instinctively into battle. Martim no longer knew if he were
merely obeying that indefinable ability with which cows, having
it, can force a cowboy to look and act in a certain way. Or
whether, really, it was he himself who was trying with a painful,
spiritual effort, to free himself finally from the realm of rats and
plants and rise to the mysterious breathing of higher animals.
He barely understood-since he had just now acquired the
intelligence essential to a cow-a simple law. He must not
How a Man Is Made
offend their inherent rhythm. lie must give them time, their
own time, their time that was completely dark, while they
chewed their cud. Little by little, moreover, this became the
man's rhythm. Indolently, slowly, immeasurable by the calendar; that is how a cow crosses a field.
Then, since things tend to come to an end and to rest in a
phase, the cowshed at last became peaceful. The warmth of the
man and the warmth of the cows mingled in a single ammoniated warmth. The man's silence had naturally changed. And the cows, pacified by Martim's apology, had stopped worrying about
him.
With trembling joy he felt that something had happened
finally-but then it gave him an intense loneliness, as when one
is happy and there is nothing to use the happiness on, as when
he looks around and there is no way to share the instant of
happiness-which until now he had usually felt on Saturday
night.
Something had happened. And though something else still
escaped him, he at last had something in his hand, and his chest
filled up with subtle victory. Martim took a deep breath. Now
he belonged to the cowshed.
And at last he could look at it in the way a cow would see
it.
The cowshed was a warm and good place which pulsated like
the beating of a heart. This is why men and beasts have offspring. Martim sighed, exhausted at the enormous effort: he had just found himself. This is why a large animal crosses a stream
and splashes sparkling water. The man had seen that. However
he had had only a slight concept of the beauty which now was
rested on a deeper understanding. This is why mountains are far
away and high. This is why cows wet the ground so loudly.
Because of a cowshed ti1ne is indefinably replaced by time. This
is why birds migrate from cold regions to warm. This-this
cowshed was a warm place and it was pulsating.
Perhaps he felt all this, because, satisfie.d, he spa� ?n th.e
ground. After which, with a sad determination and h1d1ng his
( 9 7)
THE APPLE
IN
THE
DARK
emotion, he put out his hand and gave the dry cow a few pats. A
great and peaceful empathy had sprung up between him and the
animals.
"You have to cultivate the corn ! " Vit6ria said to him irritatedly.
Then-he went to cultivate the corn. But the cows were
waiting for him, and he knew it.
Chapter 9
OUTSIDE of the orders and the execution of those orders there
was little to be said. And what was not being said began to be
missed. Ermelinda was surrounding him without coming close;
just barely looking, he guessed. And Vit6ria rode out through
the fields.
To her Martim still had the air of one who was ready to
laugh from one moment to the next, like the inexpressive face of
a clown looking at a dirty picture; Vit6ria was restless. And she
was exasperated with Martim's silence. The stupidity of the man
suffocated her, but she had nothing to complain about for his
work, in spite of being slow, was perfect. Vit6ria was restless.
Her own strength was growing in a certain way; the woman
seemed to be developing more and more and becoming more
sure of herself.
And in the afternoon, as the heat lessened, she would stand
on the porch and look out at the things that little by little were
would grow without any objective like a heat-wave. And the
desire would arise in her to invent new orders to be given, just to
find out what would happen; she was the disturbed owner of all
of that, and she was getting disturbed. She would become
enraged because nights would intervene and during that time
there would be no progress in the work; the man's sleeping in
the woodshed seemed to her such an insolence that she tolerated
it because there was nothing else that she could do. In the
daytime too, at a certain time, she would get irritated knowing
that the man was in the cowshed taking endless care of the cows,
complying with an excess of docility to an order she had only
thrown at him once. And then again night would come on with
its exasperating interruption. She could barely wait for the
( 9 9 )
T H E A P P L E
IN
T H E D A R K
following day, and her feeling of power was already so great that
it had become uncomfortable and useless.
That was the dull way in which the work was progressing
little by little. At the sound of the plow Vit6ria would close her
eyes, her breast would become agitated. Under a heat that was
becoming stronger and stronger the work was progressing. But it
seemed to be going too slowly for her: the woman standing on
the porch would unbutton the neck of her blouse because she
could not breathe. Coming out of nowhere the menace of a
drought was approaching, surrounding them with brilliant heat.
Every day it was becoming more difficult for the sun to die. It
was an agony that the woman would bear standing all alone.
