Jose Peixoto - The Implacable Order of Things

Early next morning, José knocked on the door of the rich people’s house and paid more attention to the sad and inexpressive face that opened it. And while he walked through the kitchen, carrying armfuls of oak wood and rockrose branches, he looked at her as if for the first time, at her arms, her fragility, her white skin. And when the morning had become fully morning and one could feel the sun’s warmth, José hid behind the waterwheel to spy on her hanging laundry from the clotheslines. Slender and delicate, she set down the basket, and José was enchanted by that slender, delicate figure who, imagining herself alone, passed amid the bright whiteness of the hanging sheets and blended in with it, since her skin was also white and reflected the sun. Later, when he let out the sheep and drove them to pasture, he dreamed the whole time of that skin and its white brightness. From that day on he wanted to know her.

I THINK: PERHAPS SUFFERING is tossed by handfuls over the multitudes, with most of it falling on some people and little or none of it on others. I suffer. I know my wife is pacing around the house. I don’t look at her. I look at the sun in the sky over the house. I see through the ceiling and the roof tiles. I look directly at the sun. And at its light. Like a river current, it rushes in, fills and purifies me. And beyond this current that washes me as if it were water, not light, I know that my wife is pacing around the house. Even though my eyes don’t see her, I see her. She’s thinking. What are you thinking about, wife? Who is that face of yours? And no silence answers me. There’s only the silence which I don’t understand, in which I don’t hear her. Only a silence of forgetting and of indifference and of silence. Far from this shaft of sunlight and close to my skin she’s pacing around the house, perhaps lost, perhaps sure of what she knows. I need her. I don’t know her.

JOSÉ’S WIFE MUST HAVE BEEN about twenty and would spend long hours sitting in a chair in the main hallway, listening to the voice shut up inside a trunk. José, who must have been about thirty, had the blindness of looking out for her and noting down what he saw in a notebook: the day, hour, place, and description of each sighting. Wednesday, nine thirty a.m., garden, asked old Gabriel for some collard greens, slender wrists. Thursday, eight fifteen a.m., courtyard, went into town. Saturday, quarter to noon, fed the chickens, I heard her voice. José tried to discover her routine so that he could wait for her or follow her more easily, but she was as apt to wash the laundry in the morning as in the evening, she didn’t have a set day for going into town, and she fed the chickens whenever it occurred to her. José suffered on her account. When he woke up, at the crack of dawn, she was the first thing he thought of. As he tended the sheep he thought of her. Sometimes he couldn’t see her face, worn down from him having imagined it so much. Then he would tightly shut his eyes and construct her piece by piece, remembering her lips, nose, hair, and eyes, and then he’d combine all the parts in his mind. He’d think of her as he went to sleep. When he spotted her he felt his heart beating faster in his temples.

He kept this up for enough months to fill a dozen notebooks. But she knew he was watching her, she was perfectly aware of the feeling that was consuming him, not because she’d ever caught him and not because she had some supernatural power but because she was a woman and all women know more than they see, when feelings are involved. And one day, late in the afternoon, the light was dwindling in a luminosity that hung over the fields, spreading across the plains and across the world, since the world ended on the horizon of the plains; one day, late in the afternoon, she crossed the courtyard, walked by the waterwheel and the small garden that the rich woman liked to see kept up, and knocked on the door of José’s house. When he opened it, she looked into his eyes, and his face, in an instant, became profound. And she was the one who broke that instant, silently passing through the beads that hung across the threshold. José followed her. And they went into the bedroom and made love. And not feeling the weariness of her frazzled body after its last exertion of the day, she quietly left.

The next day, after quickly grazing and penning up the sheep, José went into town. In his sister’s backyard he found his father in the same chair as always, like a marble statue getting old. José sat down and, after an hour, said I’m going to get married. No change occurred in the faces of the two men. After another hour had gone by, he was already making the necessary arrangements for the wedding. He got married three weeks later.

It was on a Saturday in July. José wore his only suit, a black suit that had belonged to Doctor Mateus and that was baggy in the sleeves and big in the waist, a black suit that he’d used for his mother’s funeral and his sister’s wedding. The bride wore a white dress that had belonged to the doctor’s wife and that she recovered from its use as a floor rag. They were married by the devil, he being the one who performed the town’s weddings. The two male witnesses were Moisés and Elias, and the two female ones the cook and the madwoman from the Rua da Palha, since she happened to be passing by the church door and was pulled inside. The guests were old Gabriel, José’s father, José’s sister, his brother-in-law the blacksmith, and his seven-month-old nephew. Dressed in lay clothes, the devil entered behind the altar and, smiling, began to read from a black book. José’s forlorn father sat in a corner, stiffer than the agonizing wax figures. His sister, with a bunch of plastic tulips on her head, rocked her baby back and forth like a broken clock, and the child’s cries echoed in the church like an air-raid siren. The cook, out of sorts, muttered through her teeth. The madwoman from the Rua da Palha drooled and jerked this way and that, like a bullock besieged by blowflies. The devil, saying nothing, smiled wide. José said yes. His bride nodded her head. The witnesses signed with an X, except for the madwoman from the Rua da Palha, who signed with a scribble. No one was waiting outside the church. No one threw flowers. There was no lunch or reception. Everyone went home. That night José’s wife slept with him, but they didn’t make love.

On Sunday José had to tend the sheep. The young bride, with the indifference of a wife married for twenty or thirty years, made coffee and went to wash the laundry in the washtub of the rich people’s house. José didn’t go spy on her.

I THINK: PERHAPS SUFFERING is tossed by handfuls over the multitudes, with most of it falling on some people and little or none of it on others. Even if I feel a great weight on my chest, doesn’t an abyss weigh more? Even if I feel like a blind man advancing without eyes toward a precipice, I have to get up from this bed. I have to raise these arms that aren’t mine, I have to raise these legs that aren’t mine but those of a huge rock, and go tend the sheep. My sheepdog. The fields. The big old cork tree. What shade is cast by the big old cork tree? Even if in midafternoon I’m walking in the night, even if the sun at its height is the blackest night, and inside night there’s just more night, since everything is night to my eyes, I have to get up from this bed. Even if it’s just to suffer and suffer, I have to go face what I’ll be next, since that’s what I’ll be and I can’t escape it, I can’t escape becoming something.

WRAPPED UP IN A BANDAGE, José got up and began to get dressed. His wife looked at him and said nothing. The baby woke up.

THEY REMAINED QUIET, THE three old men, for a long time. The walls of the oil press were covered by a layer of lees, like a protection against the cement’s roughness. The color of the men’s faces absorbed the darkness of the oil press. Quiet, all three. Moisés, Elias, and old Gabriel all thinking of one thing and thinking that the others were thinking of another thing, but they were all thinking the same thing. Moisés was thinking of José’s wedding and of the cook whom he met that day; he thought that Elias was thinking of José’s wife when she was still a girl at the brickyard and that old Gabriel was thinking of José’s wife hidden away at the Mount of Olives, already worn and used. Elias was thinking of José’s wedding and of how that was the day his brother fell for the cook; he thought that Moisés was thinking of José’s wife when she was still a girl at the brickyard and that old Gabriel was thinking of José’s wife hidden away at the Mount of Olives, already worn and used. Old Gabriel was thinking of José’s wedding and of how Moisés had pulled his brother by the little finger, almost pulling it off, so that he could get closer to the cook at the altar; he thought that Moisés was thinking of José’s wife when she was a girl at the brickyard and that Elias was thinking the same thing as his brother.