The Complete Stories (32 page)

Where I am now, slowly beating the batter for tomorrow’s cake. Sitting, as if for all these years I’ve been waiting patiently in the kitchen. Under the table, today’s chick trembles. The yellow is the same, the beak is the same. As we are promised on Easter, in December he will return. Ofélia is the one who didn’t return: she grew up. She went off to become the Hindu princess her tribe awaited in the desert.

BACK OF THE DRAWER

( Fundo de gaveta)

The Burned Sinner
and the
Harmonious Angels

(“A pecadora queimada e os anjos harmoniosos”)

Invisible angels
: Behold us nearly here, coming down the
long path that exists before you all. But we are not tired, such a road does not
require strength and, were it to require vigor, not even that of your prayers would
lift us. Dizziness alone is what makes us whirl round shouting with the leaves until
the opening of a birth. Is dizziness all it takes, as far as we know? if men
hesitate over men, angels know nothing of angels, the world is wide and may whatever
is be blessed. We are not tired, our feet have never been washed. Screeching at this
next diversion, we came so as to suffer what must be suffered, we who have yet to be
touched, we who have yet to be boy and girl. Behold us in the web of true tragedy,
from which we shall extricate our primary form. When we open our eyes to become
those who are born, we shall remember nothing: babbling children we shall be and we
shall wield your very weapons. Blind on the path that precedes footsteps, blind
shall we push onward when we are born with eyes that already see. Nor do we know
what we have come to. All we need is the conviction that what is to be done shall be
done: an angel’s fall is a direction. Our true beginning precedes the visible
beginning, and our true end will follow the visible end. Harmony, terrible harmony,
is our only prior destiny.

Priest
: In love for the Lord I have not lost my way, always
secure in Thy day as in Thy night. And this simple woman lost her way for so little,
and lost her nature, and behold her possessing nothing more and, now pure, whatever
remains to her they will yet burn. The strange paths. She sealed her fate with a
single sin to which she surrendered entirely, and behold her on the threshold of
being saved. Every humble path is a path: crude sin is a path, ignorance of the
commandments is a path, lust is a path. The only thing not a path was my premature
joy at taking, as a guide and so easily, the sacred path. The only thing not a path
was my presumption of being saved halfway through. Lord, grant me the grace to sin.
It weighs heavily, the lack of temptation in which thou hast left me. Where are the
water and fire through which I never passed? Lord, grant me the grace to sin. This
candle I was, burning in Thy name, was always burning in the light and I saw
nothing. Yet, ah hope that will open the doors of Thy violent heaven to me: now I
see that, if thou hast not made of me the torch that will blaze, at least thou hast
made the one who fans the flames. Ah hope, in which I can still see my pride in
being chosen: in guilt I beat my breast, and with joy that I would like to mortify I
say: the Lord sought me out to sin more than she who sinned, and at last I shall
seal my tragedy. For it was my wrathful word that Thou didst employ so I might
perform, more than the sin, the sin of punishing the sin. So that I might descend so
far beneath my dangerous peace that the total darkness—where neither
candelabras nor papal purple exist and not even the symbol of the Cross—the
total darkness might be Thee. “The darkness shall not blind thee,” it was said in
the Psalms.

People
: For days we have gone hungry and here we are in search
of food.

Enter sinner and two guards.

Priest
: “She took her delight in the slavery of the senses,” by
the sign of the Holy Cross.

People
: Behold her, behold her, and behold her.

Sleepy child
: Behold her.

Woman of the people
: Behold her, she who erred, she who in
order to sin required two men and one priest and one people.

1
st guard
: We are the guardians of
our homeland. We suffocate in airless peace, and of the last war we have already
forgotten even the bugles. Our beloved King distributes us to posts of extreme
responsibility, but in keeping useless watch we have nearly put to sleep our
virility. Created to die in glory, behold us ashamedly living.

