Ancient Tillage

by Raduan Nassar

  6

  from the time I left home, it was by stifling my revolt (my silence was bruising! my anger was textured!) that step by step I distanced myself from the fazenda; and if perchance I were to become distracted and ask “Where are we going?’ — it made no difference that in looking around I perceived very new, perhaps less harsh landscapes, it made no difference that my walking led me to increasingly remote regions, because I could hear the rigid judgment clearly, even as it emerged from my longing, like gravel, or a brittle bone, devoid of any doubt whatsoever — “We’re forever on our way home.”

  7

  “when i said I was going to bring you home, she held still and her eyes brimmed with water, fear was in those eyes, ‘Come on, Mother,’ I said, ‘Try to cheer up, you should laugh, Mum,’ I said, tussling her hair, ‘don’t act like that, and don’t worry, I promise there will be no arguing with that renegade, you’ll see how happy he’ll be, you’ll see,’ I told her, ‘Mother, you’ll see how everything is going to be like it was, just like it used to be,’ I said and she held me, and as she held me she merely said, ‘Bring him back, Pedro, bring him back, and don’t tell your brother, nor your sisters that you’re going, but bring him back,’ and while I was saying, ‘Stop it, Mum, stop it,’ she went on to say, ‘Now I’m going to go knead sweet rolls, the kind he used to like so much,’ she said, holding me as if she were holding you, André,” and my brother smiled, his washed-out eyes filled with light, with the most tender, cloudless expression in the world, but this didn’t really move me, I remained quiet, and in my moist memory I could only recall her pulling me out of bed and dragging me into the kitchen, “Come on, sweetheart, come with me,” and, standing near the table holding my hand in one of hers while she reached with the fingertips of the other deeply into the bowl, she would get a mouthful of food to feed me, not with a fork, but with those thick fingers, “Like you feed a lamb,” she would always say, and hearing my brother say, suddenly reserved, “She’s aged tremendously,” I continued to think of her in the other direction and I could see her sitting in her rocking chair, absolutely alone and lost in her gray daydreams, from the earliest hours of the day unraveling the lace of love and family unity woven over a lifetime, and seeing the comb in her hair buried into the bun at the nape of her neck, in majestic simplicity, it seemed right then that it was worth an entire history book, and I also felt, thinking about her, that the fruit growing in my throat was about to burst, and it was not just any fruit, but a fig dripping thick honey, filling my lungs, already rising sumptuously to my eyes, but with great effort, by lowering my eyelids, I closed all my pores, although it was totally pointless, since nothing kept my brother from his indefatigable tillage: “But no one at home has changed as much as Ana,” he said, “as soon as you left she shut herself up in prayer in the chapel; when she is not wandering aimlessly in the most remote parts of the woods, she’s sort of hidden, somewhat strangely, over by the old house; no one at home is able to bring her out of her pious silence; she always wears a veil over her head and she spends all day wandering around the fazenda barefoot, like a sleepwalker; no one at home causes us more worry,” he said, and suddenly I saw my room darken, and I knew only that darkness, the darkness against which I always closed my eyes in fear, which is why I stood up, reacting to the dizziness I was beginning to feel, and on the pretext of refilling our glasses, I stepped haltingly over to the table to get another bottle, but as soon as I made a move to pour more wine, I saw the gesture of his hand, like my father’s; “I won’t have any more,” he said gravely, resolutely, strangely changed, “nor should you drink any more, it is not from this wine that the wisdom of our father’s lessons comes forth,” he said, frowning, with a sudden trace of anger, having decidedly resigned from breaking my silence with affection, and making it clear that from that point on I was to be submitted to a harsh reprimand: “It is not the spirit of this wine that will repair so much damage in our home —” he continued cuttingly — “put the bottle away, refrain from debauchery, we’re talking about the family,” he went on, cruelly, openly hostile, suddenly making me feel that the dog forever stretched out in the sleepy shadow of the eaves was getting away from me, escaping its leash and making me feel that any restraint and sobriety at that moment deserved my most sarcastic scorn and, in a flash of light, making me feel what a generous, abundant gift it would be to simply plunge from the ceiling, I felt all of that and much more with the trembling that overtook my entire body in a tormented spasm, “It’s all right for us to have a drink,” I yelled, transformed, the transformation that should have happened at home years before, “I’m an epileptic,” I exploded, in my worst convulsion ever, and with that violent rush flooding my veins, “an epileptic,” I yelled and sobbed to myself, well aware that, at extreme risk, and