The sun weighs on me like something I carry within. I carry the sun inside me and calmly pour out all its light and heat over the fields. It’s too late to turn back, since there’s never any turning back. Only the regret for what we didn’t choose persists, exists. Only the old age of the cork trees, the sculpted shape of the olive trees, stones suspended in the sky and in this earth crossed by the flight of birds, this earth, the world’s age and clarity, my eyes that are the sky and the cork and olive trees, my eyes that weep without weeping, this road I’ve walked a thousand times and a thousand times it’s the same, I, I and the sound of the earth, the crunching of the sand under my feet. And I walk on as if standing still, I feel as if I sometimes force my legs to stop, I feel them standing still, and yet I walk on. Despair and the end are approaching. And despair and the end, now I know, are the serenity of an eternal and irreparable solitude, they’re a grief that’s an eternal and irreparable suffering, everything eternal and everything irreparable, they’re the silence of someone crying all alone on an infinite night. The Mount of Olives isn’t far and I see old Gabriel. I feel my legs walking, I speed them up, I try to flee, but I’m standing still in front of him. He looks at me for years and years and says don’t go. I’m suddenly old like him, I feel the enormity of his life in that gaze that is set on me and says don’t go. He says don’t go, and the sun tortures him even more. There’s not a breeze or a cool moment in his face. I turn from his gaze and go on. Time doesn’t belong to me, nor does life, or words, or the water of springs and fountains. And old Gabriel, more than his face, is a gaze that knows everything, is the name of solitude talking to itself, is the word death suffering its own fatal torment. He’s more than his face but is also his face, his sorrow, and his tenderness. More than his shadow, he’s also his shadow. His childish gaze full of certainties. His fear. Behind me, an instant. Old Gabriel, crushed by a hand or by a mystery or by a secret, falls dead on the ground that knows him, that knew his one hundred and fifty years but that doesn’t remember him now that he’s dead. His body, lying on top of the earth, his grave, his dead body, visited by sparrows that happen to alight on his chest. His body, like a furrow of plowed land beneath the sun. His dead body shouting all the silence of his solitude across the sky, down the road where I go on, over the fields which are the world. And the day’s hottest hour immortalizes this death and its splendor, immortalizes death, and each moment is this infinite death in all places. And I go on. I go on. I place my hands on my belly, on my dead son. I carry death inside me. The sun shouts the vastness of the fields and my sadness. In the depths of my gaze and inside me, I see the farmstead. I go on. I’m solitude.
WHEN I WALKED PAST MY WIFE and felt the sun in her eyes and realized that my legs were walking on the street without knowing where to, it was as if my body were nothing but its own weakness. Since I knew she was looking at me, I walked as straight down the street as I could. Then I stopped and leaned against a wall in some shade. No one passed by, not even a dog or a chicken. Only the pigeons, as if they were free, traced wide arcs in the sky, imperfect circles. Only the pigeons passed by all morning, but without looking at me. I felt a finger choking my throat and making me want to vomit. I lowered my head and made sounds of vomiting, felt my stomach emptily churn, opened my mouth, stuck out my tongue, and vomited only the nothing I’d eaten that day. Straightening up, I looked at the hazy image of the world. At the indifferent sky, the indifferent houses, the indifferent existence of things. And I kept going. Wherever my body took me, without knowing where I was going. The silence was perhaps an audible murmur, perhaps an insistence that kept repeating a despair, a disquiet, whose speechlessness and anxiety made it all the more anguishing. I was my own uncertainty. I was that moment, and that moment was the fascination of one who looks on without understanding. I was the empty place of myself, I was my eyes, I was my gestures that were no more than my absence. And I kept going. I kept going. Wherever my body took me. Down the streets, an anxiety and a discomfort. My life happening independent of me, without me directing it, without me existing. Me without me. I without I. Me, and someone acting in place of me. My hands stronger than my will. My legs walking without being mine. And the silence shouting at me, saying all that I didn’t understand, or know, or listen to. And the morning’s poison made me cross the square. Looking normal, like any man in any banal moment, like a man not carrying a world of suffering in his shadow, on a morning just like other mornings, I crossed the square and entered Judas’s general store and lowered my gaze. And Judas’s general store, which would have been cool on a normal morning, cool like the shade, was the heat from outside and the sun and the light and the men looking at me and the devil smiling and a glass of red wine in front of me and the counter burning with heat and my skin seething with sweat and the devil in front of me smiling and the men looking at me and the light and sun and my legs like rubber and the flesh of my arms shriveled and my arms like dead weights and my face in front of my face as in a mirror and my face defeated and worn and old and facing death and the tempter facing me to say your wife and smiling and saying José and smiling and saying the two of them and smiling and saying like rabbits and smiling and saying him on top of her and smiling and saying like rabbits and smiling and the glass of wine making me hotter and the light and the sun and death and death and death and the devil smiling and saying José and smiling over and over and over and over. Judas’s general store would have been cool on a normal morning. Judas’s general store would have been cool like the shade. Judas’s general store was the heat from outside. It was the sun. It was the light. The men looked at me. I drank a glass of red wine. The devil smiled. The devil smiled and said your wife is with José, the two of them together, like rabbits, him on top of her, screwing.