He whistled and his dog stood up, rejuvenated. He untied the knot of wires that secured the gate and felt the dog pass between his legs. As the sun at the foot of the sky became stronger, the dog made the sheep leave the pen in a steady stream, and the ones in front, who knew the way, dragged an ever-larger cape of slender bodies behind them, an ocean tide of shorn sheep flouncing in the new morning.
THE WORLD HAS COME TO A STANDSTILL, in a picture where I can only keep going, where my staff can only continue, where I can only keep whittling this broken branch with my jackknife, where my staff can only continue to stand watch over the plain like a venerable old man.
The birds have all flown away. The animals of the ground make no sound. The clouds have all halted. The moment is near at hand. I look into the sun and think: if the punishment that’s my lot can be contained in me, if I can accept it and somehow hold it inside me, perhaps I’ll be spared further judgments, perhaps I can rest. The loud roar of silence surges behind the earth. The fire of the horizon is approaching. And I see him. He walks straight toward me with mechanical steps. His body, larger than a man’s, is like that of a walking tree, like that of a man the size of three men. And each of his steps is equal to three human steps. Beneath the cork trees, the sheep have become lifeless, curled-up balls of wool. Closer now, he looks at me without veering his gaze. Still closer, the rage in his eyes grabs me and slowly pulls me toward him. Right in front of me, he stands perfectly still. We look at each other.
THEY LOOKED AT EACH OTHER. Sitting beneath a tall cork tree, José held his open knife and a whittled piece of branch. Leaning against the same tree, to his right, was the staff. The giant’s unwavering frame blocked the sun and cast a shadow that ended in the round shadow of the tree. Within the silence, as within a dream, the giant began to walk. José looked at him as if waiting, as if a great amount of time had passed during those two long strides, and he felt three successive kicks in the gut, and he didn’t defend himself. He didn’t reach for his staff, he didn’t tighten his grip on the jackknife. The giant opened wide his huge hands and flung him to the ground. José looked at him and didn’t shrink when the giant’s toe-plated boots began to maul his flesh and crack against his bones, kicking him in the back, in the hips, in the shins. The moments that passed in silence and that seemed like an entire night to José were not a night, they were just a few moments within the silence. The sweating giant turned over José’s inert body, and despite the blood and dirt that smeared his skin, José’s gaze was the same. The giant felt like thrashing him some more, thrashing him until that gaze disappeared, but instead he turned around and walked away, without once looking back. José’s abandoned body was like a bush or stone or some other object that the wind slowly sweeps from the landscape. The singing of the sparrows and crickets and cicadas increased. José looked straight at the sun. His hand still held the open jackknife.
PERHAPS A SLIGHT BREEZE has kicked up and the leaves of the cork trees are trembling, like the hands of old people. My body feels crumpled, indented by the bumps in the ground where it lies, submerged in the earth’s frozen waves. Perhaps the birds and animals have come back, to look at me. I see the sun before me, high above me, like a god embracing me with rays of light or of death. I think.
~ ~ ~
THE THREE MEN WERE LEANING against one of the large tanks of olive oil. There were four such tanks, square and very tall, with spigots at the bottom. Under the four spigots were four pails that received, at precise intervals, the tiny shout of dripping oil pierced by a clean, clear light. It was summer in the hot hour of that summer’s day, but there, in that dusky room of the oil press, the summer was hot only in the placid imagination of the three old men; beneath the roof tiles and within the cold walls of old bricks thickly coated with lime, their forgetful bodies remembered cool weather. It was summer and little oil remained in the iron tanks, but the smell that had accumulated over the years wafted in the air, wrapping and penetrating and blending with the old men’s heavy words. Old Gabriel, seated to the far left, looked down as he spoke, lifting his eyes only during the brief silences. Under the black shirt of a very black mourning, his tanned skin was covered by the thick white of an undershirt. Above the cobwebs of his thick beard’s whiskers, his face was marked by a prophetic profusion of wrinkles and by a gaze as large as a pond. He rolled his cap over in his hands.
