The Complete Stories (18 page)

The Dinner

(“O jantar”)

He came into the restaurant late. He had certainly just been occupied with very important business. He might have been around sixty, was tall and corpulent, with white hair, bushy eyebrows and powerful hands. On one finger the ring of his might. He sat down, ample and solid.

I lost sight of him and while eating went back to observing the slim woman in the hat. She was laughing with her mouth full and her dark eyes sparkled.

Just as I raised my fork to my mouth, I looked over at him. There he sat with his eyes closed chewing his bread vigorously and mechanically, both fists clenched on the table. I kept eating and staring. The “garçon” was setting dishes on the tablecloth. But the old man kept his eyes shut. At one of the waiter’s livelier gestures he opened them so abruptly that this same movement was conveyed to his large hands and a fork dropped. The “garçon” whispered friendly words while stooping down to retrieve it; he didn’t respond. Because now awakened, he was suddenly turning his meat over, examining it vehemently, the tip of his tongue peeking out—he pressed on the steak with the back of his fork, nearly sniffed it, his mouth working in anticipation. And he began slicing it with a gratuitously vigorous movement of his whole body. Soon after he was lifting a bite to a certain level of his face and, as if he had to snatch it in mid-flight, gobbled it with a jerk of his head. I looked down at my plate. When I stared at him again, he was immersed in the full glory of his dinner, chewing with his mouth open, running his tongue over his teeth, his gaze fixed on the ceiling light. I was just about to slice my meat again, when I saw him stop entirely.

And as if he couldn’t stand it anymore—what?—he quickly grabs his napkin and presses it against his eye sockets with his hairy hands. I paused watchfully. His body was having trouble breathing, it was growing. He finally takes the napkin off his eyes and gazes numbly into the distance. He breathes while opening and shutting his eyelids excessively, wipes his eyes carefully and slowly chews the remaining food in his mouth.

A second later, however, he’s recomposed and hardened, he spears a forkful of salad with his whole body and eats hunched over, his chin active, the oil moistening his lips. He breaks off for a second, wipes his eyes again, shakes his head briefly—and another forkful of lettuce with meat is snatched in mid-air. He says to the passing “garçon”:

“This isn’t the wine I told you to bring.”

The very voice I’d been expecting of him: a voice that allows no possibility for rebuttal by which I saw that no one could ever do anything for him. Except obey.

The “garçon” left courteously holding the bottle.

But now the old man freezes again as if his chest were constricted and obstructed. His violent power quakes imprisoned. He waits. Until hunger seems to assault him and he starts chewing hungrily again, frowning. I was the one eating slowly, slightly nauseated without knowing why, participating in I didn’t know what. Suddenly he’s trembling all over, lifting the napkin to his eyes and pressing them with a brutality that transfixes me . . . I drop my fork on the plate with a certain decisiveness, I myself experiencing an unbearable tightness in my throat, furious, broken into submission. But the old man doesn’t let the napkin linger on his eyes. This time, when he pulls it off unhurriedly, his pupils are extremely sweet and tired, and before he wipes his face—I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the tear.

I hunch over my meat, lost. When I finally manage to look at him from the depths of my pale face, I see that he too has hunched over with his elbows propped on the table, head in his hands. And he just couldn’t stand it anymore. His bushy eyebrows were furrowed. The food must have got stuck right below his throat in the harshness of his emotion, for when he managed to go on he made a terrible gesture of effort to swallow and ran the napkin over his forehead. I couldn’t take it anymore, the meat on my plate was raw, I was the one who couldn’t take it anymore. Yet he—he was eating.

The “garçon” brought the bottle in a bucket of ice. I noted everything, indiscriminately: it was a different bottle, the waiter in coattails, the light haloing Pluto’s robust head that was now stirring with curiosity, gluttonous and intent. For an instant the “garçon” blocks my view of the old man and I see only the black wings of coattails: hovering over the table, he was pouring red wine into the glass and waiting with fervent eyes—because here was a guaranteed big tipper, one of those old men who are still at the center of the world and of power. The aggrandized old man took a confident sip, put the glass down and bitterly consulted the taste in his mouth. He smacked his lips together, clucked his tongue in disgust as if what was good was intolerable. I waited, the “garçon” waited, both leaning forward in suspense. Finally, he made a grimace of approval. The waiter bowed his shining head in subjection to this thanks, departed bowing, and I sighed in relief.

