The next day, the first day of autumn, José, when he woke up, wanted to see his wife’s eyes and to see her get dressed. Lying down, he noticed her belly. He got close and ran his hand over her belly. It was a hard mound, rising above her navel and making his hand rise as it passed over it. They looked at each other, and the sun that was in the morning entered the bedroom. José tended the sheep and went into town. In his sister’s backyard he sat down next to his father. They sat there all afternoon, and in a moment no different from the others, he announced I’m going to be a father. José kept looking at where he was looking. José’s father kept looking at where he was looking. The afternoon slowly hung there, indifferent to all this.
I THINK: PERHAPS THERE’S A LIGHT INSIDE PEOPLE, perhaps a clarity; perhaps people aren’t made of darkness, perhaps certainties are a breeze inside people, and perhaps people are the certainties they possess.
THAT SAME WEEK MOISÉS MARRIED THE COOK. Both were more than seventy years old, but both conserved a pungency salted by many summers, by seventy summers. Elias was his brother’s male witness. The other witnesses were paid. No one was invited to the wedding. Moisés and the cook slept in the same bed and touched each other. Winter was already bringing a breeze that, in the early morning, could be called chilly, when Moisés brought home a basket full of oranges. With remarkable dexterity Elias peeled oranges with just one hand, using one finger to secure the rinds, another to remove the seeds, and a third finger to hold on to the seeds, and he separated the segments one by one, eating them with evident relish. The cook looked at them more intently than usual, but they suspected nothing. On the dining table flowers cut out of carrots and tomatoes blossomed from inside a lettuce salad, flowers that sprouted among the lettuce leaves and formed a bud that opened up in a magnificent flower. On the platter a little woman with green-pea eyes and hair made of bread tucked a baby boy into a bread-soup cradle. Moisés ate the little woman, carved out of a chicken breast, and Elias ate the cradle and the baby boy, carved from a chicken leg. That night, as the three of them went to sleep, the cook assumed a serious expression and said you’re going to be a father. A smile slowly formed on Moisés’s blank face. A smile formed on the cook’s stern face. And not for a moment did they remember that they were more than seventy years old.
~ ~ ~
AS THE JUST-ARRIVED SHEEP greedily ripped into the grass with their teeth, filling the air with the sound of stubble being pulled and torn, I sat down under the big old cork tree. I stretched out my legs, and the sheepdog looked at me with a mournful gaze. A melancholy gaze that didn’t last more than a fraction of an instant, a gaze that told me everything’s going to end. A gaze that told me you’ll go home to the farmstead, as we do every day, but the night will pass more slowly; you’ll look over your shoulder at the last twists and turns of the thrushes in the sky and at that moment you’ll want to be a thrush; your boots will feel heavier and the earth heavier, to dissuade you from going. A gaze that told me when it’s time to drive the sheep back to the farmstead, you won’t feel like getting up from under the cork tree, you’ll feel like curling up and pretending that you don’t exist and that the earth has swallowed you and that you’re no longer responsible for anything. A gaze that told me it will be hard to cross the threshold of the door to your house, you’ll look at the just-fallen night inviting you to be black, to blend with it, and to become perhaps a star.
IN THE MAIN HALLWAY OF THE RICH PEOPLE’S HOUSE, José’s wife was sitting before the voice shut up in a chest and heard it say: perhaps the sky is a huge sea of fresh water and we, instead of walking under it, walk on top of it; perhaps we see everything upside down and the earth is a kind of sky, so that when we die, when we die, we fall and sink into the sky.
THE SHEEPDOG WANDERED OFF, like a sad thought. The sheep kept ripping at the deep-rooted stubble, and the baby lamb, which I usually carried under my arm, since it couldn’t keep up with the others, suckled its grazing mother. The baby lamb, with a slender body, short and softer wool, and pretty, with a pretty voice, shrill like early mornings, busily sucking warm milk, its eyes closed. The sheep all shorn. Divided into gentle groups and folding over the contour of the land, they merged with it a little. In the time when my father was a shepherd and Doctor Mateus still cared about the farmstead and its affairs, the doctor thought that the sheep should be identified with his mark. I remember the men laughing or smiling as they branded the sheep amid a clamor of protests, baa-aa-aa-aa-aa, using a branding iron with the letter M inside a circle, an iron that they dipped in blue ink while saying who’s next, who’s next? They smiled and laughed, because the flock could never get mixed up with any other flock, since all the pastures to which they went belonged to Doctor Mateus, and all the lands and paths and roads on which they set foot belonged to Doctor Mateus; they smiled and laughed with the morning. These are the things that make up a man’s life, I remember thinking. I thought this because I looked at the sky: the sky painted in the open spaces between the leaves of the cork tree, another plain above the plain, passing a little over the summit and falling behind it, the sky that held the sun and that wasn’t just its light but managed, in its limpid visage, to be yet more light; the pure and serene sky, which I could say is infinitely pure, and serene enough to be dead, were it not for its overwhelming blood, its vast blood that’s above us and before us and inside us, its undeniable and almost visible blood, forever ready to be our blood and to constitute our life, should we happen to look at it. I remember the sky on that day when the men laughed and smiled and branded the sheep. I looked at the sky. And now I remember the sky on that day when the sheep looked sad to my eyes, the sheep that once had no mark; the sky on that day so sad, because on that day I died a little more under the sky to which I nearly said farewell or to which I ridiculously did say farewell; the sky that looked at me with pity and without lying, enlightening me with what I once could have been, with what I am, wished to be, and won’t ever be; the sky sincere like a sheepdog’s gaze, like a mother’s gaze, like a sky.