The Apple in the Dark
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would forever give her the same security that his presence gave
her. That man would have to leave behind him there the living
part of his life, that thing that makes a person exist in the eyes of
another. Ermelinda looked at him avidly, one might have said
that she hated him, but it was only ambition and hunger. A
little paler then, because the time was short and now was the
moment to ask him for the word-a little paler and taking care
not to be too clear and reveal herself-she said with a sharp and
disagreeable laugh, "For example, I don't understand what infinity is! Just think of that!"
Through the peal of laughter she was using to disguise
herself she looked at him intensely, as if through a keyhole, and
her heart was pounding.
Martim was nailing up some loose boards on the wall of the
woodshed that afternoon and he looked over his shoulder at her,
amused.
"I'll bet," she said, very ostentatiously shaking her finger
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T H E A PPLE
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close to his face-"1'11 bet that a n engineer knows about things
like that! "
Martim slowly pushed the uncomfortable finger away from
his face and kept on working.
"How is it," she went on, struggling to maintain her coquettishness, trying to remove the expression of urgency from her face and the call for help from her eyes-"How is it that the
world, for example, never ends? And never begins, for example
. . . That's horrible! don't you think?"
The girl's voice trembled a little and he, who was smiling,
flattered by the fact that she was ignorant, looked at her quickly.
Suddenly she was so imploring and emotional that it occurred
illogically to him that she had come with her bothersome picnic
basket through all the labyrinths just to ask that question :
"How is it that the world never ended and never began?"
Martim was intrigued and he laughed again.
"The idea really is monstrous," he conceded.
She was hanging on the lips of the man with such complete
attention and for the first time she was paying so little attention
to herself that her whole face was exposed; and Martim saw a
pale face, neither ugly nor pretty, with features that seemed to
have been put together for just one expression-that of expectation.
"What's monstrous?" she asked, startled, as if instead of
giving her his hand to lift her up he had pushed her down
deeper.
"The idea of a world that never has any beginning and never
has any end," he said, a little bothered by the fact that the girl
had placed him in the situation of saying something that neither
he nor she understood.
"So?" she said, with her head to one side-all of her in
wait.
He did not understand what she was waiting for, and asked,
"So what?"
"So?" she repeated, as if insistence would be clarifying by
itself.
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The Birth of the Hero
He shrugged his shoulders, put another nail in the board, and
said, "Well, so try to imagine the opposite : a world that began
one day and will end one day. That idea is just as monstrous."
Ermelinda continued waiting, cocking a deaf ear like a person who was hard of hearing. But suddenly realizing that she felt very serious and that men don't like that, she gave a laugh,
which trailed off too quickly, however. Then her mouth seemed
to suffer, and she twisted it several times involuntarily :
"I'm going," she said slowly, getting up and shaking the
crumbs out of her lap.
On the following day, as soon as Vit6ria had disappeared,
Ermelinda, continuing her careful work, spoke to Martim about
the death of a turkey, and about what was happening now to the
turkey that had been eaten. And she guided Martim along so
well that he ended up saying, inspired perhaps by the expression
that a turkey dies the day before, "The thing is so well done," he
said-"because no one dies one day too soon. He dies exactly at
the instant of his own death, not a minute before. The thing is
perfect," he said.
But it was precisely that perfection that she was afraid of!
Ermelinda looked at him stiffly. Martim became a little embarrassed. But guided by an intuition that came from the sweet way he always treated her, he. said illogically, probing and feeling
generous without knowing in relation to what, "We don't know
where we came from and we don't know where we're going; but
we just experience things, we experience! And that's what we
have, Ermelinda. "That's what we have!"
Martim did not know how to interpret the blank look in the
girl's eyes, whose pupils suddenly looked just like any other
inexpressive feature of the face and not something to see with. It
was as if she had just turned off in herself the possibility of
thinking. And it made Martim shuffle about uncomfortably. He
did not know how much what he had just said was wortheither to her or to himself. "Now we're starting to tell ourselves things that keep on swimming in the air." he thought, as if that
was the sign of an inescapable transition and the delicate way in
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which things become corrupted, without our being able to do
anything about it. Martim had noted that both of them were
already "conversing."
But on the following day, as soon as Vit6ria went away,
Ermelinda came back and, with the haughtiness of someone
who no longer had much to lose or keep, she asked the man
what fate was like.