Even after the sun had disappeared, the farm would keep on
reverberating for an indeterminate and unquieting time. During
the day it was that sparkling, those hammer-blows, sweat. But
night-she knew it well-would be no truce. Night during a
drought always hid in its belly a bright profundity which was like
a light imprisoned in the hard shell of a nut.
The woman on the porch bit her hand distractedly until she
looked at her own injured hand with suddenly severe eyes. That
night she stayed up late on the porch, and apprehensively
examined the thousands of stars that the strange cleanness of
the dark would let be seen. Restlessly she checked her hearing,
and it was true; every night there were fewer toads to be heard,
they were deserting . . .
At least while she was on the porch, fighting with the stars
and scrutinizing the vibrant dryness of the night, she was still
powerful because she was working, working coldly, and calculating. But when it was time to go to sleep she would be overcome by misery, a proud misery that asked for nothing. And no matter
how strong she might have been during the day she lessened
then, quiet and unfathomable. Poverty came over her like a
meditation. The small woman was stretched out on her bed,
calm, looking at the ceiling. And since no one would be able to
understand her, she was calculating in vengeance, with her eyes
open, wounded-calculating, woun
ded like a prisoner in his cell.
( 1 00 )
How a Man Is Made
And every night her step went farther, every night her obscure
menace went out to watch over the indecent sleep of the happy
man.
With the vigor of the morning her feeling of discomfort in
relation to the man would disappear as soon as she discovered
another field of action : an ant hill that had to be destroyed, the
open well that did not seem to be deep enough and beside which
she tapped her foot impatiently. And then she would not seem
to know for sure what order she wanted to give; she felt that she
had at her disposition that silent man who sparkled in the sun,
silent, with his eyes wide open. Then her own power would
weigh on her, and she would gallop from one side of the field
to the other giving more orders, staring in an authoritative and
questioning way at the mysterious and dried-out horizon-she
who could not give herself the luxury of not being powerfulspreading her severe efficiency about between gallops. And there was no solution; her blouse clung to her sweating body, and she
feared that the more powerful she became the more she would
someday have to see herself free of her own power. But was
there no way to escape the situation into which things had fallen
and to escape before she would bear down excessively upon the
passive man and the malleable farm-before the man would
suddenly laugh, or the ground on the place would suddenly
break out in arid cracks? Then rage would take hold of her:
someday she would find out what the man had come to do upon
the place.
In that interim the farm was becoming beautiful.
The farm was becoming beautiful, and with the heat the
tension grew with excessive happiness; the days followed each
other clear and long. There the only sign of danger was the
agreement under which they all seemed to be living-and happiness. Vit6ria had never been so happy, and the one who suffered was the horse she whipped those mouth hung open in surprise.
It was when he was spurred that the horse kicked and ran
away-the woman, taken by surprise, lost her balance and
fiercely clutched the horse's neck. A chill ran up the woman's
( l 0 l )
THE APPLE
IN
THE
DARK
sides, and she panted in terror. Without the courage to let go of
that heavy neck her legs trembled; she stayed motionless; and
with her eyes closed she gave the bay free rein to take her to his
food and let him lower his unconquered head to eat. The
woman's whole body humbly accompanied the head of the horse
down to the hay and with her eyes closed she could feel him
eating; it was a strange peace, being led by the disorientation of
the horse. The farm was becoming beautiful, the wind was
blowing, tears of rage ran down Vit6ria's face.
"How long are you going to stay around?" she asked the man
then, ready to discharge him without knowing why.
"I don't know," he replied, continuing to dig.
"What do you mean, you don't know?" she asked rigidly.
Having forgotten that she had been ready to send him away,
she looked at him insulted. It was an insult, that man's playing
with time and bringing doubt into the mechanical passage of
days, bringing a frightening freedom to them as if on each day
he might suddenly say yes or no. Bringing indecision to her,
when if he had been asked how long he was going to stay there,
and had replied "I don't know," meaning unlimited time, time
beyond her control-and not, as it was for him, a short time.
Yes, a short time. Without tying one idea to the other
Vit6ria now seemed to want the man to work fast and twice as
hard, and the well, the digging of which she had obliged him to
interrupt so he could start working on the line fences, should be
started up again at once.
"But why doesn't he know if he's going to stay or not?"
Ermelinda asked in surprise.
Ermelinda was nervous with headaches and palpitations.
