Collected Stories (8 page)

On the following day, after they’d fastened the door again, they heard the difficult movements inside once more. No one moved afterward. No one said anything again when the first creaks were heard and the door began to give way under unusual pressure. Inside something like the panting of a penned animal was heard. Finally
the groan of rusty hinges was heard as they broke when Nabo shook his head again. ‘Until I find the comb, I won’t go to the choir,’ he said. ‘It must be around here somewhere.’ And he dug in the hay, breaking it, scratching the ground, until the man said: ‘All right Nabo. If the only thing you’re waiting for to come to the choir is to find the comb, go look for it.’ He leaned forward, his face
darkened by a patient haughtiness. He put his hands against the barrier and said: ‘Go ahead Nabo. I’ll see that nobody stops you.’

And then the door gave way and the huge bestial Negro with the harsh scar marked on his forehead (in spite of the fact that fifteen years had passed) came out stumbling over the furniture, his fists raised and menacing, still with the rope they
had tied him with fifteen
years before (when he was a little black boy who looked after the horses); and (before reaching the courtyard) he passed by the girl, who remained seated, the crank of the gramophone still in her hand since the night before (when she saw the unchained black force she remembered something that at one time must have been a word) and he reached the courtyard (before finding the stable), after
having knocked down the living-room mirror with his shoulder, but without seeing the girl (neither beside the gramophone nor in the mirror), and he stood with his face to the sun, his eyes closed, blind (while inside the noise of the broken mirror was still going on), and he ran aimlessly, like a blindfolded horse instinctively looking for the stable door that fifteen years of imprisonment had erased
from his memory but not from his instincts (since that remote day when he had combed the horse’s tail and was left befuddled for the rest of his life), and leaving behind catastrophe, dissolution, and chaos like a blindfolded bull in a roomful of lamps, he reached the back yard (still without finding the stable), and scratched on the ground with the tempestuous fury with which he had knocked down
the mirror, thinking perhaps that by scratching on the ground he could make the smell of mare’s urine rise up again, until he finally reached the stable doors and pushed them too soon, falling inside on his face, in his death agony perhaps, but still confused by that fierce animalness that a half-second before had prevented him from hearing the girl, who raised the crank when she heard him pass
and remembered, drooling, but without moving from the chair, without moving her mouth but twirling the crank of the gramophone in the air, remembered the only word she had ever learned to say in her life, and shouted it from the living room: ‘Nabo! Nabo!’

Since it’s Sunday and it’s stopped raining, I think I’ll take a bouquet of roses to my grave. Red and white roses, the kind that she grows to decorate altars and wreaths. The morning has been saddened by the taciturn and overwhelming winter that has set me to remembering the knoll where the townspeople abandon their dead. It’s a bare, treeless place,
swept only by the providential crumbs that return after the wind has passed. Now that it’s stopped raining and the noonday sun has probably hardened the soapy slope, I should be able to reach the grave where my child’s body rests, mingled now, dispersed among snails and roots.

She is prostrate before her saints. She’s remained abstracted since I stopped moving in the room, when I failed in the
first attempt to reach the altar and pick the brightest and freshest roses. Maybe I could have done it today, but the little lamp blinked and she, recovered from her ecstasy, raised her head and looked toward the corner where the chair is. She must have thought: ‘It’s the wind again,’ because it’s true that something creaked beside the altar and the room rocked for an instant, as if the level of
the stagnant memories in it for so long had shifted. Then I understood that I would have to wait for another occasion to get the roses because she was still awake, looking at the chair, and she would have heard the sound of my hands beside her face. Now I’ve got to wait until she leaves the room in a moment and goes to the one next door to sleep her measured and invariable Sunday siesta. Maybe then
I can leave with the roses and be back before
she returns to this room and remains looking at the chair.

