Daria

  But his father was always watching like a sentinel of evil, and he had to do what he was told. In these last moments with the animals, Arsénio would speak to them in silence as he took their lives away, looking deeply into their eyes, asking for forgiveness, telling them through telepathic soul messages that he was very, very sorry, profoundly sorry, but that he had no choice because he was just a little boy under the command of his father’s iron will. The shiny eyes of the animals stared at him from beginning to end, open throughout this entire carnage, remaining open even after they gave their last sigh. Then their back legs would kick the final kick, expelling the last ounce of their life blood into the bucket, making them inert matter ready to feed a hungry and wretched world. He would reach for the eyes of the animals and try to close them so that they would not stare at him in permanent accusation, but they would always open again, as if some part of the animal was still living and wanted to send a message. Then Arsénio had to skin the animals, take out their entrails, and cut them into pieces that would be hung on the windows of his father’s butcher shop. The poor villagers from Vimieiro and its surroundings would come and stare at the pieces of meat through the wide front glass window, imagining how they would taste roasted or in a good stew with garlic and potato and fresh parsley. Then Father would come out and shout at them, “Are you looking for something that you can afford? If not, get out of my sight. This is private property.” They would leave but would come back when they could to continue staring at the hanging bloody pieces on full display. Sometimes, when all the meat was not sold and was about to go bad, Arsénio would try to convince his father to give away some of it to these people, but his father would not hear of it. He would retort, “You have no sense of business, you stupid boy. There are many like you in this country, and that’s why we are in this deplorable state.” He would burn the unsold product in an open fire outside his shop so that everyone could smell the roasted meat and remember that in order to be able to buy it, they needed to work very hard. Arsénio would try to skin and cut the animals as quickly as possible so that he could get rid of the staring eyes, which he would bury deep down in the ground behind his father’s shop in an attempt to make them go away. But sometimes the eyes would come to him at night. He would have nightmares during which all he saw were eyes around him: open, shiny, and sometimes bloody ocular objects, moving in circles as if searching for something. He would feel he would never, never be forgiven and that he would surely go to hell when he died, where he would forever be assaulted by these wandering, moving, lost eyes that had no body to land upon. Sometimes, in his hurry to get rid of the staring eyes, he would not bury them deep enough and the dogs would get to them during the night, gorging on a macabre feast. One time, he was awakened by the loud barking of dogs in the middle of the night. Instinctively he knew that the dogs had found his burial site. He ran to the site and found a pack of dogs, twelve in total, engaged in a glutinous, uncanny ritual, voraciously eating the eyes of cows, pigs, hens, sheep, and goats. He screamed at the dogs, scaring them away with heavy stones and the hard blows of a sturdy stick. He then collected the remaining eyes, some of which were half eaten, and buried them very deeply as quickly as he could. Then he went to the river and took a bath in the cold water, in an attempt to cleanse himself and regain forgiveness for his sacrilege. He developed a profound aversion to meat and became a strict vegan. Even so, his father would sometimes force him to eat chunks of meat, which he would vomit straight away because his body, perhaps commanded by his soul, refused to be an assassin and a cannibal. It refused to eat the animals he had killed, which were like his own siblings and to whom he felt deeply attached. The day before the animals were to be taken to the slaughterhouse, Arsénio would spend a lot of time with them, talking to them, caressing and kissing them, saying his last goodbye. He would feel very lonely whenever the animals he had raised were taken away, but this was his profession: to raise animals and then kill them. And he raised and killed many.

  His father had another side business that involved more cruelty to animals. On Sundays he held a cockfight tournament in the village with the rest of the villagers. His cocks would fight the others viciously until their feathers and eyes had all fallen off or been eaten and they became mere walking marionettes, awkwardly moving around the ring trying to escape the final blow of the kingpin. His father owned a particularly vicious cock, a small Indian rooster. It seemed to have little strength within it, but when in battle it would destroy all its opponents in an ingenious manner. This rooster had an infallible way of attacking the other cocks, which were always bigger than him: when they least expected it, the small rooster would fly up in the air and then land on top of its enemy with the force of a monster. The bigger cock had no chance. Because Arsénio’s father always had the best and strongest cocks, he would win most of the time. He made lots of money from this cockfighting business since the losing teams had to pay in cash. The people of Vimieiro were hungry for distractions from their constantly harsh lives, and so they enjoyed the spectacle a great deal. No Sunday would go by without a good cockfight—even during Lent when one ought to stay away from excessive or unreasonable pleasures. Later on, as if dissatisfied with his own cruelty and hungry for more excitement in his life, Arsénio’s father got involved in the bullfighting business and became a widely celebrated matador in the Iberian Peninsula and beyond. In 1928, when a national law was introduced that prohibited bulls from being killed in the arena, he defied it and organized secret spectacles where he continued to perform his deathly ritual, just like before. He ranted against the government officials, saying they had been neutered and no longer had balls and that the Lusitanian bullfighting was now child’s play suited for pussies, not real men. “Real men are not afraid of the bull’s horn. Real men teach the bull who the boss is by penetrating his spine and neck with pointed arrows inflicting the fatal blow,” he would vociferate, his eyes wide open and his arm making the motion of death. There were always people who came to see him in action, just as they did before, not afraid of the consequences of disobeying the law—eager for the excitement that comes with cruelty when one’s heart pounds uncontrollably with heavy fear in anticipation of the hour.

