The Complete Stories (3 page)

O
bsession

(“Obsessão”)

Now that the affair is behind me, I can recollect it more serenely. I won’t try to make excuses for myself. I’ll try not to point fingers. It simply happened.

I don’t recall very clearly how it started. I transformed myself independently of my consciousness and when I opened my eyes the poison was circulating through my blood irremediably, its power already ancient.

I must tell a bit about myself, before my encounter with Daniel. Only thus can one understand the ground in which his seeds were scattered. Though I didn’t think one could entirely comprehend why those seeds bore such sad fruit.

I was always serene and never showed the least sign of possessing those elements that Daniel brought out in me. I was born of simple creatures, steeped in that wisdom one acquires through experience and figures out with common sense. We lived, from childhood until I was fourteen, in a nice house on the outskirts of town, where I went to school, played and roamed without a care beneath the benevolent gaze of my parents.

Until one day they discovered I was a young lady, lowered the hem of my dress, made me wear new clothes and considered me almost ready. I accepted the discovery and its consequences without much commotion, in the same distracted way that I studied, went out, read, and lived.

We moved to a house closer to the city, in a neighborhood whose name, along with other subsequent details, I shall suppress. There I would have the chance to meet other boys and girls, Mama said. I really did make friends quickly, with my good-natured, easygoing cheer. They thought I was adorable, and my sturdy body, my fair skin made them like me.

As for my dreams, I was so full of them at that age—those of any young girl: to get married, have children and, finally, be happy, a desire I didn’t really clarify and which confusingly matched the endings of the thousand novels I’d read, without ever contaminating me with their romanticism. I only hoped that everything would be all right, though I would never be overwhelmed with satisfaction if that’s how it turned out.

At nineteen I met Jaime. We got married and rented a pretty, nicely furnished apartment. We lived together for six years, without children. And I was happy. If someone asked me, I said yes, adding not without some bewilderment: “And why wouldn’t I be?”

Jaime was always good to me. And I considered his not very impassioned temperament to be somehow an extension of my parents, of my former home, where I’d grown used to the privileges of an only daughter.

I lived easily. I never devoted a deeper thought to any one subject. And, as if to spare myself even more, I didn’t entirely believe in the books I read. They were made just for entertainment, I thought.

Once in a while, groundless melancholy would darken my face, a dull and incomprehensible nostalgia for times never experienced would invade me. Nothing romantic, and I’d push them away as quickly as I would a useless notion unconnected to the really important things. Which ones? I didn’t really define them and grouped them under the ambiguous expression “things of life.” Jaime. Me. Home. Mama.

Meanwhile, the people around me carried on serenely, their foreheads smooth and unworried, in a milieu where habit had long since opened the correct paths, where facts were reasonably explained by visible causes and the most extraordinary were connected, not through mysticism but through self-serving complacency, to God. The only events that could disturb their souls were birth, marriage, death and their attendant conditions.

Or am I mistaken and could it be that, in my happy blindness, I didn’t know how to peer into things more deeply? I don’t know, but now I think it seems impossible for the shadowy region in every man, even the peaceful ones, not to harbor the threat of other, more terrible and suffering men.

If that vague dissatisfaction ever arose to bother me, I, without knowing how to explain it and used to giving a clear name to all things, wouldn’t allow it or would attribute it to physical ailments. Furthermore, the Sunday gathering at my parents’ house, together with the cousins and neighbors, whatever pleasant and lively game would quickly win me over again and set me back on the straight path, to walk again with the masses who have their eyes closed.

I realize now that it was a certain apathy, rather than peace, that turned my acts and my desires to ash. I remember how Jaime had once said, a bit emotionally:

“If only we had a child . . .”

I responded, carelessly:

“What for?”

A dense veil isolated me from the world and, without my knowing it, an abyss separated me from myself.

And that’s how I went on until I caught typhoid fever and nearly died. My two households sprang into action and throughout nights and days of labor saved me.

