It was the first real shame in my life. I lowered my eyes, unable to hold the defenseless gaze of that man I had wronged.
Yes, I got the impression that, despite his anger, he had somehow trusted me, and therefore I had wronged him with the fib about the treasure. Back then I thought everything made up was a lie, and only the tormented awareness of sinning redeemed me from this vice. I lowered my eyes in shame. I preferred his former rage, which had helped me in my struggle against myself, since it crowned my methods with failure and might end up setting me straight some day: what I didn’t want was this gratitude that was not only my worst punishment, because I didn’t deserve it, as much as it also encouraged my wayward life that I so feared, living waywardly attracted me. I very much wanted to tell him that treasure can’t be found just anywhere. But, as I looked at him, I lost my nerve: I didn’t have the courage to disillusion him. I was already used to protecting other people’s joy, that of my father, for example, who was less wary than I. But how hard it was for me to swallow whole this joy I’d so irresponsibly caused! He seemed like a beggar thanking someone for a plate of food without noticing he’d been given rotten meat. The blood had risen to my face, so hot now that I thought my eyes were bloodshot, while he, probably mistaken again, must have thought his compliment had made me blush with pleasure. That same night all this would be transformed into an uncontrollable attack of vomiting that kept all the lights on in my house.
“You,” he then repeated slowly as if gradually admitting in wonder something that had sprung to his lips by accident. “You’re a very funny girl, you know? You’re a silly little thing . . .” he said putting on that smile again like a boy sleeping with his new shoes on. He didn’t even know he was ugly when he smiled. Trusting, he let me see his ugliness, which was the most innocent part of him.
I had to swallow it as best I could, the way he offended me by believing in me, I had to swallow my compassion for him, my shame at myself, “fool!” I could have shouted at him, “I made up that whole story about the treasure in disguise, it’s just stuff for little girls!” I was very aware of being a child, which explained all my serious flaws, and had put so much faith in growing up one day—and that big man had let himself be fooled by a naughty little girl. He was killing my faith in adults for the first time: he too, a man, believed, as I did, in big lies . . .
. . . And suddenly, my heart beating with disappointment, I couldn’t stand it a second longer—without taking my notebook I ran out to the park, hand over my mouth as if someone had smashed my teeth. Hand over my mouth, horrified, I went running, running to never ever stop, the profound prayer isn’t the one that asks, the most profound prayer is the one that no longer asks—I went running, running in such fright.
In my impurity I’d placed my hope for redemption in adults. The need to believe in my future goodness made me venerate grown-ups, whom I had made in my own image, but in an image of myself purified at last by the penitence of growing up, liberated at last from the dirty soul of a little girl. And now the teacher was destroying all that, and destroying my love for him and for myself. My salvation would be impossible: that man was also me. My bitter idol who had unwittingly fallen into the lures of a mixed-up impure child, and who had meekly let himself be led by my diabolical innocence . . . Hand clamped over my mouth, I ran through the dust of the park.
When I finally realized that I was far out of the teacher’s vicinity, I exhaustedly reined in my gallop, and nearly collapsing leaned all my weight against a tree trunk, breathing heavily, breathing. There I stood panting and with my eyes shut, tasting the trunk’s dusty bitterness, my fingers running over and over the rough carving of a heart with an arrow. And suddenly, squeezing my eyes further shut, I moaned while understanding a bit more: could he mean that . . . that I was a treasure in disguise? The treasure where you least expect it . . . Oh no, no, poor little thing, poor thing that King of Creation, that was why he had needed . . . what? what had he needed? . . . to have transformed even me into a treasure.
I still had a lot more running inside me, I forced my dry throat to catch its breath, and angrily shoving the tree trunk I started running again toward the end of the world.
But I still hadn’t spotted the shadowy end of the park, and my steps grew sluggish, excessively tired. I couldn’t go any further. Maybe it was fatigue, but I was giving in. My steps were slowing down and the foliage of the trees was slowly swaying. My steps were a bit dazzled. Hesitantly I came to a halt, the trees swirling high above. For an entirely strange sweetness was wearing out my heart. Intimidated, I hesitated. I was alone in the grass, barely standing, with nothing to lean on, hand on my weary chest like a virgin annunciate. And from fatigue of that first gentleness a finally humble head that from a distance may have resembled a woman’s. The grove swayed back, and forth. “You’re a very funny girl, you’re a silly little thing,” he’d said. It was like a love.
