The woman might have left but the silence felt good in the waning afternoon.
And in the silence of the paddock, those meandering steps, the dry dust beneath those dry hooves. At a distance, in the midst of his calm pacing, the black buffalo looked at her for an instant. The next instant, the woman again saw only the hard muscle of his body. Maybe he hadn’t looked at her. She couldn’t tell, since all she could discern of that shadowy head were its outlines. But once more he seemed to have either seen or sensed her.
The woman raised her head a little, retracted it slightly in misgiving. Body motionless, head back, she waited.
And once more the buffalo seemed to notice her.
As if she couldn’t stand feeling what she had felt, she suddenly averted her face and looked at a tree. Her heart didn’t beat in her chest, her heart was beating hollowly somewhere between her stomach and intestines.
The buffalo made another slow loop. The dust. The woman clenched her teeth, her whole face ached a little.
The buffalo with his constricted torso. In the luminous dusk he was a body blackened with tranquil rage, the woman sighed slowly. A white thing had spread out inside her, white as paper, fragile as paper, intense as a whiteness. Death droned in her ears. The buffalo’s renewed pacing brought her back to herself and, with another long sigh, she returned to the surface. She didn’t know where she’d been. She was standing, very feeble, just emerged from that white and remote thing where she’d been.
And from where she looked back at the buffalo.
The buffalo larger now. The black buffalo. Ah, she said suddenly with a pang. The buffalo with his back turned to her, standing still. The woman’s whitened face didn’t know how to call him. Ah! she said provoking him. Ah! she said. Her face was covered in deathly whiteness, her suddenly gaunt face held purity and veneration. Ah! she goaded him through clenched teeth. But with his back turned, the buffalo completely still.
She grabbed a rock off the ground and hurled it into the paddock. The torso’s stillness, quieted down even blacker: the rock rolled away uselessly.
Ah! she said shaking the bars. That white thing was spreading inside her, viscous like a kind of saliva. The buffalo with his back turned.
Ah, she said. But this time because inside her at last was flowing a first trickle of black blood.
The first instant was one of pain. As if the world had convulsed for this blood to flow. She stood there, listening to that first bitter oil drip as in a grotto, the spurned female. Her strength was still trapped between the bars, but something incomprehensible and burning, ultimately incomprehensible, was happening, a thing like a joy tasted in her mouth. Then the buffalo turned toward her.
The buffalo turned, stood still, and faced her from afar.
I love you, she then said with hatred to the man whose great unpunishable crime was not wanting her. I hate you, she said beseeching the buffalo’s love.
Provoked at last, the enormous buffalo approached unhurriedly.
He approached, the dust rose. The woman waited with her arms hanging alongside her coat. Slowly he approached. She didn’t take a single step back. Until he reached the railings and stopped there. There stood the buffalo and the woman, directly across from each other. She didn’t look at his face, or his mouth, or his horns. She looked him in the eye.
And the buffalo’s eyes, his eyes looked her in the eye. And such a deep pallor was exchanged that the woman fell into a drowsy torpor. Standing, in a deep sleep. Small red eyes were looking at her. The eyes of the buffalo. The woman was dazed in surprise, slowly shaking her head. The calm buffalo. Slowly the woman was shaking her head, astonished by the hatred with which the buffalo, tranquil with hatred, was looking at her. Nearly absolved, shaking an incredulous head, her mouth slightly open. Innocent, curious, plunging deeper and deeper into those eyes staring unhurriedly at her, simple, with a drowsy sigh, neither wanting nor able to flee, trapped in this mutual murder. Trapped as if her hand were forever stuck to the dagger she herself had thrust. Trapped, as she slid spellbound down the railing. In such slow dizziness that just before her body gently crumpled the woman saw the whole sky and a buffalo.
THE FOREIGN LEGION
(“A legião estrangeira”)
The Disasters of Sofia
(“Os desastres de Sofia”)
Whatever his previous job had been, he had left it behind, changed careers, and onerously moved on to teaching primary school: that was all we knew of him.
The teacher was fat, big and silent, with hunched shoulders. Instead of a lump in his throat, he had hunched shoulders. He wore a sport coat that was too short, rimless glasses, with a gold wire perched on his broad Roman nose. And I was attracted to him. Not in love, but attracted by his silence and the restrained impatience with which he taught us and which, feeling offended, I had sensed. I started acting up in class. I’d talk really loudly, pester my classmates, disrupt the lesson with wisecracks, until he’d say, reddening:
“Quiet down, young lady, or I’ll kick you out of class.”
