The attempt to live more intensely led them, in turn, into a kind of constant verifying of revenue and expenditures, trying to weigh what was and wasn’t important. They did this in their own way: awkwardly and lacking experience, modestly. They groped along. In a compulsion they both discovered too late in life, each for their own part tried constantly to distinguish what was from what wasn’t essential, that is, they would never have used the word essential, which didn’t belong to their milieu. But the vague, almost embarrassed effort they made came to nothing: the plot eluded them daily. It was only, for example, in looking back at the day that they got the impression of having—somehow and so to speak behind their backs, and thus it didn’t count—the impression of having lived. But by then it was night, they put on their slippers and it was night.
All this never quite created a circumstance for the couple. In other words, something they each could tell even themselves when turning over in bed toward one side and, for a second before falling asleep, lay awake with their eyes open. And people need so badly to tell their own story. They didn’t have anything to tell. With a sigh of comfort, they’d close their eyes and sleep fitfully. And whenever they calculated the balance of their lives, they couldn’t even reckon this attempt to live more intensely, and deduct it, as with income tax. A balance that they gradually started to calculate more frequently, even without the technical equipment of a terminology suited to thoughts. If it was a circumstance, it never managed to become a circumstance for ostensible living.
But that wasn’t the only way it happened. In fact they were also calm because “not guiding,” “not inventing,” “not erring,” was for them, far beyond a habit, a point of honor they had tacitly adopted. They would have never considered disobeying.
They had the proud conviction that came from their noble consciousness of being two people among millions of equals. “Being an equal” had been the role that suited them, and the task that fell to them. The pair, distinguished, solemn, gratefully and civic-mindedly lived up to the trust that their equals had placed in them. They belonged to a caste. The role they played, with some emotion and with dignity, was of anonymous people, children of God, as in a club.
It was perhaps strictly due to the insistent passage of time that all this had started, nevertheless, becoming daily, daily, daily. Sometimes breathless. (The man as much as the woman had already entered the critical age.) They’d open the windows and remark on how hot it was. Without exactly living in tedium, it was if they never got any news. Tedium, anyhow, was part of a life of honest feelings.
Yet, ultimately, since all this was incomprehensible to them, and far, far over their heads, and if expressed in words they wouldn’t recognize it—all this, taken together and considered as already past, resembled that irremediable life. To which they submitted with a silence of the masses and with that slightly wounded look possessed by men of goodwill. It resembled the irremediable life God wanted us for.
An irremediable life, but not a concrete one. In fact it was a life of dreams. Sometimes, when speaking of some eccentric, they’d say with the benevolence one class bears another: “Ah, he leads the life of a poet.” It might be said, taking advantage of the few words known about the couple, it might be said that they led, minus the extravagance, the life of a bad poet: a life of dreams.
No, that’s not true. It wasn’t a life of dreams, since that had never guided them. But of unreality. Despite moments when suddenly, for some reason or other, they sank into reality. And then they felt they had touched the bottom somewhere beyond which no one could go.
As, for example, whenever the husband got home earlier than usual and his wife hadn’t yet returned from some errand or visit. For the husband a flow was then interrupted. He’d carefully sit down to read the paper, immersed in a silence so quiet that even a dead person beside him would have broken it. He feigning with severe honesty a minute absorption in the newspaper, his ears pricked. Just then the husband would touch the bottom with surprised feet. He couldn’t stay that way for long, without the risk of drowning, because touching the bottom also means having water over your head. Thus were his concrete moments. Which made him, logical and sensible as he was, break away quickly. He’d quickly break away, though curiously against his will, since his wife’s absence was such a promise of dangerous pleasure that he got a taste of what disobedience would be like. He’d break away against his will but without arguing, obeying what was expected of him. He wasn’t a deserter who would betray the trust of the others. Besides, if that’s what reality was like, there was no way of living in or off it.
As for the wife, she touched reality more often, since she had more leisure and less of what are called facts, such as coworkers, a crowded bus, administrative terms. She’d sit down to mend clothes, and little by little along came reality. The sensation of sitting there mending clothes was intolerable while it lasted. The sudden manner in which the i was dotted, that way of fitting entirely into whatever existed and of everything remaining so distinctly whatever it was—was intolerable. But, once it faded, it was as if the wife had drunk of a possible future. Gradually this woman’s future was turning into something she brought into the present, something meditative and secret.
It was surprising how untouched they were, for example, by politics, by changes in government, by developments in general, though they sometimes discussed these matters too, like everyone else. Indeed, they were such reserved people that they would have been surprised, flattered, if anyone ever told them they were reserved. They would have never imagined that’s what it was called. They might have understood better if told: “you symbolize our military reserve.” A few acquaintances said of them, after it all happened: they were good people. And there was nothing else to say, since they were.
There was nothing else to say. They lacked the weight of a grave error, which so often just happens to be what opens a door. At some point they’d taken something very seriously. They were obedient.
Not just out of submissiveness: as in a sonnet, it was obedience from love of symmetry. Symmetry was their possible art.