No, I wasn’t funny. Without even realizing it, I was very serious. No, I wasn’t a silly little thing, reality was my destiny, and that was the thing in me that pained others. And, for God’s sake, I wasn’t a treasure. But if I had already discovered in myself all the eager venom that we’re born with and that gnaws away at life—only in that instant of honey and flowers was I discovering how I healed others: whoever loved me, that was how I would cure whoever was pained for my sake. I was dark ignorance with its hungers and laughter, with its little deaths feeding my inevitable life—how could I help it? I already knew that I was inevitable. But if I was good for nothing, at that moment I was all that man had. He would have to love at least once, not loving a person—through a person. And I alone had been there. Though this was his sole advantage: having no one but me, and forced to start off by loving something evil, he had begun by doing something few ever managed. It would be too easy to desire something clean; ugliness was what was unattainable through love, loving the impure was our deepest nostalgia. Through me, someone hard to love, he had received, with great compassion for himself, the thing of which we are made. Did I understand all this? No. And I don’t know what I understood back then. But it was as if I’d seen for an instant in the teacher, with terrified fascination, the world—and even now I still don’t know what I saw, only that forevermore and in a single second I saw—just like that I had understood us, and I’ll never know what I understood. I’ll never know what I understand. Whatever I understood in the park was, with a shock of sweetness, understood through my ignorance. Ignorance that while standing there—in a painless solitude, no less than what the trees felt—I was completely recovering, ignorance and its incomprehensible truth. There I was, the too-clever girl, and it turned out that everything worthless in me was worth something to God and men. Everything worthless in me was my treasure.
Like a virgin annunciate, yes. For him to let me make him smile at least, with that he had announced me. He had just transformed me into something more than the King of Creation: he had made me the wife of the King of Creation. Because it had fallen to me of all people, with all my claws and dreams, to pluck the barbed arrow from his heart. In a flash it became clear why I’d been born with rough hands, and why I’d been born without recoiling when faced with pain. Why do you have those long nails? To wrest you from death and pluck out your deadly thorns, answers the wolf of man. Why do you have that cruel, hungering mouth? To bite you and blow so I don’t hurt you too much, my love, since I must hurt you, I am the inevitable wolf because life was given me. Why do you have those hands that sting and clutch? So we can hold hands, for I need it so much, so much, so much—howled the wolves, and they looked fearfully at their own claws before snuggling atop each other to love and fall asleep.
. . . And that was how in the big park of the school I slowly started learning how to be loved, bearing the sacrifice of not deserving it, just to soothe the pain of one who doesn’t love. No, that was only one reason. Since the others lead to other stories. In some of them it was from my heart that o
ther claws full of hard love plucked the barbed arrow, and without recoiling from my scream.
The Sharing of Loaves
(“A repartição dos pães”)
It was Saturday and we had been invited to the obligatory luncheon. But we all liked Saturday too much to waste it on people we didn’t want to be with. We’d all been happy once and marked by desire. Me, I wanted everything. And there we were, trapped, as if our train had derailed and we were forced to spend the night with strangers. No one there wanted me, I wanted no one. As for my Saturday—swaying outside the window in acacias and shadows—I preferred, instead of squandering it, to grasp it in my tight fist, where I crumpled it like a handkerchief. While waiting for lunch, we drank without pleasure, to the health of resentment: tomorrow would already be Sunday. I don’t want to spend it with you, said our arid stares, and we slowly exhaled the smoke from our dry cigarettes. Our greediness not to have to share Saturday was progressively gnawing at us and closing in like rust, until any joy whatsoever would have been an insult to greater joy.
