The Complete Stories (21 page)

Th
e Crime of the Mathematics Teacher

(“O crime do professor de matemática”)

When the man reached the highest hill, the bells were ringing in the city below. Only the uneven rooftops were in sight. Nearby was the lone tree on the plateau. The man was standing there holding a heavy sack.

He looked down below with nearsighted eyes. The Catholics were entering the church slow and tiny, and he strained to hear the scattered voices of the children dispersed throughout the square. But despite the morning’s clearness the sounds barely reached the high plain. He also saw the river that appeared motionless from above, and thought: it’s Sunday. In the distance he saw the highest mountain with its dry slopes. It wasn’t cold but he drew his sport coat around him more snugly. At last he carefully laid the sack on the ground. He took off his glasses maybe to breathe better since, while holding his glasses, he breathed very deeply. Sunlight hit his lenses, which sent out piercing signals. Without his glasses, his eyes blinked brightly, almost youthful, unfamiliar. He put his glasses back on, became a middle-aged man and picked up the sack again: it was heavy as if made of stone, he thought. He squinted trying to make out the river’s current, tilting his head to catch any noises: the river was at a standstill and only the hardier sound of a single voice reached those heights for an instant—yes, he was quite alone. The cool air was inhospitable, since he’d been living in a warmer city. The branches of the lone tree on the plateau swayed. He looked at it. He was biding his time. Until he decided there was no reason to wait any longer.

And nevertheless he waited. His glasses must have been bothering him because he took them off again, breathed deeply and tucked them into his pocket.

He then opened the sack, peered partway into it. Next he put his bony hand inside and started pulling out the dead dog. His whole being was focused solely on that important hand and he kept his eyes deeply shut as he pulled. When he opened them, the air was even brighter and the joyful bells pealed once more summoning the faithful to the solace of punishment.

The unknown dog was out in the open.

Then he set to work methodically. He picked up the stiff, black dog, laid it in a depression in the ground. But, as if he’d already done too much, he put on his glasses, sat beside the dog and started surveying the landscape.

He saw very clearly, and with a certain futility the deserted plateau. But he noted precisely that when seated he could no longer glimpse the town below. He breathed again. He reached back into the sack and pulled out the shovel. And considered which site to choose. Maybe under the tree. He caught himself musing that he’d bury this dog under the tree. But if it were the other one, the real dog, he’d actually bury it where he himself would like to be buried if he were dead: at the very center of the plateau, facing the sun with empty eyes. So, since the unknown dog was standing in for the “other” one, he wanted it, for the greater perfection of the act, to get exactly what the other would. There was no confusion whatsoever in the man’s head. He coldly understood himself, no loose ends.

Soon, being excessively scrupulous, he became highly absorbed in rigorously trying to determine the middle of the plateau. It wasn’t easy because the lone tree stood on one side and, marking a false center, divided the plain asymmetrically. Faced with this obstacle the man admitted: “I didn’t need to bury him at the center, I’d have also buried the other one, let’s say, right where I’m standing this very second.” Because it was a question of granting the event the fatefulness of chance, the sign of an external and obvious occurrence—similar to the children in the square and the Catholics entering the church—it was a question of rendering the fact as visible as possible on the surface of the world beneath the heavens. It was a question of exposing himself and exposing a fact, and not allowing the intimate and unpunished form of a thought.

At the idea of burying the dog where he was standing that very moment—the man recoiled with an agility that his small and singularly heavy body wouldn’t allow. Because it seemed to him that beneath his feet the outline of the dog’s grave had been drawn.

So he began digging right there, his shovel rhythmic. Sometimes he’d pause to take his glasses off and put them back on. He was sweating grievously. He didn’t dig very deep but not because he wanted to save his energy. He didn’t dig very deep because he thought lucidly: “if it were for the real dog, I’d dig a shallow hole, I’d bury him close to the surface.” He thought that near the surface of the earth the dog wouldn’t be deprived of its senses.

Finally he dropped the shovel, gently lifted the unknown dog and placed it in the grave.

What a strange face that dog had. When, with a start he’d come upon the dead dog on a street corner, the idea of burying it had made his heart so heavy and surprised, that he hadn’t even noticed that stiff muzzle and crusted drool. It was a strange and objective dog.

The dog came up slightly higher than the hole he had dug and after being covered with dirt it would be a barely discernible mound on the plateau. That was exactly how he wanted it. He covered the dog with dirt and smoothed it over with his hands, feeling its shape under his palms intently and with pleasure as if he were petting it several times. The dog was now merely a feature of the terrain.

Then the man stood, brushed the dirt off his hands, and didn’t give the grave another look. He thought with a certain pleasure: I think I’ve done everything. He gave a deep sigh, and an innocent smile of liberation. Yes, he’d done everything. His crime had been punished and he was free.

