The brothers were called Moisés and Elias. If you looked straight at them, Moisés was the one on the left, Elias on the right. For obvious reasons, Moisés was right-handed and Elias left-handed. Except for that detail, they were absolutely identical. But although they were absolutely identical, moved together in perfect harmony, and were indistinguishable to the naked eye, there was a difference that divided them or, perhaps, united them all the more: Elias didn’t talk. Or rather, he talked only into the ear of Moisés, who would, when necessary, immediately give voice to his brother’s whispered words. That’s how it had been since they were children. Some people swore that they’d caught them talking by surprise, exchanging words in a primitive, perhaps foreign tongue, a quasi-animal language. This had never really been proven, but in the hazy penumbra, in the cool, cool shadow cast by the tanks in the scant light, that’s what happened. Elias whispered some incoherent sounds into his brother’s ear, and Moisés listened and repeated out loud what his brother had said.
I NEVER SAW ANYONE more eager to get married than José. The night before the wedding, we were in Judas’s general store, and his wide-open eyes laughed the whole time. Everyone there knew it was a laugh that wished to hide many things, that wished to hide the giant and all the rest. He wanted to marry and he got married, but he was never able to forget what had happened to his wife, because no one else ever forgot, because his wife never forgot, because people when they talk to him are careful not to mention his wife, careful not to mention the giant.
I remember his wife when she was still a little girl, when her father was still alive and worked at the brick kiln. At that time, in midsummer, we would pass by in our wagon at the crack of dawn, on the way to the tract of Senhor Tomé, and her father would already be drawing buckets of water from the well and working the clay with his hoe or kneading it with his feet. At that early hour there were already molds filled with clay and a stack of bricks drying in the still-cool sun. And since she had no mother, she was there too, in her filthy dress, a friendly little girl, and she’d run up to the road, wish us a good day, and hitch a ride for a few yards on the back of the wagon. At day’s end, on our way back to town, we’d see her father in front of the kiln, sweating as if his skin were water, as if his skin were the skin of a river, he’d be in front of the kiln, placing bricks in rows amid the flames and embers. She, with her dress now even filthier, would again come up to us, wish us a good day, and hang on to the end of the wagon. At the top of the road, when we reached the turning, I’d look back and see that lone man, working amid the flames, and that little girl, gleefully running around the brickyard.
ELIAS STOPPED TALKING INTO MOISÉS’S EAR, and the silence, which was there even while he spoke, was now all that the three old men’s faces expressed. For a moment, the oil that dripped into the pails reechoed with importance. For a moment, the shadows. And it was the voice of Moisés, now speaking for himself, that softly sounded, as if his lips weren’t even moving, so soft and tenuous and fragile was his voice.
BEFORE HER FATHER WENT TO THE GRAVE, we went to see him at home, coughing coal and ashes onto the bed, onto the sheets. I remember that it was on a Sunday and in September. He was in an iron bed that screeched with a jolt every time he coughed. José’s future wife was a skinny girl, of some sixteen years marked by hunger and want. She ran this way and that, slithering between us, as if something she did could save her father from dying, as if her bringing a clean toweclass="underline" a towel she’d scrubbed and scrubbed against some stones and dried in the sun: as if her bringing a towel could save her father, who coughed clouds of smoke and spurts of blood as if coughing his lungs out; as if her bringing a glass of milk: milk that she begged for and someone said no, that she begged for and someone else said no, that she begged for and someone gave it to her saying don’t ever come back here: as if a glass of milk could stop him from burning up inside and throwing everything up including the glass of milk.
She ran this way and that because her father was all she had. It was in September, in the afternoon. Her father still wasn’t in the grave, and already I noticed how from time to time the giant would pass by on the street and crouch down to peek through the window.
