MASTER RAFAEL AND SALOMÃO went their separate ways on the streets leading them home. At that hour lunch was waiting for them amid the evasive glances of their wives. As they walked to their respective homes under the same sun, Master Rafael thought of Salomão’s naïve joy, and Salomão thought of Master Rafael’s anguish. They crossed the threshold at the same time. They felt the shade cover their skin with a coolness that disagreed with Master Rafael but that was soothing to Salomão, and they went back to thinking of themselves. Salomão sat down. Master Rafael laid his crutch on the table and sat down. The table was already set for both. The blind prostitute bustled about the kitchen, dodging Master Rafael’s veering head, whose wide-open left eye tried to follow her motions. Salomão’s wife ran between the widowed cook and the stove, stirring the water and soup that boiled inside the pot, and making her mother comfortable in her chair. Both women put the food on the table at the same time; both sat down at the same time. Salomão’s wife began to spoon soup into her mother’s panting mouth. The blind prostitute calmly began to eat. Salomão and Master Rafael simultaneously opened their mouths to say something and simultaneously let their words dangle, unspoken, as they swallowed their first spoonful of soup.
I LOOK STRAIGHT AT THE SUN. The trunk of the big old cork tree slowly fuses with my back and turns me into wood. The earth slowly fuses with my stretched legs and turns me into earth. I look straight at the sun. My gaze is sunlight.
MASTER RAFAEL AND SALOMÃO looked at their wives at the same moment and closed the door behind them. Salomão’s boots, touching the earth, kicked a stone here and there. Master Rafael’s crutch and boot, touching the earth, carefully avoided the stones in their path. The sunlight smoldered on their skin. Master Rafael tilted his cap. Salomão tilted his cap. Something slowly died and something slowly lit up in both of them. Master Rafael slowly began to remember Salomão’s naïve happiness. Salomão slowly began to remember Master Rafael’s anguish. And they met, as if they’d expected to, at the point where the two streets met. Together, without talking, they walked to the carpenter’s shop.
~ ~ ~
DAWN. THE GRASS SLOWLY lifting. Rustling sounds from far away, farther than on other days, waking up like a very old man returning to life with his meager strength. It was Saturday, and therefore a different and special day. The sun, a ball of fire, appeared on the horizon later than on other days, pouring its unbridled river of flames across the streets and fields, burning what it had spared the day before. It was summer. In every nook and cranny a light was growing that only children could see. A gentle light that only illuminated. Dawn slowly took shape in the air and in the birds’ keen eyes as a new morning. The sky was a transparent place that could only be seen, not entered.
They began as muffled moans against her pillow, soft moans smothered in the coolness that still filled the room with a translucent darkness. Then, when it seemed they had finished and the blind prostitute lay back and lowered her eyelids with a sigh of relief, she was seized by a new and stronger wave of pangs and anxiety, and the sun was risen, and Master Rafael woke up. He looked at her and felt frightened. With hair unkempt and looking almost ugly, she repelled him. He looked at her and felt frightened, not knowing what to do. During the night she’d kicked off the sheet, which lay balled up at the foot of the bed, like a worthless corpse. Master Rafael got up, got dressed, and, still frightened, looked at her again. The blind prostitute lay there half sunken into the mattress, on top of the badly wrinkled under-sheet, with her belly sticking out, with her body all contorted so as to keep her belly upright, with her back arched to the breaking point. She was propped against two firm pillows, with her legs twisted and unabashedly wide open. Master Rafael looked and saw none of this, seeing only the tenderness he remembered. He saw a small and clean face that wasn’t the one now sweating; he saw sweet and timid body movements that weren’t those unruly ones. As if he’d closed his left eye for a moment, Master Rafael left the bedroom, went to the kitchen, and returned with a mug of coffee in his hand. He gave it to the blind prostitute and said you can’t go with an empty stomach. Emerging from her pangs, she turned her head toward him as if she could see him and took the mug with her two hands. She raised it to her lips in silence. The first, slow sip was a long moment of peaceful calm. But she still hadn’t finished the coffee, there was still a brown remainder in the mug, when she jerked forward without warning, leaving Master Rafael just enough time to place the basin under her mouth. And there he stayed, with the right side of his torso and the stub of his arm pressed against the blind prostitute’s shoulder, and with his left hand holding the basin under her mouth. Unable to do anything more, Master Rafael stood still as she bellowed and vomited. When it was over, he wiped her lips with a towel and didn’t notice the blood in the basin, threading amid the coffee.
Time was passing and, like a girl who leaves off being a girl, the morning slowly left off being morning to become a blazing fire that made the earth crack from within. Master Rafael, leaning against the window, looked at the yard through the chink between the shutters and remembered imagining a garden with trees and flowers or a cabbage patch. And that garden he’d only imagined seemed to him in that moment to be all the things he could have done. And the groans of the blind prostitute, growing in intensity or at least seeming to him louder and more frequent, were a refrain that tormented him. Looking through the chink between the shutters, as if his whole body had become his gaze and vanished into the earth, Master Rafael repeated lemon trees grafted into orange trees, apricot trees grafted into peach trees, grapevines, cabbages, flower beds with colorful patterns, lilies, mallows. It was a childish illusion which he shouted in silence to convince himself it was attainable, which he shouted in spite of an inner voice denying it, which he shouted so as to drown out that feeble, almost dying voice that said you’ve done nothing, that said you knew everything and did nothing, an agonizing and ruthless voice that would say these things whenever he found a silent respite in his inner darkness.
Drawing away from the window, he went over to her as if he’d just noticed her. He pulled up a chair and sat next to the bed. He looked at his hand that moved without moving, and placed it on her belly. The blind prostitute tried to smile. And Master Rafael didn’t feel any of the anguish or fear he’d been feeling for many nights. Looking farther back, he felt the same joy he’d felt when he found out he was going to become a father. A father. And that certainty, which he’d sometimes forgotten, became the only certainty. And it gleamed in his eyes. And the groans of the blind prostitute, which had tormented him with a cold terror, now seemed a natural and almost pleasant, soothing sound. A father. And his hand, resting on the blind prostitute’s belly, told her all this, comforting her, and in this way they talked. The afternoon dragged on, like a life. And when the birds, free at last of the afternoon heat, began to fly over the yard that began to turn cool, when the blind prostitute tightened her face and it was clear she was about to give birth, they were both already old and loved each other still more.