The hostess was the only one who didn’t seem to be saving up her Saturday to use on a Thursday night. She, nonetheless, whose heart had already known other Saturdays. How had she forgotten that people desire more and more? She wasn’t even the least impatient with this disparate, dreamy bunch, who were resigned to the fact that all there was to do at her house was wait, as for the departure of the first train, any train—anything except staying in that empty station, except having to rein in the horse that would run, its heart pounding, toward others, other horses.
We finally went into the living room for a lunch that lacked the blessing of hunger. And that was when in surprise we happened upon the table. It couldn’t possibly be for us . . .
It was a table laid for men of good will. Who could be the actual expected guests who hadn’t come? But it really was for us. So that woman gave away her best to just anyone? And contentedly washed the feet of the first stranger. Embarrassed, we stared.
The table had been spread with a solemn abundance. Piled on the white tablecloth were stalks of wheat. And red apples, enormous yellow carrots, plump tomatoes nearly bursting their skin, watery-green chayote, pineapples malignant in their savagery, calm and orangey oranges, gherkins spiky like porcupines, cucumbers wrapped taut round their watery flesh, hollow red peppers that stung our eyes—all entangled with strands and strands of corn silk, reddish as near a mouth. And all those grapes. They were the deepest shade of purple grape and could hardly wait for the moment they’d be crushed. And they didn’t care who crushed them. The tomatoes were plump to please no one: for the air, for the plump air. Saturday was for whoever showed up. And the orange would sweeten the tongue of whoever arrived first. Alongside the plate of every undeserving guest, the woman who washed the feet of strangers had placed—without even singling us out, without even loving us—a stalk of wheat or a bunch of spicy radishes or a red slice of watermelon with its cheerful seeds. All cut through with the Spanish tartness the limes suggested. In the jugs was milk, as if it had crossed the desert bluffs with the goats. Wine, nearly black from being so thoroughly pressed, trembled in earthen vessels. Everything before us. Everything unsullied by twisted human desire. Everything the way it is, not the way we wanted it. Simply existing, and whole. Just like a field exists. Just like the mountains. Just like men and women, and not us, the greedy ones. Just like a Saturday. Just as it simply exists. It exists.
In the name of nothing, it was time to eat. In the name of no one, it was good. Without any dreams. And we were slowly rising to the day, slowly becoming anonymous, growing, adults, to the level of possible life. Then, like rustic noblemen, we accepted the food.
There was no holocaust: it all wanted to be eaten as badly as we wanted to eat it. Saving nothing for the next day, there and then I made an offering of what I was feeling to what was making me feel. It was a way of living that I hadn’t paid in advance with the suffering of waiting, a hunger born when the mouth is already nearing the food. Because now we were hungry, a complete hunger that encompassed everything down to the crumbs. Whoever was drinking wine, kept an eye on the milk. Whoever slowly drank the milk, tasted the wine someone else was drinking. Outside, God in the acacias. Which existed. We kept eating. As if watering a horse. The carved meat was doled out. The geniality was crude and rural. No one spoke ill of anyone because no one spoke well of anyone. It was a harvest gathering, and there was a truce. We kept eating. Like a horde of living beings, we gradually covered the earth. Busy like people who plow for their existence, and plant, and harvest, and kill, and live, and die, and eat. I ate with the honesty of someone who doesn’t betray the things he eats: I ate that food and not its name. Never was God so taken by what He is. The food was saying crudely, happily, austerely: eat, eat and share. All that belonged to me, it was my father’s table. I ate without tenderness, I ate without the passion of piety. And without offering myself to hope. I ate without longing. And I really did deserve that food. Because I cannot always be my brother’s keeper, and I cannot be my own any longer, oh I don’t want myself any longer. And I don’t want to shape life since existence already exists. It exists like some ground over which we all advance. Without a word of love. Without a word. But your pleasure understands mine. We are strong and we eat. Bread is love among strangers.
The Message
(“A mensagem”)
At first, when the girl said she felt anguish, the boy was so surprised that he blushed and quickly changed the subject to disguise the quickening of his heart.
Yet for a long time now—since he was young—he had boldly outgrown the childish oversimplification of discussing events in terms of “coincidence.” Or rather—having evolved substantially and no longer believing in them—he considered the expression “coincidence” just another play on words and yet another ruse.
