want to spoil the first thing
that was being given to him. "Oh God, I've already ruined so
much; I've already understood so little, I've already refused
so much. I spoke when I should have kept quiet; I've ruined so
much already." He, for the first time, was experiencing the worst
kind of loneliness, the one in which there is no vanity; and then
he wanted the girl. But he had ruined everything that had been
given to him ! To him, who once had again been given the first
Sunday of a man. And out of all that, what remained after a
while was a crime.
Martim did not know what word to say to the child without
its breaking in his heavy hand. The child was silent. Who knows
but that it too was silence she expected of him. But what sort of
silence did she want to share with him? Ready to stop being
entirely what he himself wanted, he just wanted to be what the
girl wanted him to be. A child was the common denominator of
a man; he wanted to join in with her.
But the silence of the busy girl was different from the silence
he had shared with the cows, and it was different from the high
cold of a hilltop. He remained silent. As his first donation he
then stopped t
hinking, and thus he came close to the natural
heart of a little girl. In a little while the silence between the two
of them became a silence that would fit into a matchbox, where
children keep buttons and little wheels. Both of them therefore
remained in a secret calm. Except that he was afraid because he
had already ruined so much.
Then she said; "One day I went to Vila and I went into a
drugstore," and she knew just how to speak without breaking
that silence in which they both understood each other and
which he, since his heart was soft now, loved. "When I went
into the drugstore I ran and I didn't even fall down. Then I
( 2 l 6 )
The Apple in the Dark
weighed myself on the scale in the drugstore with Mommy."
She adjusted the bricks and she added in an educated way,
"You know what? I don't weigh anything. Even Mommy said
so. She said I didn't weigh anything. Then I ran and I didn't
even fall down, and I almost crossed the street all by myself but
I'm too smart because of the cars. Mommy doesn't like for me
to sleep in her bed and she stays there looking at magazines,
looking at magazines, looking at magazines. Then in the night
time she'd go out with her high heels on, but I didn't cry : I slept
and I slept and I slept. The next morning when I woke up I
stubbed my toe here on the edge of the bed. Do you think it
hurt?" she asked and stared expectantly at him with her calm
and yellow eyes.
When the man finally managed to speak, he said with effort,
"I don't know, child, I don't know."
"Well it didn't," she told him with impersonal sweetness.
She was almost black and she had little teeth. She started
putting one brick on top of another again and another one on
top of that-for the tall man who was standing there. They
looked at each other. The man's heart gave way with difficulty;
he could not swallow his saliva, an extremely painful sweetness
weakened him. "Oh God, then it's not with thought a person
loves ! It's not with thought that we build other people! And a
little girl escapes my strength, and what do you do with a bird
that sings?"
The girl looked at him attentively.
"Will you give me something? Will you give me something?" she said, attent and expectant; and her little face was that of a prostitute.
Then the man tried not to look at the girl. He stared
stoically at a tree.
"Will you, huh? Anything!" she said very intimately.
"I will," he said hoarsely.
Suddenly satisfied, pacified, her face again became childlike
and extremely shiny. "Did you know that Jose's grandmother
died one day?" she said in thanks.
THE APP L E IN
THE
D A R K
"No, I didn't."
"I swear by the Holy Virgin," she said without insisting. "I
was even there when she died."
She arranged the bricks better, socially, carefully, maternally.
But a slight restlessness passed across her face. She lifted up her
blinking eyes at him, and once more a false flattery appeared on
her features, which were mature, sweet, corrupt.
"You will give me something? A present? It doesn't have to
be today," she conceded greedily. "Maybe tomorrow? Yes, tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow?" he said, lost. "Tomorrow?" he said with horror.
"Yes, tomorrow! " she repeated authoritatively, laughing.
"Tomorrow, silly, it's what comes after I fall asleep! "
The man drew back horrified. He could not leave right away.
