Jose Peixoto - The Implacable Order of Things

Night. It was a night of deeper, total silence, a night beyond silence. Master Rafael’s footsteps, indistinguishable in the darkness, made no sound. The lightless and desolate houses, with windows and doors shut, were speechless blocks of stone that accompanied him for an instant but stayed behind, as if lost or abandoned. Prevailing over his weariness again and again but never definitively, Master Rafael walked on. His body, like a dead tree, or a dead morning, or a piece of death itself, walked on. His lips trembled. Sweat ran down his chest. A breeze silently swept over the ground. A breeze not felt. The baby girl’s face. The blind prostitute’s face. Master Rafael remembered. And each image he saw was an image of his endless solitude. The night in Master Rafael’s gaze, beyond all silence, was a well with clean water where children played during the day without fear, throwing pebbles and imagining twigs to be boats; it was a well with clean black water, a solitary well, on a plot of land far from the town, on a moonless and starless night without end. The baby girl’s face. My daughter. The blind prostitute’s face. You were my certainty and I lost you. Night. Master Rafael went on. Up ahead, in the opaque blackness, he visualized the carpenter’s shop.

He thrust his hand deep into his pocket and found the keys. He opened the gate, which for the first time made no sound, whether of rust, dirt, pebbles on the ground, or boards. He walked without stumbling in the absolute darkness, knowing the place of things that had places and the things that had none. He struck a match and lit the kerosene lamp. It was an old, soot-blackened lamp that was used in winter when night fell early, and the rest of the year was forgotten behind a box of crooked nails, where it impregnated the sawdust that fell on it with kerosene. He slowly made his way to the table in the middle of the shop and set down the lamp. Then he went to the window and opened it. The quiet song of the crickets filled the night’s vastness with their absence. As if he were gazing at the sky, Master Rafael saw the baby girl wrapped in the shawl and nestled in the arms of the blind prostitute. Mother and daughter. He lingered on his vision of them. They slept and no one could harm them. He closed his eyes. He opened his hand and felt the blind prostitute’s face. Her skin. Her hair wet with sweat. And he knew deep down that she was dead. Without looking back, he returned to the table in the middle of the shop and sat on one end of it. He looked around. The bench that had been his father’s. The tools arranged in the way he always arranged them. His father working and teaching him. Patiently teaching him. With a simple, satisfied look in his eyes. Master Rafael tossed his crutch on the floor and it made no sound. On the floor, like a worthless object. And he raised his hand in front of his face. He looked straight at it. A thick hand, like either one of his father’s. In the palm of his hand and between its fingers he felt the weight of the little girl’s corpse. My daughter. Her scrawny chest. Her tiny lifeless head. Her face. He grabbed the saw and held it against his leg. He aligned its teeth with the wrinkle where his leg joined his groin and began to saw, tearing trousers and skin at the same time. The blade dug into his flesh. Master Rafael kept his arm and gaze steady, as if he were sawing a board at a right angle. And when he sawed his leg bone, it made only a dull sound. Blood streamed down from the tabletop. His leg fell next to his crutch, like one more useless object. The baby girl’s face. My daughter. Master Rafael stretched out his arm, grabbed the kerosene lamp and hurled it to the floor. Flames rose up the walls. And on that night the flames reached the sky.

IOPENED MY EYES. I HEARD the shouts on the street but didn’t want to hear. When they banged on the door with their fists, I got up, still in my long johns. They came in without me telling them to. In the kitchen, darkly lit up by the small moon that shone through the open door, they looked like ghosts with long whitish faces, ghosts with bright and disembodied eyes, and they said the carpenter’s shop is on fire. I stopped looking at them, as if they’d said nothing, and returned to the bedroom. I struck a match, which slowly exploded in the air. I lit the kerosene lamp. My wife sat up in bed without speaking, her belly a growing mound under the sheets. The widowed cook, her face buried in the pillow, which muffled the syllables she formed with each breath, seemed to have fallen silent. Through the wall I could hear the sound of the fountain pen of the man shut up in a windowless room writing. It was the sound of thoughtless, impulsive, angry strokes. To someone who didn’t know, it might seem like the sound of crossing out. But no, it was the sound of writing. I bent over to put on my trousers, first the right leg, then the left. I buttoned my shirt. With my face leaning over the lamp, I looked at my wife, who did not look away. The men’s husky and nervous voices arrived from the kitchen. I blew out the lamp’s small flame.

Only outside, when already halfway there, did I feel the cold shock of waking up and being real. The sudden awareness in me of myself. Of myself and of the world. The unspoken embarrassment of our being three men walking in silence, and the perhaps ridiculous hurry of our steps, and the ridiculous sound of our noses breathing. The faces of the men who had woken me up. Their solemn and unchanging expressions. The discomfort of cold clothes against my skin still warm from the sheets. A breeze entering through my shirt sleeves. And the deep dark night before dawn. The stars, likewise ridiculous, in the dull black sky. The three of us walking quickly, as if it were important. And then a halo of light swirling in the sky over the carpenter’s shop, as if the sun were trying to come up in the middle of the night, to rend the darkness. And as we got closer and closer I remembered, as if struck by an idea, the peaceful gaze of Master Rafael, the open gate of the lumberyard, the declining afternoons seen through the window of the carpenter’s shop, and I hurried my step even more. At last wide awake, by the time I reached the shop I was walking as if running, or running as if walking.

The rafters had given way and the roof, in two halves with the tiles intact, had caved in on the carpenter’s shop. The flames rose up where the roof had been. Streams of sparks flew upward and vanished into the sky. The night swallowed up thick black waves of smoke. The gate was a pile of fallen boards on fire. A long row of men and women shouted and passed buckets of water from hand to hand. And they uselessly threw the water against the fire, as if it weren’t water and the fire and night weren’t fire and night. As if they poured empty buckets into the air, as if they hurled buckets of nothing against an indifferent fire. I stood there all alone and watched. The flames warmed my face, my flesh, my blood. No one had told me, but I knew that Master Rafael was dead. I looked and that’s what I saw. And morning broke. With the first light of day the flames went out. The women went home. The men sat down on the ground next to me. I was the only one standing. The carpenter’s shop had burned to the ground. Every strip of wood, every pinewood log in the yard, every speck of sawdust, every board, every unfinished window, every carpenter’s bench, every tool. The walls, which no longer held anything up or protected anything within, were charcoal black. Amid the silence of the men and the morning, the embers crackled with a dim glow under the ashes, quickened now and then by an intermittent breeze. Old Gabriel loomed in the distance, coming toward us with his slow steps. He came up to me.

I DIDN’T SAY GOOD MORNING. I didn’t say anything. I looked at Salomão and each man there, and each man and Salomão looked at me with the clear gleam of grief in their eyes. I looked at the fire. The last ember died out in a sigh that ascended as a small swirl of smoke in the air. One by one, the men started to get up. The last one came to me and said in a whisper, as if behind a shielding cloak, that when they learned of the fire they went to Master Rafael’s house and found the blind prostitute dead from childbirth, with the child likewise dead; he said that Master Rafael was inside the carpenter’s shop; he said he was sure that Master Rafael was inside the shop; he said that Salomão didn’t know. He stopped speaking to hear what I had to say. There was a brief silence, and then I waved him along with my hand. A few men searched among the ashes for things of value. Perfectly still, as if he weren’t breathing, Salomão stood in the same place and in the same position, like a post, like a hill, like an unmoving tree. In his eyes the flames still raged.