The Complete Stories (29 page)

The Fifth Story

(“A quinta história”)

This story could be called “The Statues.” Another possible name is “The Murder.” And also “How to Kill Cockroaches.” So I will tell at least three stories, all true because they don’t contradict each other. Though a single story, they would be a thousand and one, were I given a thousand and one nights.

The first, “How to Kill Cockroaches,” begins like this: I was complaining about cockroaches. A lady overheard me. She gave me this recipe for killing them. I was to mix equal parts sugar, flour and plaster. The flour and sugar would attract them, the plaster would dry up their insides. That’s what I did. They died.

The other story is actually the first one and is called “The Murder.” It begins like this: I was complaining about cockroaches. A lady overheard me. The recipe follows. And then comes the murder. The truth is that I was only complaining about cockroaches in the abstract, since they weren’t even mine: they belonged to the ground floor and would crawl up the building’s pipes to our home. Only once I prepared the mixture did they become mine too. In our name, then, I began to measure and weigh the ingredients with a slightly more intense concentration. A vague resentment had overtaken me, a sense of outrage. By day the cockroaches were invisible and no one would believe in the secret curse that gnawed at such a peaceful home. But if they, like secret curses, slept during the day, there I was preparing their evening poison. Meticulous, ardent, I concocted the elixir for drawn-out death. An excited fear and my own secret curse guided me. Now I icily wanted just one thing: to kill every cockroach in existence. Cockroaches crawl up the pipes while we, worn out, dream. And now the recipe was ready, so white. As if for cockroaches as clever as I was, I expertly spread the powder until it looked more like something from nature. From my bed, in the silence of the apartment, I imagined them crawling one by one up to the laundry room where the darkness was sleeping, just one towel alert on the clothesline. I awoke hours later with a start when I realized how late it was. It was already dawn. I crossed the kitchen. There they were on the laundry-room floor, hard, huge. During the night I had killed. In our name, day was breaking. Up in the favela a rooster crowed.

The third story that now begins is the one about the “Statues.” It begins by saying that I had been complaining about cockroaches. Then comes the same lady. It keeps going up to the point where, near dawn, I awake and still sleepy cross the kitchen. Even sleepier than I is the room from the perspective of its tile floor. And in the darkness of dawn, a purplish glow that distances everything, I discern at my feet shadows and white forms: dozens of statues scattered, rigid. The cockroaches that have hardened from the inside out. Some, belly up. Others, in the middle of a gesture never to be completed. In the mouths of some a bit of the white food. I am the first witness of daybreak in Pompeii. I know how this last night went, I know of the orgy in the dark. Inside some of them the plaster will have hardened as slowly as during some vital process, and they, with increasingly arduous movements, will have greedily intensified the night’s joys, trying to escape their own insides. Until they turn to stone, in innocent shock, and with such, such a look of wounded reproach. Others—suddenly assaulted by their own core, without even the slightest inkling that some internal mold was being petrified!—these suddenly crystallize, the way a word is cut off in the mouth: it’s you I . . . They who, taking the name of love in vain, kept singing through the summer night. Whereas that one there, the one whose brown antenna is smeared with white, must have figured out too late that it had been mummified precisely for not having known how to make use of things with the gratuitous charm of being in vain: “because I looked too deep inside myself! because I looked too deep inside . . .”—from my cold, human height I look at the destruction of a world. Day breaks. The occasional antenna of a dead cockroach quivers drily in the breeze. From the previous story the rooster crows.

The fourth narrative inaugurates a new era at home. It begins as we know: I was complaining about cockroaches. It goes up to the moment I see the plaster monuments. Dead, yes. But I look toward the pipes, from where this very night a slow and living population will renew itself in single file. So would I renew the lethal sugar every night? like someone who can no longer sleep without the eagerness of a rite. And every dawn lead myself to the pavilion with the compulsion of greeting the statues that my sweaty night has been erecting. I trembled with wicked pleasure at the vision of that double life of a sorceress. And I also trembled at the sign of plaster drying: the compulsion to live that would burst my internal mold. A harsh instant of choosing between two paths that, I thought, are bidding each other farewell, and sure that either choice would be a sacrifice: me or my soul. I chose. And today I secretly boast in my heart a plaque of virtue: “This house has been disinfested.”