Now he was mingling the meat with sips of wine in that large mouth and his false teeth chomped heavily as I spied on him in vain. Nothing else was happening. The restaurant seemed to radiate with redoubled force under the clinking of glasses and cutlery; in the hard, brilliant corona of the room the murmurs ebbed and flowed in soft waves, the woman in the big hat smiling with her eyes half-closed, so slim and beautiful, the “garçon” slowly pouring wine into the glass. But now he gestures.

With his heavy, hairy hand, its palm so fatefully etched with lines, he makes a thinking gesture. He says in pantomime as much as he can, and I, I don’t understand. And as if he could no longer stand it—he put the fork down on his plate. This time you’ve really been caught, old man. He sits there breathing, done, noisy. Then he grabs his wine glass and drinks with his eyes closed, in resounding resurrection. My eyes sting and the brightness is loud, persistent. I am seized by the heaving ecstasy of nausea. Everything seems big and dangerous to me. The increasingly beautiful slim woman trembles, solemn, under the lights.

He’s finished. His face empties of expression. He closes his eyes, stretches out his jaw. I try to seize this moment, in which he no longer possesses his own face, to see at last. But it’s no use. The grand appearance that I see is unknown, majestic, cruel and blind. What I want to see directly, through the venerable elder’s extraordinary strength, doesn’t exist in this instant. He doesn’t want it to.

Dessert comes, some kind of mousse, and I am surprised by the decadence of his choice. He eats slowly, takes a spoonful and watches the sticky liquid drip. He ingests it all, however, grimaces and, enlarged, well-fed, pushes the plate away. Then, no longer hungry, the great horse rests his head on his hand. The first clearer sign appears. The old devourer of children is thinking in his depths. Blanching I watch him lift his napkin to his mouth. I imagine hearing a sob. We both sit in silence at the center of the room. Perhaps he’s eaten too quickly. Because, in spite of everything, you haven’t lost your hunger, have you!, I goaded him with irony, rage and exhaustion. But he was falling to pieces in plain sight. His features now sunken and demented, he swung his head from side to side, from side to side no longer restraining himself, lips compressed, eyes shut, rocking back and forth—the patriarch was crying inside. My anger was choking me. I saw him put his glasses on and age by several years. As he counted his change, he clicked his teeth while jutting out his chin, surrendering for an instant to the sweetness of old age. As for me, so intent on him had I been, that I hadn’t seen him take out his money to pay, nor examine the bill, and I hadn’t noticed the “garçon” returning with the change.

At last he took off his glasses, clicked his teeth, wiped his eyes while grimacing needlessly and painfully. He ran his square hand through his white hair, smoothing it powerfully. He stood holding the table’s edge with vigorous hands. And now, free of anything to lean on, he seems weaker, though still enormous and still capable of stabbing any one of us. With nothing for me to do about it, he puts on his hat caressing his tie in the mirror. He crosses the luminous shape of the room, disappears.

But I am still a man.

Whenever they betrayed or murdered me, whenever someone leaves forever, or I lost the best of what I still had, or when I found out that I am going to die—I do not eat. I am not yet this power, this structure, this ruin. I push away the plate, reject meat and its blood.

Preciousness

(“Preciosidade”)

(for Mafalda)

Early in the morning it was always the same thing renewed: waking up. Which was languorous, unfurling, vast. Vastly she’d open her eyes.

She was fifteen years old and not pretty. But inside her scrawniness, the nearly majestic vastness in which she moved as within a meditation. And inside the haziness something precious. That never sprawled, never got involved, never got contaminated. That was intense as a jewel. Her.

