After which the woman painfully tried to recuperate; she had
to keep herself as lucid and clear as she was in the daytime. Had
she not finally managed to live peacefully on her farm, busy with
her duties? Had she not finally managed to free herself from that
menace which was the anxiety of living? And free herself from
that hard and empty ardor which would have carried her God
knows where?
"I managed ! " she answered herself painfully, feeling her
great loss. And had she not managed God with a great deal of
effort? "I managed," she answered, frightened. She did not know
exactly what she meant by God. But she had managed. Then
what she should logically do was lie down and go to sleep.
She had managed, yes. But just as in the case of a former
addict who could no longer resist temptation-there had appeared a man, who by his temporary stay seemed to require an ultimatum that she manage again and renew the decision. Why
should a person have to decide every day and every night? What
freedom was it that the woman had not even asked for? And as
if she had not already chosen with such great effort, she had to
choose over and over again; as if she had not already chosen. The
shortness of the man's stay on the place recalled with an obscure
echo another transitory time and another urgency-which one?and it gave her a last opportunity. Opportunity for what? And her heavy soul, which had desisted with such great pride, felt
itself obliged to choose between continuing the struggle and
giving in. Giving in to what? No sooner had she seen the man
( 2 4 5 )
T H E A P P L E
IN
T H E DARK
for the first time by the porch than with rage she had guessed
that she would have to decide again.
"Which does not mean that I have not resisted! " she
shouted to herself in justification, angrily demanding the right to
receive mercy-she, who out of caution had betrayed the man to
the professor. And was that not a sign of resistance? It was. So
now that she had done her duty, now that she had turned him
in, she could sleep peacefully.
But she kept on sitting. "I love you," she experimented
carefully. As if loving was somehow the way of reaching one's
own limits and the way of giving one's self to the dark world that
was calling her. "Because I'm unhappy," she thought with the
tranquillity of one who was looking way off into the distance. At
least if what she was feeling was happiness. Because it resembled
it so much. She remained quiet, sitting, listening to the frogs,
quiet, with her love-wound, and all alone to resolve, without the
resources of comprehension, the fact that she had reported the
man. The calm expectancy of the night confined her, just as
silence obliges one to speak.
Suddenly Vit6ria came back to her senses. "After all," she
thought with authority, "after all, I have my rights and duties,
and there's no reason to be awake in the dark. After all, I'm not
lost in Africa !''
But she was. The frogs were croaking as if they were in the
room; the black wind came in through the window. The woman
shivered. "That dark and good and welcome thing which is
evil." The only word that she had left over from her unknown
thought and which came out with another shiver was : "evil."
Evil? why use that terrible word? Still it was what she was
feeling in the dark, all surrounded and welcomed and received.
What stages had she missed to arrive at the point at which the
dark received her? Could she feel only the cruelty in love? In
love what there was of a diluted feeling for life all came together
in one single instant of fright, and the rage by which she lived
had become transformed before the concrete man into a mortal
hatred of love, as if the spread-out green of all the trees had
( 2 4 6 )
The Apple in the Dark
come together into one single black color. In love what there
was of a vague foreboding of life came together in one single
instant of horror.
And yet-yet one might say that she loved that fright and
that darkness, and that was where the terrible joy that the
woman felt in the dark came from. Her ambition for rough
fingers had come back. Touched by what one does not know
how to call except love-so different from what one hoped love
and softness and goodness would mean-her ambition had returned, canceling out the bright and busy days on the farm. In the darkness of the room, obscure ambition, obscure violence,
the obscure fear that makes one attack, she who out of fear had
turned the man in.
The night was made for sleeping. So that a person is never
present at what happens in the dark. For that reason, with eyes
blinded by the darkness, sitting and quiet, that lady seemed even
more to be spying, since her body was functioning inside : she
herself was the dark stomach with its nausea, the lungs with
their tranquil bellows, the warmth of the tongue, the heart
which unfortunately never had been heart-shaped, the intestines
in their delicate labyrinth-those things which do not stop while
one sleeps, and at night they enlarge, and now they were she.
Sitting with her body, so much body suddenly. At midnight
Cinderella would be the rags she really was, the coach would
tum back into a pumpkin, and the horses into mice-that is how
it was invented and they had not been lying. At midnight one
entered the dominion of God, which was such a broad domain
that a person, unable to cross it, was lost in God's means
without understanding their clear ends. Because there was that
lady face to face with her own body, which was a means, and
where she suddenly had become bound without being able to
get away. And the means of God were such a heavy force of
enveloping darkness-the animals came out from their curfew
one by one, protected by the soft animal possibility of the night.