And now he could think freely about the real dog. He immediately started thinking about the real dog, which he’d avoided doing up till now. The real dog that even now must be wandering bewilderedly through the streets of the other town, sniffing all over that city where he no longer had a master.

He then started to think with some trouble about the real dog as if he were trying to think with some trouble about his real life. The fact that the dog was far away in that other city troubled the task, though longing brought him closer to its memory.

“While I was making you in my image, you were making me in yours,” he thought then with the aid of longing. “I gave you the name José to give you a name that would also serve as your soul. And you—how can I ever know what name you gave me? How much more you loved me than I loved you,” he reflected curiously.

“We understood each other too well, you with the human name I gave you, I with the name you gave me that you never spoke except with your insistent gaze,” thought the man smiling tenderly, now free to reminisce as he pleased.

“I remember you when you were little,” he thought amused, “so small, cute and weak, wagging your tail, looking at me, and I unexpectedly finding in you a new form of having my soul. But, from then on, every day you were already starting to be a dog one could abandon. Meanwhile, our games were getting dangerous from so much understanding,” the man recalled in satisfaction, “you ended up biting me and growling, I ended up hurling a book at you and laughing. But who knows what that fake laugh of mine meant. Every day you were a dog one could abandon.”

“And how you sniffed at the streets!” thought the man laughing a little, “you really didn’t leave a single stone unsniffed . . . That was your childish side. Or was it your true calling as a dog? and the rest was just playing at being mine? Because you were indomitable. And, calmly wagging your tail, you seemed to reject silently the name I’d given you. Ah, yes, you were indomitable: I didn’t want you to eat meat so you wouldn’t get ferocious, but one day you leaped onto the table and, as the children happily shouted, snatched the meat and, with a ferocity that doesn’t come from what you eat, you stared at me mute and indomitable with the meat in your mouth. Because, though you were mine, you never yielded to me even a little of your past or your nature. And, worried, I started to understand that you didn’t demand that I give up anything of mine to love you, and this started to bother me. It was at the endpoint of the stubborn reality of our two natures that you expected us to understand each other. My ferocity and yours shouldn’t be exchanged out of sweetness: that was what you taught me little by little, and that too was starting to weigh on me. By not asking anything of me, you asked too much. From yourself, you demanded that you be a dog. From me, you demanded that I be a man. And I, I pretended as best I could. Sometimes, sitting back on your paws in front of me, how you’d stare at me! So I’d look at the ceiling, cough, pretend not to notice, examine my nails. But nothing affected you: you went on staring at me. Who were you going to tell? Pretend—I’d tell myself—quick pretend you’re someone else, give a false interview, pet him, throw him a bone—but nothing distracted you: you went on staring at me. What a fool I was. I shuddered in horror, when you were the innocent one: if I turned around and suddenly showed you my true face, and, bristling, hurt, you’d drag yourself over to the door forever wounded. Oh, every day you were a dog one could abandon. One could choose to. But you, trusting, wagged your tail.

“Sometimes, touched by your perceptiveness, I’d manage to see your particular anguish in you. Not the anguish of being a dog which was your only possible form. But the anguish of existing so perfectly that it was becoming an unbearable joy: then you’d leap and lick my face with a freely given love and a certain threat of hatred as if I were the one who, through friendship, had exposed you. I’m pretty sure now I wasn’t the one who had a dog. You were the one who had a person.

“But you possessed a person so powerful that he could choose: and so he abandoned you. With relief he abandoned you. With relief, yes, since you demanded—with the serene and simple incomprehension of one who is a heroic dog—that I be a man. He abandoned you with an excuse the whole household approved of: since how could I move house with all that baggage and family, and on top of that a dog, while adjusting to a new high school and a new city, and on top of that a dog? ‘Who there’s no room for,’ said Marta being practical. ‘Who’ll bother the other passengers,’ reasoned my mother-in-law without knowing that I’d already thought of excuses, and the children cried, and I looked neither at them nor at you, José. But you and I alone know that I abandoned you because you were the constant possibility of the crime never committed. The possibility that I would sin which, in the concealment of my eyes, was already a sin. So I sinned right away to be guilty right away. And this crime stands in for the greater crime that I wouldn’t have the nerve to commit,” thought the man ever more lucidly.

“There are so many ways to be guilty and lose yourself forever and betray yourself and not face yourself. I chose to hurt a dog,” thought the man. “Because I knew that would be a lesser crime and that no one goes to Hell for abandoning a dog that trusted a man. Because I knew that crime wasn’t punishable.”

As he sat on the plateau, his mathematical head was cool and intelligent. Only now did he seem to comprehend, in all his icy plenitude, that what he’d done to the dog was truly unpunished and everlasting. For they hadn’t yet invented a punishment for the great concealed crimes and for the profound betrayals.

