Because she had her absent moments. Her face would get lost in an impersonal and unwrinkled sorrow. A sorrow more ancient than her spirit. Her eyes would pause, vacant; I’d even say a bit harsh. Whoever was next to her suffered and could do nothing. Except wait.
Because she was devoted to something, that mysterious infant. No one would have dared touch her right then. You’d wait a little solemnly, heart constricted, keeping an eye on her. There was nothing you could do for her except hope for the danger to pass. Until in an unhurried movement, almost a sigh, she’d rouse herself as a newborn goat rises on its legs. She had returned from her repose in sorrow.
She would return, you couldn’t say richer, but more reassured after having drunk from some unknown fount. What you could see is that the fount must have been ancient and pure. Yes, there was depth in her. But no one would find a thing if they descended into her depths—except depth itself, as in the dark you find the dark. It’s possible that, if someone pressed ahead, they’d find, after walking miles through the shadows, the hint of a path, guided perhaps by a beating of wings, by some trace of an animal. And—suddenly—the forest.
Ah, so that must have been her mystery: she had discovered a trail into the forest. Surely that was where she went during her absences. Returning with her eyes filled with gentleness and ignorance, eyes made whole. An ignorance so vast that inside it all the world’s wisdom could be contained and lost.
That was Eremita. Who, if she rose to the surface with everything she had found in the forest, would be burned at the stake. But what she had seen—on what roots she had gnawed, on what thorns she had bled, in what waters she had bathed her feet, what golden darkness held the light that had shrouded her—she didn’t speak of all this because she didn’t know about it: perceived in a single glance, too fleeting to be anything but a mystery.
Thus, whenever she emerged, she was a maid. Who was constantly being summoned from the darkness of her trail for lesser duties, to do the laundry, wipe the floor, serve someone or other.
But would she really serve? For if anyone paid attention they’d see that she did the laundry—in the sun; that she wiped the floor—wet from the rain; that she hung the sheets—in the wind. She found ways to serve much more remotely, and other gods. Always with the wholeness of spirit she had brought back from the forest. Without a thought: just a body moving calmly, a face full of a gentle hope that no one can give and no one can take away.
The only sign of the danger through which she had passed was her furtive way of eating bread. In all else she was serene. Even when she pocketed the money her mistress had forgotten on the table, even when she took her fiancé supplies wrapped in a discreet bundle. Pilfering was something else she’d learned in her forests.
* “Hermit. “
Boy in Pen and Ink
(“Menino a bico de pena”)
How can you ever know a little boy? To know him I have to wait until he deteriorates, and only then will he be within reach. There he is, a dot in the infinite. No one will ever know his today. Not even he himself. As for me, I look, and it’s no use: I can’t manage to understand something that’s solely in the present, completely in the present. What I do know about him is his setting: the little boy is the one whose first teeth have just started coming in and the same one who’ll go on to be a doctor or a carpenter. Meanwhile—there he is sitting on the ground, made of a reality that I must call vegetative to understand. Thirty thousand of these boys sitting on the ground, might they have the chance to construct another world, one that takes into account the memory of the absolute present to which we once belonged? There would be strength in numbers. There he sits, starting all over again but for his own future protection, with no true chance of really getting started.
I don’t know how to sketch the boy. I know it’s impossible to sketch him in charcoal, for even pen and ink bleed on the paper beyond the incredibly fine line of extreme presentness in which he lives. One day we’ll domesticate him into a human, and then we can sketch him. Since that’s what we did with ourselves and with God. The boy himself will aid in his domestication: he’s diligent and cooperates. He cooperates without knowing that this aid we seek of him goes toward his self-sacrifice. Lately he’s even been practicing a lot. And that’s how he’ll keep progressing until, little by little—through the necessary goodness with which we save ourselves—he’ll go from present time to routine time, from meditation to expression, from existence to life. Making the great sacrifice of not going mad. I haven’t gone mad out of solidarity with the thousands of us who, so as to construct what’s possible, have also sacrificed the truth that would be a kind of madness.
Yet for now he’s sitting on the floor, immersed in a profound emptiness.
From the kitchen his mother checks on him: are you sitting still over there? Summoned to work, the boy struggles to get up. He wobbles on his legs, his full attention turned inward: all his balance is internal. Now that he’s managed this, his full attention turns outward: he observes what the act of getting up has provoked. For standing brings all sorts of consequences: the ground shifts uncertainly, a chair looms over him, the wall delimits him. And on the wall there’s the portrait of The Little Boy. It’s hard to look at the portrait high up there without leaning on a piece of furniture, he hasn’t practiced this yet. But here’s where his very difficulty gives him something to lean on: what keeps him standing is precisely focusing on the portrait high up there, looking hoists him like a crane. But he makes a mistake: he blinks. Blinking cuts him off for a fraction of a second from the portrait propping him up. He loses his balance—in a single complete motion, he falls into sitting. From his lips, slightly parted from the force of life, clear drool slides and drips onto the floor. He looks at the droplet up close, as if it were an ant. His arm rises, extends in an arduous, multi-stage mechanism. And suddenly, as if to pin down something ineffable, with unexpected violence he flattens the drool with the palm of his hand. He blinks, waits. Finally, once the time it takes to wait for things has passed, he carefully unclamps his hand and looks at the fruit of experience on the floorboards. The floor is empty. In another abrupt stage, he looks at his hand: so the drop of drool is stuck to his palm. Now he knows this too. Then, eyes wide open, he licks the drool that belongs to the boy. He thinks very loudly: boy.
