Four weeks after the Negro had stopped coming to the band, Nabo was combing the tail of one of the horses. He’d never done that. He would just curry them and sing in the meantime. But on Wednesday he’d gone to the market and had seen a comb and had said to himself: ‘That comb is for combing the horses’ tails.’ That was when the whole thing happened with the horse that gave him a kick and left him all mixed up for the rest of his life, ten or fifteen years before. Somebody in the house said: ‘It would have been better if he’d died that day and hadn’t gone on like this, all through, talking nonsense for the rest of his life.’ But no one had seen him again ever since the day we locked him up. Only we knew that he was there, locked up in the room, and since then the girl hadn’t moved the gramophone again. But in the house we had very little interest in knowing about it. We’d locked him up as if he were a horse, as if the kick had passed the sluggishness on to him and encrusted on his forehead was all the stupidity of horses: animalness. And we left him isolated within four walls as if we’d decided he should die of imprisonment because we weren’t cold-blooded enough to kill him in any other way. Fourteen years passed like that until one of the children grew up and said he had the urge to see his face. And he opened the door.
Nabo saw the man again. ‘A horse kicked me,’ he said. And the man said: ‘You’ve been saying that for centuries and in the meantime we’ve been waiting for you in the choir.’ Nabo shook his head again, sank his wounded forehead into the hay once more, and thought he suddenly remembered how things had happened. ‘It was the first time I ever combed a horse’s tail,’ he said. And the man said: ‘We wanted it that way so you would come and sing in the choir.’ And Nabo said: ‘I shouldn’t have bought the comb.’ And the man said: ‘You would have come across it in any case. We’d decided that you’d find the comb and comb the horses’ tails.’ And Nabo said: ‘I’d never stood behind them before.’ And the man, still tranquil, still not showing impatience: ‘But you did stand there and the horse kicked you. It was the only way for you to come to the choir.’ And the conversation, implacable, daily, went on until someone in the house said: ‘It must be fifteen years since anyone opened that door.’ The girl (she hadn’t grown, she was over thirty and was beginning to get sad in her eyelids) was sitting looking at the wall when they opened the door. She turned her face in the other direction, sniffing. And when they closed the door, they said again: ‘Nabo’s peaceful. There’s nothing moving inside anymore. One of these days he’ll die and we won’t be able to tell except for the smell.’ And someone said: ‘We can tell by the food. He’s never stopped eating. He’s fine like that, locked up with no one to bother him. He gets good light from the rear side.’ And things stayed like that; except that the girl kept on looking toward the door, sniffing the warm fumes that filtered through the cracks. She stayed like that until early in the morning, when we heard a metallic sound in the living room and we remembered that it was the same sound that had been heard fifteen years before when Nabo was winding the gramophone. We got up, lighted the lamp, and heard the first measures of the forgotten song; the sad song that had been dead on the records for such a long time. The sound kept on, more and more strained, until a dry sound was heard at the instant we reached the living room, and we could still hear the record playing and saw the girl in the corner beside the gramophone, looking at the wall and holding up the crank. We didn’t say anything, but went back to our rooms remembering that someone had told us sometime that the girl knew how to crank the gramophone. Thinking that, we stayed awake, listening to the worn little tune from the record that was still spinning on what was left of the broken spring.
The day before, when they opened the door, it smelled of biological waste, of a dead body. The one who had opened it shouted: ‘Nabo! Nabo!’ But nobody answered from inside. Beside the opening was the empty plate. Three times a day the plate was put under the door and three times a day the plate came out again with no food on it. That was how we knew that Nabo was alive. But by no other means. There was no more moving inside, no more singing. And it must have been after they closed the door that Nabo said to the man: ‘I can’t go to the choir.’ And the man asked why. And Nabo said: ‘Because I haven’t got any shoes.’ And the man, raising his feet, said: ‘That doesn’t matter. Nobody wear shoes here.’ And Nabo saw the hard, yellow soles of the bare feet the man was holding up. ‘I’ve been waiting for you here for an eternity,’ the man said. ‘The horse only kicked me a moment ago,’ Nabo said. ‘Now I’ll throw a little water on my face and take them out for a walk.’ And the man said: ‘The horses don’t need you anymore. There aren’t any more horses. You’re the one who should come with us.’ And Nabo said: ‘The horses should have been here.’ He got up a little, sank his hands into the hay while the man said: ‘They haven’t had anyone to look after them for fifteen years.’ But Nabo was scratching the ground under the hay, saying: ‘The comb must still be here.’ And the man said: ‘They closed up the stable fifteen years ago. It’s full of rubbish now.’ And Nabo said: ‘Rubbish doesn’t collect in one afternoon. Until I find the comb I won’t move out of here.’
On the following day, after they’d fastened the door again, they heard the difficult movements inside once more. No one moved afterward. No one said anything again when the first creaks were heard and the door began to give way under unusual pressure. Inside something like the panting of a penned animal was heard. Finally the groan of rusty hinges was heard as they broke when Nabo shook his head again. ‘Until I find the comb, I won’t go to the choir,’ he said. ‘It must be around here somewhere.’ And he dug in the hay, breaking it, scratching the ground, until the man said: ‘All right Nabo. If the only thing you’re waiting for to come to the choir is to find the comb, go look for it.’ He leaned forward, his face darkened by a patient haughtiness. He put his hands against the barrier and said: ‘Go ahead Nabo. I’ll see that nobody stops you.’
