THE EVENING FELL LIKE A SCREEN IN THE SKY over the oil press. The three old men maintained their silence.
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THROUGHOUT THE REST OF the summer, the brothers often passed by the cook’s house. When it was already late, after nightfall in August, they would sit on the stone bench outside the house of the man who writes in a room without windows and remain there all evening. At the beginning of the street, there was a nook with a fountain, and from there to the end of the street all the doors were open, and the people who lived there sat in the doorways. The man who writes in a room without windows was the only exception, he never came out, and so Moisés took advantage. Night after night, for a whole week, he had to convince his brother to go there, but then it became a habit and there was no more need to convince him. Moisés talked loudly with the migrant who lived opposite the cook and sometimes talked with her, softly. It so happened that Elias sat on the side of the cook, which meant that Moisés and the cook had to talk either in front of him or behind him. No one said anything to Elias. Elias said nothing to anyone. And the warm night, the cook’s dull chatter about pennyroyal and purslane, the stars, the cool trickle of water falling into the shallow pool of the fountain, all made Elias fall asleep. And he only woke up when someone passed by on the street. He woke up with a zigzag of good evenings: good evening here, good evening there, good evening here, good evening there. Moisés didn’t fall asleep, and even in bed the thought of the cook kept him from sleeping. In September the days began to get shorter and a bit cool, and the brothers were the last to quit the ever-cooler evening coolness and the stone bench of the house of the man who writes in a room without windows.
The sun of late September was almost as hot as the sun of August, but the season for sitting in the doorway at night had passed, and Moisés and the cook stopped seeing each other. But Moisés was the kind of man who won’t give up, and one day he thought: it has to be. The next day he again thought: it has to be. The day after that he again thought: it has to be. And two weeks later he contrived to meet the cook at the door to the grocer’s. They got married on a Saturday, the date of which they forgot. Since the cook’s house was larger, it was the two brothers who moved. They loaded three wagons with chests and junk. They rented out their place for not very much money, but it helped pay expenses.
The brothers weren’t big spenders. They had the clothes they needed, and what they earned from the oil press was enough for them to eat platefuls of boiled potatoes with collard greens and lots of olive oil for lunch and dinner. The cook, who for all her adult life was used to tasting the rich people’s food at the Mount of Olives, wouldn’t settle for collard greens. If at first she made collard greens and potatoes in all the ways collard greens and potatoes can be made, soon she used her expertise to obtain new ingredients. In the first weeks she made boiled potatoes with collard greens; the brothers sat at the table and ate up. Then she started making pies and empanadas out of potatoes and collard greens; the brothers sat at the table and ate up. After a month had gone by she made sculptures out of potatoes and collard greens that sighed like women in love and seemed to blow thick-lipped kisses from the collard leaves, green lips dripping olive oil from the corner of the mouth; Elias, somewhat warily, and Moisés, eagerly, sat at the table and ate up. One night for dinner the cook placed, in the middle of the table, a platter with shapely, wide-open potato legs and an open, steaming vagina made of collard greens which, by a trick of her culinary art, slowly contracted before the brothers’ eyes, contracting until it became a collard-green vagina that was irrevocably closed and dried up, with just a trickle of olive oil; Elias, feeling perplexed, and Moisés, perturbed, sat down and ate. Moisés and the cook looked at each other in a silent understanding, and the next morning he ordered turnip greens and onions from old Gabriel. On Sunday morning the brothers set traps for the sparrows on Gallows Tree Hill. Some days later Moisés bought two packages of noodles; then he picked out some good mushrooms; then he bought half a pound of shark’s meat; then he went acorn picking; then he planted garlic and cabbages in the backyard; then he grew parsley and coriander in a tub; then he raised rabbits and hens in a chicken coop he built out of crates; then he bought three sardines; and then he bought some fruit. The rent money from the brothers’ old house began to go entirely toward food.
I THINK: PERHAPS THERE’S A LIGHT INSIDE PEOPLE, perhaps a clarity; perhaps people aren’t made of darkness, perhaps certainties are a breeze inside people, and perhaps people are the certainties they possess.