But when he did manage to get out of the greedy claws of the
child, he almost ran-and as he looked behind in disbelief, he
saw to his still greater horror that the little girl was laughing,
laughing, laughing. As if he had been horrified with himself, he
almost ran. The water-the water was polluted. The girl had not
wanted to be the symbol of childhood for him. For the first
time, then, he thought that he was a criminal, and he got all
mixed up because, even though he was a criminal, he had at the
same time a great horror of the impure. And what confused him
even more was that that child with her sharp little teeth that
could bite and with her yellowish, expectant and dirty eyes full
of hope was also pure-delicate and pardoned eyes like those of
an animal. He almost ran. What did he need so much that he
froze up when they asked him for it? He saw Vit6ria again with
her graying hair, which now seemed luxuriant and lascivious to
him. He felt in his heart the hardness with which Ermelinda had
fallen out of love. "Are we terrible?" he asked himself perplexed,
as if he had never lived. "What a dark thing is it that we need;
what an avid thing is this existence which makes our hand
scratch like a claw? And yet this avid desire is our strength. Our
children are born astute and unprotected out of our darkness,
and they inherit it; and the beauty is in that dirty wanting,
( 2 1 8 )
The Apple in the Dark
wanting, wanting. Oh, body and soul, how can we judge you if
we love you? Are we terrible?"-that had never occurred to him
except as an abstraction. "Are we terrible?" he asked himself, he
who had not committed a crime out of evil. Not even his own
crime had ever given him the idea of decay and anxiety and
pardon and the irreparable way the innocence of the Negro girl
had.
Now it was nighttime and everything was peaceful. He spent
the whole night waiting. The drums had been beating all the
while. He had not been able to lie down. Then he sat down on
the bed and waited the whole night through.
Chapter
ON THE LIMPID SUNDAY that seemed to have dawned before its
time the man had the impression that he had only invented the
danger. In the round sky the angels were on guard across the
clouds-that was how he had the idea of inoffensive peace.
Later on, when he saw Ermelinda with her hair curled, it
became clear to him that she had disappeared the day before to
curl her hair: it had been only that, then ! And-why not? The
doldrums had only 1ueant the eve of the last Sunday of the
month; for Martim now understood what a revolution took
place for the visit of the professor and his son. In the happy
morning two chickens had been snatched up out of their
squawking and had turned up dead in the kitchen. Jam to stuff a
cake with had appeared out of the pantry.
And at eleven o'clock, from behind the woodshed door, he
finally saw an old car approaching. The short fat man who got
out did not look anything like the German ! And the boy who
was with him, looked timidly at Ermelinda and Vit6ria waiting
there well-dressed on the porch unsure of himself. Then the
visitors disappeared inside the house . . .
So everything had been in his own imagination ! Almost
laughing, passing his trembling hand across the dryness of his
mouth. With relief Martim heard for an indeterminate time the
sound of conversation coming from the house and the sound of
dishes
. The noises were familiar, innocent, reassuring. Free of
tension at last, he fell onto the bed and into a deep sleep.
When he woke up, the afternoon had become broad and
tranquil. And a while later Vit6ria appeared. She still looked
tired and defeated, erect in the woodshed door.
"Since you are an engineer," she said to him, "and he is a
teacher, the two of you should have lots to talk about."
( 2 2 0 )
The Apple in the Dark
When Martim did not answer she added with even more
fatigue, "The professor is very intelligent, he makes wonderful
puns."
There was an empty pause.
"We' re expecting you; all right?"
Martim ran his hand across his rough face, which he had not
shaved for days. She noticed the gesture and made one of her
own that showed an inexplicable despondency.
"It doesn't matter," she said, "the professor doesn't worry
about things like that."
She was already going away when she stopped short. She
seemed to make a resolution and she explained to him. "He isn't
the headmaster, but he really runs the whole school because he
has a strong personality. His puns are excellent. He's quite smart
and brilliant."
The sleep had left Martim feeling calm and well-fed; and
now that there was no danger, he looked at her expectantly.
"The professor is strict, but he's like a father to his students.
His theory is that a teacher deserves to be on a higher level than
the students."
He did not ask any questions, and he looked at her serenely.
She was pretty and she was tired. He had never seen her so wellgroomed. She was still waiting, and for the first time they were talking about something that did not have to do with work. It
was then that Martim, sensing the novelty, looked her over with
mistrust.
"He's quite strict with his students," she went on monotonously, and she did not seem to be paying much attention to what she was saying. "One day a student was whispering in class,
and at the end of the period, in front of them all, he called the
student up-and such a speech he made, calling him son and
asking him to lift his feelings up to God. The boy was so sorry
that all he could do was cry. No one laughs at the professor; he
won't tolerate that. The students laugh at other teachers, but
not at him."
The Apple in the Dark Page 28
