Jose Peixoto - The Implacable Order of Things

WHEN I WALKED PAST MY WIFE and felt the sun in her eyes and realized that my legs were walking on the street without knowing where to, it was as if my body were nothing but its own weakness. Since I knew she was looking at me, I walked as straight down the street as I could. Then I stopped and leaned against a wall in some shade. No one passed by, not even a dog or a chicken. Only the pigeons, as if they were free, traced wide arcs in the sky, imperfect circles. Only the pigeons passed by all morning, but without looking at me. I felt a finger choking my throat and making me want to vomit. I lowered my head and made sounds of vomiting, felt my stomach emptily churn, opened my mouth, stuck out my tongue, and vomited only the nothing I’d eaten that day. Straightening up, I looked at the hazy image of the world. At the indifferent sky, the indifferent houses, the indifferent existence of things. And I kept going. Wherever my body took me, without knowing where I was going. The silence was perhaps an audible murmur, perhaps an insistence that kept repeating a despair, a disquiet, whose speechlessness and anxiety made it all the more anguishing. I was my own uncertainty. I was that moment, and that moment was the fascination of one who looks on without understanding. I was the empty place of myself, I was my eyes, I was my gestures that were no more than my absence. And I kept going. I kept going. Wherever my body took me. Down the streets, an anxiety and a discomfort. My life happening independent of me, without me directing it, without me existing. Me without me. I without I. Me, and someone acting in place of me. My hands stronger than my will. My legs walking without being mine. And the silence shouting at me, saying all that I didn’t understand, or know, or listen to. And the morning’s poison made me cross the square. Looking normal, like any man in any banal moment, like a man not carrying a world of suffering in his shadow, on a morning just like other mornings, I crossed the square and entered Judas’s general store and lowered my gaze. And Judas’s general store, which would have been cool on a normal morning, cool like the shade, was the heat from outside and the sun and the light and the men looking at me and the devil smiling and a glass of red wine in front of me and the counter burning with heat and my skin seething with sweat and the devil in front of me smiling and the men looking at me and the light and sun and my legs like rubber and the flesh of my arms shriveled and my arms like dead weights and my face in front of my face as in a mirror and my face defeated and worn and old and facing death and the tempter facing me to say your wife and smiling and saying José and smiling and saying the two of them and smiling and saying like rabbits and smiling and saying him on top of her and smiling and saying like rabbits and smiling and the glass of wine making me hotter and the light and the sun and death and death and death and the devil smiling and saying José and smiling over and over and over and over. Judas’s general store would have been cool on a normal morning. Judas’s general store would have been cool like the shade. Judas’s general store was the heat from outside. It was the sun. It was the light. The men looked at me. I drank a glass of red wine. The devil smiled. The devil smiled and said your wife is with José, the two of them together, like rabbits, him on top of her, screwing.

And I walked through the streets as if seized by a rage with no cause. And I walked through the streets carrying a weight that, I now realized, was a profound grief. I felt inwardly abandoned. Banished and lost inside myself, with an inexplicable rage, with a profound grief. I am death and don’t know what death is. I am sorrow and dejection and torment and don’t know. I’m my not knowing anything and this suffocating anguish, endless and suffocating. I walked through the streets and arrived here. I arrived here and arrived nowhere, because I’m the same. I’m on the road that goes from the town to the farmstead, and I’m still at the square, I’m still at Judas’s general store, where the devil smiles at me and says like rabbits. The sun striking the earth scorches me, and it wouldn’t scorch me any less if I were walking in the sky, nor would I feel less anxiety. The sun striking the earth scorches me. The silence saddens me. The infinite vastness of the wheat fields saddens me. And the sun above the sun, inside the sun, overlaying the sun, the sun, the sun, the sun’s heat is my luminous grief, my sorrow, the news of my death announced to me and my sadness. I’m where I haven’t arrived. Here I keep walking, I go on. The olive and cork trees, August, the turned earth, the earth’s smell. My wife and José are this heat and my legs walking. Or perhaps they aren’t. Perhaps I am this heat I don’t control. I am my legs that walk without me. I am this anguish much larger than me. I am eyes that see me. The road that continues. I am ears that listen. The sand under my feet. The sand under my feet. The road that continues. I see old Gabriel. His night-ravaged face veiled by sadness and discouragement. And I hear old Gabriel. Don’t go, his voice dying, don’t go, his feeble insistence, don’t go. I look at the pleading in his eyes. I feel his tender, sick-child’s gaze. As if I didn’t see him, as if I didn’t hear him. And I keep going as if I’d thrust a knife into his voice, as if I’d turned him into nothing. Behind me, the silence of his slumping body. Old Gabriel dead. His life of one hundred and fifty years yielded up through resignation. Behind me, old Gabriel’s sad and resigned death, and sad because resigned. Behind me his certainties, lost forever, scattered across the earth, in the wind and in the light of the sun. Over the wheat fields looms the devil’s smile saying him on top of her, the two of them going at it like rabbits. The sweat on my face is the sweat of a thousand men. My face is a thousand faces. The world has shut down. Nothing exists in the distance, behind the hills. Here, as there, all that exists is my despair and desolation. In the depths of my gaze and inside me I see the farmstead. Alone. I’m solitude.

THE SHEEPDOG EMERGED from the midst of the sheep as if she were one more sheep, coming over with her belly full of stubble to look at me. Her eyes, large with earnestness, spoke tenderness and comfort. She also knew. I called her with my gaze and ran my hand through her fur. She lay down at my feet, feeling those moments which she knew, she also knew, would be my last. The big old cork tree grew even larger above me, and then the sky. And the vast plain, vaster than a spring breeze, greater than all the heat I felt at that hottest hour of the day. On either side, behind me, in front of me: the world. This is how I ended up. This is me. I think: it’s coming slowly, but it’s coming, and it will be an infinite day, an everlasting night, a frozen moment that won’t be a moment; and great matters will be smaller than the pettiest ones, and greater matters will be yet greater because they’ll be the only ones. I think: it’s today. And the silence that once seemed innocent to me, that same silence, now seems to me cruel and murderous. I run my hand through the sheepdog’s fur. The sheep obliviously graze. And my eyes blackly look upon death. The trail of suffering left by death before it arrives. Its certainty. And this anguish more powerful than any power is choking me. I know, and this knowing gives me everything and takes everything from me; it makes me a man and shows me death; it teaches me, forcing me to forget. And I feel that the sky’s roots, planted in the ground, are planted inside me. I feel, I feel it as I feel the sun falling on me or as I feel my hand in the sheepdog’s fur, but I know that the sky isn’t mine. I know. Not even death is mine. Just my own death. I’m distressingly small within myself. And I, within myself, am all that I am. I’m small and insignificant, I’m a past history of misunderstandings and mistakes, I’m the act of gazing at this sky, I’m the certainty of no future. I find the smell of the earth in the heat, and I smile with my lips and in my gaze. Never again. My smile is sad. It always was. Smiling, I laugh at myself and cry for myself. No one cries for a man whose gaze is black like this. I cry for myself, without tears. My dry eyes uselessly look at the sky, my dry face burns in this day’s hottest hour, my dry lips smile and cry with self-contempt. I run my hand through the sheepdog’s fur. I find the smell of the earth. Deep earth, mother and core of the world. I think: why?