“Who’s that you’re calling?” asks his mother from the kitchen.
With effort and kindness he looks around the living room, looks for whomever his mother says he’s calling, turns and falls backward. While crying, he sees the room distorted and refracted by his tears, its white mass expanding until reaching him—Mother! absorbs him with strong arms, and now the boy is high in the air, deep in the warmth and goodness. The ceiling is closer, now; the table, below. And, since he’s too tired to go on, his pupils start rolling back until they plunge into the horizon of his eyes. He shuts them on the last image, the bars of his crib. He falls asleep exhausted and serene.
The moisture has dried up in his mouth. The fly knocks against the windowpane. The boy’s sleep is streaked with brightness and heat, his sleep vibrates in the air. Until, in a sudden nightmare, one of the words he’s learned occurs to him: he shudders violently, opens his eyes. And in terror sees only this: the hot, bright emptiness of the air, without his mother. What he’s thinking bursts into sobs throughout the whole house. While crying, he begins to recognize himself, transforming into something his mother will recognize. He nearly collapses into sobs, urgently he must transform into a thing that can be seen and heard or else he’ll be left alone, he must transform into something comprehensible or else no one will understand him, or else no one will go to his silence no one will know him if he doesn’t speak and explain, I’ll do whatever it takes to belong to others and for others to be mine, I’ll give up my real happiness that would only bring abandonment, and I’ll be like everyone else, I strike this bargain to be loved, it’s absolutely magical to cry in exchange for: a mother
.
Until the familiar sound comes through the door and the boy, mute with interest in what a boy’s power can provoke, stops crying: mother. A mother is: not dying. And his security is knowing there is a world to be betrayed and sold out, and that will sell him out.
It’s mother, yes it’s mother holding a diaper. As soon as he sees the diaper, he starts crying again.
“Look you’re all wet!”
The news shocks him, his curiosity starts up again, but now it’s a comfortable and assured curiosity. He looks blindly at his own wetness, in another stage he looks at his mother. But suddenly he tenses up again and listens with his whole body, his heart beating heavily in his belly: beep beep! he recognizes it suddenly in a shriek of victory and terror—the boy has just recognized it!
“That’s it!” his mother says proudly, “that’s it, my darling, it’s beep beep that went by in the street just now, I’m going to tell Papa what you’ve learned, that’s exactly how you say it: beep beep, my darling!” says his mother tugging at him from bottom to top and then from top to bottom, lifting him by the legs, leaning him back, tugging at him again from bottom to top. In every position the boy keeps his eyes wide open. They’re dry as the fresh diaper.
A Tale of So Much Love
(“Uma história de tanto amor”)
Once upon a time there was a little girl who observed chickens so closely that she got to know their souls and innermost yearnings. The chicken is anxious, whereas the rooster suffers a near-human anguish: he lacks a true love in that harem of his, and moreover has to keep watch all night long so as not to miss the first of the most distant daybreaks and to crow as sonorously as possible. It is his duty and his art. Back to the chickens, the little girl had two of her very own. One was named Pedrina and the other Petronilha.
Whenever the girl thought that one had a sick liver, she’d sniff under their wings, with a nurse’s directness, considering it the primary symptom of illness, for the smell of a live chicken is no laughing matter. Then she’d ask her aunt for some medicine. And her aunt would say: “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with your liver.” Then, being very close to this favorite aunt, she explained to her who the medicine was for. The girl thought it wise to give as much to Pedrina as to Petronilha to avoid mysterious contagions. It was almost pointless to give them medicine because Pedrina and Petronilha continued to spend all day pecking at the ground and eating the junk that hurt their livers. And the smell under their wings was precisely that foul odor. It didn’t occur to her to put deodorant on them because in Minas Gerais where they lived people didn’t use it just as they didn’t wear underclothes made of nylon but of muslin. Her aunt went on giving her the medicine, a dark liquid that the girl suspected was water with a few drops of coffee—and then came the hell of trying to pry open the chickens’ beaks to give them something that would cure them of being chickens. The girl hadn’t yet understood that people can’t be cured of being people and chickens of being chickens: people as well as chickens possess sorrows and greatness (the chicken’s is laying a perfectly formed white egg) inherent to their own species. The girl lived in the countryside and there weren’t any pharmacies nearby to advise her.
Another hellish difficulty came whenever the girl thought Pedrina and Petronilha were too skinny beneath their ruffled feathers, though they ate all day long. The girl hadn’t understood that fattening them up would hasten their destiny on the dinner table. And she’d start in again on the hardest task of all: prying open their beaks. The girl became a great intuitive expert on chickens in that immense yard in Minas Gerais. And when she grew up she was surprised to discover that chicken was slang for something else.* Not realizing the comic seriousness the whole thing took on:
“But the rooster’s the one who gets worked up, who wants it! The chickens don’t really do anything! and it goes by so fast you hardly notice! The rooster’s the one who’s always trying to love one of them and can’t!”