The fifth story is called “Leibniz and the Transcendence of Love in Polynesia.” It begins like this: I was complaining about cockroaches.

A Sincere Friendship

(“Uma amizade sincera”)

Not that we were friends from way back. Weonly met in our last year of school. From then on we were together all the time. We had both been in need of a friend for so long that there was nothing we didn’t confide to each other. We reached the point of friendship at which we could no longer keep a thought to ourselves: one would soon call the other, making plans to meet right away. After the conversation, we felt as happy as if we had given ourselves to each other as presents. This state of constant communication reached such a level of exaltation that, the day neither of us had anything to confide, we searched with some distress for something to talk about. Only, the topic had to be serious, because not just anything would contain the vehemence of a sincerity experienced for the first time.

Right around that time came the first signs of disturbance between us. Sometimes one would call the other, we’d meet, and have nothing to say. We were very young and didn’t know how to sit quietly. At first, when we started running out of topics, we tried talking about people. But we were well aware that we were already adulterating the nucleus of our friendship. Trying to talk about our respective girlfriends was also out of the question, since a man didn’t talk about his loves. We tried sitting quietly—but we’d get worried soon after parting ways.

My solitude, upon returning from these outings, was great and arid. I started reading books just to be able to talk about them. But a sincere friendship called for the purest sincerity. Seeking this, I began to feel empty. Our outings were getting ever more disappointing. My sincere poverty was gradually being revealed. He too, I knew, had reached the impasse of himself.

That’s when, since my family had moved to São Paulo, and he was living alone, because his family was from Piauí, that’s when I invited him to move into our apartment, which had remained in my care. What a tumult of the soul. Ecstatic, we arranged our books and records, setting up an environment perfect for friendship. After everything was ready—there we were at home, at a loss, mute, filled solely with friendship.

We wanted so badly to save each other. Friendship is the stuff of salvation.

But we’d already gone over every problem, already studied every possibility. All we had was that thing we’d sought thirstily until at last finding it: a sincere friendship. The only way, we knew, and how bitterly we knew it, to emerge from the solitude a spirit feels in the body.

But how synthetic this friendship revealed itself to us. As if we wanted to disseminate through a lengthy speech a truism that a single word would exhaust. Our friendship was as unsolvable as the sum of two numbers: it was pointless trying to explore for more than a second the certainty that two and three make five.

We tried to throw a few wild parties at the apartment, but not only did the neighbors complain as it was no use.

If only we could have at least done each other favors. But no opportunity came up, nor did we believe in giving proof of a friendship that didn’t need any. The most we could do was what we did: know that we were friends. Which wasn’t enough to fill the days, especially the long holidays.

The real trouble dates from these holidays.

He, to whom I could offer nothing but my sincerity, he started becoming an accusation of my poverty. Moreover, our solitude when side by side, listening to music or reading, was much greater than when alone. And, more than greater, uncomfortable. There was no peace. Heading to our own rooms afterward, in relief we wouldn’t even look at each other.

It’s true there was a break in the course of things, a truce that gave us more hope than there was actually room for. It happened when my friend had a little dispute with City Hall. Not that it was a serious issue, but we made it one to put it to better use. Because by that time we’d already fallen into the habit of doing favors. I went around enthusiastically to the offices of family acquaintances, pulling strings on my friend’s behalf. And when it came time for the paperwork, I ran all over the city—I can say in good conscience that not a single signature was notarized without my intervention.

During that time we’d meet at home in the evenings, exhausted and excited: we’d recount the day’s exploits, plan our next line of attack. We didn’t really delve into what was happening, it was enough that it had the makings of friendship. I thought I understood why couples gave each other presents, why the husband makes a point of comforting his wife, and she toils at making him food, why the mother goes overboard when caring for her child. It was, incidentally, during this time that, with a bit of sacrifice, I gave a little gold brooch to the woman who’s now my wife. Only much later did I understand that being there is also giving.

Once the trouble with City Hall was over—let the record show, by the way, that we won—we went on side by side, without finding that word that would yield the soul. Yield the soul? but after all, who wants to yield his soul? Of all things.

After all, what did we want? Nothing. We were worn out, disillusioned.