Wounded, triumphant, I’d answer defiantly: go ahead! He wouldn’t do it, since that would mean obeying me. But I exasperated him so much that it had become painful for me to be the object of hatred for that man whom in some way I loved. I didn’t love him like the woman I would one day be, I loved him like a child who clumsily tries to protect an adult, with the fury of one who has yet to be a coward and sees a strong man with such stooped shoulders. He irritated me. At night, before I fell asleep, he irritated me. I had recently turned nine, a tough age like the unbroken stem of a begonia. I goaded him, and whenever I succeeded in aggravating him I’d taste, in the glory of martyrdom, the unbearable acidity of the begonia when crushed between the teeth; and I’d bite my nails, exultant. In the morning, as I passed through the school gates, walking along all pure with my milky coffee and scrubbed face, it was a shock to bump into, in flesh and blood, the man who had made me fantasize for an abysmal minute before falling asleep. On the surface of time it had only lasted a minute, but in its depths it was ancient centuries of the darkest sweetness. In the morning — as if I hadn’t counted on the actual existence of the person who had unleashed my black dreams of love — in the morning, face to face with that big man in his short jacket, in a collision I was launched into shame, bewilderment and frightening hope. Hope was my greatest sin.
Each day renewed the meager struggle I had initiated for that man’s salvation. I wished for his well-being, and in return he hated me. Bruised, I became his demon and torment, symbol of the hell it must have been for him to teach that giggling, uninterested class. It had become an already-terrible pleasure, not leaving him in peace. The game, as always, fascinated me. Unaware that I was obeying old traditions, but with a wisdom that the evil are born with — those evil ones who bite their nails in alarm — , unaware that I was obeying one of the most common occurrences in the world, I was playing the prostitute and he the saint. No, maybe that wasn’t it. Words precede and surpass me, they tempt and alter me, and if I am not careful it will be too late: things will be said without my having said them. Or, at the very least, that wasn’t the only thing. My entanglement comes from how a carpet is made of so many threads that I can’t resign myself to following just one; my ensnarement comes from how one story is made of many stories. And I can’t even tell them all — a more truthful word could from echo to echo cause my towering glaciers to tumble down the cliff. Therefore, then, I’ll no longer mention the maelstrom within me when I’d fantasize before falling asleep. Or else even I’ll end up thinking it was that gentle vortex alone that propelled me toward him, forgetting my desperate renunciation. I had become his seductress, a duty no one had imposed on me. It was regrettable that the task of saving him through temptation had fallen into my wayward hands, since of all the adults and children from that time I was probably the least suitable. “That one’s a bad seed,” as our maid used to say. But it was
as if, alone with a mountaineer paralyzed with terror of the precipice, I, no matter how clumsy I was, couldn’t but try to help him down. The teacher had suffered the misfortune of being stranded alone at his deserted outpost with the most ill-advised person of all. Risky as it was on my side, I had to drag him over to it, since the side he was on was fatal. That’s what I was doing, as an annoying child tugs a grown-up by the hem of his jacket. He wouldn’t turn around, wouldn’t ask what I wanted, and would pull himself free with a jerk. I kept pulling him by the jacket, my only tool was persistence. And of all this the only thing he noticed was that I was ripping his pockets. It’s true that not even I really knew what I was doing, my life with the teacher was invisible. But I felt that my role was evil and dangerous: I was propelled by voraciousness for a real life that was being delayed, and worse than being inept, I also enjoyed ripping his pockets. Only God would forgive what I was because only He knew of what He had made me and to what end. I let myself, then, be His matter. Being the matter of God was my only goodness. And the source of a nascent mysticism. Not mysticism for Him, but for His matter, for raw life filled with pleasure: I was a worshipper. I accepted the vastness of which I knew nothing and entrusted it with everything of myself, with secrets of the confessional. Could it be for the sake of the darknesses of ignorance that I was seducing the teacher? and with the ardor of a nun in her cell. A cheerful and monstrous nun, alas. And I couldn’t even brag about it: all of us in the class were just as monstrous and gentle, eager matter of God.
But if his fat, hunched shoulders and his tight short jacket had an effect on me, my bursts of laughter only managed to make him, as he pretended with great effort to forget about me, tense up even more from all that self-restraint. The antipathy that man felt for me was so strong that I hated myself. Until my laughter started definitively replacing my impossible tact.
As for learning, I learned nothing during those lessons. I was already too caught up in the game of making him unhappy. Enduring my long legs and always worn-out shoes with brazen bitterness, humiliated at not being a flower, and above all tortured by an enormous childhood that I feared would never end — I made him unhappier still and I would haughtily toss my sole treasure: the straight hair that I planned to beautify some day with a perm and that, bearing the future in mind, I’d already practiced tossing. As for studying, I never studied, trusting in my always successful idleness that the teacher took as yet another provocation from that hateful girl. He was wrong about that. The truth is that I didn’t have time to study. My joys kept me busy, being alert took days and days; there were the storybooks that I read, while passionately biting my nails down to the quick, in my first ecstasies of sorrow, a refinement I’d already discovered; there were boys I had chosen and who hadn’t chosen me, I wasted hours suffering because they were unattainable, and even more hours suffering by accepting them with tenderness, since the man was my King of Creation; there was the hopeful threat of sin, I kept busy with fear while waiting; not to mention that I was permanently busy wanting and not wanting to be what I was, I couldn’t decide which me, every me was impossible; having been born meant being full of mistakes to correct. No, it wasn’t to annoy the teacher that I didn’t study; all I had time for was growing up. Which I was doing all over, with an awkwardness that seemed more the result of a mathematical error: my legs didn’t go with my eyes, and my mouth was emotional while my fidgety hands would get dirty — in my haste I was growing up without knowing in what direction. The fact that a picture from that time shows me, to the contrary, to be a well-grounded girl, wild and gentle, with thoughtful eyes beneath thick bangs, this real picture doesn’t contradict me, all it does is reveal a ghostly stranger that I wouldn’t understand even if I were her mother. Only much later, after having settled into my body and feeling fundamentally more assured, could I venture out and study a bit; previously, however, I couldn’t risk learning, I didn’t want to disrupt myself — I was intuitively careful with what I was, since I didn’t know what I was, and I vainly cultivated the integrity of innocence. It’s too bad the teacher never saw what I unexpectedly became four years later: at thirteen, my hands clean, freshly bathed, all nice and composed, he would have seen me standing there like a Christmas decoration on the balcony of a house. But, instead of him, it was an ex-classmate walking by who yelled my name, without realizing that I was no longer a kid on the street but a respectable young lady whose name could no longer be hollered over city sidewalks. “What is it?” I inquired of the interloper with utmost coldness. That’s when I received the shouted news that the teacher had died that morning. And pale, eyes wide open, I had looked down at the dizzying street at my feet. My composure cracked like a broken doll’s.
