But sitting before his closed books and notes, his gloomy expression cleared up.
He no longer heard doors slamming, the neighbor’s piano, his mother talking on the phone. There was a great silence in his room, as in a vault. And the waning afternoon seemed like morning. He was far away, far away, like a giant who could be outside with just his fingers inside the room and leave them absorbed in twirling a pencil around and around. Sometimes his breathing became labored like an old man’s. Most of the time, though, his face barely grazed the bedroom air.
“I already did my homework!” he shouted to his mother who was asking about the sound of the water. Carefully washing his feet in the bathtub, he thought about how Glorinha’s friend was better than Glorinha. He hadn’t even tried to see whether Carlinhos had “taken advantage” of her. At this thought, he hurried out of the tub and paused before the sink mirror. Until the tiles chilled his wet feet.
No! he didn’t want to have to justify himself to Carlinhos and no one was going to tell him how to spend the money he’d get, and Carlinhos could go ahead and think he was spending it on bicycles, but so what if he was? and what if he never, but never, wanted to spend his money? and he just got richer and richer? . . . what’s the big deal, you wanna fight? so you think that . . .
“. . . maybe you’re just too wrapped up in your own thoughts,” his mother said interrupting him, “but at least eat your dinner and say something every once in a while.”
Then he, in a sudden return to his paternal home:
“First you say we’re not supposed to talk at the dinner table, then you want me to talk, then you say we’re not supposed to talk with our mouths full, then . . .”
“Watch how you speak to your mother,” said his father without severity.
“Papa,” asked Artur meekly, frowning, “Papa, what are promissory notes?”
“Apparently,” said his father with pleasure, “Apparently high school’s useless.”
“Have some more potatoes, Artur,” his mother tried in vain to pull the two men toward her.
“Promissory notes,” his father began while pushing his plate away, “work like this: let’s say you have a debt to pay.”
Mystery in São Cristóvão
(“Mistério em São Cristóvão”)
One May evening — the hyacinths rigid against the windowpane — the dining room in a home was illuminated and tranquil.
Around the table, frozen for an instant, sat the father, the mother, the grandmother, three children and a skinny girl of nineteen. The perfumed night air of São Cristóvão wasn’t dangerous, but the way the people banded together inside their home made anything beyond the family circle hazardous on a cool May evening. There was nothing special about the gathering: they had just finished dinner and were chatting around the table, mosquitoes circling the light. What made the scene particularly sumptuous, and each person’s face so blooming, was that after so many years this family’s progress had at last become nearly palpable: for one May evening, after dinner, just look at how the children have been going to school every day, the father keeps up his business, the mother has worked throughout years of childbirth and in the home, the girl is finding her balance in the delicateness of her age, and the grandmother has attained a certain status. Without realizing this, the family gazed happily around the room, watching over that rare moment in May and its abundance.
Afterward they each went to their rooms. The old woman stretched out groaning benevolently. The father and mother, after locking up, lay down deep in thought and fell asleep. The three children, choosing the most awkward positions, fell asleep in three beds as if on three trapezes. The girl, in her cotton nightgown, opened her bedroom window and breathed in the whole garden with dissatisfaction and happiness. Unsettled by the fragrant humidity, she lay down promising herself a brand new outlook for the next day that would shake up the hyacinths and make the fruits tremble on their branches — in the midst of her meditation she fell asleep.
Hours passed. And when the silence was twinkling in the fireflies — the children suspended in sleep, the grandmother mulling over a difficult dream, the parents worn out, the girl asleep in the midst of her meditation — a house on the corner opened and from it emerged three masked individuals.
One was tall and had on the head of a rooster. Another was fat and had dressed as a bull. And the third, who was younger, for lack of a better idea, had disguised himself as a lord from olden times and put on a devil mask, through which his innocent eyes showed. The masked trio crossed the street in silence.
When they passed the family’s darkened home, the one going as a rooster and who came up with nearly all the group’s ideas, stopped and said:
“Look what we have here.”
His comrades, made patient by the torture of their masks, looked and saw a house and a garden. Feeling elegant and miserable, they waited resignedly for him to finish his thought. Finally the rooster added:
“We could go pick hyacinths.”
The other two didn’t reply. They’d taken advantage of the delay to examine themselves despondently and try to find a way to breathe more easily inside their masks.
“A hyacinth for each of us to pin on our costumes,” the rooster concluded.
The bull got riled up at the idea of yet another decoration to have to protect at the party. But, after a moment in which the three seemed to think deeply about the decision, without actually thinking about anything at all — the rooster went ahead, shimmied over the railing and set foot on the forbidden land of the garden. The bull followed with some difficulty. The third, despite some hesitation, in a single bound found himself right in the middle of the hyacinths, with a dull thud that stopped the trio dead in their tracks: holding their breath, the rooster, the bull and the devil lord peered into the darkness. But the house went on among shadows and frogs. And, in the perfume-choked garden, the hyacinths trembled unaffected.