Under the pretext of a vacation with my family, we parted ways. Incidentally he was also going to Piauí. A heartfelt handshake was our farewell at the airport. We knew we wouldn’t see each other again, except by chance. More: that we didn’t want to see each other again. And we also knew that we were friends. Sincere friends.

The Obedient Ones

(“Os obedientes”)

It was a simple situation, a fact to mention and forget.

But if you’re imprudent enough to linger an instant longer than you should, a foot sinks in and you’re involved. From the instant we venture into it, it’s no longer one more fact to tell, we begin to lack the words that would not betray it. At that point, we’re in too deep, the fact is no longer a fact and becomes merely its dispersed repercussion. Which, if overly stunted, will one day explode as it did on this Sunday afternoon, when it hasn’t rained for weeks and when, like today, beauty desiccated persists nonetheless as beauty. Before which I grow solemn as before a grave. At that point, what has happened to the initial fact? it became this afternoon. Without knowing how to handle it, I hesitate to be aggressive or to retreat a bit wounded. The initial fact is suspended in the sunlit dust of this Sunday—until they call me to the phone and in a single bound I go gratefully to lick the hand of the one who loves me and sets me free.

Chronologically the situation was thus: a man and a woman were married.

Merely by noting this fact, my foot has sunk in. I have been forced to think about something. Even if I said nothing else, and concluded the story by establishing this, I’d have already got involved in my most unknowable thoughts. It would already be as if I had seen, black outline on a white background, a man and a woman. And on that white background my eyes would be riveted with quite enough to see, for every word has its shadow.

That man and that woman began—without the least intention of going too far, and perhaps spurred by some need people have—they began trying to live more intensely. In search of the destiny that precedes us? and toward which instinct wants to lead us? instinct?!

The attempt to live more intensely led them, in turn, into a kind of constant verifying of revenue and expenditures, trying to weigh what was and wasn’t important. They did this in their own way: awkwardly and lacking experience, modestly. They groped along. In a compulsion they both discovered too late in life, each for their own part tried constantly to distinguish what was from what wasn’t essential, that is, they would never have used the word
essential
, which didn’t belong to their milieu. But the vague, almost embarrassed effort they made came to nothing: the plot eluded them daily. It was only, for example, in looking back at the day that they got the impression of having—somehow and so to speak behind their backs, and thus it didn’t count—the impression of having lived. But by then it was night, they put on their slippers and it was night.

All this never quite created a circumstance for the couple. In other words, something they each could tell even themselves when turning over in bed toward one side and, for a second before falling asleep, lay awake with their eyes open. And people need so badly to tell their own story. They didn’t have anything to tell. With a sigh of comfort, they’d close their eyes and sleep fitfully. And whenever they calculated the balance of their lives, they couldn’t even reckon this attempt to live more intensely, and deduct it, as with income tax. A balance that they gradually started to calculate more frequently, even without the technical equipment of a terminology suited to thoughts. If it was a circumstance, it never managed to become a circumstance for ostensible living.

But that wasn’t the only way it happened. In fact they were also calm because “not guiding,” “not inventing,” “not erring,” was for them, far beyond a habit, a point of honor they had tacitly adopted. They would have never considered disobeying.

They had the proud conviction that came from their noble consciousness of being two people among millions of equals. “Being an equal” had been the role that suited them, and the task that fell to them. The pair, distinguished, solemn, gratefully and civic-mindedly lived up to the trust that their equals had placed in them. They belonged to a caste. The role they played, with some emotion and with dignity, was of anonymous people, children of God, as in a club.

It was perhaps strictly due to the insistent passage of time that all this had started, nevertheless, becoming daily, daily, daily. Sometimes breathless. (The man as much as the woman had already entered the critical age.) They’d open the windows and remark on how hot it was. Without exactly living in tedium, it was if they never got any news. Tedium, anyhow, was part of a life of honest feelings.

Yet, ultimately, since all this was incomprehensible to them, and far, far over their heads, and if expressed in words they wouldn’t recognize it—all this, taken together and considered as already past, resembled that irremediable life. To which they submitted with a silence of the masses and with that slightly wounded look possessed by men of goodwill. It resembled the irremediable life God wanted us for.