A man might yet outsmart the Last Judgment. No one condemned him for this crime. Not even the Church. “They’re all my accomplices, José. I’d have to go door to door and beg them to accuse me and punish me: they’d all slam the door on me with suddenly hardened faces. No one condemns me for this crime. Not even you, José, would condemn me. For all I’d have to do, powerful as I am, is decide to call you—and, emerging from your abandonment in the streets, in one leap you’d lick my cheek with joy and forgiveness. I’d turn the other cheek for you to kiss.”

The man took off his glasses, sighed, put them back on.

He looked at the covered grave. Where he had buried an unknown dog in tribute to the abandoned dog, attempting at last to repay the debt that distressingly no one was demanding. Attempting to punish himself with an act of kindness and be freed of his crime. The way someone gives alms in order at last to eat the cake for which another went without bread.

But as if José, the abandoned dog, demanded much more from him than this lie; as if he were demanding that he, in a final push, be a man—and as a man take responsibility for his crime—he looked at the grave where he had buried his weakness and his condition.

And now, more mathematically still, he sought a way not to have punished himself. He shouldn’t be consoled. He coolly sought a way to destroy the false burial of the unknown dog. He crouched then, and, solemn, calm, with simple movements—unburied the dog. The dark dog at last appeared whole, unfamiliar with dirt in its eyelashes, its eyes open and glazed over. And thus the mathematics teacher renewed his crime forever. The man then looked around and to the heavens beseeching a witness to what he had done. And as if that still weren’t enough, he started descending the slopes toward the bosom of his family.

The Buffalo

(“O búfalo”)

But it was spring. Even the lion licked the lioness’s smooth forehead. Both animals blond. The woman averted her eyes from the cage, where the hot smell alone recalled the carnage she’d come looking for at the Zoological Gardens. Then the lion paced calmly, mane flowing, and the lioness slowly recomposed the head of a sphinx upon her outstretched paws. “But this is love, it’s love again,” railed the woman trying to locate her own hatred but it was spring and two lions had been in love. Fists in her coat pockets, she looked around, surrounded by the cages, caged by the shut cages. She kept walking. Her eyes were so focused on searching that her vision sometimes darkened into a kind of sleep, and then she’d recompose herself as in the coolness of a pit.

But the giraffe was a virgin with freshly shorn braids. With the mindless innocence of large and nimble and guiltless things. The woman in the brown coat averted her eyes, feeling sick, sick. Unable—in front of the perching aerial giraffe, in front of that silent wingless bird—unable to locate inside herself the spot where her sickness was the worst, the sickest spot, the spot of hatred, she who had gone to the Zoological Gardens to get sick. But not in front of the giraffe that was more landscape than being. Not in front of that flesh that had become distracted in its height and remoteness, the nearly verdant giraffe. She was searching for other animals, trying to learn from them how to hate. The hippopotamus, the moist hippopotamus. That plump roll of flesh, rounded and mute flesh awaiting some other plump and mute flesh. No. For there was such humble love in remaining just flesh, such sweet martyrdom in not knowing how to think.

But it was spring, and, tightening the fist in her coat pocket, she’d kill those monkeys levitating in their cage, monkeys happy as weeds, monkeys leaping about gently, the female monkey with her resigned, loving gaze, and the other female suckling her young. She’d kill them with fifteen dry bullets: the woman’s teeth clenched until her jaw ached. The nakedness of the monkeys. The world that saw no danger in being naked. She’d kill the nakedness of the monkeys. One monkey stared back at her as he gripped the bars, his emaciated arms outstretched in a crucifix, his bare chest exposed without pride. But she wouldn’t aim at his chest, she’d shoot the monkey between the eyes, she’d shoot between those eyes that were staring at her without blinking. Suddenly the woman averted her face: because the monkey’s pupils were covered with a gelatinous white veil, in his eyes the sweetness of sickness, he was an old monkey—the woman averted her face, trapping between her teeth a feeling she hadn’t come looking for, she quickened her step, even so, turned her head in alarm back toward the monkey with its arms outstretched: he kept staring straight ahead. “Oh no, not this,” she thought. And as she fled, she said: “God, teach me only how to hate.”

“I hate you,” she said to a man whose only crime was not loving her. “I hate you,” she said in a rush. But she didn’t even know how you were supposed to do it. How did you dig in the earth until locating that black water, how did you open a passage through the hard earth and never reach yourself? She roamed the zoo amid mothers and children. But the elephant withstood his own weight. That whole elephant endowed with the capacity to crush with a mere foot. But he didn’t crush anything. That power that nevertheless would tamely let itself be led to a circus, a children’s elephant. And his eyes, with an old man’s benevolence, trapped inside that hulking, inherited flesh. The oriental elephant. And the oriental spring too, and everything being born, everything flowing downstream.

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 forehead 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.