Convalescence arrived to find me thin and wan, without the slightest interest in anything of the world. I hardly ate, grew irritated at the simplest words. I’d spend the day propped against the pillow, not thinking, not moving, caught in a sweet and abnormal languor. I can’t say for certain whether this state more easily allowed Daniel’s influence. I rather imagine that I exaggerated my infirmity to keep people around me, as when I was ill. Whenever Jaime got back from work, I’d purposely emphasize my fragility.

I hadn’t meant to frighten him, but I managed to. And one day, when I’d already forgotten my “convalescent” pose, they informed me that I was to spend two months in Belo Horizonte, where the good climate and new environment would strengthen me. Argument was out of the question. Jaime took me there, on a night train. He found me a nice boardinghouse and departed, leaving me alone, with nothing to do, suddenly launched into a freedom I hadn’t asked for and didn’t know how to use.

Perhaps that was the start. Out of my sphere, far from the things that seemed like they’d always been there, I felt unsupported because in the end not even conventional wisdom had taken root in me, so superficially had I been living. What had kept me going until then were not convictions, but the people who held them. For the very first time they were giving me a chance to
see
with my own eyes. For the very first time they were isolating me with myself. Judging from the letters I wrote during that time and read much later, I notice that a feeling of distress had seized me. In all of them I mentioned coming home, desiring it with a certain anxiety. That is, until Daniel.

I cannot, even now, recall Daniel’s face. I mean my first impressions of that physiognomy of his, altogether different from the assemblage I later got used to. Only then, unfortunately a bit too late, did I manage through daily proximity to comprehend and absorb his features. But they were different . . . Of the first Daniel I’ve retained nothing, except the imprint.

I know that he was smiling, that’s all. From time to time, some isolated feature of his comes to mind, from the former days. His long and curved fingers, those thick, wide-set brows. That’s all. Because he overpowered me in a way that, if I can put it like this, almost prevented me from seeing him. I really do believe that my later anguish was intensified by this impossibility of reconstructing his appearance. So all I possessed were his words, the memory of his soul, everything that wasn’t human in Daniel. And during nights of insomnia, unable to reconstruct him mentally, already exhausted by these futile attempts, I’d glimpse him as you might a shadow, huge, with shifting contours, looming oppressive yet also distant as a threat. Like a painter who bends the treetops in order to capture a gust of wind on his canvas, sending hair and skirts flying, I could only ever manage to recall him by transporting me to myself, to the version from that time. I martyred myself with accusations, despised myself and, hurt and brokenhearted, lodged him vividly inside myself.

But I must start at the beginning, to put a bit of order into this narrative of mine . . .

Daniel lived in the boardinghouse where I was staying. He never approached me, nor had I ever particularly noticed him. Until one day I heard him speak, entering suddenly into someone else’s conversation, though without losing that distant manner he had, as if just emerging from a deep sleep. It was about work. Which should be no more than a means of ending immediate hunger. And, amused at scandalizing the bystanders, he added—any day now he’d abandon his own, which he’d done several times before, to live like “a good bum.” A bespectacled student, after the first moment of silence and reticence that fell, coldly retorted that above all else work was a duty. “A duty in the interest of society.” Daniel made some gesture, as if he couldn’t be bothered to convince anyone, and granted one sentence:

“Someone’s already declared there’s no foundation for duty.”

He left the room, leaving the student fuming. And me, surprised and amused: I had never heard anyone defy work, “such a serious obligation.” Jaime and Papa’s greatest revolts manifested themselves in the form of some trivial complaint. In general, I’d never recalled that you ever could not accept, could choose, could revolt . . . Above all, I’d perceived in Daniel’s words a disregard for convention, for “things of life” . . . And it had never occurred to me, except as a slight whimsy, to wish that the world were different than it was. I recalled Jaime, always praised for “fulfilling his duties,” as he said, and felt, without knowing why, safer.

Later, when I saw Daniel again, I stiffened into a cold and useless posture, since he barely noticed me, lumping me together with the rest of the boardinghouse, safeguarded. However, when I looked everyone over at dinner, I vaguely felt a certain shame in belonging to that amorphous group of men and women who had banded together in tacit agreement, stoking their indignation, united against the one who had come to disturb their comfort. I understood that Daniel scorned them and I was irritated because I too was implicated.

I wasn’t used to lingering for very long over any one thought, and a subtle discontent, like an impatience, seized me. From then on, without thinking, I avoided Daniel. Whenever I saw him, I imperceptibly grew wary, eyes wide open, watchful. I think I feared he’d make one of those cutting remarks of his, because I was worried I’d agree . . . I mustered my dislike, defending myself from who knows what, defending Papa, Mama, Jaime and all my own people. But it was in vain. Daniel was the danger. And I was heading toward him.

Another time, I was wandering aimlessly through the empty boardinghouse, at two o’clock on a rainy afternoon, until, hearing voices in the waiting room, I went in. He was talking to a thin fellow, dressed in black. Both were smoking, speaking unhurriedly, so absorbed in their thoughts that they didn’t even see me come in. I was about to retreat, but a sudden curiosity took hold of me and led me to an easy chair, at a distance from where they were sitting. After all, I justified to myself, the room belonged to the lodgers. I tried not to make a sound.

In those first few moments, to my astonishment, I understood none of what they were saying . . . I gradually made out a few recognizable words, among others that I’d never heard spoken aloud: terms from books. “The universality of . . .” “the abstract meaning of . . .” It must be known that I never witnessed discussions in which the subject wasn’t “things” and “stories.” I myself, having little imagination and little intelligence, thought strictly along the lines of my narrow reality.

His words slid over me, without penetrating. However, I sensed, singularly uncomfortable, how they hid a harmony of their own that I couldn’t quite grasp . . . I tried not to get distracted so as not to miss any part of the magical conversation.

“Achievements kill desire,” said Daniel.

“Achievements kill desire, achievements kill desire,” I repeated to myself, somewhat bewildered. I drifted off and when I started paying attention again yet another brilliant and mysterious phrase had been born, disturbing me.

Now Daniel was talking about himself.

“What interests me above all is feeling, accumulating desires, filling me up with myself. Achievements open me up, leave me empty and sated.”

“There’s no such thing as satiety,” the other one said, between exhalations from his cigarette. “Dissatisfaction returns, creating yet another desire that a normal man would try to satisfy. You’re justifying its futility with some random theory. ‘What matters is feeling and not doing . . .’ Sorry. You’ve failed and all you can do is assert yourself through the imagination . . .”

I listened to them, numb. Not only did the conversation surprise me but, the grounds on which it was based, something far from everyday truth, but mysteriously melodic, touching upon, I sensed, other truths unknown to me. And I was also surprised to see them attack each other with unfriendly words that would have offended any other person but that they accepted indifferently, as if . . . as if they didn’t know the meaning of “honor,” for example.

And, above all, for the very first time I, in a deep slumber until then, caught a glimpse of ideas.

The uneasiness those first conversations with Daniel produced in me arose as from a certainty of danger. One day I managed to explain to him that the thought of this danger was linked to expressions read in books with the scant attention I generally granted to everything and that now flared in my memory: “fruit of evil” . . . When Daniel told me that I was speaking of the Bible, I was seized with terror of God, combined nevertheless with a strong and shameful curiosity like the kind from an addiction.

Because of all this, my story is difficult to explain, when divided into its elements. How far did my feeling for Daniel go (I use this general term because I don’t know exactly what it contained) and where did my awakening to the world begin? Everything was interwoven, mixed up inside me and I couldn’t specify whether my unease was desire for Daniel or yearning to seek the newly discovered world. Because I awoke simultaneously as a woman and a human.

Perhaps Daniel had acted merely as an instrument, perhaps my destiny really was the one I pursued, the destiny of those set loose upon the earth, of those who don’t measure their actions according to Good and Evil, perhaps I, even without him, would have discovered myself some day, perhaps, even without him, I would have fled Jaime and his land. How can I know?