And then the door gave way and the huge bestial Negro with the harsh scar marked on his forehead (in spite of the fact that fifteen years had passed) came out stumbling over the furniture, his fists raised and menacing, still with the rope they had tied him with fifteen years before (when he was a little black boy who looked after the horses); and (before reaching the courtyard) he passed by the girl, who remained seated, the crank of the gramophone still in her hand since the night before (when she saw the unchained black force she remembered something that at one time must have been a word) and he reached the courtyard (before finding the stable), after having knocked down the living-room mirror with his shoulder, but without seeing the girl (neither beside the gramophone nor in the mirror), and he stood with his face to the sun, his eyes closed, blind (while inside the noise of the broken mirror was still going on), and he ran aimlessly, like a blindfolded horse instinctively looking for the stable door that fifteen years of imprisonment had erased from his memory but not from his instincts (since that remote day when he had combed the horse’s tail and was left befuddled for the rest of his life), and leaving behind catastrophe, dissolution, and chaos like a blindfolded bull in a roomful of lamps, he reached the back yard (still without finding the stable), and scratched on the ground with the tempestuous fury with which he had knocked down the mirror, thinking perhaps that by scratching on the ground he could make the smell of mare’s urine rise up again, until he finally reached the stable doors and pushed them too soon, falling inside on his face, in his death agony perhaps, but still confused by that fierce animalness that a half-second before had prevented him from hearing the girl, who raised the crank when she heard him pass and remembered, drooling, but without moving from the chair, without moving her mouth but twirling the crank of the gramophone in the air, remembered the only word she had ever learned to say in her life, and shouted it from the living room: ‘Nabo! Nabo!’
Someone Has Been Disarranging These Roses
Since it’s Sunday and it’s stopped raining, I think I’ll take a bouquet of roses to my grave. Red and white roses,
the kind that she grows to decorate altars and wreaths. The morning has been saddened by the taciturn and overwhelming winter that has set me to remembering the knoll where the townspeople abandon their dead. It’s a bare, treeless place, swept only by the providential crumbs that return after the wind has passed. Now that it’s stopped raining and the noonday sun has probably hardened the soapy slope, I should be able to reach the grave where my child’s body rests, mingled now, dispersed among snails and roots.
She is prostrate before her saints. She’s remained abstracted since I stopped moving in the room, when I failed in the first attempt to reach the altar and pick the brightest and freshest roses. Maybe I could have done it today, but the little lamp blinked and she, recovered from her ecstasy, raised her head and looked toward the corner where the chair is. She must have thought: ‘It’s the wind again,’ because it’s true that something creaked beside the altar and the room rocked for an instant, as if the level of the stagnant memories in it for so long had shifted. Then I understood that I would have to wait for another occasion to get the roses because she was still awake, looking at the chair, and she would have heard the sound of my hands beside her face. Now I’ve got to wait until she leaves the room in a moment and goes to the one next door to sleep her measured and invariable Sunday siesta. Maybe then I can leave with the roses and be back before she returns to this room and remains looking at the chair.
Last Sunday was more difficult. I had to wait almost two hours for her to fall into ecstasy. She seemed restless, preoccupied, as if she had been tormented by the certainty that her solitude in the house had suddenly become less intense. She took several turns about the room with the bouquet of roses before leaving it on the altar. Then she went out into the hallway, turned in, and went to the next room. I knew that she was looking for the lamp. And later, when she passed by the door again and I saw her in the light of the hall with her dark little jacket and her pink stockings, it seemed to me now that she was still the girl who forty years ago had leaned over my bed in that same room and said: ‘Now that they’ve put in the toothpicks your eyes are open and hard.’ She was just the same, as if time hadn’t passed since that remote August afternoon when the women brought her into the room and showed her the corpse and told her: ‘Weep, he was like a brother to you,’ and she leaned against the wall, weeping, obeying, still soaked from the rain.
For three or four Sundays now I’ve been trying to get to where the roses are, but she’s been vigilant in front of the altar, keeping watch over the roses with a frightened diligence that I hadn’t known in her during the twenty years she’s been living in the house. Last Sunday, when she went out to get the lamp, I managed to put a bouquet of the best roses together. At no moment had I been closer to fulfilling my desires. But when I was getting ready to return to the chair, I heard her steps in the corridor again. I rearranged the roses on the altar quickly and then I saw her appear in the doorway with the lamp held high.
She was wearing her dark little jacket and the pink stockings, but on her face there was something like the phosphorescence of a revelation. She didn’t seem then to be the woman who for twenty years has been growing roses in the garden, but the same child who on that August afternoon had been brought into the next room so that she could change her clothes and who was coming back now with a lamp, fat and grown old, forty years later.
