at the path that would take her to the woodshed and, in the
secret confusion of the bushes, she could almost guess where the
door was. She went down the steps.
She breathed slowly until she felt her lungs full of the black
wet air. Pushing back branches, she managed to reach the little
clearing which told where the door was. She could almost hear
the silence coming from the woodshed. It was hard for her to
imagine that someone living existed in that darkness besides
herself, who was breathing softly; her head was to one side,
listening, listening. Where could the man be? She remembered
once · when she had heard him snoring. If it were not such an
absurd idea, it would have occurred to her that the woodshed
was empty; she had always been able to sense when a place was
empty.
It started to rain again. The drops ran down the branches,
( 2 5 2 )
The Apple in the Dark
beat delicately against the leaves and scattered into the vastness
of the countryside. A green flash of lightning suddenly revealed
the unsuspected height of the sky. Another flash of light suddenly placed a previously invisible tree within her reach . And the thunderclaps rolled over into the abyss. "I" -said the old
woman-"! am Queen of Nature."
Tightening her bathrobe across her breast, she then came
close enough to get the smell of the wet wood of the door and,
from a little deeper inside, the smell, the rotting smell that came
from the logs in the woodshed. Her hands ran slowly and lively
across the door. It gave way without any noise. She pushed it
slowly, and as she opened an unknown door, the woman seemed
nlore restless than the similar cautious figure in the dark which
the man would become out of fright when she woke him up. She
stood motionless, neither inside nor out of the woodshed, with
her face attentive and wet.
But the kind of instinctive stubbornness of will that had
guided her that far seemed to have become extinguished. Even
before the act was done, the inspiration that had fed it had
ended. And as if on that night the woman had been enveloped
by innumerable layers of nightmare and each time had freed
herself from one of them, she would think mistakenly that she
had come to the last one-only now had she wakened completely from the dream. She passed her hand across her face where the water freely flowed. Even her trip to the kitchen and
the mango she had eaten had been a nebulous part of a dream
and of a strength. Why had she gone to the woodshed? she
asked herself, curious.
Then she remembered that in some no longer indentifiable
instant she had planned to tell the man that she had betrayed
him to the professor. It had been that, then, that she had come
to do in the woodshed. But although until she realized that, she
had seemed so determined to the point of not even questioning
it now she suddenly did not know what step to take next. She
was reduced to being a woman by a door on a rainy night. Was it
T H E A P P L E
I N T H E D A R K
that if someone saw her, he would say "Look at the old woman
out in the rain"? she asked herself, meditating. "I am the queen
of the beasts," the lady said.
Nobody in the world knew that she was there. And nobody
would ever know-because now she already seemed certain that
she would not talk to Martim, and that she would go back to
bed, going along the path through the rain again. "Nobody in
the world would ever know" -which suddenly stretched out the
great darkness of the countryside, and the woman remained lost
in it, she, tremulous queen of nature. That thought which was so
secret that only the rain partook of it gave her a pleasure, as if
she had finally done something beyond human strength. She
trembled with joy. The night beat hard upon her face with the
wet wind; the lady accepted the unknown pact with delight.
It was with the same previous care, but without the same
emotion, that she turned to go away. In a little while she
reached the porch, slipping on the wet steps and the moss; in a
little while she was going through the living room and the
hallway, without making any sound, leaving behind her the wet
footprints of a biped. But when she reached the landing of the
stairs, her caution became useless : her foot had stepped on
something that rolled and rolled and rolled. With her back flat
up against the wall, holding in her breath, she bore with horror
the object that was rolling down step by step, pausing like the
minutes of a clock. Perhaps it was the spool of thread that she
had lost. And she had heard, or had she only thought that she
had heard, the creaking of the bed in Ermelinda's room. The
silence closed in again in a little while; the shadows went back to
their places.
Only when she got to her room did her heart begin to pound
violently. She stood there in the darkness, and while she trembled from the daring of what she had done-now she could not tell whether the daring had been her trip to the woodshed or her
betrayal to the professor-while she was trembling all over at
what she had done, she began to smile in triumph. She did not
tum on the switch because she was afraid that she would not
The Apple in the Dark
like the weak and yellowish light they had on the farm, to which
she had never become accustomed. Every time that she put on
the light, it seemed to her that she was only gilding the darkness.
