that after all, he had nothing to do with any of this.
"Nobody," Martim said, unexpectedly emphatic-"nobody
can ask for more than he can receive from someone else! Human
nature," he said very self-satisfied, "is always the same. Nobody
can ask for more than someone else can give him because asking
( 2 9 0 )
The Apple in the Dark
and giving is the same act, and one doesn't exist without the
other. Besides, nobody can invent what doesn't exist, my dear
lady. If asking was invented it's because the answer exists in
giving! " he said quite firm and contented.
"But asking whom?" she yelled.
"Well," Martim said, ,stumbling and already losing interest
-"that's the question. But then there's also this" -he added,
suddenly serious and sensual-"there's also this, there's a
definite technique in asking! Because, my dear lady, things are
not like that. No, my dear lady! You can't just say 'Give m�! '
and let i t go a t that! Lots o f times you have to deceive the one
you're asking," he said, intimate, sensual. "To be exact, you have
to ask in some disguised sort of way. You're an intelligent and
well-read woman, you must have learned that too. Let's imagine,
for example, that you were married and needed a pair of shoes,"
he said, suddenly most interested in the problem, while the
woman looked at him, her eyes silly with surprise. "If you
needed a pair of shoes, the wisest thing would never be to say to
your husband, 'Give me some shoes !' The wise thing would be
to say a little by little every day, 'My shoes are getting old.'
'My shoes are getting old.' 'My shoes are getting old,' " Martim
said and could not help laughing. "You understand?" he said
"and one fine day your husband will wake up in the morning and
without knowing why he'll say : 'Vit6ria, my love, I'm going to
buy you a pair of shoes! ' Because in asking for help there's a
definite technique! Receiving a request frightens people a lot,
while on the other hand, dear lady, they're really itching to give
you something. You understand, a definite technique! For everything else too there's a definite technique! For example," he continued with enthusiasm-"for example, you can only express
what you want to say, when you express it well ! There's a
definite technique. You've got to know how to live in order to
live, because the other side, dear lady, is spying on us at every
step. One wrong step, and suddenly a walking man looks like a
monkey! Just one wrong step, and instead of being perplexed,
people laugh ! One moment of weakness, dear lady, and love is
( 2 9 1 )
T H E A P P L E
I N T H E D A R K
perdition. It takes skill, dear lady, lots of skill, because without it
life goes wrong. And lots of wisdom : because time is short, you
have to pick a fraction of a second between one word and
another, between remembering and forgetting; there's a definite
technique! ''
"Technique?" she repeated, stupefied.
"That's right," he said, bored with the wisdom she had
forced on him.
The lady looked at him, completely stupid. The man smiled
in a constrained way, without knowing how to get out of the
predicament to which he had brought himself.
"I'm going to the cowshed," he then said in a low voice, with
discreet modesty, as if he were asking permission to go to the
bathroom.
But she suddenly came to : "Listen."
The insistence put into the word began to tear at the man's
fibers and make him give in. He stopped again. He felt that he
was being used by that woman as if she were emasculating him
little by little : there were women like that, who break everything
they touch. With the mouth of a leech, she was sucking something out of him, something that was not valuable, but which after all still belonged to him. What she was doing with what
she sucked out he did not know. He looked at her without
pleasure, without curiosity. He no longer seemed to have the
strength to resist the word "listen," which finally made him bow
down, resigned. Slowly, without any defense at all, he prepared
to hear her out.
"Listen," she repeated then, gentle, like a mother who had
surprised her child with an involuntary shout. "Listen : before
you came here I was different," she then said, as if she were
going back to the beginning of beginnings. And she gave the
man the fatigue he had felt before and put a heroic readiness for
sacrifice on his face. "Not that I was really different," the lady
added with certain kindness, "but the fact was that I hadn't
always owned this place."
She paused. Because-busy at showing consideration for the
( 2 9 2 )
The Apple in the Dark
man whom she was nullifying in some way-the meaning of
what she had wanted to say escaped her. The heat had left them
wet and salty.
"I used to live in Rio," she continued, and her tone tried to
be unpretentious, as if having lived in the city would make her
too big in the man's eyes. "But I came here of my own volition.
I know, I know it was a mistake; you don't have to tell me," the
lady added with that vanity of hers which offended so easily.