How each came to the conclusion that, alone, without the other, they’d live more—would be a long arc to reconstruct, and a pointless undertaking, since plenty of people have arrived at the same point from all over.
The wife, beneath this continual fantasy, not only rashly arrived at this conclusion but she transformed her life into something broader and more bewildered, richer, and even superstitious. Each thing seemed to signal another, all was symbolic, and even had a touch of spiritualism within the bounds of what Catholicism would allow. Not only did she rashly move on to this but—provoked exclusively by the fact of being a woman—she began to think that another man would save her. Which wasn’t altogether absurd. She knew it wasn’t. Being half right confused her, plunged her into reflection.
The husband, influenced by the milieu of afflicted masculinity in which he lived, and by his own as well, which was shy but effective, started to think that life would be many love affairs.
Dreamy, they began to suffer dreamily, it was heroic to bear. Quiet about their own fleeting visions, disagreeing over the best time to have dinner, one serving as a sacrifice for the other, love is sacrifice.
Thus we arrive at the day on which, long since engulfed in dreams, the woman, taking a bite of an apple, felt one of her front teeth crack. Still holding the apple and looking at herself too closely in the bathroom mirror—and thus losing all perspective—she saw a pale, middle-aged face, with a cracked tooth, and her own eyes . . . Touching the bottom, and with the water already up to her neck, fifty-something years old, without a note, instead of going to the dentist, she threw herself out the apartment window, a person toward whom such gratitude could be felt, that military reserve and pillar of our disobedience.
As for him, once the riverbed ran dry and with no water left to drown in, he walked along the bottom without looking at the ground
, briskly as if using a cane. With the riverbed unexpectedly dry, he walked bewildered and out of danger along the bottom with the nimbleness of someone about to fall on his face.
The Foreign Legion
(“A legião estrangeira”)
If anyone asked me about Ofélia and her parents, I’d have answered with the decorum of honesty: I hardly knew them. Before the same jury I’d answer: I hardly know myself—and to every face in the jury I’d say with the same clear-eyed look of someone hypnotized into obedience: I hardly know you. Yet sometimes I awake from a long slumber and I meekly turn to the delicate abyss of disorder.
I am trying to talk about that family that disappeared years ago without leaving a trace in me, and of whom all I’ve retained is an image tinged green by distance. My unexpected consent to know was provoked today by the fact that a chick turned up in the house. It was brought by a hand that wanted the pleasure of giving me something born. As soon as we released the chick, its charm took us by surprise. Tomorrow is Christmas, but the moment of silence I await all year came a day before Christ’s birth. A thing peeping on its own rouses that ever so gentle curiosity that beside a manger is worship. Well, well, said my husband, and now look at that. He’d felt too big. Dirty, mouths open, the boys approached. I, feeling a bit daring, was happy. The chick, it kept peeping. But Christmas is tomorrow, my older boy said bashfully. We were smiling helplessly, curious.
Yet feelings are the water of an instant. Soon—as the same water is already different when the sun turns it clear, and different when it gets riled up trying to bite a stone, and different over a submerged foot—soon our faces no longer held only aura and illumination. Surrounding the woeful chick, we were kind and anxious. With my husband, kindness makes him gruff and severe, which we’re used to; he crucifies himself a bit. In the boys, who are more solemn, kindness is a kind of ardor. With me, kindness intimidates. In a little while the same water was different, and we watched with strained looks, tangled in our clumsiness at being good. And, the water different still, gradually our faces held the responsibility of a yearning, hearts heavy with a love that was no longer free. What also threw us off was the chick’s fear of us; there we were, and none of us deserved to be in the presence of a chick; with every peep, it scattered us back. With every peep, it reduced us to doing nothing. The steadiness of its fright accused us of a frivolous joy that by then was no longer even joy, it was vexation. The chick’s moment had passed, and it, ever more urgently, was expelling us without letting us go. We, the adults, had already shut down our feelings. But in the boys there was a silent indignation, and their accusation was that we were doing nothing for the chick or for humanity. With us, father and mother, the increasingly endless peeping had already led to an embarrassed resignation: that’s just how things are. But we had never told the boys this, we were ashamed; and we’d been putting off indefinitely the moment to call them and explain clearly that’s how things are. It got harder every time, the silence would grow, and they’d slightly push away the eagerness with which we wanted to offer them, in exchange, love. Since we’d never discussed these things, now we had to hide from them all the more the smiling that ultimately came over us at the desperate peeping from that beak, smiling as if it were up to us to bless the fact that this was just how things are, and we had newly blessed them.
The chick, it kept peeping. On the polished table it didn’t venture a step, a movement, it peeped inwardly. I didn’t even know where there was room for all that terror in a thing made only of feathers. Feathers covering what? a half dozen bones that had come together weakly for what? for the peeping of a terror. In silence, respecting the impossibility of understanding ourselves, respecting the boys’ revolt against us, in silence we watched without much patience. It was impossible to offer it that reassuring word that would make it not be afraid, to console a thing frightened because it was born. How could we promise it would get used to things? A father and mother, we knew how fleeting the chick’s life would be. It knew as well, in that way that living things know: through profound fright.