Last Sunday was more difficult. I had to wait almost two hours for her to fall into ecstasy. She seemed restless, preoccupied, as if she had been tormented by the certainty that her solitude in the house had suddenly become less intense. She took several turns about the room with the bouquet
of roses before leaving it on the altar. Then she went out into the hallway, turned in, and went to the next room. I knew that she was looking for the lamp. And later, when she passed by the door again and I saw her in the light of the hall with her dark little jacket and her pink stockings, it seemed to me now that she was still the girl who forty years ago had leaned over my bed in that same
room and said: ‘Now that they’ve put in the toothpicks your eyes are open and hard.’ She was just the same, as if time hadn’t passed since that remote August afternoon when the women brought her into the room and showed her the corpse and told her: ‘Weep, he was like a brother to you,’ and she leaned against the wall, weeping, obeying, still soaked from the rain.

For three or four Sundays now
I’ve been trying to get to where the roses are, but she’s been vigilant in front of the altar, keeping watch over the roses with a frightened diligence that I hadn’t known in her during the twenty years she’s been living in the house. Last Sunday, when she went out to get the lamp, I managed to put a bouquet of the best roses together. At no moment had I been closer to fulfilling my desires. But
when I was getting ready to return to the chair, I heard her steps in the corridor again. I rearranged the roses on the altar quickly and then I saw her appear in the doorway with the lamp held high.

She was wearing her dark little jacket and the pink stockings, but on her face there was something like the phosphorescence of a revelation. She didn’t seem then to be the woman who for twenty years
has been growing roses in the garden, but the same child who on that August afternoon had been brought into the next room so that she could change her clothes and who was coming back now with a lamp, fat and
grown old, forty years later.

My shoes still have the hard crust of clay that had formed on them that afternoon in spite of the fact that they’ve been drying beside the extinguished stove
for forty years. One day I went to get them. That was after they’d closed up the doors, taken down the bread and the sprig of aloe from the entrance-way, and taken away the furniture. All the furniture except for the chair in the corner which has served me as a seat all this time. I knew that the shoes had been set to dry and they didn’t even remember them when they abandoned the house. That’s why
I went to get them.

She returned many years later. So much time had passed that the smell of musk in the room had blended in with the smell of the dust, with the dry and tiny breath of the insects. I was alone in the house, sitting in the corner, waiting. And I had learned to make out the sound of rotting wood, the flutter of the air becoming old in the closed bedrooms. That was when she came.
She had stood in the door with a suitcase in her hand, wearing a green hat and the same little cotton jacket that she hadn’t taken off ever since then. She was still a girl. She hadn’t begun to get fat and her ankles didn’t swell under her stockings as they do now. I was covered with dust and cobwebs when she opened the door, and, somewhere in the room, the cricket who’d been singing for twenty
years fell silent. But in spite of that, in spite of the cobwebs and the dust, the sudden reluctance of the cricket and the new age of the new arrival, I recognized in her the girl who on that stormy August afternoon had gone with me to collect nests in the stable. Just the way she was, standing in the doorway with the suitcase in her hand and her green hat on, she looked as if she were suddenly going
to shout, say the same thing she’d said when they found me face up on the hay-covered stable floor still grasping the railing of the broken stairs. When she opened the door wide the hinges creaked and the dust from the ceiling fell in clumps, as if someone had started hammering on the ridge of the roof, then she paused on the threshold, coming halfway into the room after, and with the voice of
someone calling a sleeping person she said: ‘Boy! Boy!’ And I remained still in the chair, rigid, with my feet stretched out.

I thought she had come only to see the room, but she continued living in the house. She aired out the room and it was as if she had opened her suitcase and her old smell of musk had come from it. The others had taken the furniture and clothing away in trunks. She had taken
away only the smells of the room, and twenty years later she brought them back again, put them in their place, and rebuilt the little altar, just the way it was before. Her presence alone was enough to restore what the implacable industry of time had destroyed. Since then she has eaten and slept in the room next door, but she spends the day in this one, conversing silently with the saints. In
the afternoons she sits in the rocker next to the door and mends clothing. And when someone comes for a bouquet of roses, she puts the money in the corner of the kerchief that she ties to her belt and invariably says: ‘Pick the ones on the right, those on the left are for the saints.’