  When Arsénio was about to turn seventeen—that benchmark age when he would become a man and emerge as his own human being, separate from his family—his mother stopped coming back. Two months had passed, the usual time that it would take for her to return, and she did not show up. And then the third month came and then the fourth and the fifth. Finally, on July 27, the day he turned seventeen, the news about Camila das Dores came, brought by the Romani who arrived in one of the largest caravans ever seen in Vimieiro. They were on their way to the south of Portugal to sell their products. Their business had expanded significantly, and they were now running a circus with all kinds of exotic animals to do the tricks that can make people laugh and marvel. There were lions of all sizes, birds of equatorial colours, elephants, panthers, cheetahs, snakes, and seven ballerinas. And there was a tall giraffe, with her otherworldly neck, that made Arsénio very uncomfortable. When she looked at him from such a great height, he saw himself as small and invisible, like an ant that could be smashed in a second. There was also a spectacular parrot that spoke fluent Punjab and Zulu. When it was angry, for whatever reason—and the reason could not always be understood—it would break into incomprehensible tongues that caused everyone, including the animals, to experience heavy migraines for days. The ballerinas would lose their balance, suddenly unable to execute their complex acrobatics; the master would lose his power over the animals; and the animals themselves would just lie on the floor. Not even the heavy kicks of the caretakers made them move—they would simply roll their eyes from side to side as if affected by some internal invisible disease that disturbed the functioning of their bodies and souls. Needless to say, this would cause the circus to underperform, and so it was no surprise that everyone tried to treat the temperamental parrot with the utmost respect an
d sensitivity. They always attended to his desires, even the most outlandish ones, like his frequent demand to sleep with one of the ballerinas, the beautiful Sophia Zarakoska. The master managing all the animals and birds was a tall Nubian the Romani had found in Spain. He had been left bleeding and nearly dead after a group of Spanish fascists had attacked him viciously because they did not think he was in the right continent and ought to go back to where he came from. He had the capacity to make the animals execute the most unusual tricks, and he even taught them songs, which would alternate between beautiful classical music, heart-wrenching flamenco melodies, and even certain types of heavy rock melodies that seemed to have come before their time. He was the conductor of a never seen orchestra, a man capable of speaking to the animals in such a manner, that they would always respond to his commands and with a promptness and precision that made the notes come out perfectly in pitch and tempo—a hallowed, marvelling sound, entering the ears of a stunned and beatified audience.

  None of the ballerinas looked like the Romani girls; they had blond hair, translucent white skin that made their veins visible to the eye, and green or blue irises—shades no one in the area had ever seen before. They looked like fragile, magic porcelain dolls—perfect for children to play with. The circus was an enchanting treat for the starved eyes of the villagers of Vimieiro, and they came to see the spectacles as often as their meagre escudos allowed. They marvelled at the magic displayed right there in front of their eyes, and for a moment they felt as if Jesus Christ through the will of His father had descended on earth again, dressed in another dress, singing another song, offering another kind of miracle. The children stood frozen in a daze when the ballerinas climbed on top of the giraffe, standing on one foot as the animal moved, noble and erect, like a dazzling princess of the universe or a powerful goddess uniting earth and sky. Some of them would scream, “I want the doll. Give me the doll. I want the doll. Give me the doll!,” their eyes leaving their faces to follow the walking miracle.