"But I'd made a mistake. What was I going to do? To err is
human; I made a mistake like a woman who had been deceived
by a man's promises-oh, there wasn't any man, if that's what
you mean or at least what you're thinking," she interrupted,
flattered by the possibility that it might have occurred to
Martim. "But how can I explain it?" she asked, as if he were
anxious to understand, even though there was no question on
the man's complying face. "I thought that here I could
find .
"
.
.
What had she really come to find? The passion of living?
Yes, she had come in search of the passion of life, the woman
discovered disappointedly; and a drop of sweat ran sadly down
her nose.
"I'll tell you what happened," she said then with effort, and
probably that woman had already had her speech prepared for
years. "This is how it all started. Once, some relatives had come
to visit us in Rio, and I left Ermelinda to take care of my father.
I took them around to show them the city-my relatives I mean.
We always drove : my uncle had rented a car. It was already
getting chilly . . . I never saw such long roads, it was getting
cold, every day I wore a blue dress that I had never had a good
chance to wear. And we ate in restaurants so many times, enjoying ourselves and getting to know the restaurants. It was the first time that I had ever done anything like that . . . eating juicy
steaks. I have to admit" -she informed him-"that I had always
shied away from big meals. I always liked dry things; my meals
had always been so simple! Because until then I had ended up
adopting my father's diet . . .
T H E A P P LE
I N THE
D A R K
"But at that time," the woman continued, her face suddenly<
br />
cleared by pleasure and by the unexpected attack of an unattainable ideal, "at that time they would come with huge plates filled with stuffed pork chops; and when I left the restaurant, I could
see that the fruit in the pushcarts was squashed and then . . ."
She was quiet. By interrupting herself, however, all she did was
make herself smell, as if the breeze had brought in the smell that
came from inside the pushcarts, the whiff of rotten pineapples
and warm chicken feathers-and then she smiled with a face
that was clear, mysterious.
"When I left the restaurant, I tossed my coat, which was
also new, over my shoulders; but it wasn't because it was cold, it
was only because it seemed that something was happening to
me. I don't know," she said, having trouble wiping away the
perspiration, "but it was as if I saw that things are much more
than the dry shell, you understand me maybe? It was as if I
could see that even though I had felt sick before, it was because
I knew then that the danger was beneath the dryness-I don't
know why, but driving around those days, it seemed to me that
everything that existed was, was horribly ripe, you know how it
is? And I felt so tired that it almost hurt. To tell you the truth, it
didn't even seem like wintertime. It's hard to believe, but it
didn't seem like it; the cars blowing their horns, the pushcarts so
full of fruit . . . fruit that was almost rotten, almost-almost I
don't know what," Vit6ria said softly, lovingly, and out of pure
intimacy with the man she did not try to explain it any better.
Martim took his dirty handkerchief out of his pocket and
wiped his face. The woman saw that he had not understood. But
now it was nice and too late to stop, it did not matter now even
if he did not understand. She stayed there for a moment with an
unraveled look, reduced to remembering herself alone as in the
restaurant and how her mouth glowed at the sauce as it poured
out, giving her a touch of repugnance; how in those days it had
seemed to her that one had to exult in what was ugly; and then,
with a feeling of nausea that she suddenly had not been able to
separate from love, she had admitted that things are ugly. The
( 2 9 4 )
The Apple in the Dark
smell of the pushcart seemed to be a warm smell of dirty people,
and one had to get emotional over things that were so imperfect
that they seemed to ask for her understanding, her support, her
pardon, and her love; happiness weighed upon her stomach in
those days. Yes, and she had felt that she was capable of loving
all of that. It was surprising, it was horrible, as if it had been a
wedding.
At that instant the woman trembled, as she remembered
that it was precisely those strange days of happiness that later on
had led her to dare go to the island all alone-to look for something more. And that she had failed nevertheless.
She looked thoughtfully at the man without seeing him. It
did not even pain her any more whether Martim understood her
or not. A woman has the right to speak out once in her life.
"Driving around that time," she informed him humbly, "it
was as if I had become ill . . ."
"Maybe the food was too heavy?" he suggested with his head
boiling in the sun and his hair crackling itself dry.
"A man without a calling at least ought to have the advantage of being free," Martim mused, absorbed in his thoughts.
But everybody calls it following a duty. And truthfully, in the
sun, he was just as completely mixed up as he had been before;
wherever a man goes, a city grows up, all that is needed are
streetcars and movies. Ermelinda wanted him . . . what did
Ermelinda want? And Vit6ria was forcing him to take her confession. It was difficult not to collaborate. Then in some vague way there grew in Martim a new explanation for his crime-that
crime which was becoming more and more elastic and amorphous-and the man had already got so far away from it that he really seemed to have committed an abstract crime; and his
crime now really seemed more like a sin of the spirit, just that.