"Why doesn't he know if he's going to stay or not?" And as if
they had eliminated the possibility of waiting for a more favorable time and a natural ripening, the girl felt herself trapped, forced to define herself before the man left, and have that fruit,
even if it was green, even if it was still incomprehensible. Whatever the obscure stages of love might be they would have to go along more rapidly now. Trying not to stumble over shame,
( l 0 2)
How a Man Is Made
Ermelinda had already forgotten what she had wanted from the
man. She was only trying to bring back that instant in which
love, beside the pail of corn, had been fateful and grand-there
had only been that instant in an afternoon lost now forever. But
in that instant death too had seemed to her to be a ritual of
life-there had been that instant in which she had faced death
with the same grandeur as one looking from a distance.
But it was useless: with that lost instant she had lost contact
with fatality. And again she only saw trickery and meanness in
death. And she too became mean again to the point of fearing
death; and she was avaricious and crafty, and she tricked because
she felt that she was being tricked.
In the meantime something told her that no one could die
without first resolving his own death. She looked around,
afflicted. The bee in some way had resolved it: she saw the bee
fly off. And Francisco too, in the same way, standing mute in the
concentration of watering the mule as if watering the mule in
that silent way were some signal of preparedness. Ermelinda
looked at him with envy. But she, she was mean : she did not
forgive death. She would never know how to tell what she
wanted from Martim. Obscurely, she wanted her life to take on
a destiny through him. She was confused; she knew only that she
had to hurry for time was growing short.
And false, calculating, she tried to project herself in some
way into a crisis of love, until finally, from so much looking at
the man and so much pushing herself and demanding so much
of herself, she began to feel that uneasiness once more. Then,
radiant, weakened by the effort, she loved him. The countryside
seemed empty to her, ashen. She looked at the sick grass beside
the hen-house, and she looked at the dirty flock, the chickens
running weakly and rapidly about, cackling; the dissonance of
the wheels of the plow bothered her: it was love, yes. So much
so that if the man were to appear in the distance with his hoethen-then it happened : there he was !
There he was, wrapped up in the power he had over her, and
which she herself had conferred upon him.
T H E A PP L E
IN
T H E D A R K
Until finally Ermelinda reached the point where she no
longer asked whether she loved him. She was no longer ashamed
of watching him as she hid behind the wall, and she rediscovered
every feature of the man's face with an exclamation of recognition and surprise. And when, untiring, she discovered for the thousandth time that the man's e
yes were blue she was surprised
that so much could be given to her, a woman. His mouth was
thin, and he had that extraordinary beauty that only a man
could have and which had left her mute with a desire to fleewhich made her spy on him in a bloodthirsty way. She trembled with the fear that she would stop loving him. She had never got
close to him; between the two of them there had always been a
distance. But after a while the girl had spiritualized the distance
and had ended up by turning it into a perfect means of communication, up to the point at which now only distance was able to provide sufficient space for her to unfold her love and reach
the man; near him she felt herself inconvenienced by him, and
she did not know how to give him all her love.
Which had not stopped the girl from becoming very active;
she carefully calculated the steps she would have to take, feeding
what she felt with the foresight of a murderer. She bathed with
scented herbs, she took better care of her underwear, she ate a
lot so she would put on some weight, she tried to feel emotion at
the sunset, she intensively petted the dogs on the farm, she
cleaned her teeth with charcoal, she protected herself against the
sun so she would be quite fair, she was worried over how much
times love would assault her unexpectedly, as when, shuffling
too herself to see if she was right, "I want to be the shoe he
wears, I want to be the axe he has in his hand" and then she
waited very attentively; and she was so right that she lowered her
modest eyes with emotion, confused, hiding a smile as best she
could.
But Ermelinda did not always have to arouse herself. Sometimes love would assault her unexpectedly, as when, shuffling through Vit6ria's writing desk in search of a pair of shears, she
came upon the list of tools Martim had ordered for the mistress
( l 0 4)
How a Man Is Made
of the place. Even before she thought about it she was sure it
was his writing. Because her heart was beating as if she had been
reading the very secret of the man; "one shovel, two scythes,"
she went on reading. And what he had written gave her such a
feeling of ripeness that she felt ill. The words seemed full and
painful, heavy with themselves. It was heartbreaking to feel the
strength of the man in his words, a quiet and contained strength
-and in the meantime, all of it right there in front of her, a