The woman then tried the camel. The camel in rags, humpbacked, chewing at himself, absorbed in the process of getting to know his food. She felt weak and tired, she’d hardly eaten in two days. The camel’s large, dusty eyelashes above eyes dedicated to the patience of an internal craft. Patience, patience, patience, was all she was finding in this windblown spring. Tears filled the woman’s eyes, tears that didn’t spill over, trapped inside the patience of her inherited flesh. The camel’s dusty odor was all that arose from this encounter she had come for: for dry hatred, not for tears. She approached the bars of the pen, inhaled the dust of that old carpet where ashen blood flowed, sought its impure tepidness, pleasure ran down her back into the distress, but still not the distress she’d come looking for. In her stomach the urge to kill convulsed in hunger pangs. But not the camel in ragged burlap. “Dear God, who shall be my mate in this world?”
So she went alone to have her violence. In the zoo’s small amusement park she waited meditatively in the line of lovers for her turn on the roller coaster.
And there she was sitting now, quiet in her brown coat. Her seat stopped for now, the roller-coaster machinery stopped for now. Separate from everyone in her seat, she looked like she was sitting in a Church. Her lowered eyes saw the ground between the tracks. The ground where simply out of love—love, love, not love!—where out of pure love weeds sprouted between the tracks in a light green so dizzying that she had to avert her eyes in tormented temptation. The breeze made the hair rise on the back of her neck, she shivered refusing it, in temptation refusing, it was always so much easier to love.
But all of a sudden came that lurch of the guts, that halting of a heart caught by surprise in midair, that fright, the triumphant fury with which her seat hurtled her into the nothing and immediately swept her up like a rag doll, skirts flying, the deep resentment with which she became mechanical, her body automatically joyful—the girlfriends’ shrieks!—her gaze wounded by that enormous surprise, that offense, “they were having their way with her,” that enormous offense—the girlfriends’ shrieks!—the enormous bewilderment at finding herself spasmodically frolicking, they were having their way with her, her pure whiteness suddenly exposed. How many minutes? the minutes of an extended scream of a train rounding the bend, and the joy of another plunge through the air insulting her like a kick, her dancing erratically in the wind, dancing frantically, whether or not she wanted it her body shook like someone laughing, that sensation of laughing to death, the sudden death of someone who had neglected to shred all those papers in the drawer, not other people’s death, her own, always her own. She who could have taken advantage of the others screaming to let out her own howl of lament, she forgot herself, all she felt was fright.
And now this silence, sudden too. They’d come back to earth, the machinery once again completely stopped.
Pale, kicked out of a Church, she looked at the stationary earth from which she’d departed and back to which she’d been delivered. She straightened out her skirts primly. She didn’t look at anyone. Contrite as on that day when in the middle of everyone the entire contents of her purse had spilled onto the ground and everything that was valuable while lying secretly in her purse, once exposed in the dust of the street, revealed the pettiness of a private life of precautions: face powder, receipt, fountain pen, her retrieving from the curb the scaffolding of her life. She rose from her seat stunned as if shaking off a collision. Though no one was paying attention, she smoothed her skirt again, did what she could so no one would notice how weak and disgraced she was, haughtily protecting her broken bones. But the sky was spinning in her empty stomach; the earth, rising and falling before her eyes, remained distant for a few moments, the earth that is always so troublesome. For a moment the woman wanted, in mutely sobbing fatigue, to reach out her hand to the troublesome earth: her hand reached out like that of a crippled beggar. But as if she had swallowed the void, her heart stunned.
Was that it? That was it. Of the violence, that was it.
She headed back toward the animals. The ordeal of the roller coaster had left her subdued. She didn’t make it much further: she had to rest her forehead against the bars of a cage, exhausted, her breath coming quick and shallow. From inside the cage the coati looked at her. She looked at him. Not a single word exchanged. She could never hate that coati who looked at her with the silence of an inquiring body. Disturbed, she averted her eyes from the coati’s simplicity. The curious coati asking her a question the way a child asks. And she averting her eyes, concealing from him her deadly mission. Her forehead was pressed against the bars so firmly that for an instant it looked like she was the caged one and a free coati was examining her.
