Jose Peixoto - The Implacable Order of Things

Moisés was thinking of José’s wedding and of the cook, whom he met that day.

IT WAS ON A SATURDAY IN JULY. My brother and I wore our newest suits and our jackets with navy buttons that were the last thing the tailor made before he died, for he didn’t want to die without leaving us each a suit for special occasions, and he was the only one capable of inventing and executing an intricate system of buttons and fasteners and straps that would allow us to wear shirts, sweaters, and jackets. Since it was Saturday, we woke up a little late, at eight thirty. We drank our coffee and put two clay pots of water on the fire. When they came to a boil, we grabbed them with a rag, since clay also burns, and poured them into two enamel tubs in the middle of the kitchen. We added a tad of cold water and took a bath. We shared the blue soap and dried off with the same towel. We sat on two stools by the fire and clipped our fingernails and toenails. Our suits, ironed the night before, hung on the chairs in the bedroom, next to our shined shoes and brand-new socks. It was Elias who ironed them, for he has always been more delicate with his hands, and the suits, albeit the newest ones we owned, were made when we were young, and any carelessness with the weight of the hot iron could scorch them permanently. I remember Elias asking me to move the iron around and to stir up the embers, and this I know how to do. Since we don’t have much beard, we merely sprinkled some scented water on our cheeks and let our two or three fine whiskers, white or blond, have a chance.

Outside, the day was the bright sun flooding the building walls and the ground and sky, turning everything, walls and ground and sky, into a sun as well. We walked without a care and, as I remember, smiling. It seemed, like all Saturdays, to have good things in store. The frightened chickens scurried out of our path. The dogs looked at us in a friendly way. People said good morning to us. We reached the church and the door was closed. On the three front steps José’s sister was holding on to her baby, who whined as if he wished to fill the morning air with the deafening bugle sound of his screaming, while José’s sister talked nonstop in a torrent of scarcely intelligible words: look what I have to put up with the sun beating down on us and no one showing up to open the door and no bride or groom look what I have to put up with this kid who won’t shut his trap I only just fed him I just changed his diaper he just woke up and already he’s whining to go to sleep: rapid words without letup, like a wailing or a lament; the blacksmith was leaning against the façade, hunched over and downcast, smoking a cigarette and staring at the ground; José’s father, looking hypnotized, was squatting like a child on one of the church steps, with a strip of cloth tied around his neck. We said good morning. No one answered us. There was nothing to do but wait, and it was truly uncomfortable. The sun hotter and hotter. The baby screaming at the top of his lungs.

When the devil arrived, we wiped the sweat off our foreheads with our jacket sleeves. And while he fiddled with the key, we lined up behind him. The dejected blacksmith went over to José’s father, gently lifted him up, and led him by the strip of cloth that he wore against his will around his neck, like a leash. Which in effect is what it was. The blacksmith sat him down and untied the cloth from his neck. We sat down. The baby kept screaming, and it seemed impossible that such a tiny body could have a throat strong enough to scream like that. The devil, forever smiling, walked around the altar getting things ready, and we saw everything, since the church has no sacristy. He struck an entire box of matches that went out as he tried to light a candle, he tasted a moldy host, he donned a chasuble that came unstitched at the back, and as he continued in these preparations, she arrived. She appeared in the doorway to the church, lit from behind, and that silhouette dazzled me immediately. I knew that she had moved into town, but I still hadn’t seen her. During the fifty years she’d worked at the Mount of Olives, I’d never once seen her, since whenever I went to the farmstead, she was busy, and whenever she came into town, we never chanced to meet. But I knew that she’d moved. I even knew that she’d moved next door to the house of the man who writes in a room without windows, and during the months since then I’d often invented excuses for us to pass that way when coming home from the oil press. Even so, I never saw her until that moment when she entered the church. Although it was very hot, she wore a maroon velvet dress and some lace-trimmed stockings that covered her shins. She walked in front of the altar and didn’t make the sign of the cross before the tabernacle. In fact no one made the sign of the cross before the tabernacle, not only because no one knew how to make the sign of the cross but also because the church had no tabernacle. She stole along the aisle by the wall and sat down right next to me. She grumbled about the heat and the discomfort of her clothes, and she didn’t say good morning. Hot and sweaty, she waved a fan which, I found out later, the rich woman had brought her from the fair in Seville.

The groom entered hand in hand with the bride. The cook pulled the madwoman from the Rua da Palha into the church, saying help us out here. The baby boy of José’s sister howled. Given the position of the bride and groom at the altar, it fell to me to be a witness for José. The cook refused to be a witness for the bride, muttering abortion, muttering she had an abortion, so she ended up next to me, as a witness for the groom. Muttering, she passed on to me the scent of her perfume. She was a woman. As was plain to see from the way she took a hanky from her purse and blew her nose, from the way she moved her lips while chewing on tiny words, from the way she impatiently shifted from one foot to the other. She was a woman. And it didn’t fluster her to see me and my brother attached. And she almost smiled at me once. And she almost looked into my eyes. She was a woman.

ELIAS WAS THINKING OF JOSÉ’S WEDDING and of how that was the day his brother fell for the cook.

THE CHURCH WALLS WERE MADE OF ROUGH STONE, though successive layers of whitewash had smoothed them down somewhat. On each side there was a saint, regarded as such just because they were there and not because they were really saints, for no one knew who they were. And the ceremony proceeded. Smiling, the devil read phrases, intoning them like a chant, while my brother was falling in love with the cook. There were also two small stained-glass windows. The floor was made of wood and riddled with worms. José’s sister’s baby wouldn’t quit bawling, he didn’t even stop to breathe, he bawled incessantly, and although we heard the devil chanting a lament, we couldn’t make out the random words. The madwoman from the Rua da Palha, who was a witness with me for José’s wife, had a large stain of drool on the front of her sweater and a huge bloodstain on her skirt. She didn’t wear stockings and her legs were filthy black. Her hair was all disheveled and fleas crawled on her neck. She moved her body in almost controlled jerks, and her head twisted to see something in the air, something I tried to see but couldn’t, something that flew and made her head move every which way on her neck. The screams of José’s sister’s baby ricocheted against the church walls until it became impossible to distinguish between the shouts coming from the child’s open mouth and red face and the identical shouts repeated by the walls. They shouted at the same time, walls and child, shouts coming at us from all sides. The cook blew her nose continuously. Before her hand could get from nose to handbag with her colorful, flower-stamped hankie, she would be sniffling again, and we could hear the full depth of her sniffling in spite of the baby’s shrill cries. And my brother looked at her with rapture. The cook muttered, as if praying. With her small mouth she muttered softly, quickly. As if she were eating grains of rice, one by one, or slurping soup from a spoon, with an annoyed, irate look, almost a look of hatred. And my brother looked at her with rapture. The cook restlessly shifted her weight from one foot to the other, perhaps because her shoes pinched or perhaps because she was irritated by the screaming child or by the madwoman from the Rua da Palha who smelled like manure. And my brother looked at her with rapture. The moment arrived for exchanging rings, and the bride and groom had no rings. Unconcerned about this detail, they placed imaginary rings on each other’s finger. My brother didn’t see this, for by then his eyes were glued on the cook. As if he were stuck to her and not to me. As if she were a woman.