She awoke before everyone else, since to get to school she’d have to catch a bus and a tram, which would take her an hour. Which would give her an hour. Of daydreaming keen as a crime. The morning wind violating the window and her face until her lips grew stiff, frozen. Then she’d smile. As if smiling were a goal in itself. All this would happen if she were lucky enough for “no one to look at her.”

When she awoke at dawn—gone that instant of vastness in which she fully unwound—she’d dress in a hurry, trick herself into thinking there wasn’t time for a shower, and her sleeping family had never guessed how few she actually took. Under the glare of the dining room light, she’d gulp down the coffee that the maid, scratching herself in the kitchen darkness, had warmed up. She hardly touched the bread that butter never softened. Her mouth fresh from fasting, books tucked under her arm, she’d finally open the door, cross the threshold of the house’s insipid warmth, dashing into the frosty fruition of the morning. Then she’d no longer hurry.

She had to traverse the long, deserted street before reaching the main avenue, at the end of which a bus would emerge careening through the fog, its headlights still on at the stoplight. In the wintry June wind, her mysterious, authoritative and perfect act was to raise her arm—and already from a distance the shuddering bus would start contorting itself in obedience to the arrogance of her body, the representative of a supreme power, from a distance the bus would grow uncertain and lumbering, lumbering and advancing, increasingly solid—until it screeched to a halt right in her face amid fumes and heat, heat and fumes. Then she’d board, solemn as a missionary because of all the laborers on the bus who “might say something to her.” Those men who were no longer young. But she was afraid of young men too, afraid of boys too. Afraid they “might say something” to her, that they’d look at her too long. In the seriousness of her closed mouth was this great supplication: for them to respect her. More than that. As if she’d taken vows, she must be venerated, and, while inwardly her heart beat with fear, she too venerated herself, she, the guardian of a rhythm. If they looked at her, she grew stiff and doleful. What spared her was that the men didn’t see her. Though something inside her, as the age of sixteen was approaching amid fumes and heat, something was intensely surprised—and this surprised a few men. As if someone had tapped them on the shoulder. A shadow perhaps. On the ground the looming shadow of a girl without a man, an indeterminate, crystallizable element that took part in the monotonous geometry of great public ceremonies. As if they’d been tapped on the shoulder. They looked and never saw her. She cast more of a shadow than she existed.

On the bus the laborers were silent, holding their lunch boxes, sleep still on their faces. She felt ashamed at not trusting them, tired as they were. But until she forgot them, the discomfort. Because they “knew.” And since she knew too, hence her discomfort. They all knew the same thing. Her father knew too. An old man begging for change knew. The wealth distributed, and the silence.

Then, marching like a soldier, she’d cross—unscathed—the Largo da Lapa, where it was day. By now the battle was nearly won. She’d choose a row on the tram that was empty if possible or, with luck, sit next to some reassuring woman with a bundle of laundry on her lap, for example—and that was the first truce. She’d still have to face the long hallway at school where her classmates would be standing around chatting, and where the heels of her shoes would make a noise that her tense legs couldn’t hold back as if she wished in vain to make her heart stop beating, shoes that danced of their own accord. A vague silence would descend over the young men who sensed perhaps, beneath her disguise, that she was one of the devout. She’d pass by the ranks of classmates growing, and they wouldn’t know what to think or what to say about her. The noise her shoes made was ugly. She was betraying her own secret with wooden heels. If the hallway went on any longer, it would be as if she’d forgotten her destiny and she’d break into a run with her hands over her ears. All the shoes she had were sturdy. As if they were still the same ones they’d solemnly slipped on her feet at birth. She’d walk the length of the interminable hallway as if mired in the silence of the trenches, and in her face was something so fierce—and haughty too, because of her shadow—that no one said a thing to her. Forbidding, she prevented them from thinking.

Until, at last, the classroom. Where suddenly everything became unimportant and faster and lighter, where her face had some freckles, her hair fell into her eyes, and where she was treated like a boy. Where she was intelligent. The sly profession. She seemed to have done her homework. Her curiosity gave her more information than answers ever did. She’d sense, tasting in her mouth the citric flavor of heroic pains, she’d sense the fascinated revulsion her thinking head inspired in her classmates, who, once more, didn’t know what to say about her. The big faker was getting smarter and smarter. She’d learned how to think. The necessary sacrifice: that way “no one had the nerve.”

