On Sunday José had to tend the sheep. The young bride, with the indifference of a wife married for twenty or thirty years, made coffee and went to wash the laundry in the washtub of the rich people’s house. José didn’t go spy on her.
I THINK: 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. Even if I feel a great weight on my chest, doesn’t an abyss weigh more? Even if I feel like a blind man advancing without eyes toward a precipice, I have to get up from this bed. I have to raise these arms that aren’t mine, I have to raise these legs that aren’t mine but those of a huge rock, and go tend the sheep. My sheepdog. The fields. The big old cork tree. What shade is cast by the big old cork tree? Even if in midafternoon I’m walking in the night, even if the sun at its height is the blackest night, and inside night there’s just more night, since everything is night to my eyes, I have to get up from this bed. Even if it’s just to suffer and suffer, I have to go face what I’ll be next, since that’s what I’ll be and I can’t escape it, I can’t escape becoming something.
WRAPPED UP IN A BANDAGE, José got up and began to get dressed. His wife looked at him and said nothing. The baby woke up.
~ ~ ~
THEY REMAINED QUIET, THE three old men, for a long time. The walls of the oil press were covered by a layer of lees, like a protection against the cement’s roughness. The color of the men’s faces absorbed the darkness of the oil press. Quiet, all three. Moisés, Elias, and old Gabriel all thinking of one thing and thinking that the others were thinking of another thing, but they were all thinking the same thing. Moisés was thinking of José’s wedding and of the cook whom he met that day; he thought that Elias was thinking of José’s wife when she was still a girl at the brickyard and that old Gabriel was thinking of José’s wife hidden away at the Mount of Olives, already worn and used. Elias was thinking of José’s wedding and of how that was the day his brother fell for the cook; he thought that Moisés was thinking of José’s wife when she was still a girl at the brickyard and that old Gabriel was thinking of José’s wife hidden away at the Mount of Olives, already worn and used. Old Gabriel was thinking of José’s wedding and of how Moisés had pulled his brother by the little finger, almost pulling it off, so that he could get closer to the cook at the altar; he thought that Moisés was thinking of José’s wife when she was a girl at the brickyard and that Elias was thinking the same thing as his brother.
Moisés was thinking of José’s wedding and of the cook, whom he met that day.
IT WAS ON A SATURDAY IN JULY. My brother and I wore our newest suits and our jackets with navy buttons that were the last thing the tailor made before he died, for he didn’t want to die without leaving us each a suit for special occasions, and he was the only one capable of inventing and executing an intricate system of buttons and fasteners and straps that would allow us to wear shirts, sweaters, and jackets. Since it was Saturday, we woke up a little late, at eight thirty. We drank our coffee and put two clay pots of water on the fire. When they came to a boil, we grabbed them with a rag, since clay also burns, and poured them into two enamel tubs in the middle of the kitchen. We added a tad of cold water and took a bath. We shared the blue soap and dried off with the same towel. We sat on two stools by the fire and clipped our fingernails and toenails. Our suits, ironed the night before, hung on the chairs in the bedroom, next to our shined shoes and brand-new socks. It was Elias who ironed them, for he has always been more delicate with his hands, and the suits, albeit the newest ones we owned, were made when we were young, and any carelessness with the weight of the hot iron could scorch them permanently. I remember Elias asking me to move the iron around and to stir up the embers, and this I know how to do. Since we don’t have much beard, we merely sprinkled some scented water on our cheeks and let our two or three fine whiskers, white or blond, have a chance.
Outside, the day was the bright sun flooding the building walls and the ground and sky, turning everything, walls and ground and sky, into a sun as well. We walked without a care and, as I remember, smiling. It seemed, like all Saturdays, to have good things in store. The frightened chickens scurried out of our path. The dogs looked at us in a friendly way. People said good morning to us. We reached the church and the door was closed. On the three front steps José’s sister was holding on to her baby, who whined as if he wished to fill the morning air with the deafening bugle sound of his screaming, while José’s sister talked nonstop in a torrent of scarcely intelligible words: look what I have to put up with the sun beating down on us and no one showing up to open the door and no bride or groom look what I have to put up with this kid who won’t shut his trap I only just fed him I just changed his diaper he just woke up and already he’s whining to go to sleep: rapid words without letup, like a wailing or a lament; the blacksmith was leaning against the façade, hunched over and downcast, smoking a cigarette and staring at the ground; José’s father, looking hypnotized, was squatting like a child on one of the church steps, with a strip of cloth tied around his neck. We said good morning. No one answered us. There was nothing to do but wait, and it was truly uncomfortable. The sun hotter and hotter. The baby screaming at the top of his lungs.
When the devil arrived, we wiped the sweat off our foreheads with our jacket sleeves. And while he fiddled with the key, we lined up behind him. The dejected blacksmith went over to José’s father, gently lifted him up, and led him by the strip of cloth that he wore against his will around his neck, like a leash. Which in effect is what it was. The blacksmith sat him down and untied the cloth from his neck. We sat down. The baby kept screaming, and it seemed impossible that such a tiny body could have a throat strong enough to scream like that. The devil, forever smiling, walked around the altar getting things ready, and we saw everything, since the church has no sacristy. He struck an entire box of matches that went out as he tried to light a candle, he tasted a moldy host, he donned a chasuble that came unstitched at the back, and as he continued in these preparations, she arrived. She appeared in the doorway to the church, lit from behind, and that silhouette dazzled me immediately. I knew that she had moved into town, but I still hadn’t seen her. During the fifty years she’d worked at the Mount of Olives, I’d never once seen her, since whenever I went to the farmstead, she was busy, and whenever she came into town, we never chanced to meet. But I knew that she’d moved. I even knew that she’d moved next door to the house of the man who writes in a room without windows, and during the months since then I’d often invented excuses for us to pass that way when coming home from the oil press. Even so, I never saw her until that moment when she entered the church. Although it was very hot, she wore a maroon velvet dress and some lace-trimmed stockings that covered her shins. She walked in front of the altar and didn’t make the sign of the cross before the tabernacle. In fact no one made the sign of the cross before the tabernacle, not only because no one knew how to make the sign of the cross but also because the church had no tabernacle. She stole along the aisle by the wall and sat down right next to me. She grumbled about the heat and the discomfort of her clothes, and she didn’t say good morning. Hot and sweaty, she waved a fan which, I found out later, the rich woman had brought her from the fair in Seville.