An irremediable life, but not a concrete one. In fact it was a life of dreams. Sometimes, when speaking of some eccentric, they’d say with the benevolence one class bears another: “Ah, he leads the life of a poet.” It might be said, taking advantage of the few words known about the couple, it might be said that they led, minus the extravagance, the life of a bad poet: a life of dreams.

No, that’s not true. It wasn’t a life of dreams, since that had never guided them. But of unreality. Despite moments when suddenly, for some reason or other, they sank into reality. And then they felt they had touched the bottom somewhere beyond which no one could go.

As, for example, whenever the husband got home earlier than usual and his wife hadn’t yet returned from some errand or visit. For the husband a flow was then interrupted. He’d carefully sit down to read the paper, immersed in a silence so quiet that even a dead person beside him would have broken it. He feigning with severe honesty a minute absorption in the newspaper, his ears pricked. Just then the husband would touch the bottom with surprised feet. He couldn’t stay that way for long, without the risk of drowning, because touching the bottom also means having water over your head. Thus were his concrete moments. Which made him, logical and sensible as he was, break away quickly. He’d quickly break away, though curiously against his will, since his wife’s absence was such a promise of dangerous pleasure that he got a taste of what disobedience would be like. He’d break away against his will but without arguing, obeying what was expected of him. He wasn’t a deserter who would betray the trust of the others. Besides, if that’s what reality was like, there was no way of living in or off it.

As for the wife, she touched reality more often, since she had more leisure and less of what are called facts, such as coworkers, a crowded bus, administrative terms. She’d sit down to mend clothes, and little by little along came reality. The sensation of sitting there mending clothes was intolerable while it lasted. The sudden manner in which the
i
was dotted, that way of fitting entirely into whatever existed and of everything remaining so distinctly whatever it was—was intolerable. But, once it faded, it was as if the wife had drunk of a possible future. Gradually this woman’s future was turning into something she brought into the present, something meditative and secret.

It was surprising how untouched they were, for example, by politics, by changes in government, by developments in general, though they sometimes discussed these matters too, like everyone else. Indeed, they were such reserved people that they would have been surprised, flattered, if anyone ever told them they were reserved. They would have never imagined that’s what it was called. They might have understood better if told: “you symbolize our military reserve.” A few acquaintances said of them, after it all happened: they were good people. And there was nothing else to say, since they were.

There was nothing else to say. They lacked the weight of a grave error, which so often just happens to be what opens a door. At some point they’d taken something very seriously. They were obedient.

Not just out of submissiveness: as in a sonnet, it was obedience from love of symmetry. Symmetry was their possible art.

How each came to the conclusion that, alone, without the other, they’d live more—would be a long arc to reconstruct, and a pointless undertaking, since plenty of people have arrived at the same point from all over.

The wife, beneath this continual fantasy, not only rashly arrived at this conclusion but she transformed her life into something broader and more bewildered, richer, and even superstitious. Each thing seemed to signal another, all was symbolic, and even had a touch of spiritualism within the bounds of what Catholicism would allow. Not only did she rashly move on to this but—provoked exclusively by the fact of being a woman—she began to think that another man would save her. Which wasn’t altogether absurd. She knew it wasn’t. Being half right confused her, plunged her into reflection.

The husband, influenced by the milieu of afflicted masculinity in which he lived, and by his own as well, which was shy but effective, started to think that life would be many love affairs.

Dreamy, they began to suffer dreamily, it was heroic to bear. Quiet about their own fleeting visions, disagreeing over the best time to have dinner, one serving as a sacrifice for the other, love is sacrifice.

Thus we arrive at the day on which, long since engulfed in dreams, the woman, taking a bite of an apple, felt one of her front teeth crack. Still holding the apple and looking at herself too closely in the bathroom mirror—and thus losing all perspective—she saw a pale, middle-aged face, with a cracked tooth, and her own eyes . . . Touching the bottom, and with the water already up to her neck, fifty-something years old, without a note, instead of going to the dentist, she threw herself out the apartment window, a person toward whom such gratitude could be felt, that military reserve and pillar of our disobedience.

As for him, once the riverbed ran dry and with no water left to drown in, he walked along the bottom without looking at the ground, briskly as if using a cane. With the riverbed unexpectedly dry, he walked bewildered and out of danger along the bottom with the nimbleness of someone about to fall on his face.