Sometimes, while the teacher was talking, she, intense, hazy, would make symmetrical lines in her notebook. If a line, which had to be both strong and delicate, strayed outside the imaginary circle it was supposed to fit inside, everything would collapse: she’d concentrate absently, guided by eagerness for the ideal. Sometimes, instead of lines, she’d draw stars, stars, stars, so many and so high that she’d emerge from this annunciatory work exhausted, raising a barely awake head.

The way home was so plagued by hunger that impatience and hatred gnawed at her heart. On the way back it looked like a different city: across the Largo da Lapa hundreds of people reverberating with hunger seemed to have forgotten and, if reminded, would gnash their teeth. The sun outlined every man in black charcoal. Her own shadow was a black pole. At this hour that required greater caution, she was protected by a kind of ugliness that hunger accentuated, her features darkened by the adrenaline that darkened the flesh of hunted animals. In the empty house, the whole family away at work, she’d shout at the maid who wouldn’t even respond. She’d eat like a centaur. Her face close to the plate, her hair nearly in the food.

“So skinny, but you sure can wolf it down,” the clever maid would say.

“Go to hell,” she’d shout gloomily.

In the empty house, alone with the maid, she no longer marched like a soldier, since she no longer needed to be careful. But she missed the battle on the streets. The melancholy of freedom, with the horizon still so far off. She’d given herself to the horizon. But this nostalgia for the present. The apprenticeship of patience, the vow of waiting. From which she might never manage to free herself. The afternoon stretching out interminably and, until everyone came home for dinner and with relief she could become a daughter, it was the heat, the book opened and then shut, an intuition, the heat: she sat with her head in her hands, hopeless. When she was ten, she recalled, a boy with a crush on her had thrown a dead rat at her. Disgusting! she’d yelled pale with indignation. It had been an experience. She’d never told anyone. With her head in her hands, sitting. She’d say fifteen times over: I am vigorous, I am vigorous, I am vigorous—then realize that she was only paying attention to the count. Compensating with quantity, she’d say one more time: I am vigorous, sixteen. And now she was no longer at the mercy of anyone. Despondent because, vigorous, free, she was no longer at their mercy. She had lost her faith. She went to talk with the maid, ancient priestess. They understood one another. Both barefoot, standing in the kitchen, steam from the stove. She had lost her faith, but, on the verge of grace, she sought in the maid only what was already lost, not what she had gained. So she’d act distracted and, chatting, avoid the subject. “She thinks that at my age I ought to know more than I do and might try to teach me something,” she thought, head in her hands, shielding her ignorance as she would a body. There were elements she lacked, but she didn’t want them from someone who’d already forgotten them. The great waiting played a part. Inside the vastness, plotting.

All that, yes. Prolonged, weary, the exasperation. But at dawn the next day, like a slow ostrich straightening itself out, she was waking up. She awoke to the same intact mystery, opening her eyes she was the princess of the intact mystery.

As if the factory whistle had already blown, she dressed in a hurry, downed her coffee in one gulp. Opened the front door.

And then she stopped hurrying. The great immolation of the streets. Cunning, alert, an Apache woman. Part of the crude rhythm of a ritual.

It was an even colder, darker morning than the others, she shivered inside her sweater. The white haziness made the end of the street invisible. Everything was cottony, you couldn’t even hear the sound of a bus passing on the avenue. She was heading toward the unforeseeable of the street. The houses were sleeping behind closed doors. The gardens rigid with cold. In the dark air, more than in the sky, in the middle of the street a star. A great ice star that hadn’t yet returned, tentative in the air, damp, formless. Surprised in its delay, it swelled roundly in hesitation. She looked at the nearby star. She walked alone through the bombarded city.