cutting away at my palms, I was throwing the jug of my former identity to the ground, the jug worked from the clay of my own hands, and hurling myself flat on my face onto that shard-ridden floor, I kept shouting insanely, “Your brother is an epileptic, let it be known, go home now and make this revelation, go now and you will see the doors and windows of the house banging shut with the wind of this knowledge, and you, the men of the family, wearing hoods and carrying our father’s heavy toolbox, will surround the house outside, violently hammering and nailing planks into crosses against the shutters, and our sisters dressed in black, true to their Mediterranean background, will rush around the house in a flurry of mourning, and the dance of this imprisoned family will be accompanied by a chorus of howling, whimpering and sighing, and finally, our sisters, sobbing wearily, in a flight of handkerchiefs to hide their faces, will go off and huddle in the corner and you will scream at them ever more loudly, ‘Our brother is a convulsive, possessed epileptic!’ and go ahead and tell them that I chose a boardinghouse room for my fits and also say, ‘We lived with him and never knew, never ever suspected,’ then you can all call out at once, ‘He tricked us! He tricked us!’ and yell as much as you want, gorge yourselves on this renewed knowledge, even if you aren’t aware of the sinister web in which I was caught, and you, as the eldest brother, can howl in a desperate moan, ‘It’s so sad that he has our blood,’ then cry out, ‘He’s been possessed by cursed pestilence,’ and scream, ‘Such disgrace has befallen our household,’ and ask furiously, as if saying the rosary, ‘What makes him different?’ and you’ll hear the somber, hoarse chorus from the shapeless mass huddled in the corner, ‘He’s possessed by the devil,’ and go ahead and say, ‘His eyes are somber,’ and you’ll keep hearing, ‘He’s possessed by the devil,’ and you’ll continue mouthing those gutter beads and then say in amazement and fear, ‘What a heinous crime he’s committed! He’s possessed by the devil,’ and then say, ‘He’s tainted the family, condemned us to burn up in flaming shame,’ and you’ll keep hearing the same cavernous, hollow sound, ‘He’s possessed by the devil! He’s possessed by the devil!’ and in a clamor, as if in blasphemy, raise your arms and cry out to heaven in unison, ‘He has abandoned us, he has abandoned us,’ and afterward, after so much lamentation, so much sobbing and grinding of teeth, and after flaunting the hair on your chest and your arms, right afterward, go directly to the linen closet, and check quickly behind the doors, take up the finely woven old sheets, and even these, like everything else in our house, even those carefully washed, folded, white cloths, everything, Pedro, every­thing in our house is morbidly soaked with Father’s words; Father always said, he always said, Pedro, ‘We must begin with the truth and finish the same way,’ he was always saying things like that, those family sermons were heavy, but he always laid the foundations in the same way, with the same blocks of words, those were the rocks we tripped over as children, the stones that forever grazed us, that’s where our thrashings and these marks on our bodies came from, look, Pedro, look at my arms; but he also said, probably unaware of what he was saying and certainly not realizing how one of us would use it one day, he also said carelessly, in an aside, ‘Look at the strength of the tree growing in isola
tion and the shade it provides for the herd, and the troughs, the long troughs emerging in isolation from the immense fields, so smooth from so many tongues, where the cattle come to feed on the salt provided to purify their meat and hides,’ he was always saying things like that, in his unique syntax, hard and stiffened by the sun and rain, he was the toughened farmer tilling the earth, ploughing up the shapeless rock he did not realize was so malleable in each of our hands; Pedro, the hallways of our house were confused, but that was how he wanted it, to injure the family’s hands with coarse rocks, to scrape our blood as you would limestone, but did it ever occur to you, did it ever cross your mind, for even a second, to lift the lid of the bathroom hamper? Did you ever think of delving in with precarious hands and carefully removing each and every article thrown inside? I would drag up a piece of each one of us when I dug in there, no one heard all of our cries better than I did, I can assure you, the exasperation of the family was laid to rest in the guarded silence of the intimate articles thrown in there, but you had only to look, to lift the lid and stick your hands in, it was enough to plunge your hands inside to realize how ambivalently they were used, the men’s handkerchiefs, which had been extended like trays to protect the purity of the sheets, all you had to do was put your hands in to gather up the wrinkled sleep of the nightgowns and pajamas and to discover, lost in their folds, the coiled, repressed energy of the most tender pubic hair, you didn’t even need to rummage very much to find the periodic, walnut-colored stains on the women’s intimate cloth pads, nor to hear