And I walked through the streets as if seized by a rage with no cause. And I walked through the streets carrying a weight that, I now realized, was a profound grief. I felt inwardly abandoned. Banished and lost inside myself, with an inexplicable rage, with a profound grief. I am death and don’t know what death is. I am sorrow and dejection and torment and don’t know. I’m my not knowing anything and this suffocating anguish, endless and suffocating. I walked through the streets and arrived here. I arrived here and arrived nowhere, because I’m the same. I’m on the road that goes from the town to the farmstead, and I’m still at the square, I’m still at Judas’s general store, where the devil smiles at me and says like rabbits. The sun striking the earth scorches me, and it wouldn’t scorch me any less if I were walking in the sky, nor would I feel less anxiety. The sun striking the earth scorches me. The silence saddens me. The infinite vastness of the wheat fields saddens me. And the sun above the sun, inside the sun, overlaying the sun, the sun, the sun, the sun’s heat is my luminous grief, my sorrow, the news of my death announced to me and my sadness. I’m where I haven’t arrived. Here I keep walking, I go on. The olive and cork trees, August, the turned earth, the earth’s smell. My wife and José are this heat and my legs walking. Or perhaps they aren’t. Perhaps I am this heat I don’t control. I am my legs that walk without me. I am this anguish much larger than me. I am eyes that see me. The road that continues. I am ears that listen. The sand under my feet. The sand under my feet. The road that continues. I see old Gabriel. His night-ravaged face veiled by sadness and discouragement. And I hear old Gabriel. Don’t go, his voice dying, don’t go, his feeble insistence, don’t go. I look at the pleading in his eyes. I feel his tender, sick-child’s gaze. As if I didn’t see him, as if I didn’t hear him. And I keep going as if I’d thrust a knife into his voice, as if I’d turned him into nothing. Behind me, the silence of his slumping body. Old Gabriel dead. His life of one hundred and fifty years yielded up through resignation. Behind me, old Gabriel’s sad and resigned death, and sad because resigned. Behind me his certainties, lost forever, scattered across the earth, in the wind and in the light of the sun. Over the wheat fields looms the devil’s smile saying him on top of her, the two of them going at it like rabbits. The sweat on my face is the sweat of a thousand men. My face is a thousand faces. The world has shut down. Nothing exists in the distance, behind the hills. Here, as there, all that exists is my despair and desolation. In the depths of my gaze and inside me I see the farmstead. Alone. I’m solitude.
THE SHEEPDOG EMERGED from the midst of the sheep as if she were one more sheep, coming over with her belly full of stubble to look at me. Her eyes, large with earnestness, spoke tenderness and comfort. She also knew. I called her with my gaze and ran my hand through her fur. She lay down at my feet, feeling those moments which she knew, she also knew, would be my last. The big old cork tree grew even larger above me, and then the sky. And the vast plain, vaster than a spring breeze, greater than all the heat I felt at that hottest hour of the day. On either side, behind me, in front of me: the world. This is how I ended up. This is me. I think: it’s coming slowly, but it’s coming, and it will be an infinite day, an everlasting night, a frozen moment that won’t be a moment; and great matters will be smaller than the pettiest ones, and greater matters will be yet greater because they’ll be the only ones. I think: it’s today. And the silence that once seemed innocent to me, that same silence, now seems to me cruel and murderous. I run my hand through the sheepdog’s fur. The sheep obliviously graze. And my eyes blackly look upon death. The trail of suffering left by death before it arrives. Its certainty. And this anguish more powerful than any power is choking me. I know, and this knowing gives me everything and takes everything from me; it makes me a man and shows me death; it teaches me, forcing me to forget. And I feel that the sky’s roots, planted in the ground, are planted inside me. I feel, I feel it as I feel the sun falling on me or as I feel my hand in the sheepdog’s fur, but I know that the sky isn’t mine. I know. Not even death is mine. Just my own death. I’m distressingly small within myself. And I, within myself, am all that I am. I’m small and insignificant, I’m a past history of misunderstandings and mistakes, I’m the act of gazing at this sky, I’m the certainty of no future. I find the smell of the earth in the heat, and I smile with my lips and in my gaze. Never again. My smile is sad. It always was. Smiling, I laugh at myself and cry for myself. No one cries for a man whose gaze is black like this. I cry for myself, without tears. My dry eyes uselessly look at the sky, my dry face burns in this day’s hottest hour, my dry lips smile and cry with self-contempt. I run my hand through the sheepdog’s fur. I find the smell of the earth. Deep earth, mother and core of the world. I think: why?
I raise my hand and the sheepdog, waiting for this moment and knowing it to be the right one, looks at me with all of her eyes’ pity. Without my whistle needing to tell her, I see her round up the sheep and drive them toward the farmstead. Beneath my black sheepskin and beneath my shirt, what’s left of me impels me onward. At each step, I thrust my staff forward. In a long and slow arc, it strikes the ground and I pass beyond it, as if I were always, always passing myself. Onward I walk, and I remember her and remember Salomão and remember my mother. In the same whirling thought: her, Salomão, my mother. Her sad gaze, Salomão’s childish gaze begging please, my mother’s gaze of death and mourning. Onward I walk, and with me, within my steps, sitting still by the fire far away from here, my mother also walks. Her waiting for death where she always remains is her way of walking in time. And only in time can we walk. Even if our feet tread the ground, as mine seem to do, only in time can we walk. Right now she’s gazing at the fire. The fire that gently burns. Forever gently. In the slow combustion of a heart engulfed by a gentle suffering. Gentle and incessant. A fire of suffering oppressing her heart. My mother who knows and gazes at a secret, who sees death in that secret, who gazes at the fire and sees me. Mother, your waiting is almost done, but not your suffering. I think: not to exist, to be the forgotten thought of someone forgotten forever, to repeatedly die when already dead. The sheep are my silence walking ahead of me. Salomão, my cousin whom I never called cousin, the son of my father’s sister, Salomão, the frightened little boy who would come around and confuse cork trees with olive trees, suppose that thrushes were swallows, and call the sheep as if calling a dog, holding out his closed fist saying come get your treat, Salomão, where are you now? Where did life lose you? Where did life lose us both? I think: not to exist, to be the forgotten thought of someone forgotten forever, to repeatedly die when already dead. And her. Woman. Promises. Her face. I never lied to you. If I said sky to you, it was sky. If I said sun or water, it was sun or water. If I said morning, it was the morning of your eyes deceiving me. Without your eyes deceiving me. The deceit of a morning that was born in your eyes. We dreamed. We dreamed and were blind. And I’m not afraid of the word love. I’m not afraid of words. Look how I say death: death death death death death. By repeating it so much I take away its meaning. I take death away from death. I take away darkness and solitude. Death death death death death. I’m not afraid of words. Once more I see your eyes before my own, morning, and I want this to be our last word: love.