Jose Peixoto - The Implacable Order of Things

IT WAS SATURDAY. NO ONE would dare say it, but the sun was gentler, the chickens walked more briskly on the streets, the pigeons made wider circles in the sky. The women were all carrying bags of bread and stopped to talk with one another. The men’s faces were all washed. Basking in the morning, the grass gladly waved. It was Saturday. Master Rafael had been at the blind prostitute’s house since the first colors of dawn. Salomão and the apprentice arrived at the hour when they usually began at the carpenter’s shop. It was the third and last Saturday they spent renovating the house. On the first Saturday, with three picks and three shovels, they dug a cesspool some twenty feet deep in the backyard, and by the time night arrived they had already made a cover so solid that the earth overlaying it would never cave in, even if they planted a ninety-year-old cork tree on top of it. On the second Saturday, they installed the toilet in a corner of the kitchen and connected the drainpipe to the cesspool. It was a lighter day of work, and Master Rafael, who hadn’t had time the week before to plot his ambitions, spent the day making plans. I’ll build a china cabinet to go here, I’ll make some shelves for over there. And at lunchtime, while they waited for the blind prostitute to arrive with three bowls of bread soup, each with a special treat of two grilled sardines, Master Rafael took the pencil from his ear, a small and thin sheet of wood from his pocket, and began to draw detailed plans for making the most of the area in the yard: lemon trees grafted into orange trees, apricot trees grafted into peach trees, grapevines, cabbages, flower beds with colorful patterns, lilies, mallows, and invented plants. Another show of his enthusiasm was when, at the end of the day, he asked his employees to wait in the yard while he tried out the toilet. Salomão and the apprentice stood there in silence, hands in their pockets, listening to the sounds in the kitchen, increased by the toilet’s flushing, and with greater attention they heard the water and filth passing through the drainpipe. Master Rafael, with his belt still unbuckled, jumped up and down on his crutch. The blind prostitute arrived right behind him with three glasses and a bottle of red wine. Now, on the third Saturday, they were going to install two windows, one in the bedroom wall next to the backyard, and another in the kitchen wall facing onto the street. They began with the bedroom window. Master Rafael measured it, outlined it with a pencil on the whitewash, and began to hammer out the wall with his one and only hand. The hammer had a handle the size of a man’s arm, and the hammer’s head was made of a special steel, with a special alloy that had been a generations-old secret but was forever lost when an identical hammer hit the head of the blacksmith’s youngest son, crushing it instantaneously. Even though the hammer was heavier than a woman, Master Rafael grabbed it by the tip of the handle, twirled it, and made it strike exactly where he wanted, with a bang that came from the depths of the earth or of men or of who knows what. In the yard the apprentice sifted spadefuls of sand, and with a hoe Salomão mixed the sand with cement and water into a coherent but not stiff mixture, soft but not runny. When Master Rafael had finished opening the hole, Salomão went to the toolbox to fetch a chisel and a carpenter’s hammer and made the oval hole into a rectangular shape. Even though the bed was covered with a drop cloth and plaster dust, the bedroom looked like a happy place for the first time; the light discovered its every nook, chasing out the gloom of many generations. The apprentice fetched the varnished window that Master Rafael had made on three late afternoons, and after driving large nails in crosswise around the edges, they began to secure it with trowels full of cement. Salomão, with hammer in hand, went to the kitchen to start the next window. Its shape was already outlined on the wall. Using both hands, Salomão slammed the hammer into the rectangular area, and the bricks didn’t budge, as the wall was very thick. On his second try, the first rubble gave way. A ray of sunlight shot through the wall. And Salomão, peeking through the hole, saw the devil on the other side. As if he’d known that Salomão was going to open a window there, as if he’d been waiting for him. The devil was on the street, a foot away from the wall, looking at him, smiling.

