fruit that could only shrivel up after that. Since Ermelinda was
quick-witted the vague idea of a fruit brought her to the idea of
"the harvest of death," for she had read that somewhere, and
she had even seen pictures to that respect. "Oh, my love," she
thought then, but her heavy heart did not know how to express
itself. The hands that had written "those very simple words"
were large and ugly, and they saddened her. "Oh, my love," she
said in a final touch of resignation, and while she was asking
herself if perhaps she could give and receive life in love, she stole
the list the man had made and kept it in her room. "My way of
loving is so pretty! " she thought. She had never been so happy.
In fact, she had never even come to the point of asking that he
love her. In the selfishness of her happiness she thought like this;
"a pity that he doesn't feel what I feel, he doesn't know what
he's 1nissing."
On Friday, since he was nearby, she finally said the following
to him: "I'm dying with this heat." And her eyes filled with tears
because she had said nothing, as it were. Then later on she said
humbly to Vit6ria : "This heat is bitter."
But Vit6ria replied with : "Cold is what they call bitter, not
heat."
( 1 0 5)
Chapter10
As FOR MARTIM, he had time. In fact, he seemed to have
discovered time.
At the end of the day he would leave his work and go to the
cowshed, with that same serene avidity with which he had
formerly gone to the plot by the woodshed. And, free at last
from the imminence of an order from Vit6ria, free from Ermelinda' s increasingly besieging presence-each day the man would again pick up in the cowshed the instant interrupted on the day
before putting into one theme all the scattered instants that he
had had with the cows, and creating from it all the only
sequence, "As I had been feeling . . .
" he would seem to think
as he entered the barn-he would go on with what had been
interrupted.
The dark heat of the cows filled the barn. And as if there had
been something which no person and no consciousness could
have given him, there in the barn, it was given to him; he
received it. The suffocating smell was that of the slow blood that
flowed in the bodies of the animals. It was no longer the intense
sleep of the plants, no longer the mean prudence of survival that
existed in the suspicious rats.
But the cows had already begun to upset him a little. One
day, for example, he woke up and opened the door of the woodshed to let in the first light. And since the day seemed to have been given to him, he received it. But-but now he wanted, for
the first time, to do something on his own. It was at the door of
the shed for the first time he was in need of a deeper experience
-even if he could never share it with the cows. Restless, he was
separating himself from them. It was a risk and an initial
audacity. Then seeing that the countryside was large and full
( 106)
How a Man Is Made
of light he-took the risk of having a deeper experience. He
blinked several times, quietly.
That was how that man was growing, the way a rolling thing
takes on volume. He was growing calmly, emptily, indirectly,
patiently advancing.
He had never looked directly at the mulatto woman. But she
would laugh. And a peaceful strength had come awake in him. It
was a power-he still remembered well. Alert, without any plan,
he waited day after day for the moment when he might make
the mulatto woman stop laughing. Both the woman and the
child would observe him in pretense from a distance, never
coming close. As for the child, Martim avoided her, confused,
evasive.
But the woman laughed a lot. One might really say that she
laughed too much. Without thinking about it he knew what her
laughter meant. And sometimes it was as if her laughter were a
moo : then he would lift his head, stunned, summoned, powerful. But he waited. As if patience had become a part of desire he waited without hurrying.
The mulatto had an open nature, as open as her laughter; she
would laugh before she knew what she was laughing at. Life had
arranged itself in her in some dark, sweet way, and she laughed
at anything; perhaps she had pleasure from it. Even if sometimes
that same thing would stir inside of her in rage the way a dog
will snarl. She was a person who could err without sinning. The
slaps she gave her child were almost filled with joy, and they
reinvigorated her all over. The man observed that the usual
thing would be for her to start out singing and end up beating
the child. The girl would duck away from the slaps, learning
without resentment that this is how it was, and that her mother
was that force that laughed out loud and beat her without a
sense of vengeance; and to be a daughter was to belong to that
mother in whom vigor was laughter. The man pretended to be
interested in his work as a cover-up. The fact was that a person
could come to understand himself completely in the mulatto
woman. The man found in her a past which if it was not his own
(I 0 7 )
T H E A P P L E
IN
T H E D A R K
could serve just as well. What she brought out in a man was
what he was. Martim had only to take a look at her and he knew
that she was there. You could deal man to man with her, except
that when you came right down to it, she was a woman.