  On the third night of its stay in the village, the circus revealed something that no one had ever known existed—or at least, they had never been explained or shown its existence in that fashion before. The substance the Nubian master was about to expose had been always associated with the devil, his sins and dirty paws, his Hell or Purgatory, his inscrutable and dangerous night. The Nubian master, standing alone in the middle of the presenting platform—dressed in white, as he always was—brought out a black box from under his vest. He told the audience, in an accent of a man who speaks many languages, that the trick he was about to show them was in actuality not a trick but a very profound scientific fact that could explain the mysteries of the human brain and the space between bodies. He said it could satisfy the gurus of astronomy who had been trying to decipher the matter for a very long time without any success. “This box,” he said, “contains black matter, the substance that is all around and in us, filling the vast space between stars and planets and commanding the cells and veins of our brains. No one has yet been able to see it and capture it—no one but me.” He said he had discovered this universal axiomatic truth when he was travelling from Sudan to Andalusia on foot for twenty-four straight months, crossing deserts and mountains by night and sleeping by day so that he would not awaken the coast and border guards. The first time he was able to capture this evasive substance, which he had dreamed about countless times, he was in the desert, at the Egyptian and Libyan border. He had walked for a long time and had had a lot of difficulty distracting the guards on both sides of the border, who had been given very specific orders by their respective leaders that no intruders or disturbers of any order, much less Africans, should be allowed in or out of each nation. The borders had been closed so that the culture and tradition of each nation could be properly preserved. These leaders and many of their followers did not see themselves as African but rather Mediterranean or Arab when they looked into the narrow mirrors they had placed behind their front doors. After waiting for five days and five nights to leave Egypt and enter Libya, he finally managed to cross when the guards, tired of doing nothing and bored to the bone, decided to ignore their leaders and started playing a game of stones. The game consisted of throwing stones as far as possible into the desert, running to them, and bringing them back. This was not an easy exercise because the terrain was all sand, and, when thrown, the stone would sink deep into the sand. Not to mention there were other similar stones around, and knowing which one had been thrown was no task for the stupid. The team that managed to recover all or most of the thrown stones was the winning team. The prize was a bottle of a non-alcoholic and very refreshing beverage made of palm leaves. When the winning team was in a good mood, they would share the drink with the losing team and everyone would become equal. Sitting down by the palm tree, which was half on the Libyan side and half on the Egyptian side—because plants know no boundaries and need to access many soils to find water and minerals—the guards drunk together and forgot that they were from different countries. It turns out that on the sixth day, the guards of the winning team were in a good amicable mood and did just that: they shared the drink with the losing team under the palm tree. Everyone took off their uniforms and put down their arms, which were hard to carry under that blazing desert sun. They were fully naked and relaxed under the tree, and they seemed to have forgotten where they were and why they were there. The Nubian master, who had been spying on them for quite some time, noticed their tranquil mood and the sense of brotherhood between them. He observed them in their relaxed state and saw them naked and beautiful. They appeared as innocent children who had just been born and knew nothing about the names that different people go by, about which colours are considered good or bad, or about the many laws written in books—senseless, stubborn axioms that tell the world how to turn and forbid you from shaking hands with everyone. They were pure. They were in bliss. They were enchanting to watch. They were enchanted. In that moment of utter beauty, he saw floating between the whiteness and yellowness of their bodies and the endless Sahara, known as the Greatest Desert, bubbles of pure black matter, which then turned into lines and moved up and down, entering and leaving the bodies of the guards, the thousands of sand grains, the green leaves of the palm trees, the sleeping barracks, the demarcated line between Libya and Egypt, and even his own Black body. From his body, he also saw emerge Ramses the Great and other ancient pharaohs who had run away from Egyptian museums where they had been forced to wear golden masks. The pharaohs left him and walked freely through the desert, like dancing living mummies, finally liberated from their deadly condition and appearing in a vast array of shades from lighter to darker. Then, without any trace of fear— for he felt the world was all love—he walked openly to the guards, took off all his clothes, and sat among them. They welcomed him, gave him a glass of the cool palm tree drink, and asked, “Where have you been, brother? We have missed you immensely, so lost we have been in ourselves, blindly immersed in the paleness of our moonlight colour, suffocating in this endless yellow desert. Where have you been, brother? We have missed you.” They all sat there and after some time all they could see around them, and flowing out of them, was the beautiful black bubbles and lines floating and dancing up and down, somersaulting like freed children playing games invented by God—the stunning games of heaven just so that the people of the world could marvel at the extraordinary. The white and beige colours that had dominated previously began to vanish, disappearing into thin air, and all they could see was the black matter executing its life, demonstrating its fundamental, everlasting, and ever-present existence. Then, before the end of this game or shamanistic trance, and just before the Nubian master sensed that the black matter was receding into the invisible realm, he got up and walked steadily into the Libyan desert. Then he moved through Tunisia and Algeria, reaching the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, where the valiant Berber warriors live. He sensed then that he would have to be careful with these people when crossing their lands; he knew they had li
ttle trust in invaders and that they have had to defend their territory from countless destructive assailants and settlers: Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Christians, Muslims, and many other vandals and barbarians. He wandered for seven days and seven nights in the frigid mountains. He encountered familiar animals in versions he had never quite seen before, as if the force that created the world wanted you to see yourself in others and at the same time remind you of your own difference: leopards, stags, elephants, macaques, lions, gazelles, aurochs, vipers, bald ibises, and dippers. At first, he felt afraid of them, but then he recognized that they were not very different from the many other animals he knew and had an intimate connection with. He had been born with the power to relate, on a very deep level, with animals. He did not know why he had been given such power, but he could always understand the thoughts and feelings of animals. They would come to him voluntarily, even when not called, as if they wanted to smell him or look into his eyes, and they would follow his command blindly whenever he gave one. There was no fear or distrust between him and the animals. So close was their link that the outside observer would think there was but one species in the world and that all its members got along with one another very well. The animals that he encountered in the Atlas Mountains guided his passage through the region, protecting him from the village warriors. When he was at the highest peak of the mountains, in Toubkal, an auroch—the very ancient animal that can seldom be seen by anyone or anywhere these days—came to him. The animal told him that if he closed his eyes and then opened them again, he would be able to see the amazing substance that floats through the universe and that is responsible for the equilibrium of all things. This material tones down colours that are too brilliant in order for us to be able to see the multiplicity that there is in the world.