Without turning on the light, without making any noise that
would wake up Ermelinda, who slept like a bird, Vit6ria turned
down the spread, carefully tucked in the sheets, and carefully got
into bed; she covered herself up to her chin and stayed there
with her eyes wide open in the dark, enjoying the still-tremulous
comfort of a dog who goes off by himself to lick his wounds,
with the human look that animals have.
It was only then that it also occurred to her that there had
been no act . . . That she had gone as far as the door of the
woodshed and returned; just that. Just that? Her eyes opened
wider in the dark. With surprise-with pain? No, with reliefwith surprise, her life on the place was completely intact. Everything became clear then : by turning in the stranger she had only been defending that life. So that in the clearness of the next day
a thousand little chores awaited her. She had managed one thing
at least : she had cried. She cried. "And," she thought illogically,
"since the man had not gone away yet, I still have time." Another indistinct sound from Ermelinda' s room made the lady try in some way to not even think: she immobilized herself even
more, looking for the sleep that would deny everything.
As for Ermelinda, she too was taking a little time to realize
that she was awake. Lying there she looked peacefully at the
darkness of the ceiling. Then she went on to distinguish the
crickets that were separated from the silence. And then the noise
of the calm frogs began to come to life in her ears. Her attention
then searched for a certain rhythmical sound that she
heard no
more now; a sound within the house itself or within her sleep,
something that was strangely related to the steps of a staircase.
She remembered that she had dreamed that she was going down
them one by one. And she had dreamed that a mouse had rolled
down the stairs. The house was peaceful in the rain.
But when she finally realized that she was awake, she asked
herself with a sudden start how long she had been awake. She
( 2 5 5 )
T H E A P P L E I N T H E D A R K
rolled over quickly, really began to listen, close to the window,
to the hoarse frogs, and she heard the noise of the wind in the
leaves. Everything that had been faintly in the background took
on the hard shape of reality. "It's now," she thought, with cold
hands.
She did not even have to think about what "now" meant,
because her heart had already beaten as it knew. She knew that
if she stayed all alone in the dark one instant too long, she would
end up feeling once more the expanse of the countryside in the
dark and the little flowers that continued to exist even at night
with their soft laughter-by the same process that had made the
frogs and the wind real.
As if she had been bitten, in less than a second the girl was
standing up, in less than a second she wrapped herself up in the
sheet and was running through the hall with her slippers in her
hand. Without asking herself why, she had found the door to
the porch unexpectedly open; she went through it with a wind of
sheets and hair. And only when she reached the clearing by the
woodshed-after covering in one single instant of an almost
audible fear the distance that separated her from the man-did
she realize with a hollow exclamation that she had found the
porch door inexplicably open . . . The door of the woodshed
was also open . . .
This was the final sign that perhaps that thing which cannot
be known until it happens had already happened: between life
and death there was no longer any barrier, the doors were all
open.
The girl then became motionless in the clearing, with her
wet sheet, rigid, not taking another step. Her terror was peaceful
in the falling rain. And standing there, she seemed relieved. She
had been captured without warning. Captured by her religion
and by the abyss of her faith and by the consciousness of a soul
and by a respect for what is not understood and which ends up
being worshipped, captured by what in Africa makes the drums
beat, by what makes a dance a danger, and by what makes the
jungle a person's fear. Incapable of moving, with respect and
( 2 5 6 )
The Apple in the Dark
terror for her own thought, which was flying away from her, and
the rain seemed to be flying up from the ground the way smoke
rises up from ruins. But it was not the ruins that the girl was
afraid of, it was the smoke. And it was not death that she feared.
What she respected, with the veneration one had for a jungle,
was the other life. Standing there, looking at the empty fields
through which one day she would stroll free of her body. With
that indirect way of walking which her soul would have : backward and forward and to both sides all at the same time. So all alone after being dead. Completely alone. Finally given over to
the dream that was dragging her along through life, she, who
had understood the 1niracle of the spirit so poorly.
The girl stayed quiet in her sheets then, like a great white
butterfly. And she could offer nothing as sacrifice in exchange for
death. She had nothing that was needed as a gift of martyrdom.