Then the rooster pushed ahead. He could have picked the hyacinth right by his hand. The bigger ones, however, rising near a window — tall, stiff, fragile — shimmered calling out to him. The rooster headed toward them on tiptoe, and the bull and the lord went along. The silence was watching them.
Yet no sooner had he broken the largest hyacinth’s stalk than the rooster stopped cold. The other two stopped with a sigh that plunged them into sleep.
From behind the dark glass of the window a white face was staring at them.
The rooster had frozen in the act of breaking off the hyacinth. The bull had halted with his hands still raised. The lord, bloodless under his mask, had regressed back to childhood and its terror. The face behind the window stared.
None of the four would ever know who was punishing whom. The hyacinths ever whiter in the darkness. Paralyzed, they peered at each other.
The simple approach of four masks on that May evening seemed to have reverberated through hollow recesses, and others, and still others that, if not for that instant in the garden, would forever remain within this perfume in the air and within the immanence of four natures that fate had singled out, designating time and place — the same precise fate of a falling star. These four, coming from reality, had fallen into the possibilities afoot on a May evening in São Cristóvão. Every moist plant, every pebble, the croaking frogs, were taking advantage of the silent confusion to better position themselves — everything in the dark was mute approach. Having fallen into the ambush, they looked at each other in terror: the nature of things had been cast into relief and the four figures peered at each other with outstretched wings. A rooster, a bull, the devil and a girl’s face had unleashed the wonder of the garden . . . That was when the huge May moon appeared.
It was a stroke of danger for the four visages. So risky that, without a sound, four mute visions retreated without taking their eyes off each other, fearing that the moment they no longer held each other’s gaze remote new territorie
s would be ravaged, and that, after the silent collapse, only the hyacinths would remain — masters of the garden’s treasure. No specter saw any other vanish because all withdrew at the same time, lingeringly, on tiptoe. No sooner, however, had the magic circle of four been broken, freed from the mutual surveillance, than the constellation broke apart in terror: three shadowy forms sprang like cats over the garden railing, and another, bristling and enlarged, backed up to the threshold of a doorway, from which, with a scream, it broke into a run.
The three masked gentlemen who, thanks to the rooster’s disastrous idea, had been planning to surprise everyone at a dance happening such a long time after Carnival, were a big hit at the party already in full swing. The music broke off and those still intertwined on the dance floor saw, amid laughter, the three breathless, masked figures lurking like vagrants in the doorway. Finally, after several tries, the revelers had to abandon their wish to crown them kings of the party because, fearful, the three refused to split up: a tall one, a fat one and a young one, a fat one, a young one and a tall one, imbalance and union, their faces speechless under three masks that swung about on their own.
Meanwhile, all the lights had come on in the hyacinth house. The girl was sitting in the living room. The grandmother, her white hair braided, held the glass of water, the mother smoothed the daughter’s dark hair, while the father searched the entire house. The girl couldn’t explain a thing: she seemed to have said it all in her scream. Her face had clearly become smaller — the entire painstaking construction of her age had come undone, she was a little girl once more. But in her visage rejuvenated by more than one phase, there had appeared, to the family’s horror, a white hair among those framing her face. Since she kept looking toward the window, they left her sitting there to rest, and, candlesticks in hand, shivering with cold in their nightgowns, set off on an expedition through the garden.
Soon the candles spread out dancing through the darkness. Ivy shrank from the sudden light, illuminated frogs hopped between feet, fruits were gilded for an instant among the leaves. The garden, roused from dreaming, sometimes grew larger sometimes winked out; somnambulant butterflies fluttered past. Finally the old woman, keen expert on the flower beds, pointed out the only visible sign in the elusive garden: the hyacinth still alive on its broken stalk . . . So it was true: something had happened. They returned, turned all the lights on in the house and spent the rest of the night in wait.
Only the three children slept more soundly still.
The girl gradually recovered her true age. She was the only one not constantly peering around. But the others, who hadn’t seen a thing, grew watchful and uneasy. And since progress in that family was the fragile product of many precautions and a handful of lies, everything came undone and had to be remade almost from scratch: the grandmother once again quick to take offense, the father and mother fatigued, the children intolerable, the entire household seeming to hope that once more the breeze of plenty would blow one night after dinner. Which just might happen some other May evening.
The Crime of the Mathematics Teacher
(“O crime do professor de matemática”)
When the man reached the highest hill, the bells were ringing in the city below. Only the uneven rooftops were in sight. Nearby was the lone tree on the plateau. The man was standing there holding a heavy sack.
