osed 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 I’d walk very close to the buildings, and the groups of women and of men would scrutinize, with their gaze, my shrinking figure, and as I passed by I’d hear she had an abortion, I’d hear abortion and feel even more ashamed, hugging the building wall even more, as if I were a sheet of paper stuck to it. At the grocer’s I didn’t say what I wanted, I handed over the piece of paper with the cook’s illiterate handwriting, and everything was loaded into the baskets. I went a roundabout way to avoid the square, but I never escaped the devil, who was waiting for me on a corner, in the shade, smiling. And beneath that smile my legs got tangled, like basting, my legs turned into plasticine, and with baskets under my arms, on my head, and in my hands, I was like a drunk circus performer sliding along a high wire. It was as if the devil’s gaze had stripped me of everything, of all the building walls behind which I hide from others and hide even from myself. When I reached the beginning of the road, I was already tired. Loaded down like a mule of the Gypsies under the midday sun, I sweated and silently cursed the cook. In the coolness of the kitchen, I felt as if I’d crossed many deserts, and I was given five minutes to refresh. With a piece of cardboard I fanned my face and the neckline of my dress. On the crooked chair, I opened my legs and felt the relief of a breeze against my raw, burning thighs. In those days the voice shut up inside a chest, always changing, said: perhaps suffering is tossed by handfuls over the multitudes, with most of it falling on some people and little or none of it on others.