~ ~ ~
BEFORE MY FATHER WENT TO the grave, the brothers came to see him. What I most remember is how those brothers, hooked together by a finger, were always in the way. I’d turn to the left and find one of them, I’d turn to the right and find the other one, or the same one. I’d return to the bedroom with some warm milk and run up against the back of one or the other, I’d step to one side and be up against an identical back, I’d step to the other side and still the same back, until I’d eventually manage to slip past. Those brothers were like paper dolls joined at the hands, like inseparable dolls condemned to a perpetual line dance. And my father, slowly dying, and I knowing that he was slowly dying but not wanting to believe it. My father, who was all I had, wasting what energy he had left to say tell me how the brickyard’s doing. Slowly dying and asking about the kilns and the well. The brickyard that wasn’t his but that belonged to him more than to Doctor Mateus, who never hauled a bucket of clay, who never touched clay with his hands or feet, who never saw clay. Go and take the rent to Doctor Mateus, sweetie. And I, under the blazing sun, would walk to the Mount of Olives clenching a sweaty banknote in my fist. Finding José there, I’d say here’s the rent money for Doctor Mateus, and José, without even looking at me, would put the banknote in his pocket. On my way back, now more relaxed, I’d stop under the cork trees to cool off, and I’d think about the pretty sadness of José’s eyes. Reaching the brickyard, I’d find my father looking at me in the same way he looked at me before dying, enclosed in a silence of not being able to say what he felt and saying it in a speechless stare. I remember the brothers just sitting there, like vultures on death’s branches, and the massive waist of the giant passing back and forth outside, visible through our flimsy tulle curtains. And my father, silent for prolonged moments, as if meditating on something that only he knew and only he could know, with the same gaze I now see in José, looking straight ahead at nothing. José who, unlike my father, isn’t going to die but who seems to know secrets reserved for the dying. José, lying between the sheets I washed yesterday, all beaten up, his chest wrapped up in a bandage, gazing the way angels on church altars gaze, with wide-open eyes. Wrapped up in a bandage, because yesterday I called for the bonesetter, who, after cracking his knuckles in a symphonic scale, poked his fingertips into José’s flesh. He ran his hands over his back and neck, probing to see if anything was missing, and when he reached his ribs he said whoa, I looked at him and he repeated whoa. Then he silently dug his fingers deep into José’s chest and, after a crack that echoed, said if I hadn’t pulled out that rib, it could have punctured his lungs. I paid him, and he left José wrapped up in a bandage. But his gaze hasn’t changed. Does he think I’m a gaze-setter? The baby fell asleep a while ago, so now I could rest up a little, but I’ve been feeling anxious. This bedroom reminds me of my father’s bedroom when he was dying, and I even have the impression, perhaps by way of suggestion, that the giant’s hulking figure has passed by the window. Back and forth. Like on the day after my father died, his body still fresh and intact under the ground, the worms still not having discovered it but already gnawing at my heart and filling it with grief, the terrible grief of having a dead father, just that one father, just that one person suffering for me and hurting for me and caring about me, and that person no longer existing. On the day after the end of my childhood, the giant knocked on the door and didn’t repeat in a weary voice the usual words of sympathy, chanted like a litany or a curse; he looked at my skinny body and hugged me. Just like that. He hugged me and lifted me in the air and squeezed me hard. Again I was a little girl in her father’s arms, spinning around in her father’s strong arms and smiling in a world made only of mornings and springtimes, a tiny girl who could smile. And on top of the sheets my body ripped and torn as if by the fangs of wolves, my torn body opening up in a gush of blood that didn’t gush. On top of the cold sheets of my father’s bed, sheets like marble, on top of that coldness, the absence of my blood. And the giant, on top of me, saying you whore. Into my ear: you whore. And the bedroom ceiling melting into tears, becoming a night sky in the night. I who had never been with a man or experienced anything like that having to hear, each time the giant’s volcanic respiration warmed my ears, you whore, in gusty breaths: you whore. At the foot of the bed, he buttoned himself up and stared at me, smiling. And I, on top of the sheets, like a broken doll with its hair sticking out, its arms separated from the trunk, its legs yanked loose, its head