This time, however, without her understanding why the
engineer was so angry all morning-perhaps because he was
already tired of her?-this time instead of answering, he repeated in a dumbfounded way : "Fate? What is fate like? !" he repeated with a surprise that left Ermelinda mortified. Then
because it was impossible for him to express his own anger the
man's face took on for an instant an appalled look that Ermelinda rejoicingly interpreted as participation-until she discovered that the repetition of the question was only fury and fatigue. Whatever the next word would be it would come like a
punch in the face. She waited, intimidated.
"Fate, oh for God's sake!" he finally said, furious.
The girl did not cry. She immediately passed on to things
that might flatter him, telling him that the place had changed so
much since he had come, that everything now looked so well
cared for and new, "that now it was something different." And if
that did not succeed in changing the man's glowering expression,
at least it calmed him down and pleased him. And the girl
quickly calculated as she blinked her eyes that she still had the
right to come back to the woodshed sometimes. Only a few
times, because time was passing . . . her face drew itself up
tight in anticipation. With a hope that tried to be stronger than
her disbelief, she promised herself, "Who can tell,. maybe the
next time . . ." She did not interrupt herself even for an instant
to ask herself honestly what it was she expected from Mart
im.
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gr Part III
THE APPLE
IN THE DARK
Chapter1
AND so the day arrived when Vit6ria left for Vila Baixa with the
truck loaded up with tomatoes and ears of corn, and the truck
looked like a harvest festival. They all came out with smiles and
anxiety to watch it leave, because everything they all had worked
for had finally come to the end of its term. And since it had been
exactly that for which they had worked so hard it was with
smiles and anxiety that they watched the truck, garlanded with
yellow ears. Vit6ria, feigning seriousness, looked at them for an
instant, alone with the product of her effort. Ill at ease, they
waved good-bye to her.
Martim stood there watching her go away, until the last bit
of dust had settled to the ground and until the noise of the
wheels had disappeared even from his memory and the countryside was restored to silence and the wind.
The time had come to an end.
Without Vit6ria's presence, a sudden lull came over the
farm, which was in a state of emergency just as when someone is
about to die or go away, and then the sun shone and then the
plants waved their leaves-that was how the birds flew about,
attentively.
And that was how it was on the farm, where the people
seemed to have worked in vain, and yet it was not true. From
wherever Martim looked he seemed to see the place from the
distance of years and years already gone by. The place seemed
unpopulated; he felt the breeze blowing. And because something
important was going to happen in such a near future-Vit6ria's
meeting with the German-the farm was relegated to the past,
the standing flowers to the wind, the sparkling dry tile roof to
the sun.
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There was a silence as when drums are beating.
As for Ermelinda, she was quite wounded because he did not
love her any more. For he did not love her any more. The great
attraction that had justified a whole lifetime had passed. She
was wounded and melancholy. It was a dead pain. There is the
water-and I don't need to drink any more. There's the sunand I don't need it any more. There's the man-and I don't love him. Her body had lost its feeling. And she, who had concentrated her entire self in anticipation of the day Vit6ria would leave for Vila and leave her the man all to herself, without
hiding places at last, without precautions at last, she only sought
him out once, when she told him sadly, honestly, indirectly:
"I loved a man once. Then I stopped loving him. I don't
know why I loved him, I don't know why I stopped loving him."
Martim, worried about the German, did not know what to
say in return, and then he asked, "And did you become his
friend afterwards?"
And he asked a question like that because he was unprotected and he needed friendship.
"No," she said, looking at him slowly. "No. Friendship is
very nice by itself. But love is better. I couldn't be friends with a
man I had loved."
"And afterwards?" he asked, with an anguish of whose origin
he himself was unaware.
"Afterwards," she said, "afterwards I cried sadly, even
though it was painless. I begged; 'Make me suffer from lovel'
But nothing happened, I was free again."
"And wasn't it good to be free?"
"It was as if the years had passed and I saw in a face that
before had been everything for me, I saw in that face the thing
that love is made of: ourselves. And it was as if the most genuine
love had been made out of a dream. If that's being free, then I
was free."
