Master Rafael stood up and ran to the window with his crutch as if he didn’t have a crutch and opened it. Then he fetched two clean towels and a tub full of water and an empty tub. Because of the shame they knew they both felt, without ever having talked about it, he called no one. The light outside was fading and Master Rafael lit the kerosene lamp. The blind prostitute felt something rip through her like a blade, splitting and slashing her, as if her torso and neck and head had been sliced down the middle, turning her whole body into an open wound. And she struggled with all her might, as if trying to pull up a tree by the roots or to move the world over an inch. Her skin was purplish red and wrinkled. Her face was sheer suffering. Her water broke over the balled-up bedsheet, as Master Rafael didn’t have time to put the tub in place. And the baby began to emerge just as the new day descended on earth and night still filled the sky. First the head. Master Rafael, knowing what to do, used two fingers to pull the baby by the roof of its mouth. It was born. The turmoil ceased, like something already long forgotten. Rafael held up the baby, still covered with blood, and looked at it. It was a girl. His daughter. Blind in both eyes. Missing her right arm. Missing both legs. She didn’t cry. She didn’t move. She was dead.
And the girl’s tiny corpse fit in his hand. His thumb and pinkie wrapped around her chest. His other fingers supported the head that hung from her neck. And the weight he felt in his arm was the weight of her dead life. He looked at her. Stared at her. And her glowing child’s face, her lips, the soft shadow cast by her nose and the sockets of her eyes were like a self-pronouncement of death. And Master Rafael, filled with the blackest grief, was darkness itself. He slowly raised his head to look at the blind prostitute, stretched out on pillows, arms extended and hands open, with her nightgown striped by blood where her flesh was gashed. Peaceful, with a relaxed face, as if sleeping. Master Rafael nestled the child on the bed and bent over the blind prostitute. He placed his hand on her chest. Her skin tired, warm. Blood covered his fingers. He placed his hand on her face. Her skin. And he felt the image of her face, as she had once felt his. And his fingers slid through her sweat, leaving a trail of sweat and blood. He lifted his arm and waited for the form of her face to dissolve in his hand. The sorrow that remained: a silent absence of meaning falling on all gestures, an abyss negating the meaning of all words, a veil that canceled time. The woman he had truly loved, truly loved, was now nothing in this world. And his solitude was a sky even vaster than the night, a sky where there was nothing but night and cold, a black place he entered with his gaze. Leaning on his crutch, Master Rafael went to get the shawl that had belonged to the blind prostitute as a girl, and to her mother before her, and to her grandmother before her mother. It was a white shawl made of soft wool, its fringe dirtied by time. It was kept in a small chest, among other treasured objects: the apron from the wedding, a knitted wool coat, a flower-print scarf. He returned to the bed with the shawl and wrapped it snugly around the baby. He pressed her against his chest, placed her between her mother’s arms, and covered them with a sheet up to the shoulders. He looked at them for the last time and left.
Night. It was a night of deeper, total silence, a night beyond silence. Master Rafael’s footsteps, indistinguishable in the darkness, made no sound. The lightless and desolate houses, with windows and doors shut, were speechless blocks of stone that accompanied him for an instant but stayed behind, as if lost or abandoned. Prevailing over his weariness again and again but never definitively, Master Rafael walked on. His body, like a dead tree, or a dead morning, or a piece of death itself, walked on. His lips trembled. Sweat ran down his chest. A breeze silently swept over the ground. A breeze not felt. The baby girl’s face. The blind prostitute’s face. Master Rafael remembered. And each image he saw was an image of his endless solitude. The night in Master Rafael’s gaze, beyond all silence, was a well with clean water where children played during the day without fear, throwing pebbles and imagining twigs to be boats; it was a well with clean black water, a solitary well, on a plot of land far from the town, on a moonless and starless night without end. The baby girl’s face. My daughter. The blind prostitute’s face. You were my certainty and I lost you. Night. Master Rafael went on. Up ahead, in the opaque blackness, he visualized the carpenter’s shop.
He thrust his hand deep into his pocket and found the keys. He opened the gate, which for the first time made no sound, whether of rust, dirt, pebbles on the ground, or boards. He walked without stumbling in the absolute darkness, knowing the place of things that had places and the things that had none. He struck a match and lit the kerosene lamp. It was an old, soot-blackened lamp that was used in winter when night fell early, and the rest of the year was forgotten behind a box of crooked nails, where it impregnated the sawdust that fell on it with kerosene. He slowly made his way to the table in the middle of the shop and set down the lamp. Then he went to the window and opened it. The quiet song of the crickets filled the night’s vastness with their absence. As if he were gazing at the sky, Master Rafael saw the baby girl wrapped in the shawl and nestled in the arms of the blind prostitute. Mother and daughter. He lingered on his vision of them. They slept and no one could harm them. He closed his eyes. He opened his hand and felt the blind prostitute’s face. Her skin. Her hair wet with sweat. And he knew deep down that she was dead. Without looking back, he returned to the table in the middle of the shop and sat on one end of it. He looked around. The bench that had been his father’s. The tools arranged in the way he always arranged them. His father working and teaching him. Patiently teaching him. With a simple, satisfied look in his eyes. Master Rafael tossed his crutch on the floor and it made no sound. On the floor, like a worthless object. And he raised his hand in front of his face. He looked straight at it. A thick hand, like either one of his father’s. In the palm of his hand and between its fingers he felt the weight of the little girl’s corpse. My daughter. Her scrawny chest. Her tiny lifeless head. Her face. He grabbed the saw and held it against his leg. He aligned its teeth with the wrinkle where his leg joined his groin and began to saw, tearing trousers and skin at the same time. The blade dug into his flesh. Master Rafael kept his arm and gaze steady, as if he were sawing a board at a right angle. And when he sawed his leg bone, it made only a dull sound. Blood streamed down from the tabletop. His leg fell next to his crutch, like one more useless object. The baby girl’s face. My daughter. Master Rafael stretched out his arm, grabbed the kerosene lamp and hurled it to the floor. Flames rose up the walls. And on that night the flames reached the sky.
~ ~ ~
I OPENED MY EYES. I HEARD the shouts on the street but didn’t want to hear. When they banged on the door with their fists, I got up, still in my long johns. They came in without me telling them to. In the kitchen, darkly lit up by the small moon that shone through the open door, they looked like ghosts with long whitish faces, ghosts with bright and disembodied eyes, and they said the carpenter’s shop is on fire. I stopped looking at them, as if they’d said nothing, and returned to the bedroom. I struck a match, which slowly exploded in the air. I lit the kerosene lamp. My wife sat up in bed without speaking, her belly a growing mound under the sheets. The widowed cook, her face buried in the pillow, which muffled the syllables she formed with each breath, seemed to have fallen silent. Through the wall I could hear the sound of the fountain pen of the man shut up in a windowless room writing. It was the sound of thoughtless, impulsive, angry strokes. To someone who didn’t know, it might seem like the sound of crossing out. But no, it was the sound of writing. I bent over to put on my trousers, first the right leg, then the left. I buttoned my shirt. With my face leaning over the lamp, I looked at my wife, who did not look away. The men’s husky and nervous voices arrived from the kitchen. I blew out the lamp’s small flame.