twisted. The next night the giant returned, and the next night, and the next night, and the next night. I would open the door without looking at him, I’d lower my head, and in my father’s bedroom I’d feel him going through me with a knife. Every night the ceiling would open to show me the stars that didn’t exist in the nocturnal sea of those nights. When my period didn’t come and I fell out of sync with the moon, I said nothing to the giant, since he never heard my voice, since I’ve never to this day spoken to him. My belly grew quickly. After fifteen days, it looked like I’d been carrying for two months; after a month, like four months. When the ice-cold forceps dug inside me, I stopped feeling. I stopped hearing. I stopped seeing. I know that the old woman with rough hands and false teeth was wearing a plastic apron. I know they stretched me out on a hard bed, as on a slaughtering table. I know they stuck a clay bowl beneath me to catch the blood, like the fresh blood of pigs, stirred with a wooden spoon to keep it from coagulating. But I saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing. Deaf and blind, I didn’t even imagine the child that was yanked out of me like a tumor or a hex. It was as if a fog had entered my life, penetrating to my bones and blinding me to what doesn’t exist: mornings, clear skies, spring, and your embraces, Papai. And I was no longer a child. At home, at night, the giant didn’t return. In the street, wrapped in my black mourning shawl, I walked very close to the buildings. Conversations stopped when I came near, and the women or the men stared at me, as if their eyes were probing me, as if they wished to humiliate me with their eyes, as if their eyes were saying you whore, as if their eyes were my conscience that never stopped following me and repeating you whore. By the time of the olive harvest I still hadn’t found work and was living off what my father, in between the solid flakes of smoke he coughed over his asthmatic words, passed on to me: precious little. By the time of the olive harvest, Doctor Mateus’s oldest housekeeper died of old age, worrying as she died about Master Mateus’s breakfast, because for her Doctor Mateus, married and with many sons, was still the little boy whom she’d lovingly helped deliver on linen sheets. I trudged over the paths leading to the Mount of Olives, asked to fill the vacancy, and was hired on the spot, even before Doctor Mateus had eaten his breakfast. And José, who now looks dead but isn’t, for I know the smell of death and it’s very different from glassy eyes meditating on a personal condemnation, José sometimes came by when herding the sheep or when carrying armfuls of firewood, he and his father, to the rich people’s house. At the time old Gabriel was around a hundred years old and tended the vegetables in the garden. I spent the days shut up inside. At night I slept with the other housekeepers on iron beds in the attic. None of them would talk to me. I never again saw Doctor Mateus, who stopped coming to the farmstead. Sometimes postcards for the doctor’s wife would arrive from foreign cities, cities that I invented from the strange photographs of a huge building ending in a point or of a building that was leaning and about to fall, cities that I invented until the cook shouted shut up. Postcards arrived for the doctor’s wife, but she had likewise packed all her bags and left. We were alone, but we did everything as if the rich people were still there. And it was then that, while dusting, I began to hear a voice shut up inside a trunk. A trunk that was old and polished, like all the other trunks, like everything else in the rich people’s house, old and polished, a trunk in the main hallway, beneath a portrait with a handlebar mustache, and inside the trunk a voice. At first I thought it was a person shut up inside, but the cook, one afternoon when the muffled voice talked to me, said pay no attention, it’s just a voice. It talked in a solemn tone, as if it were reading an epic poem from a book, saying: 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. I couldn’t ignore the voice shut up inside a chest. It was a man’s voice. On the week following this discovery, I pretended to have work to do in the main hallway so as to listen to the voice. It said phrases that seemed very true to me, but I never answered, and the voice shut up inside a chest perhaps wasn’t even aware of my presence, though I began to consider it a friend. I would stand there listening and nod my head yes or fix my gaze on the ideas it raised as if it were raising horizons. When the other housekeepers saw me doing nothing, they’d push me out of the main hallway toward the kitchen. The cook would put the wicker baskets in my hands and send me to town on an errand. And through the wheat fields, under the cork trees, I’d follow the sandy, sunlit road to town, and when I arrived