I didn’t sleep during siesta. The dog’s gaze spoke to me again, saying you will walk for a long time in silence.
ON THAT EXPIRING AUGUST EVENING, as he crossed the town under the night sky, the people sitting in their doorways greeted him with surprise in their voice, openly staring at him until he was out of sight. He reached the square wearing the black sheepskin on his back and with an old sack slung over his shoulder by a rope. His body still felt sore from the giant’s kicks and from having been left all night on top of the stones and the protruding roots of the big old cork tree. There was mud on his boots. His trousers weren’t their usual color but that of the sun’s bleaching gaze. His chest was wrapped in the bonesetter’s bandage. His shirt was drenched in sweat. He reached the square and his dog followed him. He entered Judas’s general store: silence. On one side of the counter: the devil’s smile. On the other side: the hunched giant, his head touching the ceiling. The men were scattered, hazy, mixed together, it being impossible to distinguish the beginning of one man from the end of another; men on all sides of the store, wide-eyed and waiting, amid the casks and the smell of wine. José didn’t set down his staff, didn’t set down his sack, didn’t go up to the counter, didn’t trace the veins in the marble with his finger. The giant walked up to José, with a veil made of the charcoal-drawn faces of all the men, and shoved him. In the square, swallowed by night, José stayed on his feet long enough for the giant to knock him down with a kick in the shins. At the door to the general store, the devil smiled in silence; the men, mixed up in an indefinite mass around the square, said nothing but were more silent than that; the giant couldn’t be heard; José wasn’t breathing or, if he was breathing, his breath couldn’t be distinguished from the almost unbearable breeze of absolute silence. The giant’s boots against José’s prostrate body. The giant’s boots against José’s defenseless body. The giant’s boots against the body without body of José without José. The whitewash of the houses surrounding the square was black with night. When the giant got tired, he went away. The devil vanished, smiling. The men slowly walked up to José. Eyes open. The stars. From the store Judas brought, between two fingers and with his pinkie in the air, a glass of red wine that he poured on José’s parched lips. Many arms carried him, like a heavy sack or a corpse, to the wagon of a man José didn’t recognize. The bandage of the bonesetter still squeezed his chest. On the road to the farmstead, crossing through the night as through a storm, the sheepdog followed the wagon.
HE LET THE BABY LAMB RUN FREE on the ground and closed the gate by coiling some rusty wires around a post. The sheep headed for the trough that was filled with clean water from buckets or for wherever else in the dusty pen they wanted to go. José walked toward the house, just a few yards away. And that short distance was so long and so slow. All his sorrow. All his sorrow that was his wife and his believing in her, all his sorrows were packed into that distance. José walked toward the house, and the thrushes, in the gray sky, were not like flames in a fireplace, they were like a forest fire with a gaping mouth swallowing branches and twigs, dry leaves and the sky. The afternoon, dying, slowly entered into José and into the heart of things: into the white walls of the rich people’s house, into the plains that were infinity on all sides, into the shadow of the sheepdog’s gaze. José walked and the afternoon absorbed him, and José walked over the afternoon. And time became distorted, because the time José took to walk those few yards was greater than the time that flowed in his veins or the time of silence between heartbeats. It was a frozen time. Frozen. With thrushes and other birds frozenly flying in the sky that slid past them in an afternoon that refused to die. It was a dead time of anxiety. So much time passed. And, after so much time, José saw the house come toward him. It was finally night. He stood before the door, and entered.
On the table the lamp’s recently lit wick dispersed into the air the weak but unmistakable smell of kerosene. Beneath that steady light José’s wife and their baby, whom she held in her lap, poured long black shadows across the brick floor. With a spoon for stirring coffee she fed him soup. She didn’t look at José. The child had a white dish towel tucked under his collar as a bib and laughed at his father. José’s overcast face was set in a quasi-idiotic expression between laughing and crying. Indifferent because only six months and two weeks old and because no one six months and two weeks old understands the silence of a man weary of anxiety, the boy looked at his father with baby eyes. José’s arms hung limp at his sides, hands open: José’s thick and tired hands, like two old people scorched by the sun, sitting in the sun with their eyes closed, feeling only the sun and all the deaths they’ve outlived, the faces that once were people sunken beneath the earth and the distance of the night under the earth and the enormous distance of the earth on top of the lonely dead, the weight of the earth in José’s abandoned hands. His wife’s eyes were of black stone, perhaps basalt, and cold, and they traced perfectly straight lines, resting sadly on the essential. Her hair was slightly disheveled, and José felt like running his hand through the hair of that lovely woman and saying sweet girl, saying sweet girl, he felt like running his hand through her hair like a breeze, just the palm of his gentle hand, and his fingers, his fingers, the tips of his fingers through her hair, slowly penetrating, slowly passing through her hair, and José saying sweet girl, saying sweet girl. And, in José, the sad despair of having lost all certainties. A man without certainties loses nearly all of what makes him a man. A man without certainties is like a body without flesh, like ideas without thought. A man emptied of certainties. An empty man. Just the shell of a man before a woman he doesn’t know, before a son whom he doesn’t know and who smiles at him. The boy’s hair was curly like José’s. He ate spinach soup as well as bread soup, as if eating soup were important to him. He ate well. He smiled. José’s wife, back curved, fed him soup without a mother’s pride in her son’s appetite. Indifferent. They poured long shadows, like black water, across the brick floor. Without setting down his staff or the sack slung over his shoulder by a rope, without removing the black sheepskin he wore on his back, without saying anything, he headed straight for the town.
