Jose Peixoto - The Implacable Order of Things

DAWN. THE GRASS SLOWLY lifting. Rustling sounds from far away, farther than on other days, waking up like a very old man returning to life with his meager strength. It was Saturday, and therefore a different and special day. The sun, a ball of fire, appeared on the horizon later than on other days, pouring its unbridled river of flames across the streets and fields, burning what it had spared the day before. It was summer. In every nook and cranny a light was growing that only children could see. A gentle light that only illuminated. Dawn slowly took shape in the air and in the birds’ keen eyes as a new morning. The sky was a transparent place that could only be seen, not entered.

They began as muffled moans against her pillow, soft moans smothered in the coolness that still filled the room with a translucent darkness. Then, when it seemed they had finished and the blind prostitute lay back and lowered her eyelids with a sigh of relief, she was seized by a new and stronger wave of pangs and anxiety, and the sun was risen, and Master Rafael woke up. He looked at her and felt frightened. With hair unkempt and looking almost ugly, she repelled him. He looked at her and felt frightened, not knowing what to do. During the night she’d kicked off the sheet, which lay balled up at the foot of the bed, like a worthless corpse. Master Rafael got up, got dressed, and, still frightened, looked at her again. The blind prostitute lay there half sunken into the mattress, on top of the badly wrinkled under-sheet, with her belly sticking out, with her body all contorted so as to keep her belly upright, with her back arched to the breaking point. She was propped against two firm pillows, with her legs twisted and unabashedly wide open. Master Rafael looked and saw none of this, seeing only the tenderness he remembered. He saw a small and clean face that wasn’t the one now sweating; he saw sweet and timid body movements that weren’t those unruly ones. As if he’d closed his left eye for a moment, Master Rafael left the bedroom, went to the kitchen, and returned with a mug of coffee in his hand. He gave it to the blind prostitute and said you can’t go with an empty stomach. Emerging from her pangs, she turned her head toward him as if she could see him and took the mug with her two hands. She raised it to her lips in silence. The first, slow sip was a long moment of peaceful calm. But she still hadn’t finished the coffee, there was still a brown remainder in the mug, when she jerked forward without warning, leaving Master Rafael just enough time to place the basin under her mouth. And there he stayed, with the right side of his torso and the stub of his arm pressed against the blind prostitute’s shoulder, and with his left hand holding the basin under her mouth. Unable to do anything more, Master Rafael stood still as she bellowed and vomited. When it was over, he wiped her lips with a towel and didn’t notice the blood in the basin, threading amid the coffee.

Time was passing and, like a girl who leaves off being a girl, the morning slowly left off being morning to become a blazing fire that made the earth crack from within. Master Rafael, leaning against the window, looked at the yard through the chink between the shutters and remembered imagining a garden with trees and flowers or a cabbage patch. And that garden he’d only imagined seemed to him in that moment to be all the things he could have done. And the groans of the blind prostitute, growing in intensity or at least seeming to him louder and more frequent, were a refrain that tormented him. Looking through the chink between the shutters, as if his whole body had become his gaze and vanished into the earth, Master Rafael repeated lemon trees grafted into orange trees, apricot trees grafted into peach trees, grapevines, cabbages, flower beds with colorful patterns, lilies, mallows. It was a childish illusion which he shouted in silence to convince himself it was attainable, which he shouted in spite of an inner voice denying it, which he shouted so as to drown out that feeble, almost dying voice that said you’ve done nothing, that said you knew everything and did nothing, an agonizing and ruthless voice that would say these things whenever he found a silent respite in his inner darkness.

Drawing away from the window, he went over to her as if he’d just noticed her. He pulled up a chair and sat next to the bed. He looked at his hand that moved without moving, and placed it on her belly. The blind prostitute tried to smile. And Master Rafael didn’t feel any of the anguish or fear he’d been feeling for many nights. Looking farther back, he felt the same joy he’d felt when he found out he was going to become a father. A father. And that certainty, which he’d sometimes forgotten, became the only certainty. And it gleamed in his eyes. And the groans of the blind prostitute, which had tormented him with a cold terror, now seemed a natural and almost pleasant, soothing sound. A father. And his hand, resting on the blind prostitute’s belly, told her all this, comforting her, and in this way they talked. The afternoon dragged on, like a life. And when the birds, free at last of the afternoon heat, began to fly over the yard that began to turn cool, when the blind prostitute tightened her face and it was clear she was about to give birth, they were both already old and loved each other still more.

Master Rafael stood up and ran to the window with his crutch as if he didn’t have a crutch and opened it. Then he fetched two clean towels and a tub full of water and an empty tub. Because of the shame they knew they both felt, without ever having talked about it, he called no one. The light outside was fading and Master Rafael lit the kerosene lamp. The blind prostitute felt something rip through her like a blade, splitting and slashing her, as if her torso and neck and head had been sliced down the middle, turning her whole body into an open wound. And she struggled with all her might, as if trying to pull up a tree by the roots or to move the world over an inch. Her skin was purplish red and wrinkled. Her face was sheer suffering. Her water broke over the balled-up bedsheet, as Master Rafael didn’t have time to put the tub in place. And the baby began to emerge just as the new day descended on earth and night still filled the sky. First the head. Master Rafael, knowing what to do, used two fingers to pull the baby by the roof of its mouth. It was born. The turmoil ceased, like something already long forgotten. Rafael held up the baby, still covered with blood, and looked at it. It was a girl. His daughter. Blind in both eyes. Missing her right arm. Missing both legs. She didn’t cry. She didn’t move. She was dead.

And the girl’s tiny corpse fit in his hand. His thumb and pinkie wrapped around her chest. His other fingers supported the head that hung from her neck. And the weight he felt in his arm was the weight of her dead life. He looked at her. Stared at her. And her glowing child’s face, her lips, the soft shadow cast by her nose and the sockets of her eyes were like a self-pronouncement of death. And Master Rafael, filled with the blackest grief, was darkness itself. He slowly raised his head to look at the blind prostitute, stretched out on pillows, arms extended and hands open, with her nightgown striped by blood where her flesh was gashed. Peaceful, with a relaxed face, as if sleeping. Master Rafael nestled the child on the bed and bent over the blind prostitute. He placed his hand on her chest. Her skin tired, warm. Blood covered his fingers. He placed his hand on her face. Her skin. And he felt the image of her face, as she had once felt his. And his fingers slid through her sweat, leaving a trail of sweat and blood. He lifted his arm and waited for the form of her face to dissolve in his hand. The sorrow that remained: a silent absence of meaning falling on all gestures, an abyss negating the meaning of all words, a veil that canceled time. The woman he had truly loved, truly loved, was now nothing in this world. And his solitude was a sky even vaster than the night, a sky where there was nothing but night and cold, a black place he entered with his gaze. Leaning on his crutch, Master Rafael went to get the shawl that had belonged to the blind prostitute as a girl, and to her mother before her, and to her grandmother before her mother. It was a white shawl made of soft wool, its fringe dirtied by time. It was kept in a small chest, among other treasured objects: the apron from the wedding, a knitted wool coat, a flower-print scarf. He returned to the bed with the shawl and wrapped it snugly around the baby. He pressed her against his chest, placed her between her mother’s arms, and covered them with a sheet up to the shoulders. He looked at them for the last time and left.