There was no possible bargain. The thought of death was the
last point that her thinking had managed to reach and also the
one from which her thought could not even retreat. To go back
would be to find, as in a persecution nightmare, the broad fields
of that land, the inflated and empty clouds in the sky, the
flowers-everything that on earth is already as soft as the other
life. The small and perfect flowers waving in clusters in the
field . . . did they not have the serene madness and delicacy of
the "other life"? When she was obliged to face up to her fear,
the very soft smell of the flowers would pursue her like a bird
that was circling about her head. That delicate girl preferred a
rat, the body of a steer, the pain and the continuous work of
living, she who had so little skill for living-but she preferred all
of that to the horrible and tranquil little cold joy of the flowers,
and to the birds. Because on earth they were also the nauseating
sign of the after life. Their presence, an innocent reminder, took
away the assurance of terrestrial life itself. And it was then that
even houses with their lives inside seemed to her to be built too
fragile, with no feeling of the danger there was in not being
more deeply rooted in the ground. Yet only the girl seemed to
see what others did not see, and what the solid houses did not
T H E A P P L E
I N T H E D A R K
even suspect: that they had been built without caution, just as a
person in the dark will fall asleep in a cemetery and not know
it. Houses and people were merely perching upon the earth, just
as temporary as a circus tent. That succession of temporary
things on an earth that did not even have frontiers marking off
where a person lived in life and where he lived in death-that
earth which perhaps was the very place a soul would someday
stroll a bout in lost, sweet and free.
But if the girl did manage to see, coming from afar where
one day she herself would go, if she did manage to see the
birds-what? What were the other "signs"? How could one
distinguish them in their disguise? Sometimes she could distinguish. Sometimes she could suddenly perceive in a solid tree the soft suspicion. But how, how could one distinguish the other
signs? Even if the wind did blow sometimes.
All of the work of that girl, who once had fallen into the
mystery of thinking, was to search uselessly for proofs that death
would be the total peaceful end. And that would be salvation
and she would earn her life. But with her tendency toward
details, what she managed was a contrary indication. A chicken
that flew higher than usual-had that naturalness of the supernatural. Hairs that always grew so quickly would make her so thoughtful. And a snake. "But it was there a minute ago, I
swear! and it isn't there any more!" -the rapidity with which
things would disappear, the rapidity with which she lost handkerchiefs and did not know where she had left the shears, the rapidity with which things turned into other things, the automatic evolution of a bud as it mechanically opened up into a flower-or the head of a horse that she suddenly would discover
on the horse, the added head, like a frightful mask on that solid
body-all of that was in some way an indication that after death
immeasurable life began. For that had been the way that Ermelinda had come to take note of beauty : by its eternal side. And if thousands of ways of seeing things exist, the girl had fastened
herself forever to one of them.
Oh, but not this time!
The Apple in the Dark
There in the clearing, suddenly, and in an unexpected movement of liberation, she unstuck her feet from the soaked ground
--and as in flight, she crossed the threshold, throwing herself
forward in search of the man with the despair of a caged bird.
And when her body struck his, she was not even surprised to find
Martim standing up and dressed and soaked to the skin, as if he
too had just come into the woodshed.
And the stupefied man, seeing her with her hair hanging
down, wild as a chrysanthemum, only realized what was happening when he finally recognized the shape of the girl. And he could not tell whether she had run to him or whether he himself
had thrown himself at her-so much had one startled the other,
and so much was one the very solution for the other's not
becoming terrified at the fact that they were so unexpectedly
together. She was glued to him in the dark, that big, wet man
with the smell of verdigris about him, and it was strange and
voracious to be embraced without seeing him, merely trusting
in the avid sense of a desperate touch, the rough, concrete
clothes, he seemed to be a lion with a wet mane-would he be
the executioner or the companion? But in the dark she had to
trust, and she closed her eyes tightly, giving herself completely
over to what there was that was entirely unknown in that
stranger, beside the minimum that was known, that was his
living body-she clung to that dirty man in terror of him, they
clutched each other as if it were an impossible love. It did not
even matter if he were a murderer or a thief, it did not matter
for what reason he had ended up on the farm; there is one
instant at least in which two strangers can devour each other,
and how could she help liking him if she was in love with him
again? and when his voice sounded as a grunt in the dark the
girl felt that she was saved, and they loved one another the way
parents do when they have lost a child.
And now the pair of them were embracing on the bed like
two monkeys in the zoo, and not even death can separate two
monkeys who love each other. Now he was a stranger, yes. No
longer because she did not know him, but in the way she had of
The Apple in the Dark Page 33