No, she was not alone. Eyes frowning in disbelief at the far end of her street, inside the mist, she saw two men. Two young men approaching. She looked around as if she could have had the wrong street or city. But her timing was off by minutes: she’d left home before the star and the two men had time to vanish. Her heart took fright.

Her initial impulse, when realizing her mistake, was to retrace her steps and go back home until they had passed: “they’re going to look at me, I know it, there’s no one else for them to look at and they’re going to stare at me!” But how could she turn back and flee, if she had been born for adversity. Since all her slow preparation had an unknown destiny that she, out of devotion, must obey. How could she retreat, and then never again forget the shame of having waited miserably behind a door?

And anyway maybe there wasn’t any danger. They wouldn’t have the nerve to say anything because she’d stride firmly past, jaw set, with her Spanish rhythm.

Legs heroic, she kept walking. The closer she got, the closer they got too—so that they were all getting closer, the street shrinking bit by bit. The shoes of the two young men mingled with the sound of her own, it was awful to hear. It was relentless to hear. Either their shoes were hollow or the sidewalk was hollow. The paving stones sounded a warning. All was echo and she heard, unable to prevent it, the silence of the siege being broadcast through the neighborhood streets, and she saw, unable to prevent it, that the front doors were shut even tighter. Even the star had retreated. In the newly arisen pallor of the dark, the street left to those three. She walked, listened to the men, since she couldn’t look at them yet needed to know about them. She listened to them and was surprised by her own nerve in pressing on. But it wasn’t nerve. It was her gift. And the great vocation for a destiny. She kept on, suffering in obedience. If she managed to think about something else she wouldn’t hear their shoes. Nor whatever they might say. Nor the silence with which their paths would cross.

With abrupt rigidity she looked at them. When she least expected to, betraying her vow of secrecy, she glimpsed them. Were they smiling? No, they were somber.

She shouldn’t have seen. Because, by seeing, she for an instant risked becoming an individual, and so did they. That’s what it seemed she’d been warned against: as long as she operated in a classical world, as long as she was impersonal, she’d be a daughter of the gods, aided by whatever must be done. Yet, having seen whatever it is that eyes, upon seeing, diminish, she risked being a she-herself that tradition couldn’t support. For an instant she hesitated completely, having lost her way. But it was too late to retreat. The only way it wouldn’t be too late was if she ran. But running would be like going astray at every step, and losing the rhythm that still sustained her, the rhythm that was her sole talisman, which had been delivered unto her at the edge of the world where one must be alone—at the edge of the world where all memories were wiped out, and all that remained as an incomprehensible souvenir was the blind talisman, a rhythm she was destined to copy, performing it for the consummation of the world. Not her own. If she ran, this order would be altered. And she’d never be forgiven the worst thing of all: haste. And even when you flee they give chase, these are things everyone knows.

Rigid, catechistic, not altering for a second the slow pace at which she advanced, she advanced. “They’re going to look at me, I know it!” But she struggled, out of some instinct from a past life, not to signal her fear to them. She sensed that fear unleashed things. It would be swift, painless. For just a fraction of a second they’d cross paths, swiftly, instantaneously, thanks to her advantage that she was moving ahead while they approached in an opposite movement, reducing the instant to its bare essence—to revealing the first of the seven mysteries that were so secret that only one thing was known about them: the number seven. Make them not say anything, make them just think, I’ll let them think. It would be swift, and a second after the transposition she’d declare in wonder, dashing down streets further and further on: it barely hurt at all. But what happened next had no explanation.

What happened next were four difficult hands, four hands that didn’t know what they wanted, four errant hands belonging to people who lacked the vocation, four hands that touched her so unexpectedly that she did the best thing she could have in the realm of movement: she got paralyzed. They, whose predestined role consisted only of passing near the darkness of her fear, and then the first of the seven mysteries would be revealed; they who represented only the horizon of a single approaching footstep, they hadn’t understood their designated function and, with the individuality of the fearful, had attacked. It was less than a fraction of a second on the tranquil street. In a fraction of a second they touched her as if entitled to all the seven mysteries. All of which she preserved, and she became more larval, and seven years further behind.