2
nd guard
: We are the guardians of
a lord, whose domain seems rather confusing to us: sometimes extending to the
borders established by habit and use, and our spears then rise at the cries of the
heralds. At other times this domain penetrates into lands where there exists a much
older law. So behold us this time guarding something that on its own will always be
guarded, by the people and by fate. Under this sky of strangled tranquility, bread
may be lacking, but the mystery of achievement never will. For what are we
imaginarily watching over? if not the destiny of a heart.

1
st guard
: How your last words
recall the longed-for thundering of a cannon. What desire to keep watch at last over
a smaller world, where our spears deal the death-blow to whatever is going to die.
But here we are guarding a woman who in a manner of speaking has already been set
afire of her own accord.

Invisible angels
: Set afire by harmony, bloody sweet harmony,
which is our prior destiny.

Enter the Husband
.

People
: Behold the husband, he who was betrayed.

Husband
: Behold her, she who will be burned by my wrath. Who
spoke through me, giving me such fatal power? I was the one who incited the word of
the priest and gathered this troop of people and roused the spears of the guards,
and granted this public square such an aspect of glory that crumbles its walls. Ah
still-beloved wife, I would like to be relieved of this invasion. I dreamed of being
alone with you and reminding you of our past joy. Leave her alone with me, for since
yesterday I live and do not live, leave her alone with me. Before you
all—strangers to my former happiness and to my present wretchedness—I
can no longer see in this woman she who was and was not mine, nor in our past
celebration she who was and was not ours, nor can I taste the bitterness that is
mine and mine alone. What will happen to this heart of mine that no longer
recognizes the offspring of its Vengeance? Ah remorse: I should have brandished the
dagger with my own hand, and then I would have known that, as the one betrayed, I
took vengeance myself. But this spectacle no longer belongs to my world, and this
woman, whom I took in modesty, I lose to the sound of trumpets. Leave me alone with
the sinner. I want to regain my former love, and then be filled with hatred, and
then murder her myself, and then worship her again, and then never forget her, leave
me alone with the sinner. I want to take possession of my disgrace and my vengeance
and my loss, and you are all preventing me from being lord of this fire, leave me
alone with the sinner.

Priest
: Many years has it been since a saint was born. Many
years has it been since a child prophesied from the cradle. Many years has it been
since the blind man has seen, the leper was cured, ah what a barren time. We exist
beneath the burden of such a mystery to be revealed that at the first sign, in a
bolt of lightning, Thy hoped-for miracle must be sealed.

1
st guard
: Everyone speaks and no
one listens.

2
nd guard
: Everyone is alone with
the guilty woman.

Enter the Lover
.

1
st guard
: The comedy is complete:
behold the lover, I am overjoyed.

People
: Behold the lover, behold the lover and behold the
lover.

Sleepy child
: Behold the lover.

Lover
: Irony that makes me laugh not: to call lover he who
burned with love, to call lover he who lost it. No, not the lover. But the lover
betrayed.

People
: We do not understand, we do not understand and we do
not understand.

Lover
: Because this woman who in my arms deceived her husband,
in the arms of her husband deceived the one deceiving him.

People
: So then she hid her lover from her husband, and her
husband from her lover? Behold the sin of sins.

Lover
: But I laugh not and for a moment I do not suffer. I now
open the eyes I have kept closed out of pridefulness, and I ask of you: who? who is
this foreign woman, who is this solitary woman for whom one heart was not
enough.

Husband
: She is the one for whom I would bring back brocades
and precious stones from my travels, and for whom all my commerce of value had
become a commerce of love.

Lover
: For in her candid joy she would come to me so singularly
mine that I never would have guessed she was coming from a home.

Husband
: There was no jewel she did not covet, and for her the
bareness of her neck did not choke. Nothing existed that I did not give her, since
for a humble and weary traveler peace is in his wife.

Priest
: “A man’s foes shall be they of his own household.”

Husband
: But in the transparency of a diamond she was already
foreseeing the arrival of a lover. He who tells you this is one who has tasted
venom: beware a woman who dreams.