"It's dark," the lady said, as if it were the awaited password that
would initiate her into hell, because the ways of God resembled a
T H E A P P L E I N T H E D A RK
hell most of all. And the hell was the way in which one
worshipped the ways of God. Absorbed, quiet, she listened to
the frogs. To be a frog was the humble and ugly way of being a
creature of God. And as if purity and beauty were no longer
possible ways to serve Him, the lady too seemed to be a frog on
the bed, with that primal joy of the devil which things take on in
the dark-so rolled up as they are, and themselves so dark. Like
a green animal, then, sitting on the bed.
The night was made for sleeping because otherwise one
understands what was meant when they talked about hell, and
everything a woman does not believe in during the day she will
understand at night. And so, in the dark of the room, with the
heavy weight of pleasure, she seemed to understand why they
said "hell" and why people wanted hell. She seemed to understand what the figure of a black monk in children's stories meant and what there was gloomy about the flight of a la
rge butterfly.
And if she were to see a dark dog now, it would be useless to
know that the soul of the devil was not in it : because now
perhaps she knew what they had meant when they invented the
tale that a black dog is inhabited by evil. Something is being said
in a black dog. And motionless, without committing any sin, she
too knew what evil and sin were. And if bats did not exist, they
would still end up coming through the window at nightfall : only
in order to say what we know with the shape of their wings.
"Everything I know is occult," she felt, and she was sitting on
the bed captured by what she knew. But it was also true that
when she was not in the dark, her heart did not recognize the
truth.
Her eyes were soft, constrained, intense. Perhaps she too was
understanding why it is that God, in His infinite wisdom, gave
and ordained only certain determined words to be thought-and
only them. It was so that one would live by them and only them.
Perhaps she had understood, because she remembered from out
of nowhere that the professor had said that there had been a
period in which it was considered heresy for liturgical music to
contain more than one melodic strain; yes, the professor had said
that it was considered the work of the devil. More than one
The Apple in the Dark
melodic strain and one was in the bonds of luxury. The foolish
woman remembered stories that had been told to her about
peaceful men who had gone wrong from having once experienced nocturnal life, and then had abandoned wife and children; and then had taken to drink in order to forget what they had felt
or to maintain the nocturnal feeling.
Suddenly, having been dragged along the course of her
feelings, she passed her hand across her face, trying to wake up.
It had been an involuntary mistake, hers, waking up during the
night that is made for sleeping, as if against her will she had
opened the forbidden door to the secret and had seen the livid
wives of Bluebeard. It had been an involuntary and pardonable
mistake. But it was already more than a simple error, her not
having closed the door and having yielded to the temptation of
gaining power in that silence where, because she had refused to
limit herself only to the use of His comprehensible words, God
had left her alone. Probably she had counted on a God stronger
than her mistake and stronger than her will to make mistakes.
But the silence was enveloping her. And the lady, facing her
greed, was sitting there. "My God, I pardon Thee," she said,
closing her eyes before continuing on irrepressibly along her joy.
And all of that was love. That was how it happened, then.
With that darkness and that silence and that wind and the
waving trees. "But I pardon Thee even if it is just because I
want it to be that way."
All alone with the misery of her lust, which was not even lust
for love. It was more serious. It was a lust to be alive. The frogs
were enormous now, with their open mouths near the window.
The legs that came forth out of those neckless heads, those split
mouths croaking out an ancient noise, the small monsters of the
earth. And for an instant, in a torture of joy, the woman too
seemed to have claws there on the bed because something
happens in the dark of night. In the midst of her suffering, now
at its high point, only a minimum of consciousness stopped her
from going to join the frogs beside the window. A minimum of
consciousness within her waking nightmare stopped what was
darkness in her from joining in the orgy of the frogs. Half-awake,
( 2 4 9 )
T H E
A P P LE
I N T H E D A R K
she made that effort not to be an animal, because we do have
their ears and we also have their innocent faces. A minimum of
consciousness was stopping her, favored in it all by the growing
dampness, from following the pattern of lament and howling
which exists inside a person and which the darkness of the
countryside temptingly promised to bless.