Two days later, instead of going to the cowshed, he finally
went over to the woman, who was washing clothes. And he
stood there without looking at her.
And without looking at him, she laughed. He meticulously
crumbled a piece of kindling-wood he had in his hand, and
without looking at her, he knew that she was young. Her hair
had long, hard curls. Since Martim was a person who immediately liked what he needed right away he found that she was pretty. Finally he threw the stick of wood away and looked
straight at her; either he would let her alone or he would grab
her. He grabbed her slowly, the way one day he had grabbed a
bird.
"You're strong as a bull," the woman laughed. He was
concentrating. Grasping her shoulder the man could feel her
small bones and higher up the tendons and threads beneath her
soft skin; she was a young creature, he could calculate her age as
he felt her. He could feel the warmth coming out of her, and
that is the way it should be: body to body, in tune with the most
intimate pulse of the unknown.
It was already dark when his movements woke up the girl.
The man lit the lantern in the woodshed and she gave a short
shout of rage. Whatever it was she had it had curled up into
anger. He looked at her curiously. She was trembling with rage,
God only knows why.
And he was all alone by the door of the woodshed.
Martim was very surprised because in the past he had been
used to knowing everything. And now-like a fact that was
someh
ow much more concrete-he did not know about anything. He who had grown up to be a clear man and around whom everything had been customarily visible. He had been a
person who had known all the answers; formerly he had been a
person who had lived without pain. The clarity with which he
( l 0 8 )
How a Man Is Made
had lived had made him capable of working with figures with
a never-changing patience; and naked within, his clothes had fit
him well. Expert and elegant. But now that the layer of words
had been removed from things, now that he had lost speech, he
was finally standing in the calm depths of the mystery. By the
door of the woodshed then, revitalized by his great ignorance, he
kept on standing in the darkness. It was almost night already.
He had just learned all of that with that woman : how to keep
on standing when one has a body.
Then the days began to pass.
But if at one time his tongue had grown too thick in his
mouth for him to give expression, and if in his head there was
not enough circulation of air for his thoughts to be more than
anxiety, now behind every clearness there was darkness. And it
was from her that the dark flame of his life had come. If a man
were to touch darkness once, offering it his own darkness in
exchange-and he had touched it-then his acts would lose
their error, and perhaps he would be able to go back to the city
one day and sit down in a restaurant in perfect harmony; or
brush his teeth without compromising himself. A man had only
one time when he could surrender. And only then would he be
able to live, as he was now living, in the latency of others.
And then, perhaps because one day followed upon another,
something began to happen slowly, enveloping, great, in spite of
the links that were escaping him. It was as if, living there, he no
longer counted his life in terms of days or years but in spirals
that were so large that he would never get to see them, just as he
would never see the long line of the curvature of the earth.
There was something that was a gradual essence not to be eaten
all at once.
Thus it was that Martim's life began to reach beyond him :
the days were broad and beautiful, and his life was much broader
than he. And he himself, after a while, became more than just a
man alone. There had been a wearing away of his previous
knowledge, and as for words, he only knew them as a person who
had once suffered from them-as if he had been cured. "At last
( l 0 9)
THE
APPLE
I N THE
DARK
his crime was only as big as a fact" -and what he had meant to
say by that, he did not know.
He began to understand women again too. He did not
understand them in a personal way, as if he were master of his
own name; but he seemed to understand why women are born
when a person is a man, and it was a strong and tranquil blood
that rhythmically entered and left his chest. Dealing with the
cows, he realized the desire to have a woman had been reborn
with calm. He recognized it then; it was a kind of solitude, as if
his own body was not enough for himself. It was desire; yes, he
remembered well. He remembered that a woman is more than
the friend of a man; that a woman was the very body of man.
Then, with a smile that was a little painful, he carressed the
feminine hide of the cow and looked around him; the world was
masculine and feminine. That way of seeing things gave him a
·deep physical contentment, the restful and contained physical
excitement that he got every time he "drew back the curtains."
A person has very high spiritual pleasures that no one suspects,
the life of others always seems empty, but a person has his own
pleasures.
It is true that he did not yet understand individual lives : the
two cousins seemed to him to be both shallow and abstract at
the same time, and he did not suspect what meaning there was in
the lives of those two women, nor had it occurred to him that to
understand them would be a means of contact.