the mute, scrotum-flowing cries that starched the men’s soft white cotton underwear, you had to know the body of the entire family, to hold the red-dust-covered sanitary napkins in your hands, as if they were an assassin’s rags, to know the family’s every mood moldering away in the vinegary, rotten smell of the cold, vein-ridden walls of a dirty clothes hamper; no one stuck their hands inside there more than I did, Pedro, no one felt the stains of loneliness more than I did, many of them aborted, greased by the imagination, you had to catch the charnel house off-guard, when it was snoring, leave your bed and venture through the hallways, listen to the throbbing behind all the doors, the trembling, the moaning and the soft voluptuousness of our homicidal plans, no one heard each of us at home better than I did, Pedro, no one loved each of us more, nor better knew the pathway to our union, the pathway along which we were led steadily by the image of our grandfather, the tall, slender old man carved from the wood of the family furniture; he was the one, Pedro, the truth is, he was the one running through our ancestral veins, always in the same black suit, bulky on his thin, skeletal body, depravedly baring the dry, white skin of his face; the truth is, he led us, forever locked up inside his own vest, his pocket-watch chain tracing an enormous, shiny golden hook on his dark chest, the old ascetic, the farmer worked from ancestral hay, who on drowsy afternoons of days gone by would store his dehydrated sleep inside the hampers and carefully lined drawers of our bureaus, and who would allow himself no more than the gentle, lyrical mystery of a memory-filled, dream-laden jasmine tucked into his lapel on hot, humid evenings, he was the one who directed the steps we took in unison, it was always Grandfather, Pedro, he was forever inside the silence of the china cupboards, the lost promise of the hallways, making us hide our childhood fears behind doors, never allowing us, except in contained gulps, to absorb the funereal perfume of our pain which emanated from his solemn wanderings through the old house; he was a plaster-carved guide, that eyeless grandfather of ours, Pedro, nothing more than two deep, hollow, somber cavities in his face, nothing more, Pedro, nothing else shone on that bony stalk besides the chain of his terrible, golden, oriental hook,” I said, screaming and shaking, and reading the surprise, fear, terror and absolute whiteness all over his face, I still managed to cry out, “Plug your ears, stick your fingers in the holes,” and, having run from one corner of the room to the other in possessed frenzy, I suddenly dropped to my knees, sat back on my heels and, seeing his trembling hand, he himself now filling our glasses, I was overcome with doubt whether to bash him in the face or kiss his cheeks; and for a moment, we fell into a taut silence in order that nothing disturb the current of my trance; between massive gulps of wine, contemplating both the ceiling of my room and the dark things I could see inside my brother’s mouth, I noticed how carefully he was trying to compose a look and a stance conducive to my carrying on; I wanted to say, “Don’t worry, brother, don’t worry, because I am able to resume my fit,” after all, what was the point of talking further? For me, the world had already been laid bare, I had only to take in a deep breath, take up the wine from the depth of the bottle, and bathe all my words in that sweet indolence, feel each drop all the way to the back of my tongue, each crushed grape from that wine, from that divine spirit; “It is my delirium, Pedro,” I said in a warm wave, “It’s my delirium,” I repeated, and it occurred to me that perhaps I was already in communion with the oily saliva of that word, but in fact, I was only feeling the first reverberations of my own red blood, salty and thick as it circulated in my head, inflating the formerly feeble flower, transforming that pile of worms into a sacred pillow, stripped of trimmings, on which I could rest my thoughts; at that foamy moment, only I knew the waters, the waves on which I was sailing, only I knew the salty vertigo causing my oscillation, “It’s my delirium,” I said, on a still darker wave, tired of soothing thoughts, affectionate eyes and gentle contortions; would that everything burn, my feet, the thorns in my arms, the leaves that covered my wooden body, my forehead and lips, so long as at the same time my useless tongue be spared; the rest, later, it mattered very little that later the rest be lost among the family’s tears, sobbing and trembling; “Pedro, my brother, our father’s sermons were inconsistent,” I said suddenly with a rebel’s frivolity, sensing, if only for a fleeting moment, his hand in awkward preparation for a reproachful gesture: instead it was withdrawn, anxiously and silently, the frightened hands of the family leaving the sermon-fed table; the faces surrounding that table of our adolescence were so curdled: Father, at the head of it, the wall clock behind him, each and every one of his words weighed by the pendulum, with nothing distracting us more at that time than the deep bells marking the passing of the hours.