My shoes still have the hard crust of clay that had formed on them that afternoon in spite of the fact that they’ve been drying beside the extinguished stove for forty years. One day I went to get them. That was after they’d closed up the doors, taken down the bread and the sprig of aloe from the entrance-way, and taken away the furniture. All the furniture except for the chair in the corner which has served me as a seat all this time. I knew that the shoes had been set to dry and they didn’t even remember them when they abandoned the house. That’s why I went to get them.
She returned many years later. So much time had passed that the smell of musk in the room had blended in with the smell of the dust, with the dry and tiny breath of the insects. I was alone in the house, sitting in the corner, waiting. And I had learned to make out the sound of rotting wood, the flutter of the air becoming old in the closed bedrooms. That was when she came. She had stood in the door with a suitcase in her hand, wearing a green hat and the same little cotton jacket that she hadn’t taken off ever since then. She was still a girl. She hadn’t begun to get fat and her ankles didn’t swell under her stockings as they do now. I was covered with dust and cobwebs when she opened the door, and, somewhere in the room, the cricket who’d been singing for twenty years fell silent. But in spite of that, in spite of the cobwebs and the dust, the sudden reluctance of the cricket and the new age of the new arrival, I recognized in her the girl who on that stormy August afternoon had gone with me to collect nests in the stable. Just the way she was, standing in the doorway with the suitcase in her hand and her green hat on, she looked as if she were suddenly going to shout, say the same thing she’d said when they found me face up on the hay-covered stable floor still grasping the railing of the broken stairs. When she opened the door wide the hinges creaked and the dust from the ceiling fell in clumps, as if someone had started hammering on the ridge of the roof, then she paused on the threshold, coming halfway into the room after, and with the voice of someone calling a sleeping person she said: ‘Boy! Boy!’ And I remained still in the chair, rigid, with my feet stretched out.
I thought she had come only to see the room, but she continued living in the house. She aired out the room and it was as if she had opened her suitcase and her old smell of musk had come from it. The others had taken the furniture and clothing away in trunks. She had taken away only the smells of the room, and twenty years later she brought them back again, put them in their place, and rebuilt the little altar, just the way it was before. Her presence alone was enough to restore what the implacable industry of time had destroyed. Since then she has eaten and slept in the room next door, but she spends the day in this one, conversing silently with the saints. In the afternoons she sits in the rocker next to the door and mends clothing. And when someone comes for a bouquet of roses, she puts the money in the corner of the kerchief that she ties to her belt and invariably says: ‘Pick the ones on the right, those on the left are for the saints.’
That’s the way she’s been for twenty years, in the rocker, darning her things, rocking, looking at the chair as if now she weren’t taking care of the boy with whom she had shared her childhood afternoons but the invalid grandson who has been sitting here in the corner ever since the time his grandmother was five years old.
It’s possible that now, when she lowers her head again, I can approach the roses. If I can manage to do so I’ll go to the knoll, lay them on the grave, and come back to my chair to wait for the day when she won’t return to the room and the sounds will cease in all the rooms.
On that day there’ll be a change in all this, because I’ll have to leave the house again in order to tell someone that the rose woman, the one who lives in the tumble-down house, is in need of four men to take her to the knoll. Then I’ll be alone forever in the room. But, on the other hand, she’ll be satisfied. Because on that day she’ll learn that it wasn’t the invisible wind that came to her altar every Sunday and disarranged the roses.
The Night of the Curlews
We were sitting, the three of us, around the table, when someone put a coin in the slot and the Wurlitzer played once more the record that had been going all night. The rest happened so fast that we didn’t have time to think. It happened before we could remember where we were, before we could get back our sense of location. One of us reached his hand out over the counter, groping (we couldn’t see the hand, we heard it), bumped into a glass, and then was still, with both hands resting on the hard surface. Then the three of us looked for ourselves in the darkness and found ourselves there, in the joints of the thirty fingers piled up on the counter. One of us said:
‘Let’s go.??
?
And we stood up as if nothing had happened. We still hadn’t had time to get upset.
In the hallway, as we passed, we heard the nearby music spinning out at us. We caught the smell of sad women sitting and waiting. We felt the prolonged emptiness of the hall before us while we walked toward the door, before the other smell came out to greet us, the sour smell of the woman sitting by the door. We said:
‘We’re leaving.’
The woman didn’t answer anything. We heard the creak of a rocking chair, rising up as she stood. We heard the footsteps on the loose board and the return of the woman again, when the hinges creaked once more and the door closed behind us.
We turned around. Right there, behind us, there was a harsh, cutting breeze of an invisible dawn, and a voice that said:
‘Get out of the way. I’m coming through with this.’
We moved back. And the voice spoke again:
‘You’re still against the door.’
And only then, when we’d moved to all sides and had found the voice everywhere, did we say:
‘We can’t get out of here. The curlews have pecked out our eyes.’
Then we heard several doors open. One of us let go of the other hands and we heard him dragging along in the darkness, weaving, bumping into the things that surrounded us. He spoke from somewhere in the darkness.
‘We must be close,’ he said. ‘There’s a smell of piled-up trunks around here.’
We felt the contact of his hands again. We leaned against the wall and another voice passed by then, but in the opposite direction.