He looked down below with nearsighted eyes. The Catholics were entering the church slow and tiny, and he strained to hear the scattered voices of the children dispersed throughout the square. But despite the morning’s clearness the sounds barely reached the high plain. He also saw the river that appeared motionless from above, and thought: it’s Sunday. In the distance he saw the highest mountain with its dry slopes. It wasn’t cold but he drew his sport coat around him more snugly. At last he carefully laid the sack on the ground. He took off his glasses maybe to breathe better since, while holding his glasses, he breathed very deeply. Sunlight hit his lenses, which sent out piercing signals. Without his glasses, his eyes blinked brightly, almost youthful, unfamiliar. He put his glasses back on, became a middle-aged man and picked up the sack again: it was heavy as if made of stone, he thought. He squinted trying to make out the river’s current, tilting his head to catch any noises: the river was at a standstill and only the hardier sound of a single voice reached those heights for an instant — yes, he was quite alone. The cool air was inhospitable, since he’d been living in a warmer city. The branches of the lone tree on the plateau swayed. He looked at it. He was biding his time. Until he decided there was no reason to wait any longer.
And nevertheless he waited. His glasses must have been bothering him because he took them off again, breathed deeply and tucked them into his pocket.
He then opened the sack, peered partway into it. Next he put his bony hand inside and started pulling out the dead dog. His whole being was focused solely on that important hand and he kept his eyes deeply shut as he pulled. When he opened them, the air was even brighter and the joyful bells pealed once more summoning the faithful to the solace of punishment.
The unknown dog was out in the open.
Then he set to work methodically. He picked up the stiff, black dog, laid it in a depression in the ground. But, as if he’d already done too much, he put on his glasses, sat beside the dog and started surveying the landscape.
He saw very clearly, and with a certain futility the deserted plateau. But he noted precisely that when seated he could no longer glimpse the town below. He breathed again. He reached back into the sack and pulled out the shovel. And considered which site to choose. Maybe under the tree. He caught himself musing that he’d bury this dog under the tree. But if it were the other one, the real dog, he’d actually bury it where he himself would like to be buried if he were dead: at the very center of the plateau, facing the sun with empty eyes. So, since the unknown dog was standing in for the “other” one, he wanted it, for the greater perfection of the act, to get exactly what the other would. There was no confusion whatsoever in the man’s head. He coldly understood himself, no loose ends.
Soon, being excessively scrupulous, he became highly absorbed in rigorously trying to determine the middle of the plateau. It wasn’t easy because the lone tree stood on one side and, marking a false center, divided the plain asymmetrically. Faced with this obstacle the man admitted: “I didn’t need to bury him at the center, I’d have also buried the other one, let’s say, right where I’m standing this very second.” Because it was a question of granting the event the fatefulness of chance, the sign of an external and obvious occurrence — similar to the children in the square and the Catholics entering the church — it was a question of rendering the fact as visible as possible on the surface of the world beneath the heavens. It was a question of exposing himself and exposing a fact, and not allowing the intimate and unpunished form of a thought.
At the idea of burying the dog where he was standing that very moment — the man recoiled with an agility that his small and singularly heavy body wouldn’t allow. Because it seemed to him that beneath his feet the outline of the dog’s grave had been drawn.
So he began digging right there, his shovel rhythmic. Sometimes he’d pause to take his glasses off and put them back on. He was sweating grievously. He didn’t dig very deep but not because he wanted to save his energy. He didn’t dig very deep because he thought lucidly: “if it were for the real dog, I’d dig a shallow hole, I’d bury him close to the surface.” He thought that near the surface of the earth the dog wouldn’t be deprived of its senses.
Finally he dropped the shovel, gently lifted the unknown dog and placed it in the grave.
What a strange face that dog had. When, with a start he’d come upon the dead dog on a street corner, the idea of burying it had made his heart so heavy and surprised, that he hadn’t even noticed that stiff muzzle and crusted drool. It was a strange and objective dog.
The dog came up slightly higher than the
hole he had dug and after being covered with dirt it would be a barely discernible mound on the plateau. That was exactly how he wanted it. He covered the dog with dirt and smoothed it over with his hands, feeling its shape under his palms intently and with pleasure as if he were petting it several times. The dog was now merely a feature of the terrain.
Then the man stood, brushed the dirt off his hands, and didn’t give the grave another look. He thought with a certain pleasure: I think I’ve done everything. He gave a deep sigh, and an innocent smile of liberation. Yes, he’d done everything. His crime had been punished and he was free.
And now he could think freely about the real dog. He immediately started thinking about the real dog, which he’d avoided doing up till now. The real dog that even now must be wandering bewilderedly through the streets of the other town, sniffing all over that city where he no longer had a master.
He then started to think with some difficulty about the real dog as if he were trying to think with some difficulty about his real life. The fact that the dog was far away in that other city made the task difficult, though longing brought him closer to its memory.
“While I was making you in my image, you were making me in yours,” he thought then with the aid of longing. “I gave you the name José to give you a name that would also serve as your soul. And you — how can I ever know what name you gave me? How much more you loved me than I loved you,” he reflected curiously.
“We understood each other too well, you with the human name I gave you, I with the name you gave me that you never spoke except with your insistent gaze,” thought the man smiling tenderly, now free to reminisce as he pleased.
Complete Stories Page 21