One day the family decided to take the little girl to spend the day at a relative’s house, far away from home. And when the girl returned, she who in life had been Petronilha was no more. Her aunt told her:
“We ate Petronilha.”
The girl was a creature with a great capacity for loving: a chicken can’t return the love you give yet the girl kept loving it without expecting to be reciprocated. When she found out what happened to Petronilha she began hating everyone in the house, except for her mother who didn’t like chicken and the servants who ate beef or oxtail. As for her father, well, she could hardly look at him: he was the one who liked chicken most of all. Her mother noticed all this and explained things to her.
“When people eat animals, the animals become more like people, since they end up inside us. We’re the only ones in the house who don’t have Petronilha inside us. It’s too bad.”
Pedrina, secretly the girl’s favorite, dropped dead of natural causes, for she’d always been a fragile thing. The girl, seeing Pedrina trembling in a yard being scorched by the sun, bundled her in a dark cloth and after she was all bundled up, put her on top of one of those big brick ovens they have on ranches in Minas Gerais. Everyone warned her she was hastening Pedrina’s death, but the girl was stubborn and placed the swaddled Pedrina on top of the hot bricks anyway. The next morning when Pedrina began the day stiff from being so dead, only then was the girl, amid endless tears, convinced she had hastened the death of that dear being.
When she was a little older, the girl got a chicken named Eponina.
Her love for Eponina: this time it was a more realistic love and not romantic; it was the love of someone who has suffered from love before. And when it came Eponina’s turn to be eaten, the girl not only knew but also considered it the inevitable fate of whoever is born a chicken. Chickens seem to have a prescience about their own fate and they never learn to love either their owners or the rooster. A chicken is alone in the world.
But the girl hadn’t forgotten what her mother had said about eating beloved animals: she ate more of Eponina than the rest of the family, she ate without appetite, but with a near-physical pleasure because now she knew this was how Eponina would be incorporated into her and become more hers than in life. They had cooked Eponina in a blood sauce. So the girl, in a pagan ritual transmitted to her from body to body through the centuries, ate her flesh and drank her blood. During this meal she was jealous of whoever else was eating Eponina too. The girl was a being made to love until she grew into a young woman and there were men.
* A loose woman.
The Waters of the World
(“As águas do mundo”)
There it is, the sea, the most unintelligible of non-human existences. And here is the woman, standing on the beach, the most unintelligible of living beings. As a human being she once posed a question about herself, becoming the most unintelligible of living beings. She and the sea.
Their mysteries could only meet if one surrendered to the other: the surrender of two unknowable worlds made with the trust by which two understandings would surrender to each other.
She looks at the sea, that’s what she can do. It is only cut off for her by the line of the horizon, that is, by her human incapacity to see the Earth’s curvature.
It is six in the morning. There is only a free dog hesitating on the beach, a black dog. Why is a dog so free? Because it is the living mystery that doesn’t wonder about itself. The woman hesitates because she’s about to go in.
Her body soothes itself with its own slightness compared to the vastness of the sea because it’s her body’s slightness that lets her stay warm and it’s this slightness that makes her a poor and free person, with her portion of a dog’s freedom on the sands. That body will enter the limitless cold that roars without rage in the silence of six o’clock. The woman doesn’t know it: but she’s fulfilling a courage. With the beach empty at this morning hour, she doesn’t have the example of other humans who transform the
entry into the sea into a simple lighthearted game of living. She is alone. The salty sea is not alone because it’s salty and vast, and this is an achievement. Right then she knows herself even less than she knows the sea. Her courage comes from not knowing herself, but going ahead nevertheless. Not knowing yourself is inevitable, and not knowing yourself demands courage.
She goes in. The salt water is cold enough to make her legs shiver in a ritual. But an inevitable joy—joy is an inevitability—has already seized her, though smiling doesn’t even occur to her. On the contrary, she is very serious. The smell is of a heady sea air that awakens her most dormant age-old slumbers. And now she is alert, even without thinking, as a hunter is alert without thinking. The woman is now a compact and a light and a sharp one—and cuts a path through the iciness that, liquid, opposes her, yet lets her in, as in love when opposition can be a request.
The slow journey fortifies her secret courage. And suddenly she lets herself be covered by the first wave. The salt, iodine, everything liquid, blind her for a few instants, streaming all over—surprised standing up, fertilized.
Now the cold becomes frigid. Moving ahead, she splits the sea down the middle. She no longer needs courage, now already ancient in the ritual. She lowers her head into the shine of the sea, and then lifts out the hair that emerges streaming over her salty eyes that are stinging. She plays with her hand in the water, leisurely, her hair in the sun almost immediately stiffens with salt. With cupped hands she does what she’s always done in the sea, and with the pride of people who never explain even to themselves: with cupped hands filled with water, she drinks in great, good gulps.
The Complete Stories Page 36