HE LOOKED DEAD WHEN I FOUND HIM. Day was breaking in the window when I heard his wife knock on the door. I had a clay mug of milk on the fire and didn’t drink it. She said he took the sheep out yesterday and didn’t come back, I spent all night worrying, unable to sleep. She doesn’t talk much. She chooses her words as if choosing oranges from the lower branches, or the healthiest pups from a litter. She said where could he be? Help me. That morning she talked more than usual. Which is perhaps what made me think she was right to be worried. If José hadn’t taken out the sheep, I’d suspect that he’d drunk too much and lost his way returning from Judas’s general store to the Mount of Olives, but he did take them out, and knowing José as I do, from the time he was a boy trailing behind his father, catching crickets and setting traps for the sparrows, I can say, I can guarantee, that only a serious problem would keep him from meeting his obligations. My boots made a dragging sound in the sand. As I walked, I listened and knew that something had happened. He looked dead when I found him. His neck was twisted into a sullen grimace, and his body, stretched out on the ground, was like an inert stone, born there and molded by a strange fortuity into the exact shape of a man. His dog, relieved of the work of keeping all the sheep together throughout the night, ran to me like a child telling me everything. She licked my hands while I petted her on the head. José, like a dead man, kept staring at the sun with his glassy, wide-open eyes. I leaned him against the tree with the help of the dog. Unable to carry him, I went to the farmstead to fetch a wheelbarrow. As I walked up the slope, I couldn’t avoid his wife, who looked at me hard and read my face. She was no longer interested in him but asked how he was, waited for my answer, and returned to her silence, alone. With his legs and arms hanging out of the wheelbarrow and almost touching the ground, José kept his eyes open the whole way. Ahead of us the dog drove the flock. José stared at the sun like a dead man, each beat of his heart raising just slightly his shirt.
TO THE RIGHT OF OLD GABRIEL sat the two brothers with their parallel gazes, fixed on abstract, unfocused points. Their gazes were equal but didn’t see the same thing. They were the same gaze, seeing two different things. During the months when the oil press was idle, it was the brothers who looked after it. Always together, always at each other’s side, they had aged simultaneously: they had the same curve in the back, the same halting gait, and, although they didn’t know it, the very same number of white hairs on their heads. Many more than seventy years had passed since the clear August morning when together they emerged from their mother’s womb, ripping her up inside. Old people told the story, which they’d heard from their parents, of how the mother, as soon as the umbilical cords were cut, looked and saw that they were Siamese twins. She died, without a word, a few minutes later. It was considered to be a terrible tragedy, and the whole town attended her funeral. Everyone expressed to the father their condolences, both for his wife and for his twin sons, for no one imagined that children like that could thrive. But as their mother was being buried, the babies slept under three folded blankets in their father’s bedroom, next to the bed where their mother had bled and perished. The babies slept, their skin all wrinkled, with their joined hands lying on top of the sheet that covered them, as if innocently proud of being brothers. And under the watchful eye of the people around them, they grew up as children do. As they got older, many people looked closely at their hands and were astonished by what they saw: the right hand of one and the left hand of the other were joined by a common little finger. They had very elegant hands, with long and slender fingers, but from the last knuckle of their pinkies, the two fingers were fused and ended in a single fingernail. Everyone who saw this thought of ways to separate them, but the most adamant of all was the man who pulled teeth with pliers. Waxing enthusiastic, he claimed to know men who had amputated many legs and arms in the war, and he said that he’d read a lot of books, complete with diagrams, and that cutting a child’s finger was easier than pruning a grapevine. The father of the brothers asked him but how am I to decide who to leave without a finger? And the man who pulled teeth with pliers promptly answered that he’d already thought of that problem: the fairest thing would be to cut the finger off both of them. The father of the brothers glared at him for a moment and never spoke to him again.