Feeling that perhaps she no longer was afraid, she dared ask
herself; "Why did I tum him in?"
But even in the inviting darkness, remorse turned her blood
to acid. And the worst thing about remorse was not understanding the usefulness of its vengeance. "Why did I tum him in? why that bit of cruelty, why?" Then, as a balm, she remembered a
phrase from a children's book : "The lion is not a cruel animal.
He kills only in order to eat." The lion is not a cruel animal, he
kills only in order to eat, the lion is not a cruel animal-was it
her fault that she was so hungry? But would she ever be able to
eat all that she had killed, she who had killed so much already,
she who had killed so much already? Sitting on the bed, she had
killed more than she could eat. That was her great sin. Her
infantile fright was that once she had betrayed the man to the
professor, the man remained betrayed.
If the lady had thought that in the dark she would not feel
remorse for what she had done, she had been mistaken. Even in
the dark the inexplicable point was hurting. And humiliated, she
could not bear the weight of her petty crime. The will to bum in
Hell, for which all are called and so few are damned. She did not
have the strength of evil, the flesh is weak : she was good. And
She had told on him, and the man would of course end up
being arrested. "Oh God," she said then, proud and not imploring, "have mercy on a weak heart." Because she, she did not have any. She only felt revulsion for the meanness of her crime,
and did not even want consolation. Consolation seemed petty
compared to the depths of the dark light that suffering was and
where she again seemed happy and startled.
But a minimum of consciousness made her know that at any
( 2 5 0 )
The Apple in the Dark
moment she would finally have the strength to free herself from
her evil delight in the darkness. At any moment the lady would
finally have the strength to get out of that rejoicing state into
which she had dangerously fallen, just as one falls into a hole
while searching for a path. She had gone so far that she could
only bring herself to understand what was happening to her if
she called it a nightmare. Because it must have been a nightmare
to be all alone with that warm feeling of living that no one can
use. God, who out of pure kindness had deemed that feeling to
be a sin. So that no one would dare and no one would suffer the
truth. All alone with the warm feeling of living. Like a rose
whose grace cannot be appreciated. Like a river that exists only
to have its murmur heard. A warm feeling that the woman could
not translate into any movement or thought. Useless but alive.
Imponderable, but alive, like a drop of blood on the bed. There
she was, like a drop of blood in the dark. And just like a dead
person who arose and walked, the warmth of her life suddenly
made her rise up slowly, and it br
ought her, serious and blind, to
search out her equals in the night.
When it finally began to rain, the lady had reached a point
of silence at which it seemed to her that the rain was the word.
Surprised with the sweet and unexpected meeting, she gave herself over to the water without resistance, feeling in her body that the plants were drinking, that the frogs were drinking, that the
animals on the place were listening to the noise on the roof-the
news had spread out foggily and was soaking the whole farm : it
was raining, it was raining, it was raining. "Let it rain," she said.
"Because I love you that way too," she thought before she fell
asleep; the darkness was also kindness, we were kindness too.
It was a little while later that Vit6ria woke up as if she had
been asleep for hours. And, finally free of the nightmare, she was
startled to find the night at the same point where she had
left it.
What had happened was that she had slept so deeply for a
few minutes that her body was heavy with hours of sleep. When
( 2 5 1 )
T H E A P P L E
I N T H E D A R K
she went to the bathroom she saw a calm and puffy face in the
mirror. Thirst alerted her a little, the noise of the rain among
the hollow leaves made her even thirstier. She went down to the
kitchen and picked a big mango from among the fruit. She
carefully hit it against the wall, vaguely trying not to awaken
Ermelinda with the mushy noise of the mango against the brick
wall-until, absorbed, she felt that the fruit was soft inside its
skin, full of its own juice. Meditating, Vit6ria bit off the top of
the hull, spat it out, and sucked up all the juice through the
opening. Then she tore the skin with her teeth, ate the yellow
pulp until she came to the pit.
Only when she was standing over the wash-basin brushing
her teeth did the sobs come into her chest. Then, hiding her face
in the crook of her arm against the wall, she waited patiently for
the tears to pass-after which she wiped her eyes and looked at
her teeth in the mirror.
Then she went out on the porch. While she had been in the
bathroom the rain had slackened. The night was peaceful and
calm; small, indeterminate sounds cuddled in the darkness.
Trembling from the good cold, she could guess from the porch