He did not understand individual lives. But now he looked at
them all together; the mulatto won1an who had unfortunately
been his and was now filling the pail with water while she sang,
Francisco sawing wood, Vit6ria courageous, Ermelinda spying,
and the smoke rising high out of the kitchen chimney. When it
was together he seemed to understand. And it was as if a heat
were evaporating off the efforts of them all, and it was as if he
was finally learning that night falls and day is reborn and then
night comes again. And that is how it was. His body was in good
shape during that understanding without the need for the
mistake that would be evil. Just as the cows quietly relied on the
existence of other cows the man became wrapped up in the
( l l 0)
How a Man Is Made
indirect heat of other people. And furthermore, it even seemed
sometimes, as he looked out, that he was owner of a great
factory and that the bustle and the smoke were the sign of a
progressive advance. In what direction? The man did not ask
himself, even though he might have felt-with the same vague
unrest with which the drought was gradually approaching-that
he was not too far away from the question, unripe as it was.
During all this time the drought was approaching in the
tassels of the corn.
"The days have been beautiful," Vit6ria said apprehensively,
shading her eyes with her hand.
menacingly infinite.
"They're beautiful ! " Ermelinda exclaimed, "I even had to
take a tranquilizer!"
The lizards, attracted by the promise of glare and glory, were
appearing in greater numbers, coming from nobody knows
where. They burst out of the dry land and crackled. Vit6ria
looked at the arid bodies multiplying, she closely examined some
leaves that had already begun to curl at the edges; she lifted her
inquisitive face up to a pure and deserted sky. In the fields the
sun was full of dusty butterflies.
"Pretty days like this come before a drought."
"Oh ! " Ermelinda put her hand over her heart, "They're so
pretty you don't know what to do with them."
And Martim? The smell of the earth was breaking up under
Martim's hoe-the smell of crumbling clods; the smell of hay in
the light; the smell of certain secret herbs brought to exhalation
by the heat, confused herbs providing with their twining shadow
some realm that was darker than the one that could be seen.
Martim was working; his hoe went up and down, up and down.
A branch in the shade suddenly became disentangled from
another branch frightening the bee, and making it fly off until it
was lost in the distance of the clarity. Its flight made one sense
of a world that was made up of distances and repercussionsthat deep world which seemed to be enough for the chiaroscuro of a cow and enough for a man raising and lowe
ring a hoe. Sweat
( l l l )
T H E A P P L E
IN
T H E D A R K
was one of the best things that had happened to him : Martim
raised and lowered the hoe. That nameless thing which is the
smell of earth, which upsets with its warmth and insistently
reminds us ( who knows why? ) that one is born to love, and then
it is not understood. It was when the illuminated bee flew off. It
made the man stop working and slowly wipe away his sweat,
squinting his eyes at the clarity-at the clarity that was slowly
becoming his too. His effort to understand was crude and shy :
Then, he said "The countryside looks like a jewel," and
blushed violently.
He looked around as if someone had seen him do a dirty
thing. He looked like a man who had unwillingly wanted to give
someone a flower and had stood there with the flower in his
hand.
"The countryside doesn't look like a jewel at all ! " he said
furiously. Then the bee got tangled up in the grass as it would
have in a head of hair, the ants marched in a long and wavy
line-and all of this began to belong to Martim. That was the
bottomless pit into which he had thrown himself in his passage
from the plants to the longer future of that black work-horse
that just then passed by in the distance pulling the plow. And
Francisco was sitting upright on the plow with his silent effort at
attentiveness. All of that was beginning to belong to Martim
because a person looks and sees. The cows were drooling; the
bee, smaller and smaller, annoyed the air as closer and closer it
approached an imaginary center. And Francisco's shout suddenly
gave dimension to the distance.
"I have to talk to you," Ermelinda said to him at that
moment.
The man did not interrupt the movement of his hoe upon
the ground.
"You might ask Vit6ria to plant some everlasting," she went
on with a spruced-up smile.
"Ask Dona Vit6ria," the man answered without looking at
her.
"That's the trouble; I'm afraid of her. Besides," she suddenly
( l l 2 )
How a Man Is Made
said intimately, "you have to be careful too. Don't get me
wrong; she's very good, but she's so strict. She's very nervous."
As the man's face was still bent over the furrow, the girl
leaned over too and, looking up, tried to figure out his expression. "Just imagine!" she said, from below now and speaking louder, since she was not sure that he had been aware of her