The cage was always on the side she was: she let out a moan that seemed to come from the soles of her feet. After that another moan.
Then, born from her womb, it rose again, beseeching, in a swelling wave, that urge to kill—her eyes welled up grateful and black in a near-happiness, it wasn’t hatred yet, for the time being just the tormented urge to hate like a desire, the promise of cruel blossoming, a torment like love, the urge to hate promising itself sacred blood and triumph, the spurned female had become spiritualized through her great hope. But where, where to find the animal that would teach her to have her own hatred? the hatred that was hers by right but that lay excruciatingly out of reach? where could she learn to hate so as not to die of love? And from whom? The world of spring, the world of beasts that in spring Christianize themselves with paws that claw but do not wound . . . oh no more of this world! no more of this perfume, of this weary panting, no more of this forgiveness in everything that will die one day as if made to surrender. Never forgiveness, if that woman forgave one more time, even just once, her life would be lost—she let out a hoarse, brief moan, the coati gave a start—caged in she looked around, and since she wasn’t the kind of person people paid attention to, she crouched down like an old solitary assassin, a child ran past without noticing her.
Then she started walking again, smaller now, tough, fists once again braced in her pockets, the undercover assassin, and everything was caught in her chest. In her chest that knew only how to give up, knew only how to withstand, knew only how to beg forgiveness, knew only how to forgive, that had only learned how to have the sweetness of unhappiness, and learned only how to love, love, love. Imagining that she might never experience the hatred of which her forgiveness had always been made, this caused her heart to moan indecently, she began walking so fast that she seemed to have found a sudden destiny. She was almost running, her shoes throwing her off balance, and giving her a physical fragility that once again reduced her to the imprisoned female, her steps mechanically assumed the beseeching despair of the frail, she who was nothing more than a frail woman herself. But, if she could take off her shoes, could she avoid the joy of walking barefoot? how could you not love the ground on which you walk? She moaned again, stopped before the bars of an enclosure, pressed her hot face against the iron’s rusty coolness. Eyes deeply shut she tried to bury her face between the hardness of the railings, her face attempted an impossible passage through the narrow bars, just as before when she’d seen the newborn monkey seek in the blindness of hunger the female’s breast. A fleeting comfort came from how the bars seemed to hate her while opposing her with the resistance of frozen iron.
She opened her eyes slowly. Her eyes coming from their own darkness couldn’t see a thing in the afternoon’s faint light. She stood there breathing. Gradually she started to make things out again, gradually shapes began solidifying, she was tired, crushed by the sweetness of tiredness. Her head tilted inquiringly toward the budding trees, her eyes saw the small white clouds. Without hope, she heard the lightness of a stream. She lowered her head again and stood gazing at the buffalo in the distance. Inside in a brown coat, breathing without interest, no one interested in her, she interested in no one.
A certain peace at last. The breeze ruffling the hair on her for
ehead as if brushing the hair of someone who had just died, whose forehead was still damp with sweat. Gazing detachedly at that great dry plot surrounded by tall railings, the buffalo plot. The black buffalo was standing still at the far end of that plot. Then he paced in the distance on his narrow haunches, his dense haunches. His neck thicker than his tensed flanks. Seen straight on, his large head was broader than his body, blocking the rest from view, like a severed head. And on his head those horns. At a distance he slowly paced with his torso. He was a black buffalo. So black that from afar his face looked featureless. Atop his blackness the erect stark whiteness of his horns.
The woman might have left but the silence felt good in the waning afternoon.
And in the silence of the paddock, those meandering steps, the dry dust beneath those dry hooves. At a distance, in the midst of his calm pacing, the black buffalo looked at her for an instant. The next instant, the woman again saw only the hard muscle of his body. Maybe he hadn’t looked at her. She couldn’t tell, since all she could discern of that shadowy head were its outlines. But once more he seemed to have either seen or sensed her.
The woman raised her head a little, retracted it slightly in misgiving. Body motionless, head back, she waited.