AS I SAT DOWN under the big old cork tree and the sheep, knowing we’d arrived, scattered across the pasture, I remembered Salomão’s voice. When we were kids I was already bringing the sheep here, and sometimes, when the sun was at its hottest, he would show up by himself, having escaped his mother, so that for an afternoon he ran free with me. We’d catch crickets. I taught him to distinguish between male and female crickets by the number of tails, and I said don’t ever take a female cricket home, because they attract snakes. He was scared to death of snakes, but my warning was useless, because he was just as scared of crickets, male or female. He would never touch one, and to take one home was unthinkable. We’d gather acorns. I taught him the difference between those from cork trees and those from oak trees, explaining that the latter were very bitter and could only be eaten by boars. He nodded and said yes, as if he’d understood, and then he ate both kinds of acorns, with his same rabbit’s teeth and his same naïve and childish expression. At day’s end, we’d sit and look at the sheep, as if looking at a stream, while I chewed on a stalk of sorrel. And each time I yanked a stalk for him, he shook his head as if I’d offered him a red-hot iron. He said that sorrel was bitter and that his mother had told him it was poisonous. Offended, I wouldn’t look at him, and in a harsh voice I’d say good, that leaves more for me, as if it were almost gone, as if the fields around us weren’t full of those tiny yellow flowers.

But the truth that at the time I wouldn’t even confess to myself was that those afternoons filled me with excitement. Neither I nor Salomão played with other children. I didn’t play with other children because there weren’t any at the farmstead, and I never went into town except with my mother to visit the cemetery. He didn’t play with the other children in the town because his mother wouldn’t let him and because the only time he snuck out to play with them, they played a trick on him with nettles: they surrounded him, took off his long johns, and covered him with nettles, and for a week he had to douse his privates with vinegar to relieve the itching and burning. We only played with each other. And we never lost the excitement we shared, I in secret, he without knowing how to hide it. Although I realized that those afternoons were now impossible, I still felt that excitement the last time I saw him, beneath all my sorrow and regret. A repressed, unspoken excitement, sunny like on those distant afternoons, black like on my afternoons today. And I feel like shouting Salomão, Salomão, the way I used to shout, seeing him turn around with his dependable smile. I miss him and I know we can never play again. And all I’d like to do is play. All I’d like is to take him through the fields and explain things to him, while the sheepdog wags her tail, because he’s my cousin and my friend. I feel like shouting Salomão, Salomão, but this has also become impossible, like the earth, like the sun. And those afternoons, so long and so special, are now long and make me die over and over, moment by moment. Like me, my staff leans against the trunk of the big old cork tree. Dropping my jackknife from one hand and the branch I was whittling from the other hand, I look straight at the sun. I think: if the punishment that’s my lot can be contained in me, if I can accept it and somehow hold it inside me, perhaps I’ll be spared further judgments, perhaps I can rest. And all the trees between me and the sky suddenly disappeared, so that it looked perfectly clear and distant. And the sun’s burning slowed into a steady, dull heat. And the world’s voices: the voices of stones, breezes, trees: all the world’s voices fell silent. And where the earth ends in my field of vision, I see a figure slowly take shape. It’s a very large man, walking toward me. He’s a man the size of a house or a haystack. He’s a very large man, looking straight at me and walking very fast. And like a galloping breeze, he’s already near me. He stops. I make out his face. He looks at me. We look at each other. I can’t bear the force of his enormous gaze and instantly, instinctively, turn my head away. Slowly turning back to look, I see he has disappeared. In his place there’s just the swift flight of birds under the sun’s flames, just the agony of the stones and the burning breeze and the trees enduring the day’s fire. I stand up, stick my fingers in the corners of my mouth, press them against my folded tongue, whistle, and say come on dog, and I whistle again. I’ve got to go see Salomão. The sheepdog rounds up the flock, running on both sides of it at the same time. I’ve got to go see Salomão. On the way to the Mount of Olives, I prod the lagging sheep with my staff. I’ve got to go see Salomão.