WIFE. YOUR WHITE SKIN WAS A SUMMER I wished to live that was denied me. A path that didn’t deceive me. What deceived me was the light and the bleary eyes of relived mornings. What deceived me was a dream of being the son I used to be, running all day through open country and measuring the wheat fields by the breadth of my open arms; I was deceived by a dream of being the son I used to be in the person of your husband and in your eyes, in your son, our own. Now I know that old mornings can’t be relived. New days can’t be built on top of remembered mornings. Perhaps I invented you, starting from a star like one of these. I wanted to have a star and to give it July mornings. Those glorious July mornings in front of our house while my mother finished making lunch, those tasty lunches, and my father arriving home and chiding her, but not seriously, for the lunch not being ready, and I sitting in the dirt, perhaps digging a hole, perhaps playing with my cardboard horse. I had a cardboard horse. I never told you, I told you very little, but I had a cardboard horse. I played with it and it was beautiful. I liked it a lot. A lot. Lots and lots. When my father brought it home, inside genuine wrapping paper, I anxiously started undoing the twine. When I saw it, with its little raised ears and shiny eyes, I stood still in front of it. It was my world for a week, can you believe it? That simple cardboard horse was my world for a week. But on Saturday I left it outside. My father called me for something, my mother called me for something, and I forgot it. Can you believe it? I forgot my cardboard horse in the backyard. How was it possible? How could I not remember it? How do people forget, like that, the things they cherish? I forgot my cardboard horse in the backyard. How could I sleep? How could I pull the covers over my breathing and sleep? How could I just sleep? I forgot my cardboard horse in the backyard, can you believe it? And that night it rained. On Sunday morning I woke up with lightning flashing in my eyes and thunder roaring in my chest: the cardboard horse? My cardboard horse? I ran to the backyard, racing through the kitchen in my underwear, I ran barefoot and, amid the puddles of clean water and the wet earth and drops of water hanging from the leaves of trees, I found the cardboard horse in the backyard where I’d left it. It was an amorphous pile of pulp in which I could make out two sad, glittering eyes, its washed-out colors painting the ground and the stones. I knelt before it and cried. That morning I cried. It was my father who pulled me away from there. For you, for our son, for me, I wanted a cardboard horse, without any rain. I wanted an impossible fantasy, without the blame that’s inevitable. The blame that you and I didn’t have. The fact that we exist guaranteeing condemnation. Like a precipice at the end of a race: the runners having to cross the finish line and that finish line being on the edge of a cliff. Or like a knife hanging over us, a knife that will sink into our back at any moment, for no reason, a knife we sometimes look at and we know that it’s there ready to fall and that it will fall, at any moment, for no reason. A knife sunken in our back, to make us suffer or to make us die suffering. I didn’t choose this fate. I chose roads suspecting that they were all the same. And they were all the same. I chose no roads, including this one. I didn’t choose this night that makes me go back into town, that makes me go back to Judas’s general store in search of the devil’s false smile. This night that walks with my legs and that makes me, forces me, to go back to the giant. And you know very well that I don’t want to; you know, even as you know your own name and other obvious things, you know I don’t want and didn’t choose this. It’s true that I’m going. I walk and whoever sees me imagines it’s my will. The way I’m walking is precisely my way of walking. I didn’t choose this, don’t want this, but I’m not going unwillingly. I know it’s impossible not to go. It’s impossible not to go. Impossible not to. Impossible. The sheepdog follows me, and between the grinding of my own slow steps I can hear the dog’s quick, light paws. In the darkness the cicadas sketch the vastness of the plains with their song. I think: life is a punishment, a punishment with no sin or blame, a punishment without redemption; life is a punishment that nothing hinders and nothing authorizes. I imagine you watching this night from the balcony of my eyes and entering into this forest of a thousand uncounted stars, these stars that aren’t enough to light up the earth but that light up tiny circumferences of sky surrounding them. I imagine you listening to me as perhaps you lull the baby to sleep with the lullabies that your father put you to sleep with when you were little and that he whistled in the brickyard in the afternoon.