And meanwhile, the chick full of grace, brief and yellow thing. I wanted for it too to feel the grace of its life, just as we’d been asked to, that being who was a joy for others, not for itself. For it to feel that it was gratuitous, not even necessary—one chick has to be useless—it had been born only for the glory of God, thus it was the joy of men. Yet wanting the chick to be happy just because we loved it was loving our own love. I also knew that only a mother can resolve birth, and ours was the love of those who rejoice in loving: I was caught up in the grace of having been allowed to love, bells, bells ringing because I know how to worship. But the chick was trembling, a thing of terror, not beauty.
The youngest boy couldn’t bear it any longer:
“Do you want to be its mother?”
I said yes, startled. I was the envoy dispatched to that thing that didn’t understand my only language: I was loving without being loved. The mission could fail, and the eyes of four boys awaited with the intransigence of hope my first effective gesture of love. I retreated a little, smiling in total solitude, looked at my family, wanting them to smile. A man and four boys were staring at me, incredulous and trusting. I was the woman of the house, the granary. Why this impassiveness from the five of them, I didn’t get it. How often I must have failed to cause, in my moment of shyness, them to be looking at me. I tried to isolate myself from the challenge of the five men so that I too would put hope in myself and remember what love is like. I opened my mouth, about to tell them the truth: I don’t know how.
But what if a woman came to me at night. What if she were holding her son in her lap. And said: heal my son. I’d say: how is it done? She’d answer: heal my son. I’d say: I don’t know how either. She’d reply: heal my son. So then—so then because I don’t know how to do anything and because I don’t remember anything and because it is night—so then I reach out my hand and save a child. Because it is night, because I am alone in someone else’s night, because this silence is too great for me, because I have two hands in order to sacrifice the better one and because I have no choice.
So I reached out my hand and picked up the chick.
In that moment I saw Ofélia again. And in that moment I remembered that I had borne witness to a little girl.
Later I remembered how the neighbor, Ofélia’s mother, was dusky like a Hindu. She had purplish circles under her eyes that greatly heightened her beauty and gave her an air of fatigue that made men give her a second look. One day, on a bench in the square, while the children were playing, she’d told me with that head of hers, obstinate as someone gazing at the desert: “I’ve always wanted to take a cake-decorating class.” I recalled that her husband—dusky too, as if they’d chosen each other for the dryness of their color—wished to move up in life through his business interests: hotel management or even ownership, I never quite understood. Which gave him a stiff politeness. Whenever we were forced into more prolonged contact in the elevator, he’d accept our exchange of words in a tone of arrogance he brought from greater struggles. By the time we reached the tenth floor, the humility his coldness forced on me had already calmed him somewhat; perhaps he arrived home more satisfied. As for Ofélia’s mother, she was afraid that our living on the same floor would create some kind of intimacy and, without knowing that I too kept to myself, avoided me. Our only moment of intimacy had occurred on that park bench, where, with the dark circles under her eyes and her thin mouth, she’d talked about decorating cakes. I hadn’t known how to respond and ended up saying, so she’d know I liked her, that I’d enjoy that cake class. That single moment in common distanced us even more, for fear of an abuse of understanding. Ofélia’s mother even turned rude in the elevator: the next day I was holding one of the boys by the hand, the elevator was slowly descending, and I, oppressed by the silence that, with the other woman there, was strengthening—said in a pleasant voice that I also immediately found repug
nant:
“We’re on our way to his grandmother’s.”
And she, to my shock:
“I didn’t ask you anything, I never stick my nose in my neighbors’ business.”
“Well,” I said softly.
Which, right there in the elevator, made me think that I was paying for having been her confidante for a minute on the park bench. Which, in turn, made me think she might have figured that she’d confided more than she actually had. Which, in turn, made me wonder whether she hadn’t in fact told me more than either of us realized. As the elevator kept descending and stopping, I reconstructed her insistent and dreamy look on the park bench—and looked with new eyes at the haughty beauty of Ofélia’s mother. “I won’t tell anyone you want to decorate cakes,” I thought glancing at her.
The father aggressive, the mother keeping to herself. An imperious family. They treated me as if I already lived in their future hotel and were offended that I hadn’t paid. Above all they treated me as if I neither believed, nor could they prove who they were. And who were they? I wondered sometimes. Why that slap imprinted on their faces, why that exiled dynasty? And they so failed to forgive me that I acted unforgiven: if I ran into them on the street, beyond my circumscribed sector, it took me by surprise, caught red-handed: I’d stand aside to let them pass, give them the right of way—all three, dusky and dressed up, would walk by as if on their way to mass, that family that lived under the sign of some pride or concealed martyrdom, purple-hued like passion flowers. An ancient family, that one.
But our contact happened through the daughter. She was an extremely beautiful little girl, with long, stiff curls, Ofélia, with dark circles under her eyes just like her mother’s, the same purplish gums, the same thin mouth like a slit. But this one, the mouth, spoke. It led to her showing up at my place. She’d ring the doorbell, I’d open the peephole, not see anything, hear a resolute voice: