mouth open. And no one told anyone where to go. The plant all
dirty with dust understood well enough how to twine itself.
There, there was the dark air from which living things live.
Martim was surrounded by something he understood : flies were
laying eggs, and the meaning of laying eggs was the primative
meaning of man; it was there, just as if there was a plan of which
he was ignorant, but which a plant would join on to with its
mouth and which he himself had joined quite obviously by
sitting on the stone-sitting on a stone was becoming his most
intelligible and most active position.
And the thing was so perfect that even the perspective of
distance became a part of that world without God. For when the
man lifted up his eyes the distant trees were as tall, as tall as a
thing of beauty; the man grunted approvingly. The more stupid
he was the more face to face with things he was.
So it was that after a while Martim's strength was coming
back.
Even though he had wanted nothing from the farm except
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How a Man Is Made
bed, food and the use of the truck at the most favorable
moment, the days began to become more occupied than he had
expected. And they followed one another with rhythmical and
certain hammer-blows, as if the days were the very links that
were escaping him. The mornings were cool, the trees leafy, the
jobs followed one upon the other. The mulatto woman would
look at him and laugh, the Negro child spent all her time hiding
so that she could spy on him. But he had grown used to it. And
he moved slowly like a man sowing a field. His great silence was
not apathy. It was a deep and watchful sleepiness, and an almost
metaphysical meditation upon his own body, in which he
seemed to be carefully imitating the plants of his plot.
His strength was slowly coming back, and that was how he
spent the first week, the most important of all those he spent on
the place. At the end of the first week it was as if Vit6ria had
ruled him harshly for months, as if the man had been sweating
for months in an arduous apprenticeship. And in such a way had
whatever thing it was happened that week, and in such a way
had the invisible links come together, that after seven days the
thing that one becomes aware of unexpectedly had come about:
a past. And at the end of one week there was restlessness and
indistinct noise in the place, as happens when everything has
stayed without evolving for a long time, and everything wants
to change.
Martim had also become accustomed, without resistance, to
Vit6ria's constant commands. She seemed to have discovered
an incessant and impatient game : watching over him and inventing work for him to do.
"I have an English Arabian that needs currying!"
"Yes."
"Really," she said then very attentively, "the last thing I
needed was an engineer."
But the woman doubted that he had heard or understood
her.
"I said," she repeated, examining him with surprise, "that
the last thing I really needed was an engineer!"
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"If you had needed one it wouldn't have been so easy," the
man finally answered without seeming bothered in the least.
Meanwhile his peaceful face gave the impatient woman the
idea that he was permanently amused or occupied with something that escaped other people.
"All of this," she concluded, "all of this is nonsense."
The country air had left him raw and weather-beaten but his
eyes were clearer. He moved slowly about through the great
expanse, unhampered in the end because he had no thoughts.
But if his compact absence of thought was a dullness it was the
dullness of a plant. For like a plant he was aware of himself and
of the world-with that same delicate tension with which a
weed is a plant down to its last extremities, with that delicate
tension with which a blind plant can feel the air in which its
hard leaves are imbedded. The man had reduced his whole self
to that kind of vigilance. What was happening to him was one
of those periods of time about which one says after it has passed.
Nothing happened.
( 8 2 )
Chapter 7
IT WAS the warm and inexpressive face of a man-and one afternoon Ermelinda looked at Martim, startled to see him so definite in the midst of the vagueness of the countryside.
Experiencing that vast surprise she never knew how to use,
she then became startled at the coincidence of the man's being
right there on that place, and she was startled at the curious
coincidence that she too was on the place. "But," she thought,
making herself become a bit modest, "one fact is always linked
to another, and things always have a great coincidence about
them."
Immediately, in the first week Ermelinda fell passionately in
love with Martim. Primarily because he was a man and she, in a
manner of speaking, had never fallen in love-except some other
times that did not count. And then because Martim, without
knowing it, was a man beside whom a woman did not feel
humiliated. He had no shame.
She was sitting in the afternoon hulling corn. The fact that
she had taken on the job was already perhaps a beginning of the
need to be alone and to let herself become absorbed. Being
absorbed was the usual manner of doing what Ermelinda called
" thinking. "
On that afternoon, from where Ermelinda was looking at
him, the man in the distance appeared to be a black dot, like a
single point of reference in the countryside, which the girl
regarded fixedly until brightness clouded her vision and thousands of black and luminous dots forced her to close her eyes, shattering the man to pieces.
When she opened her now-dimmed eyes again, the countryside was empty once more. Martim had disappeared. What was ( 8 3 )
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left for her to see were the hated birds flying calmly about, and
the weeds, tall and ghostly, trembling at the slightest hesitation
of the breeze. Once more everything had become an antenna
sensitive to what never came to be spoken. As if in a visitation,
with the anxiety of waiting, Ermelinda was looking. She was
very thoughtful.
It was at that moment that Martim reappeared in her field
of vision. He, the concrete man who seemed to stop things from
flying off. For Ermelinda's way of looking at things usually left
everything as unstable and light as herself. He, the man, reappeared ensuring reality. And that coarse body counterbalanced the softness of the cornfield, the softness of the women and the flowers. With the ingenuous stability that a man has,
and which is his strength, he was counterbalancing the nauseating delicacy of death-that innocent stability that even Ermelinda's husband had possessed, even Francisco, even all the other men who had worked on the place temporarily. With a stolidity
that was unaware of its own value, Martim's commonplace body
seemed to guarantee
that death, most gentle death, would never
conquer. And the man's strength justified the fact that she,
Ermelinda, was soft and the softness that without a man was as
gratuitous as a flower. Like a flower it seemed to lead to nothing,
and nothingness was death so subtley diffused that it even gave
the appearance of being life.
Ermelinda was not thinking about anything. She was absorbed.
Her head down, she hulled the corn automatically. Something different from Martim's hammer-blows-which she was listening to one by one, waiting in sweet torture for the next
one-very carefully, with the inception of a feeling of exasperating pleasure that she feared she would destroy if she made it stronger, she said to herself: "but who's talking about death,
girl? I'm so very much alive." She said it as if she was enjoying a
fainting spell or the heat. The man's hammer was beating like a
heart in the countryside. Her eyes, looking at the corn, did not
see Martim. But with each blow he gave body to the open
( 8 4 )
How a Man Is Made
countryside, and he gave body to the ever so vague body of that
girl . Ermelinda felt a shameful weakness against which, for no
reason, she was struggling, lifting up her head in a kind of
spirited way. It was true that the challenge could not last for
very long, and in a while her heavy head hung low again in
meditation. Her mechanical fingers kept on working.
But at times she made a slight movement with her head,
very calm and pretty, as if she was avoiding a fly. Meditation was
staring into space. The girl was meditating.
It was then that she lifted up her head and stared out with
some intensity. Some soft and insidious thing had become mixed
in with her blood; and she remembered how she used to speak of
love as a poison, and she agreed submissively. It was something
sweet and filled with a feeling of malaise. And joining in, she
recognized it with painful softness, the way a woman recognizes
with pride and clenched teeth the first sign that the baby is
going to be born. With joy and impassive resignation she recognized the ritual that was taking place inside of her. Then she sighed : it was the seriousness she had been waiting for all her
life.
Then, the way a woman becomes confused in moments of
crisis, she clutched the raw ear of corn with greater force; several
kernels fell . The whinny of a horse sounded across the fields, and
Francisco called "whoa"; several kernels fell into the pail. It was
something that might be love or might not be. It would be up to
her, during a few thousand seconds, to give it just that slight
emphasis love needs to come into existence.
Ermelinda paused with the ear in her hand; her head turned
a little, satisfied, vexed. Because in one second lost among
thousands of others in the vastness of the countryside, subject to
the law of that single cell which fertilizes among the ones that
perish, she had known, as if she had made a choice, that she
loved him. Not directly, for she was not a courageous girl. "I am
alive," she thought : in this way she had chosen to know that she
loved him. And at the thought "I am alive," she had become
aware for the first time that before then she had been thinking
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about death, and that she had also been thinking about the man.
Ignorance of her own thought processes gave her an innocent
surprise. And only then did she perceive that now it was too late,
that now all she could do was love him. Painfully, haughtily, she
had lost forever the possibility of resolving the problem. She was
relieved, as one always is when it is too late. A second before it
might still have been possible for her not to love him. But now,
softly, proudly: nevermore. In the same instant she felt a sense of
tragedy.
And now it was too late-whatever feeling had brought it on
it had evaporated forever. It was too late. The pain had remained in her body just as when the bee is already far away.
The pain, so recognizable, had remained. But we were created to
bear just that.
A little startled, she then became enveloped in the afternoon
heat, restless and heavy. Nothing had changed in the countryside, still hot from the motionless sun. For an instant, however, the girl did not recognize it, neither did she recognize herself;
and if she had looked into the mirror she would have seen large
eyes looking back at her, but not herself. With the keenness that
wonder brings on, she noticed a vein in her own hand that she
had not noticed for years, and she saw that her fingers were thin
and short; and she saw a skirt covering her knees. And beneath
everything that she was, she felt something: her own attention.
She looked aroung a little worried. From some obscure need for
self-preservation she was trying to recover from the countryside
that same moment when she had boldly admitted to loving the
man. She was trying to recover that moment in order to destroy
it. Perhaps she was amazed that the need to destroy love was
love itself because love is also a struggle against love. If she knew
that, it was because a person knows. Desperate and offended she
tried to find that moment which already now she would never
know again, to learn whether it had been fateful to the point of
ruling her completely-or whether in that minute she herself
had been so extremely free that she had picked it out with a
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gratuitousness that was already sin, and would have to be paid
for later on.
She tried to recover the instant in order to destroy it, but it
too rapidly. And the girl was left with only the following: with a
pail of corn, without even anything to fight against.
She was so very abandoned and so very alone as if everything
that might happen in the future had nothing to do with that
solitary minute of glory which a long ago had been lost forever
among the hammer-blows-those hammer-blows which the girl,
recovered and frightened now, was hearing stronger and closer,
fateful, fateful, fateful. Her strange freedom : she had chosen to
go out and meet fate. It was the dignity she had been waiting for
all her life. A sense of tragedy again enveloped her. And it was
strange that within it she was just anonymous.
Then she looked at the flies on the rosebush. The grace of
being alive filled her with Christian modesty, and she humbly
sought moral support from the flies, who were blue inside. But
what she saw was only blue flies and a rose trembling from the
fly that had left it trembling. Although the entire world had
become her accomplice for an instant, the girl had been dragged
off by her own volition.
Then she lowered her head and started to work again. The
kernels of corn rhythmically fell into the pail, hard drop by hard
drop. The sun suddenly lengthened into a great light and the
warm wind blew. But something had certainly happened,
be�
cause the shout of the mulatto woman made the girl twist her
face as if she had been wounded.
Uncomfortable inside the unexpected grandeur that her life
had taken on, the girl pretended not to notice anything. Then,
revolted and taking refuge in consoling pettiness where at least
she was herself, she said to herself as a challenge, "If I don't take
care of myself, no one else will ! I'm going to drink more milk to
build up my strength; I'm no fool ! " she said brutally. But s�e
lowered her head, completely distracted by what she had said,
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breathing heavily, breathing. Then she wiped away the perspiration.
"The fence hasn't been fixed yet! " Vit6ria said to Martim at
that moment.
Ermelinda shivered, startled at the fact that someone was
speaking to the man. She could not have imagined it-and at
that moment! She resented the stranger's intrusion, as if he had
meddled in the love which had just been born.
"The fence is falling apart," Vit6ria added demandingly.
Martim never seemed to get annoyed at having to interrupt
the job he had just begun and start on another one. He would
begin the new task with the same concentrated indifference with
which he had been so perfect at in the previous job.
"Don't you want to finish what you're doing first?" Vit6ria
finally suggested, having to supply herself the argument that he
had not offered.
But he did not seem to be surprised at anything Vit6ria
might say to him. At first the obedience with which he listened
gave Vit6ria a dark rage in her breast. In her fantasies Vit6ria
would get the impression that if she were to tell the man, "At
night I sleep under my bed," he would reply, "Of course,
ma'am." The fact that he would accept anything at all from
her, even the most contradictory orders, offended her-and
worse yet, all of that was surreptitiously removing one of the
supports of that vague heroism by which she lived, the motives
of which had already been lost. But after a while she was
becoming involved in his way of accepting everything in her or
in himself. It was as if he said, "I see nothing good or bad in
sleeping under the bed." A little uncomfortable, she could not
even discover what was wrong with sleeping under a bed. The