That’s the way she’s been for twenty years, in the rocker, darning her things, rocking, looking at the chair
as if now she weren’t taking care of the boy with whom she had shared her childhood afternoons but the invalid grandson who has been sitting here in the corner ever since the time his grandmother was five years old.

It’s possible that now, when she lowers her head again, I can approach the roses. If I can manage to do so I’ll go to the knoll, lay them on the grave, and come back to my chair to
wait for the day when she won’t return to the room and the sounds will cease in all the rooms.

On that day there’ll be a change in all this, because I’ll have to leave the house again in order to tell someone that the rose woman, the one who lives in the tumble-down house, is in need of four men to take her to the knoll. Then I’ll be alone forever in the room. But, on the other hand, she’ll be
satisfied. Because on that day she’ll learn that it wasn’t the invisible wind that came to her altar every Sunday and disarranged the roses.

We were sitting, the three of us, around the table, when someone put a coin in the slot and the Wurlitzer played once more the record that had been going all night. The rest happened so fast that we didn’t have time to think. It happened before we could remember where we were, before we could get back our sense of location. One of us reached his hand out over the
counter, groping (we couldn’t see the hand, we heard it), bumped into a glass, and then was still, with both hands resting on the hard surface. Then the three of us looked for ourselves in the darkness and found ourselves there, in the joints of the thirty fingers piled up on the counter. One of us said:

‘Let’s go.’

And we stood up as if nothing had happened. We still hadn’t had time to get
upset.

In the hallway, as we passed, we heard the nearby music spinning out at us. We caught the smell of sad women sitting and waiting. We felt the prolonged emptiness of the hall before us while we walked toward the door, before the other smell came out to greet us, the sour smell of the woman sitting by the door. We said:

‘We’re leaving.’

The woman didn’t answer anything. We heard the creak
of a rocking chair, rising up as she stood. We heard the footsteps on the loose board and the return of the woman again, when the hinges creaked once more and the door closed behind us.

We turned around. Right there, behind us, there was a
harsh, cutting breeze of an invisible dawn, and a voice that said:

‘Get out of the way. I’m coming through with this.’

We moved back. And the voice spoke
again:

‘You’re still against the door.’

And only then, when we’d moved to all sides and had found the voice everywhere, did we say:

‘We can’t get out of here. The curlews have pecked out our eyes.’

Then we heard several doors open. One of us let go of the other hands and we heard him dragging along in the darkness, weaving, bumping into the things that surrounded us. He spoke from somewhere
in the darkness.

‘We must be close,’ he said. ‘There’s a smell of piled-up trunks around here.’

We felt the contact of his hands again. We leaned against the wall and another voice passed by then, but in the opposite direction.

‘They might be coffins,’ one of us said.

The one who had dragged himself into the corner and was breathing beside us now said:

‘They’re trunks. Ever since I was little
I’ve been able to tell the smell of stored clothing.’

Then we moved in that direction. The ground was soft and smooth, fine earth that had been walked on. Someone held out a hand. We felt the contact with long, live skin, but we no longer felt the wall opposite.

‘This is a woman,’ we said.

The other one, the one who had spoken of trunks, said:

‘I think she’s asleep.’

The body shook under
our hands, trembled, we felt it slip away, not as if it had got out of our reach, but as if it had ceased to exist. Still, after an instant in which we remained motionless, stiffened, leaning against each other’s shoulders, we heard her voice.

‘Who’s there?’ it said.

‘It’s us,’ we replied without moving.

The movement of the bed could be heard, the creaking and the shuffling of feet looking
for slippers in the darkness. Then we pictured the seated woman, looking at us as when she still hadn’t awakened completely.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

And we answered:

‘We don’t know. The curlews pecked out our eyes.’