Therefore, in the sun, persecuted by the presence of Vit6ria, he
thought like this : that the only way to be free, as a man without
any calling has the right to be, had been to commit a crime, and
make other people stop recognizing him as someone like themselves and not ask anything of him. But if that explanation was ( 2 9 5 )
T H E A P P L E I N T H E D A R K
the right one then his crime had been useless. As long as he
himself survived, other people would call on him. Burning there
in the sun, that man, tired out by a sleepless Sunday night,
thought that this was the most reasonable explanation for his
crime. Restless, he knew also that he was only wandering.
It was then that it occurred to him that he was about to be
arrested. So that they could tell him at last what his crime had
been. He was about to be arrested and so other people could
judge him, because he, he had already made up a legend about
himself.
"It's quite possible," Vit6ria said in anguish-"it's quite
possible that the meat was very heavy indeed, and I had been
eating my father's diet for so long!" she added distractedly.
They remained silent, and the man scratched himself.
"Why didn't you go to a stomach specialist?" Martim asked,
not exactly because he did not understand her, but because he
was trying to see if, honestly reducing what she was saying to a
question of a medical cure, everything would come out in its real
proportions.
"The fact is that it was partly because of those days driving
around that years later I found that I ought not sell the place
I had inherited from my aunt, and I decided to live here," she
concluded suddenly, startled as if she had come to the tape
much more quickly than she had calculated, and without even
being ready to have arrived there.
"Oh," he said as if he had understood.
They remained silent again. The woman had finally stopped
wringing her hands.
"I think," she said with a final sigh, "I think that I thought I
would be able to find here in this place what had happened to
me during the days I was driving around. I mean those things I
saw when I came out of restaurants. Of course, not in the impossible way I wanted to find them on the island-find them here, yes, but within my reach, every day and little by little
within my reach," she said, feeling herself that she was irremediably obscure and foundering in the inexplicable.
( 2 9 6 )
The Apple in the Dark
And suddenly everything seemed really inexplicable to her. It
was true that living in the country had come to give a passion to
her purity; it was true that for the first few nlonths she had been
touched by the laziness with which the plants grew erect, and for
the first few months nature had given an ardor to her confusion.
Yes, that was true . . . . But it was also true that because of
paths that could no longer be retraced she had ended up falling
into the truculent brutality of moral purity; and her arteries ha
d
hardened like those of a judge.
But all the same, that wasn't the only truth ! She justified
herself, because there she was, a hard woman, unburdening herself so simply in front of a man who was not even listening to her, the way a drop of water can no longer bear its own weight
and falls where it falls; the thing had had enough strength of selfdirection to do it all alone. And it was also true that at the same time in which a moral code could harden that she herself did not
understand; she had approached inside, without knowing in the
slightest, through despoilment upon despoilment, something
that was alive.
"I suppose," she said to the man, "that I was imagining I
would find all of that on the farm. But later on" -she added
surprised, as if only then she had realized-"later on I got a little
confused . . .
" she said and smiled, constrained, pardonable,
with the enchantment of unprotection on her face.
What Martim had least expected had been a smile. And he
agreed, interested. Going back over it all in a more alert way, he
managed to reproduce in his ears the last words of the woman,
"I got a little confused." It was, therefore, those words which,
even though they said no more than any others, seemed to
transmit to the man a kind of total understanding, as if out of
tenderness he could no longer ignore anything about that
woman. With his effort of looking at her and understanding her,
the material that made up the man's face finally melted, and on
the surface a kind of expression arose, the shadow of a thought
perhaps.
Vit6ria noticed it, emotional, sad, modest:
T H E A P P L E
I N T H E D A R K
"As I was saying, it was because of that that I came here. It
was a mistake. But I've done so many other things for the same
reason that I can't explain it! " she said simply, perplexed. "It's
as if something that should happen is waiting for me; and then I
try to go after it, and I keep on trying, trying. It's something that
happens that keeps on encircling me-it's something that owes
itself to me, it looks like me, it's almost myself. But it never gets
close. You can call it fate if you want. Because I've tried to go
out and meet it. I sense this happening as if it were some kind of
affliction. And it's as if, after it happened, I would become
someone else," she added peacefully. "Sometimes I have the
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