Thus, excitedly swallowing the involuntary joy that the truly shocking coincidence that she too felt anguish had provoked in him—he found himself talking to her about his own anguish, and with a girl of all people! he who from a woman’s heart had only ever received a mother’s kiss.
He found himself talking to her, harshly concealing the wonder of finally being able to talk about things that really mattered; and with a girl of all people! They also discussed books, barely able to conceal their urgency to catch up on everything they had never talked about before. Even so, certain words were never exchanged between them. In this case not because the term was yet another trap the others set to fool young people. But from embarrassment. Because he wouldn’t have the nerve to say everything, though she, because she felt anguish, was trustworthy. He’d never even mention a mission, though this most perfect term, which he in a manner of speaking had created, burned in his mouth, anxious to be uttered.
Naturally, the fact that she too suffered had simplified the way you were supposed to treat a girl, because it granted her a masculine quality. He started treating her like a buddy.
She herself also started flaunting her own anguish with a haloed modesty, like a new sex. Being hybrids—not yet settling on an individual way of walking, and not yet possessing a defined handwriting, copying the lesson’s main points in a different hand each day—being hybrids they sought each other out, barely concealing their seriousness. Every once in a while, he still felt that incredulous acceptance of the coincidence: that he, such an original, had found someone who spoke his language! Over time they came to an agreement. All she had to do was say, like a code word, “I had a terrible afternoon yesterday,” for him to know austerely that she suffered the same way he did. There was sadness, pride and daring between them.
Until even the word anguish started to wither, showing how spoken language lied. (They hoped to write some day.) The word anguish started acquiring that tone the others used, and eventually became a source of slight hostility between them. Whenever he was suffering, he would consider it a faux pas for her to speak of anguish. “I’m
already over that word,” he was always over everything before she was, only afterward did the girl ever catch up to him.
And she eventually got tired of being the sole anguished woman in his eyes. Though it gave her an intellectual quality, she was also wary of that kind of misjudgment. Since they both wanted, more than anything, to be authentic. She, for example, didn’t want any mistakes even if they were in her favor, she wanted the truth, bad as it might be. Anyhow, sometimes it was all the better if it were “bad as it might be.” Above all the girl had already started taking no pleasure in being awarded the title of man whenever she showed the slightest hint . . . of being a person. While this flattered her, it offended her a bit: it was as if he were surprised that she was competent, precisely because he didn’t think she was. Still, if they weren’t careful, the fact that she was a woman could suddenly come up. They were careful.
Yet, naturally, there was confusion, no possibility of explaining, and that meant time was passing. Entire months.
And though the hostility between them grew progressively more intense, like hands that come close but never clasp, they couldn’t help seeking each other out. And that was because—if in the mouths of the others being called “young” was an insult—between them “being young” was their mutual secret, and their same irremediable curse. They couldn’t help seeking each other out because, despite their hostility—with the repulsion that members of the opposite sex feel when they don’t desire one another—, despite their hostility, they believed in one another’s sincerity, versus everyone else’s big lie. Neither offended heart forgave everyone else’s lies. They were sincere. And, not being petty, they overlooked the fact that they were good at lying—as if the main thing was solely the sincerity of the imagination. So they kept seeking each other out, vaguely proud of being different from the others, so different that they weren’t even in love. Those others who did nothing but live. Vaguely aware that something rang false in their relationship. Like homosexuals of the opposite sex, and with no possibility of uniting, as one, their separate misfortunes. All they agreed on was the sole point that united them: the error in the world and their tacit certainty that if they didn’t save it they’d be traitors. As for love, they weren’t in love, of course. She’d even told him about her recent crush on a teacher. He’d even managed to tell her—since she was like a man to him—, he’d even managed to tell her, with a coldness that unexpectedly shattered into a horrible pounding of his heart, that a guy has to take care of “certain problems,” if he wants his head clear in order to think. He was sixteen, and she, seventeen. That he, with severity, occasionally took care of certain problems, was something not even his father knew.
The Complete Stories Page 24