And once more the buffalo seemed to notice her.
As if she couldn’t stand feeling what she had felt, she suddenly averted her face and looked at a tree. Her heart didn’t beat in her chest, her heart was beating hollowly somewhere between her stomach and intestines.
The buffalo made another slow loop. The dust. The woman clenched her teeth, her whole face ached a little.
The buffalo with his constricted torso. In the luminous dusk he was a body blackened with tranquil rage, the woman sighed slowly. A white thing had spread out inside her, white as paper, fragile as paper, intense as a whiteness. Death droned in her ears. The buffalo’s renewed pacing brought her back to herself and, with another long sigh, she returned to the surface. She didn’t know where she’d been. She was standing, very feeble, just emerged from that white and remote thing where she’d been.
And from where she looked back at the buffalo.
The buffalo larger now. The black buffalo. Ah, she said suddenly with a pang. The buffalo with his back turned to her, standing still. The woman’s whitened face didn’t know how to call him. Ah! she said provoking him. Ah! she said. Her face was covered in deathly whiteness, her suddenly gaunt face held purity and veneration. Ah! she goaded him through clenched teeth. But with his back turned, the buffalo completely still.
She picked up a rock off the ground and hurled it into the paddock. The torso’s stillness, quieted down even blacker: the rock rolled away uselessly.
Ah! she said shaking the bars. That white thing was spreading inside her, viscous like a kind of saliva. The buffalo with his back turned.
Ah, she said. But this time because inside her at last was flowing a first trickle of black blood.
The first instant was one of pain. As if the world had convulsed for this blood to flow. She stood there, listening to that first bitter oil drip as in a grotto, the spurned female. Her strength was still trapped between the bars, but something incomprehensible and burning, ultimately incomprehensible, was happening, a thing like a joy tasted in her mouth. Then the buffalo turned toward her.
The buffalo turned, stood still, and faced her from afar.
I love you, she then said with hatred to the man whose great unpunishable crime was not wanting her. I hate you, she said beseeching the buffalo’s love.
Provoked at last, the enormous buffalo approached unhurriedly.
He approached, the dust rose. The woman waited with her arms hanging alongside her coat. Slowly he approached. She didn’t take a single step back. Until he reached the railings and stopped there. There stood the buffalo and the woman, face to face. She didn’t look at his face, or his mouth, or his horns. She looked him in the eye.
And the buffalo’s eyes, his eyes looked her in the eye. And such a deep pallor was exchanged that the woman fell into a drowsy torpor. Standing, in a deep sleep. Small red eyes were looking at her. The eyes of the buffalo. The woman was dazed in surprise, slowly shaking her head. The calm buffalo. Slowly the woman was shaking her head, astonished by the hatred with which the buffalo, tranquil with hatred, was looking at her. Nearly absolved, shaking an incredulous head, her mouth slightly open. Innocent, curious, plunging deeper and deeper into those eyes staring unhurriedly at her, simple, with a drowsy sigh, neither wanting nor able to flee, trapped in this mutual murder. Trapped as if her hand were forever stuck to the dagger she herself had thrust. Trapped, as she slid spellbound down the railing. In such slow dizziness that just before her body gently crumpled the woman saw the whole sky and a buffalo.
THE FOREIGN LEGION
(“A legião estrangeira”)
The Disasters of Sofia
(“Os desastres de Sofia”)
Whatever his previous job had been, he had left it behind, changed careers, and onerously moved on to teaching primary school: that was all we knew of him.
The teacher was fat, big and silent, with hunched shoulders. Instead of a lump in his throat, he had hunched shoulders. He wore a sport coat that was too short, rimless glasses, with a gold wire perched on his broad Roman nose. And I was attracted to him. Not in love, but attracted by his silence and the restrained impatience with which he taught us and which, feeling offended, I had sensed. I started acting up in class. I’d talk really loudly, pester my classmates, disrupt the lesson with wisecracks, until he’d say, reddening:
“Quiet down, young lady, or I’ll send you out of the classroom.”
