Jose Peixoto - The Implacable Order of Things

From the back door I look at her, surrounded by her toys: her little pots and little pans and little dishes. I remember when I bought them for her. After I got married, I scrimped here and there for six months, until I had enough to buy her the little set of kitchenware. Accustomed to working with sticks and wires, she grabbed the pieces one by one, and spent all afternoon admiring them. Salomão didn’t notice the change, and I said nothing to him. I look at her. The shade has moved and she’s sitting in the sun. Wherever I put her is where she stays. She fills the little pots with dirt, pebbles, and grass, and sculpts fantastic shapes. I’ve seen her make the rich people’s house at the Mount of Olives, I’ve seen her make the outside and inside of the church, I’ve seen her make the entire cemetery. But more than anything else, for many years now, I’ve seen her make over and over the face of a man, over and over the face of a man or many men with the same face. And she repeats her story. For thirty years now she has repeated her story, the same story. Always. An interminable refrain that begins where it ends, that begins in each word, which never ends. Like an ongoing prayer made of monotonic words, like a humming or a buzzing, like a flying insect, like an eternal housefly, like the inside of a gnat. All day long. All night long. Before falling asleep I always hear her, forming the same words, the same refrain, the same story: not with her voice but with her breathing. For thirty years now. Mother, mother. Her face far away, here. The shade has moved, you’re sitting in the sun.

WHEN SALOMÃO LEFT THE CARPENTER’S SHOP, he felt its intense smell of wood slowly give way to the smells from the street and to the sun. Women appeared in the doorways to empty buckets of water and wished him a good day. Salomão thought of José and remembered going to see him at the Mount of Olives, and how they spent hours and hours running in the field and playing. The first time he saw his cousin was at their grandfather’s funeral. Salomão was six years old. Without letting go of his arm, his mother introduced him to José. She tried to make them kiss each other, but José turned his head away. Salomão’s most vivid memory of their grandfather’s funeral, from start to finish, was the face of that little boy looking at him with pride and alarm, that little boy who was his cousin. And he remembered well enough the rest of the funeral: the women who didn’t cry much, who patted him on the head and face and neck, saying is this his grandson? is this his grandson?; his mother who, dressed in black, would cry now and then, to be drowned out immediately by a group of women; and the forbidden sensation that his mother was crying not for her father’s death but for her own sorrows, just her own sorrows. And he remembered the old men at the front door, looking solemn and with caps in hand, and he remembered the women saying it was no kind of life, whispering it’s terrible to outlive your own son. He remembered thinking about his grandfather in the rare moments when he succeeded in being left alone in his chair. Next to that body now lying there dead, he thought of his grandfather’s perfectly still face. Next to that body now lying there dead, he thought of his grandfather’s perfectly still face, his perfectly still gaze in front of the chicken coop. And Salomão understood the silence inhabiting that entire body, he learned to understand it on all the mornings when he was six years old. And Salomão thought of the light glancing off the skin of his grandfather on the days when he played with him, all around him, as if he were a doll or a tree. And he thought of the day before the funeral, when he came inside from his games in the backyard and said, unfrightened and lighthearted, unaware of the effect his words would have, grandpa stopped breathing. At six years of age, Salomão didn’t grasp the difference between his grandfather breathing or not breathing. Sitting next to his body during the watch through the night, Salomão thought his mother had laid him down in bed, as she did every night, and he didn’t understand why people came to see him and said poor man, and whispered it was for the best. He remembered everything, but he remembered with perfect, absolute, crystalline clarity the grown-up gaze of that boy who was his cousin. This is your cousin, said his mother, and behind them the men were throwing spadefuls of dirt over their grandfather. People shoved one another in the wide passageway leading to the exit, to the tall and black and heavy gate, the gate that reached up to the sky. She said this is your cousin, and she purposely didn’t say good day to José’s mother or even look at her. José’s mother was a black place, covered with black. She was the place of no gesture with her hands, no expression on her lips, no gaze in her eyes. José’s mother was a very thick, very cold, and very deep fog. She was a dead woman’s breathing, a dead woman’s skin, faceless, expressionless, with night in her eyes. And on that morning, with the mothers mutually ignoring each other and the boys having nothing to say to each other, the four of them walked together to José’s gravestone. His wife stood there bent over, abstract; his son lowered his eyes and pressed his hands together in front of his stomach; his sister took a handkerchief from her pocket and passed it over the letters of his name; and Salomão looked at them all. And when his mother pulled him away by the arm, when they had returned to the gate of the cemetery, José and his mother were still standing next to the gravestone. Salomão abruptly emerged from the depths of these memories. He suddenly felt all the sun and heat like a comfort. He was already almost home. He remembered José one last time. And he went on, tired, satisfied, a child.

Salomão’s wife had pulled her mother back into the shade. And while the widowed cook rearranged her delirious concoctions prepared from earth and pebbles and grass and twigs, her daughter stood there and looked at her. She was very old. The skin of her face was crumpled into a thick mass of wrinkles; she had no teeth, but from endlessly repeating the same conversations her tongue had been cut up by her gums; her hands were skin and bones; and her breasts, as her daughter knew from giving her baths, were two sacks of skin, long and empty. She was very old. When the sun began to set, old Gabriel said that the cook must be more than a hundred years old. In his opinion, she was the oldest person in the town after himself. Old Gabriel was the only one who visited her. And despite being at least one hundred thirty or one hundred fifty years old, Gabriel would arrive a little before day’s end. He would arrive looking rested and with a still-fresh bunch of collard greens or spinach under his arm, as if he didn’t even feel the long walk from the farmstead to the town. Salomão’s wife would take a stool from the stove and place it in the yard for him, and he would sit there listening and looking at the widowed cook. He said nothing to her, because he knew she was shut up inside a bygone time, and because he didn’t have anything to say to her. At sundown Salomão’s wife would come into the yard balancing a glass of water with both hands. Old Gabriel would drink it voraciously, in a long moment when nothing else existed. Handing her back the glass, he would say something. Usually he would say your mother must be more than a hundred years old, she’s the oldest person in town after me. Salomão’s wife would go back into the house and he’d follow. They’d cross through the kitchen and she’d open the door to the street. Before leaving, old Gabriel would say see you tomorrow and then walk by himself down the deserted street. He would say see you tomorrow, because they saw each other every day. Every other day she went to the farmstead to clean the rich people’s house; on the other days he came to town to visit the widowed cook. Lifting her gaze and letting it fall to the ground like a dead leaf, Salomão’s wife remembered that on that afternoon she would also trudge to the farmstead. She entered the kitchen and set out the bowl, the spoon, and the bread. She waited for the moment she knew all too well. Unstartled, she heard Salomão jiggle the door latch.