I WALK ON THE ROAD, surrounded by the plain, and I think of José’s father, surrounded by death. The nocturnal plain of death. Nocturnal, even if all of this is the day, all of this indefinite light that defines things. This plain. And all this land that makes me wish I were big enough to lie down on top of it and cover it all. All of this plain that transcends time. This profoundly sad plain, buried in its own eternity. The wagons with the field workers pass by. They’re tired and carry a bit of this plain in their faces. They look at me and rob a little strength from their bodies to greet me while they pass by. I, appreciative, greet them in return. Tomorrow, very early in the morning, they’ll make this trip again, and they’ll make it so many times, so many times, that one day they won’t know if to return means to return home, at day’s end, or if it means to return to the fields, at dawn. To where I’m going, to wherever I go, the plain goes with me. The cork trees and the holm oaks vanish behind me and are replaced by cork trees and holm oaks. I see wrinkly young corks growing which, a few yards later, turn into tall and broad cork trees. I walk and am nearing the farmstead. I’ve reached the slope. I feel the road’s many stones under my feet. I feel their oldness under my feet. José’s wife is watering the little garden that the rich woman likes to see kept up. Good afternoon. The door to José’s house is open and I enter. His son, sitting against a pillow on a quilt, holds a wooden spoon in his hand. He looks at me with more intensity than a baby is capable of. He’ll soon be a man. In the bedroom, José’s wide-eyed gaze is that of an orphan in the moment when he becomes an orphan. I sit down in front of him. I look at him trying to see inside him, but there’s a barrier that won’t let me, a black wall, like a tightly drawn curtain of night. Outside José’s wife has leaned against the wall. I know this not because I see her or hear the slightest movement but because I feel her through the wall and because I hear the faint sound of her listening, for there’s no action that doesn’t have a sound, and that sound can be identified if we’re sufficiently attentive and have lived long enough to know these things. José just lies there. I hope he can hear and understand my words. I tell him don’t go back into town anytime soon, don’t go, I’ve heard that the devil means to do you more harm, I’ve heard he has a grudge against you and means to do you more harm; if you have any respect or consideration for me, don’t go back into town; for your miserable father’s sake, for your mother who so loved you, for your son in the next room, don’t go back into town; wait a month or two, I beg you, but don’t go back into town anytime soon.
~ ~ ~
PEOPLE ARE A SMALL PART OF the world, and I don’t understand people. I know what they do and the immediate motives for what they do, but to know this is to know what’s plain to see, it’s to know nothing at all. I think: perhaps people are, perhaps they exist, with no explanation for it; perhaps people are pieces of chaos on top of the disorder they enclose, and perhaps this explains them. There was a sun inside of a sun inside of a sun in my gaze, but I know that today, beyond me and beyond the utterly nocturnal light that I’ve become, a night went by, out there in the sky, out there in the room where I lie. I know that my wife and son slept soundly. I was tortured by monsters molded in the darkness out of the sun that blinds me, with huge feet and huge claws that ripped at what I am, while they slept soundly. It’s better this way. Better that I suffer and am defeated, letting nothing touch your gazes, which I’ve always sought to protect. I’ve always sought to protect you from what destroys slowly instead of killing at once. I’ve always sought to defend you, and even in that I was defeated, I was defeated in everything, for I know that, sooner or later, your faces will also know suffering; sooner or later you too, dear wife whom I loved more than anything, will die, and you, my dear son, will die. For a while our tombstones in the cemetery will be cared for and visited by those we left behind, but they too will die one day, and our tombstones will be overrun by moss and grass, and the people who pass by us won’t stop, and even those we left behind won’t be remembered by anyone, because everything they loved will have died; and that house that was important to us will have disappeared, perhaps a cork tree will grow up in its stead, and the cemetery where we were buried will be razed, and someone we never knew will plow the land into which we were transformed, and that someone who won’t remember us will plow the land thinking perhaps of his children and dreaming of the future and forgetting that he too will die and become earth, as well as his small children and his children’s children. I know that a morning or an afternoon or a day came and went and that old Gabriel came to see me. He said words that to me were indistinguishable from music, the music of harps, and I discovered that old Gabriel isn’t a man. No man could resist more than a hundred years without his body getting tired or his enthusiasm for life running out. I envy him. I remember being little and seeing him in the garden, raising his hoe and driving it into the earth with all his might; I remember everything he taught me, and how together we’d steal birds from their nests, as if we were the same age but always knowing that we weren’t; I remember the great respect he showed for me and that I showed him in return, never out of obligation. Today I respect you even more, and I know that my son will also learn from you, I know that my son will also discover with you the smell of turned earth, the sound of the hoe digging into the ground. And there can be no sadness in that. He said words I couldn’t decipher, because they were transformed into music as they left his mouth. A music like I’ve never heard, a music of instruments I don’t recognize but presume to be harps, since harps are the instruments of angels. He said words I couldn’t decipher, because they weren’t to be deciphered, even if old Gabriel’s gaze tried its best. And the night returned. No doubt about that. The night always returns.
A NIGHT WENT BY. The morning dawned across the plain and on the roof of the rich people’s house, and José got out of bed as if it were just another morning after having slept a good night’s sleep. His wife also woke up. She began to get dressed and didn’t lift her eyes off the floor, not even when José stopped to stare at her, throwing everything else in his gaze out of focus. José went outside and took a deep breath. It was a fine morning for coming back to life. Although it was still early, the first heat could already be felt in a very soft breeze, or in the passage of José’s skin through the air. He walked around the waterwheel. He went up to the washtub and, seeing that it was full of clean water, he dipped in his hands, looking at them for a long time as if waiting for them to release something, as if they were covered with blood and the blood would slowly break loose; he lowered his face to the tub and, on an impulse, lifted his cupped hands and doused his face with water: once, twice. The water ran down his face, and he didn’t feel the coolness he’d expected, he didn’t feel himself wake up or be born. He couldn’t fool his weariness with the cool, clean water. By then the sheepdog was already at his heels. And José and the dog slowly walked to the gates that shut up the flock. All the sheep were lying under the roof. There were about two hundred sheep lying under a roof that didn’t even protect them from the wind, rain, or sun; two hundred sheep under a few rows of roof tiles supported by old joists, roof tiles held up in the air by pinewood posts made shiny by the friction of the sheep’s wool and imbued with their smell. In the feed troughs there were still vestiges of the armfuls of hay that old Gabriel had placed there the night before. The sheepdog pushed against the gate that José opened by undoing a tangle of wires. The dog ran in and drove the sheep out with barks that sounded very different from when she was young, with monotonous barks that nonetheless made the sheep react and crowd around the gate in their haste to get out. Supporting most of his weight on his staff, José slowly followed behind the sheep. The dog, working endlessly, ran around the flock to keep it together and to make it wait for the shepherd. José was the shadow of a man who was very tired and far away from that landscape, or very close and inside the plain and the infant sun; he was the shadow of a man with a staff in his hand and, on his back, the black hide of a sheep that he had raised and that he always remembered when he wore its hide like a coat, but not because the sheep was different from others. He was the shadow of a man in the morning, with a sack slung over his shoulder by a rope and with a baby lamb under his arm.