The voice said that she’d heard something about that. That the newspapers had said that three men had been drinking in a courtyard where there were five or six curlews.
Seven curlews. One of the men began singing like a curlew, imitating them.

‘The worst was that he was an hour behind,’ she said. ‘That was when the birds jumped on the table and pecked out their eyes.’

She said that’s what the newspapers had said, but nobody had believed them. We said:

‘If people had gone there, they’d have seen the curlews.’

And the woman said:

‘They did. The courtyard was
full of people the next day, but the woman had already taken the curlews somewhere else.’

When we turned around, the woman stopped speaking. There was the wall again. By just turning around we would find the wall. Around us, surrounding us, there was always a wall. One let go of our hands again. We heard him crawling again, smelling the ground, saying:

‘Now I don’t know where the trunks are.
I think we’re somewhere else now.’

And we said:

‘Come here. Somebody’s here next to us.’

We heard him come close. We felt him stand up beside us and again his warm breath hit us in the face.

‘Reach out that way,’ we told him. ‘There’s someone we know there.’

He must have reached out, he must have moved toward the place we indicated, because an instant later he came back to tell us:

‘I think
it’s a boy.’

And we told him:

‘Fine. Ask him if he knows us.’

He asked the question. We heard the apathetic and simple voice of the boy, who said:

‘Yes, I know you. You’re the three men whose eyes were pecked out by the curlews.’

Then an adult voice spoke. The voice of a woman who seemed to be behind a closed door, saying:

‘You’re talking to yourself again.’

And the child’s voice, unconcerned,
said:

‘No. The men who had their eyes pecked out by the curlews are here again.’

There was a sound of hinges and then the adult voice, closer than the first time.

‘Take them home,’ she said.

And the boy said:

‘I don’t know where they live.’

And the adult voice said:

‘Don’t be mean. Everybody knows where they live ever since the night the curlews pecked their eyes out.’

Then she went on
in a different tone, as if she were speaking to us:

‘What happened is that nobody wanted to believe it and they say it was a fake item made up by the papers to boost their circulation. No one has seen the curlews.’

And he said:

‘But nobody would believe me if I led them along the street.’

We didn’t move. We were still, leaning against the wall, listening to her. And the woman said:

‘If this
one wants to take you it’s different. After all, nobody would pay much attention to what a boy says.’

The child’s voice cut in:

‘If I go out onto the street with them and they say that they’re the men who had their eyes pecked out by the curlews, the boys will throw stones at me. Everybody on the street says it couldn’t have happened.’

There was a moment of silence. Then the door closed again
and the boy spoke:

‘Besides, I’m reading
Terry and the Pirates
right now.’

Someone said in our ear:

‘I’ll convince him.’

He crawled over to where the voice was.

‘I like it,’ he said. ‘At least tell us what happened to Terry this week.’

He’s trying to gain his confidence, we thought. But the boy said:

‘That doesn’t interest me. The only thing I like are the colors.’

‘Terry’s in a maze,’
we said.

And the boy said:

‘That was Friday. Today’s Sunday and what I like are the colors,’ and he said it with a cold, dispassionate, indifferent voice.

When the other one came back, we said:

‘We’ve been lost for almost three days and we haven’t had a moment’s rest.’

And one said:

‘All right. Let’s rest awhile, but without letting go of each other’s hands.’

We sat down. An invisible sun
began to warm us on the shoulders. But not even the presence of the sun interested us. We felt it there, everywhere, having already lost the notion of distance, time, direction. Several voices passed.

‘The curlews pecked out our eyes,’ we said.

And one of the voices said:

‘These here took the newspapers seriously.’

The voices disappeared. And we kept on sitting, like that, shoulder to shoulder,
waiting, in that passing of voices, in that passing of images, for a smell or a voice that was known to us to pass. The sun was above our heads, still warming us. Then someone said:

‘Let’s go toward the wall again.’

And the others, motionless, their heads lifted toward the
invisible light:

‘Not yet. Let’s just wait till the sun begins to burn us on the face.’