Since Ermelinda had never told him that she had loved him
up to the point of making it a life Martim did not know that he
himself was the man not loved now, nor did he understand that
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The Apple in the Dark
she had stopped loving him. But as if she were imploring him for
a truth more merciful than reality, he pleaded desperately for
the cause of someone else:
"But what stopped you from becoming his friend?" he asked.
"I was all alone," she said.
The man became dark, sad, heavy. Nothing had been said
that would be remembered afterwards. But the two of them
looked at each other with a smile worse than death, silently
submissive to the powers of nature. Scratching the ground with
his foot, keeping his hands in his pockets, Martim said inside,
quiet, intense, "Please! " He did not know really what he was
asking for, and he said "Please." But it was as if a man dying of
hunger had politely said : please. The back that Ermelinda
turned on him to go away had no face, it was a narrow and
fragile back. Nevertheless, with bitter vigor it said to the man :
"No."
And the drums kept on beating.
The whole countryside now belonged to Martim to make or
think of it what he pleased. But the expectation of what was
going to happen had cut off communication between him and
what now had become a desert. And the truth was that the man
did not want it otherwise. He did not even know what it was
that he had wanted so much. Since love had died in Ermelinda,
so the lack of desire gave silence to the man's heart. He sought
out his own hunger; but it was the silence that answered him.
He was experiencing what was worst of all : not wanting any
more. The first moment was quite terrible; he figured out right
away that not wanting was so often the most desperate form of
wanting.
And at certain moments, with an imponderable change in
the weather, even the farm would change and show a closer face,
and impose its living fields. And then for an instant the man and
the farm would vibrate again on the same level of the present
moment. And once more, as he looked at the world, once more
the man would feel that promising tension which seems to be
the maximum a person can attain, just as one becomes aware of
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a stone because it resists the fingers. More than tension? He
tried to go forward in himself; but no, that seemed to be the
limit. If he were to try to go beyond the resistance of the stone,
suddenly nothing would happen. Challenged for an instant
Martim still tried to pick up the interrupted thread of his slow
construction and suffer at least. But the time had really come to
an end.
Vit6ria returned on Saturday, covered with dust and looking
older, with an empty truck. She had fought so hard-and
perplexed, she had got what she wanted; growing old, she had
got what she wanted; Martim did not understand her. While the
woman was talking about selling the produce he avidly tried to
read her eyes and guess through them whether she had talked to
the German. But all he managed to learn, which she told him
without enthusiasm, as if fatigue had removed all interest from
the wonderful bit of news, was that i
t was already raining four
miles away from Vila Baixa.
Had she seen the German? Using minor pretexts Martim
patrolled the house, uselessly looking for Vit6ria; she was the
only element he could use to calculate with.
Until when, downcast, he stopped trying to find her and he
saw her again. But it was as if he had seen a stranger. She was
coming down the hallway against the light. He did not really see
her body, just her walk, as if he only saw the spirit of her body.
Little by little, closer to the light now, she took on shape until
she became opaque-and the man blinked, looking at her with a
start. Her hair was loose and wet from her bath and she was no
longer wearing the tight and dusty slacks that had already
become a part of her in Martim's imagination. He saw her for
the first time in a woman's dress and she was a stranger. There
was no harshness that could hold up against the damp tresses on
the shoulders. When he looked at her for the first time in terms
of a body she gained a body in his eyes. Which was no longer
energetic, as he had always seen it, and whose strength had given
the man a reason for fighting somehow against that strength. It
was a body that was so much more docile than the face. Scandal-
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The Apple in the Dark
ized, mournful, Martim looked at her. It was indecent how the
feminine clothing made her naked, just as if an old woman had
revealed an anxious desire to be a girl. He looked away with
shame. Just as Ermelinda had refused, Vit6ria-who had served
him previously as a firm landmark-now refused to present him
with a form, and she left him free. On the face between the
hanging hair there was the same tired look with which the
woman had returned from Vila Baixa and which he had tried to
interpret in vain. It was the first time that he had seen her tired.
The woman's eyes, as if they no longer wanted to contradict,
were black on the surface. Martim tried to goad her so that she
would be stronger than he. But she replied : "No, we'll let the
ditches go tomorrow. The professor and his son are coming."
Their looks met and nothing was transmitted or said. Or one
would have had to be a god to understand what they had said to
each other. Perhaps they had said; "We are in nothingness and
we touch each other in our silence." Because for a fraction of a