JOSÉ, AFTER HE GOT MARRIED, didn’t talk to his wife straightaway. They walked to the farmstead without holding hands, in silence. Across the expanse of the sunlit plains José and his wife trod, and beads of sweat trod over them, on their skin. Across the expanse of the sunlit plains went José and his wife, dressed as bride and groom, illuminated. When they reached the farmstead and the house, José didn’t remove his suit and his wife didn’t remove her dress. He put the black sheepskin on his back, grabbed his staff, and went to tend the sheep. She donned a rag that served as an apron and went to wash two already washed plates. At night they slept in the same bed but didn’t touch each other.
They continued to sleep in the same bed, because they were married and married couples always sleep in the same bed, because they had only one bed, because only one bed fit in their bedroom, but they didn’t touch each other again. And summer came. The passing days were long, as days full of sun and still with hope naturally are, with a vast and ordered sky whose blue has the depth and simplicity of being the blue of sky and sun and continued hope. The passing days were long, and José, in those days, was a new man with a serene face, hoping and yearning for a future, yearning each day for the next day. José’s wife continued to harbor a silent sadness, the sadness of a deep well containing all sadness; she continued to care for their house and for the rich people’s house. And with the door locked from inside and the keys in her pocket, she would sit for entire afternoons listening to the voice shut up inside a chest. And in these moments she almost let herself smile. She looked sad to José, but he didn’t know what to think. She looked sad, but he couldn’t tell if she was tired or sick or nervous or angry or indifferent or sad. She looked sad, but he got used to the mystery of her sadness and didn’t wish to change her. He was very fond of her. Sometimes, among the sheep, he would single one out, or he would single out a tree when among trees, and he’d call it by his wife’s name. Out loud. And he’d see that name scatter into the air and vanish in the clarity. Alone in the fields, he’d repeat that name and see it hover for a few moments. He’d repeat it and stand still, smiling. He’d sit down in some shade, smiling.
On the last night of summer, as he’d always done on the last night of each season since turning eighteen, José went to the house of the blind prostitute. Prostitute was a word left behind by a traveler and used by the townspeople to baptize the blind prostitute. It was a strange and difficult word that twisted around the tongue and that the townspeople only used when referring to the blind prostitute, but it was an apt word, because it wasn’t the word whore. The blind prostitute wasn’t a whore, she was a woman, sad because blind, who did favors since there was nothing else she could do. Her mother had been just like her and her grandmother had been just like her, but it was said that her great-grandmother had been a fickle baroness who abandoned her daughter among some brambles. Abandoned her for being a girl. Upon seeing her for the first time, still smeared with her blood; upon seeing her and regretting she wasn’t the boy whom she had imagined and for whom she’d bought a complete set of baby clothes in Lisbon; upon seeing her for the first time, she’d said she looks like a whore. People say that the scars from her grandmother still mark the womb and back of the blind prostitute. They say that the thorns blinded her grandmother and remained inside her to blind whatever daughters she might have. The blind prostitute’s mother had been blind. And the blind prostitute had a blind daughter. A one-year-old girl who rarely went outside. Pretty because tiny, and blind. The blind prostitute wasn’t a whore, and José went to visit her on the last night of summer. She lived on the Rua da Palha, and when she heard three knocks on the door, she was already expecting him. For his sake she had lit a very faint kerosene lamp, and through the darkness tainted by a dim clarity she led José to her bedroom. Through the open door of the bedroom the weak lamplight entered even more timidly, and by that light José could make out the body of the baby lying under the sheets. It was the tiny body of a girl with long black hair and, beneath her missing eyelids, the cavities of her eyes. Perhaps she was sleeping. Without talking or making noise, they got undressed and lay next to the little girl. They made love, each one probing the other’s body, becoming the other’s body. José washed himself in the basin that was in the kitchen and left money on the rustic wooden table. On the road to the farmstead, under the night sky, José thought of the blind prostitute’s eyes. They were two deep cavities of smooth flesh the color of bright blood. Two blood-colored cavities in the face of that woman.