Going back four years again. Maybe it was because of everything I’ve mentioned, mixed up and all together, that I wrote the composition the teacher had assigned, the point at which this story unravels and others begin. Or it was just that I was in a hurry to finish the assignment however I might so I could go play in the park.
“I’m going to tell a story,” he said, “and you’re all going to write it down. But using your own words. When you’re finished you don’t have to wait for the bell, you can just go straight to recess.”
The story he told: a very poor man dreamed he had found some treasure and became very rich; when he woke up, he readied his pack and set out in search of the treasure; he wandered all over the world, on and on without ever finding the treasure; worn out, he returned to his poor, poor little house; and since he had nothing to eat, he began to plant things in his poor yard; so much did he plant, so much did he harvest, so much did he begin to sell, that he ended up becoming very rich.
I listened with an air of contempt, conspicuously playing with my pen, as if wanting to make clear that I wasn’t taken in by his stories and that I knew full well who he was. He told the story without once looking at me. It’s because, in my awkward way of loving him and in the enjoyment I took in harassing him, I also hounded him with my gaze: I responded to everything he said with a simple, direct gaze, for which no one in their right mind could blame me. It was a gaze I made quite limpid and angelic, very open, like the gaze of purity upon crime. And I always provoked the same result: disturbed, he’d avoid my eyes, start stammering. Which filled me with a power that cursed me. And with compassion. Which in turn irritated me. It irritated me that he would force a lousy kid to understand a man.
It was almost ten in the morning, soon the recess bell would ring. That school of mine, which leased a building in a city park, had the biggest playground I had ever seen. It was as lovely for me as it would have been for a squirrel or a horse. It had scattered trees, extensive rolling hills and a sweeping lawn. It was endless. Everything there was big and spread out, made for a girl’s long legs, with a place for piled-up bricks and wood of unknown origin, for bushes with sour begonias that we used to eat, for sun and shade where the bees made honey. It contained an immense open space. And we’d done it all: we had already rolled down every hill, whispered intensely behind every pile of bricks, tasted various flowers, and on every trunk we had carved the date, sweet ugly names and hearts pierced with arrows; boys and girls made their honey there.
I was nearing the end of my composition and the scent of those hidden shadows was already calling to me. I hurried. Since I knew only how “to use my own words,” writing was simple. What also made me hurry was the desire to be the first to walk across the classroom — the teacher had ended up quarantining me at the last desk — and insolently turn in my composition, thereby demonstrating my quickness, a quality I felt to be essential for living and that, I was sure, the teacher couldn’t help but admire.
I turned in my notebook and he took it without even looking at me. Feeling wronged, with no praise for my speed, I went skipping off to the big park.
The story that I’d transcribed in my own words was exactly like the one he had told. Only, around that time I was just beginning to “spell out
the moral of the story,” which, if it earned me reverence, would later threaten to stifle me with rigidity. With a certain flourish, then, I’d added the final sentences. Sentences that hours later I would keep reading and rereading to see what was so powerful about them that they had finally provoked the man in a way I myself hadn’t yet managed. The thing the teacher had probably wished to imply in his sad story is that hard work was the only way to make a fortune. But flippantly I had ended with the opposite moral: something about the treasure that remains hidden, that lies where you least expect it, that all you have to do is find, I think I talked about dirty yards full of treasure. I don’t remember anymore, I don’t know if that was exactly it. I can’t possibly imagine with what childish words I could have revealed a simple sentiment that becomes a complicated thought. I suppose that, by arbitrarily contradicting the story’s real meaning, I was somehow already promising myself in writing that leisure, more than work, would grant me the great free rewards, the only kind to which I aspired. It may also be that even back then the theme of my life was already unreasonable hope, and that I’d already begun my great stubbornness: I’d give away everything that was mine for free, but I wanted everything to be given to me for free. Unlike the workingman in the story, in my composition I shrugged off all duties and emerged free and poor, and with a treasure in hand.
Complete Stories Page 23