The groom entered hand in hand with the bride. The cook pulled the madwoman from the Rua da Palha into the church, saying help us out here. The baby boy of José’s sister howled. Given the position of the bride and groom at the altar, it fell to me to be a witness for José. The cook refused to be a witness for the bride, muttering abortion, muttering she had an abortion, so she ended up next to me, as a witness for the groom. Muttering, she passed on to me the scent of her perfume. She was a woman. As was plain to see from the way she took a hanky from her purse and blew her nose, from the way she moved her lips while chewing on tiny words, from the way she impatiently shifted from one foot to the other. She was a woman. And it didn’t fluster her to see me and my brother attached. And she almost smiled at me once. And she almost looked into my eyes. She was a woman.
ELIAS WAS THINKING OF JOSÉ’S WEDDING and of how that was the day his brother fell for the cook.
THE CHURCH WALLS WERE MADE OF ROUGH STONE, though successive layers of whitewash had smoothed them down somewhat. On each side there was a saint, regarded as such just because they were there and not because they were really saints, for no one knew who they were. And the ceremony proceeded. Smiling, the devil read phrases, intoning them like a chant, while my brother was falling in love with the cook. There were also two small stained-glass windows. The floor was made of wood and riddled with worms. José’s sister’s baby wouldn’t quit bawling, he didn’t even stop to breathe, he bawled incessantly, and although we heard the devil chanting a lament, we couldn’t make out the random words. The madwoman from the Rua da Palha, who was a witness with me for José’s wife, had a large stain of drool on the front of her sweater and a huge bloodstain on her skirt. She didn’t wear stockings and her legs were filthy black. Her hair was all disheveled and fleas crawled on her neck. She moved her body in almost controlled jerks, and her head twisted to see something in the air, something I tried to see but couldn’t, something that flew and made her head move every which way on her neck. The screams of José’s sister’s baby ricocheted against the church walls until it became impossible to distinguish between the shouts coming from the child’s open mouth and red face and the identical shouts repeated by the walls. They shouted at the same time, walls and child, shouts coming at us from all sides. The cook blew her nose continuously. Before her hand could get from nose to handbag with her colorful, flower-stamped hankie, she would be sniffling again, and we could hear the full depth of her sniffling in spite of the baby’s shrill cries. And my brother looked at her with rapture. The cook muttered, as if praying. With her small mouth she muttered softly, quickly. As if she were eating grains of rice, one by one, or slurping soup from a spoon, with an annoyed, irate look, almost a look of hatred. And my brother looked at her with rapture. The cook restlessly shifted her weight from one foot to the other, perhaps because her shoes pinched or perhaps because she was irritated by the screaming child or by the madwoman from the Rua da Palha who smelled like manure. And my brother looked at her with rapture. The moment arrived for exchanging rings, and the bride and groom had no rings. Unconcerned about this detail, they placed imaginary rings on each other’s finger. My brother didn’t see this, for by then his eyes were glued on the cook. As if he were stuck to her and not to me. As if she were a woman.
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.
MOISÉS GOT CLOSER AND CLOSER TO THE COOK, defying the laws of observation, for it seemed that the closer he got, the better he could look at her and size her up. As if, leaning his shoulder into her and twisting his neck in a bundle of tendons and thick veins to look at her from within one inch of her ear, almost burying his nose in her hair, he could better appreciate her; as if his shoulders were eyes that saw; as if two eyes focused on a fuzzy, badly defined ear were the same thing as seeing a woman at a distance, seeing her walk and seeing her pass by us and draw away while we think about her, which is also a way of seeing her. And he solemnly continued, with twisted neck, to focus on that ear that wasn’t even very pretty, or very feminine, or well shaped. And the farther he pulled away from his brother, the more one could see how complicated were the jackets they wore. On the inside of the sleeve common to both and in the waist area beneath that sleeve there was a row of laces with wide bows and concealed buttons. Except for that, they looked like elegant jackets. Stately blue in color, they were furnished, in front and on the cuffs, with thick, anchor-embossed buttons of imitation gold. They were made of good cloth, and whitish stains marked the place of the shoulder blades. Moisés got closer to the cook and pulled his brother with him. Pulled him like a dead weight by jerks that he pretended not to notice, Elias seeming concentrated on the wedding and on the devil’s smile and on the madwoman from the Rua da Palha and on the saints with faded written notes from remote civilizations stuck with safety pins to their moth-eaten gowns. The bride and groom, cut by the horizontal line of the two brothers’ outstretched arms, stood with their backs to the nave, while the broadly smiling devil faced it. He read from a book and smiled. He wore an old chasuble and smiled. At a certain point he held the book in front of them and said they should kiss it. They didn’t kiss it. José’s sister’s kid was screaming and, by this time, was screaming inside our heads. An echo inside an echo of a voice inside a voice inside our heads. And we hardly heard, or we didn’t hear at all, the long question asked by the quietly smiling devil, but the silent question hovered, suspended, in the devil’s inquisitive and suspended gaze. José said yes. His wife nodded her head. When the witnesses were asked for their signatures, Moisés was surprised to see the cook pull away and walk off; perhaps he thought she was a statue that sniffled and blew its nose. The kid kept screaming. Outside José’s sister, with a bunch of plastic flowers on her head, talked with the profusion of a cartload of oats being dumped into an empty storehouse: grains on top of grains in the air, without letup, words on top of words, like an open faucet of oats or of words, one grain after another and before it, one word beginning in the middle of the previous word and that one finishing and the next one only half said when another one begins, and so on. The devil smiled all alone. The madwoman from the Rua da Palha stood in a corner of the churchyard, amid the dust and stones. The churchyard was all dust and stones, as every street in town was dust and stones, and amid the dust and stones she stood and, separating her legs, began to urinate, the faint whistle of her bladder and the foamy puddle of urine. José’s father was like an ancient tree, withered or almost dead, whose sap ran deep and slow. The newlyweds took their leave, and no one congratulated them or had anything to say to them. They took their leave and disappeared with little more than a few murmurs. Without the bride and groom, we suddenly realized there was no reason for us to be gathered there. The blacksmith took the strip of cloth from his pocket, tied it around José’s father’s neck, and left with his wife and baby. Through the streets of the town they carried the kid’s screams, which diminished, though on certain curves they could still be heard loudly, and sometimes a stray wind or a memory would bring them back from afar. And the cook left. And Moisés tried to talk his brother into following behind her. They followed. It was midday. The madwoman from the Rua da Palha, left all by herself, wandered about the churchyard.