Wounded, triumphant, I’d answer defiantly: go ahead! He wouldn’t do it, since that would mean obeying me. But I exasperated him so much that it had become painful for me to be the object of hatred for that man whom in some way I loved. I didn’t love him like the woman I would one day be, I loved him like a child who clumsily tries to protect an adult, with the fury of one who has yet to be a coward and sees a strong man with such stooped shoulders. He irritated me. At night, before I fell asleep, he irritated me. I had recently turned nine, a tough age like the unbroken stem of a begonia. I goaded him, and whenever I succeeded in aggravating him I’d taste, in the glory of martyrdom, the unbearable acidity of the begonia when crushed between the teeth; and I’d bite my nails, exultant. In the morning, as I passed through the school gates, walking along all pure with my milky coffee and scrubbed face, it was a shock to bump into, in flesh and blood, the man who had made me fantasize for an abysmal minute before falling asleep. On the surface of time it had only lasted a minute, but in its depths it was ancient centuries of the darkest sweetness. In the morning—as if I hadn’t counted on the actual existence of the person who had unleashed my black dreams of love—in the morning, face to face with that big man in his short jacket, in a collision I was launched into shame, bewilderment and frightening hope. Hope was my greatest sin.
Each day renewed the meager struggle I had initiated for that man’s salvation. I wished for his well-being, and in return he hated me. Bruised, I became his demon and torment, symbol of the hell it must have been for him to teach that giggling, uninterested class. It had become an already-terrible pleasure, not leaving him in peace. The game, as always, fascinated me. Unaware that I was obeying old traditions, but with a wisdom that the evil are born with—those evil ones who bite their nails in alarm—, unaware that I was obeying one of the most common occurrences in the world, I was playing the prostitute and he the saint. No, maybe that wasn’t it. Words precede and surpass me, they tempt and alter me, and if I am not careful it will be too late: things will be said without my having said them. Or, at the very least, that wasn’t the only thing. My entanglement comes from how a carpet is made of so many threads that I can’t resign myself to following just one; my ensnarement comes from how one story is made of many stories. And I can’t even
tell them all—a more truthful word could from echo to echo cause my highest glaciers to crumble down the precipice. Therefore, then, I’ll no longer mention the maelstrom within me when I’d fantasize before falling asleep. Or else even I’ll end up thinking it was that gentle vortex alone that propelled me toward him, forgetting my desperate renunciation. I had become his seductress, a duty no one had imposed on me. It was regrettable that the task of saving him through temptation had fallen into my wayward hands, since of all the adults and children from that time I was probably the least suitable. “That’s not a flower you want to sniff,” as our maid used to say. But it was as if, alone with a mountaineer paralyzed with terror of the precipice, I, no matter how clumsy I was, couldn’t help but try to help him climb down. The teacher had suffered the misfortune of being stranded alone at his deserted outpost with the most ill-advised person of all. Risky as it was on my side, I had to drag him over to it, since the side he was on was fatal. That’s what I was doing, as an annoying child tugs a grown-up by the hem of his jacket. He wouldn’t turn around, wouldn’t ask what I wanted, and would pull himself free with a jerk. I kept pulling him by the jacket, my only tool was persistence. And of all this the only thing he noticed was that I was ripping his pockets. It’s true that not even I really knew what I was doing, my life with the teacher was invisible. But I felt that my role was evil and dangerous: I was propelled by voraciousness for a real life that was being delayed, and worse than being inept, I also enjoyed ripping his pockets. Only God would forgive what I was because only He knew of what He had made me and to what end. I let myself, then, be His matter. Being the matter of God was my only goodness. And the source of a nascent mysticism. Not mysticism for Him, but for His matter, for raw life filled with pleasure: I was a worshipper. I accepted the vastness of which I knew nothing and entrusted it with everything of myself, with secrets of the confessional. Could it be for the sake of the darknesses of ignorance that I was seducing the teacher? and with the ardor of a nun in her cell. A cheerful and monstrous nun, alas. And I couldn’t even brag about it: all of us in the class were just as monstrous and gentle, eager matter of God.