Lover
: Ah wretched woman, for she dreamed beside me too. What
more therefore did she want? who is this foreign woman?

Priest
: She is the one to whom on holy days I would offer in
vain words of Virtue that might with a thousand cloaks have covered her
nakedness.

Woman of the people
: All these words have strange meanings. Who
is this woman who sinned and seems instead to receive praise for her sin?

Lover
: She is that unrevealed woman whom only pain revealed to
my eyes. For the first time, I love. I love you.

Husband
: She is that woman whom sin belatedly proclaimed to me.
For the first time I love you, and not my peace.

People
: She is that woman who in truth gave herself to no one,
and now is completely ours.

Invisible angels
: For harmony is terrible.

People
: We do not understand, we do not understand and etc.

Invisible angels
: Even here on this side of the edge of
the world we hardly understand, much less you, the starving, and you, the sated. May
the generative sentence be enough for you: what must be done shall be done, this is
the one perfect principle.

People
: We do not understand, we are hungry and we are
hungry.

1
st guard
: This tiresome people, if
summoned to a feast or a funeral, might just sing . . .

People
: . . . we are hungry.

2
nd guard
: They always lay the same
trap that consists of a single chant . . .

People
: . . . we are hungry.

Priest
: Do not interrupt with your hunger, rather be calm, for
yours shall be the Kingdom of Heaven.

People
: Where we shall eat, and eat and eat, and get so
fat that through the eye of a needle at last and at last we shall not pass.

Priest
: What did this people come to do? and wherefore did the
husband, the lover, and the guards come? For alone with me, this woman would be set
afire.

Lover
: What did this people come to do? Alone with me, she
would love again, again would she sin, repent again—and thus in a single
instant Love would again be fulfilled, the thing that carries its own dagger and
end. I would recall to you those messages at nightfall . . . The impatient
horse would wait, the lamp on the terrace . . . And then . . .
ah earth, thy fields at daybreak, a certain window that already in the dark was
starting to dawn. And the wine that I in joy would then sip, until sinking with
drunken tears into gloom. (Ah then it is true that even in happiness I already
sought in tears to know the foretaste of misfortune.)

Invisible angels
: The foretaste of terrible harmony.

Sleepy child
: She is smiling.

People
: She is smiling, she is smiling and she is smiling.

Husband
: And her eyes glisten damply as in a glory
. . .

Woman of the people
: In the end how does it come to pass that
this woman about to be burned is already becoming her own story?

People
: What is this woman smiling at?

Priest
: Perhaps she is thinking that, alone, she would already
have been set afire.

People
: What is this woman smiling at.

1st and 2nd guards
: At sin.

Invisible angels
: At harmony, harmony, harmony that tarries
not.

Lover
: You smile, inaccessible, and the first burst of wrath
seizes me. Remember how in the alcove where I met you your smile was different, and
the way your eyes glistened, your only tears. Through what strange grace did abject
sin transfigure you into this woman who smiles filled with silence?

Husband
: Impotent fury: behold her smiling, yet more absent
from me than when she belonged to another. Why has this people heard me so much more
than my words wished to be heard? Ah cruel mechanism I unleashed with my wounded
laments. For I have rendered her unattainable even before she dies. The incitement
for the burning was mine, but the victory will not be: it now belongs to the people,
to the priest, to the guards. For you, wretches, cannot hide that it is upon my
misery that you shall live in the end.

Lover
: You smile because you used me so that even while alive
you might yet blaze in the fire.

Husband
: Hear me once more, wife . . . (How strange
it is, perhaps she heard, but it is I who can no longer find the former words. Doubt
that now exceeds bounds: when was it I and when was it not I? I was the one who
loved her, but who is this person being avenged? He who in me was speaking until
now, fell silent as soon as he achieved his aims. What is happening for me not to
recognize the former face of my love? Perhaps she heard me, but speaking has ended
for me.)