The Complete Stories (41 page)

Ulisses, if his face were viewed from a human perspective, would be monstrous and ugly. He was beautiful from a dog’s perspective. He was vigorous like a white and free horse, only he was a soft brown, orangish, whiskey-colored. But his coat is beautiful like that of an energetic rearing horse. The muscles of his neck were vigorous and people could grasp those muscles in hands with knowing fingers. Ulisses was a man. Without the dog-eat-dog world. He was refined like a man. A woman should treat her man well.

The train entering the countryside: the crickets were calling, shrill and hoarse.

Eduardo, every once in a while, awkwardly like someone forced to fulfill a duty—gave her an ice-cold diamond as a present. She who was partial to sparkling gems. Anyhow, she sighed, things are the way they are. At times she felt, whenever she looked down from high in her apartment, the urge to commit suicide. Ah, not because of Eduardo but from a kind of fatal curiosity. She didn’t tell anyone this, afraid of influencing a latent suicide. She wanted life, a level and full life, very laid-back, very much reading
Reader’s Digest
in the open. She didn’t want to die until she was ninety, in the midst of some act of life, without feeling anything. What are you doing? I’m waiting for the future.

When the train had finally started moving, Angela Pralini lit a cigarette in hallelujah: she’d been worried that, until the train departed, she wouldn’t have the courage to go and would end up leaving the car. But right after, they were subjected to the deafening yet sudden jerking of the wheels. The train was chugging along. And old Maria Rita was sighing: she was that much closer to her beloved son. With him she could be a mother, she who was castrated by her daughter.

Once when Angela was suffering from menstrual cramps, Eduardo had tried, rather awkwardly, to be affectionate. And he’d said something horrifying to her: you have an ouchy, don’t you? It was enough to make her flush with embarrassment.

The train sped along as fast as it could. The happy engineer: that’s how I like it, and he blew the whistle at every curve in the rails. It was the long, hearty whistle of a moving train, making headway. The morning was cool and full of tall green grasses. That’s it, yessir, come on, said the engineer to the engine. The engine responded with joy.

The old woman was nothing. And she was looking at the air as one looks at God. She was made of God. That is: all or nothing. The old woman, thought Angela, was vulnerable. Vulnerable to love, love for her son. The mother was Franciscan, the daughter was pollution.

God, Angela thought, if you exist, show yourself! Because it was time. It’s this hour, this minute and this second.

And the result was that she had to hide the tears that sprang to her eyes. God had her. She was satisfied and stifled a muffled sob. How living hurt. Living was an open wound. Living is being like my dog. Ulisses has nothing to do with Joyce’s Ulysses. I tried to read Joyce but stopped because he was boring, sorry, Eduardo. Still, a brilliant bore. Angela was loving the old woman who was nothing, the mother she lacked. A sweet, naive, long-suffering mother. Her mother who had died when she turned nine. Even sick but alive was good enough. Even paralyzed.

The air between Eduardo and her tasted like Saturday. And suddenly the two of them were rare, rarity in the air. They felt rare, not part of the thousand people wandering the streets. The two of them were sometimes conspiratorial, they had a secret life because no one would understand them. And also because the rare ones are persecuted by the people who don’t tolerate the insulting offense of those who are different. They hid their love so as not to wound the eyes of others with envy. So as not to wound them with a spark too luminous for the eyes.

Bow, wow, wow, my dog had barked. My big dog.

The old woman thought: I’m an involuntary person. So much that, when she laughed—which was rare—you couldn’t tell whether she was laughing or crying. Yes. She was involuntary.

Meanwhile there was Angela Pralini effervescing like the bubbles in Caxambu mineral water, she was one: all of a sudden. Just like that: suddenly. Suddenly what? Just suddenly. Zero. Nothing. She was thirty-seven and planning at any moment to start her life over. Like the little effervescent bubbles in Caxambu water. The seven letters in Pralini gave her strength. The seven letters in Angela made her anonymous.

With a long, howling whistle, they arrived at the little station where Angela Pralini would get off. She took her suitcase. In the space between a porter’s cap and a young woman’s nose, there was the old woman sleeping stiffly, her head erect beneath her felt hat, a fist closed on the newspaper.

Angela left the train.

Naturally this hadn’t the slightest importance: there are people who are always led to regret, it’s a trait of certain guilty natures. But what kept disturbing her was the vision of the old woman when she awoke, the image of her astonished face across from Angela’s empty seat. After all who knew if she had fallen asleep out of trust in her.

Trust in the world.

Dry Sketch of Horses

(“Seco estudo de cavalos”)

Stripping

The horse is naked.

False Domestication

What is a horse? It is freedom so indomitable that it becomes useless to imprison it to serve man: it lets itself be domesticated but with a simple movement, a rebellious toss of the head—shaking its mane like flowing locks—it shows that its innermost nature is forever wild and limpid and free.

Form

The form of the horse represents what is best in the human being. I have a horse inside me that rarely manifests itself. But when I see another horse then mine expresses itself. Its form speaks.

Sweetness

What makes the horse that shining satin? It is the sweetness of one who has taken on life and its rainbow. That sweetness becomes concrete in the soft coat that suggests the supple muscles, agile and controlled.

The Eyes of the Horse

I once saw a blind horse: nature had erred. It was painful to sense its restlessness, attuned to the slightest murmur provoked by the breeze in the grasses, its nerves ready to bristle in a shiver running the length of its alert body. What is it that a horse sees to the extent that not seeing its like renders it lost as if from itself? What happens is—when it does see—it sees outside itself whatever is inside itself. It is an animal expressed by its form. When it sees mountains, meadows, people, sky—it dominates men and nature itself.

Sensitivity

Every horse is wild and skittish when unsure hands touch it.

He and I

Attempting to put my most hidden and subtle sensation into sentences—and disobeying my strict need for truthfulness—I would say: if it had been up to me I would have wanted to be born a horse. But—who knows—perhaps the horse him-self doesn’t sense the great symbol of free life that we sense in him. Should I then conclude that the horse exists above all to be sensed by me? Does the horse represent the beautiful and liberated animality of the human being? Does the human already contain the best of the horse? Then I renounce being a horse and in glory I’ll go over to my humanity. The horse shows me what I am.

Adolescence of the Colt-Girl

I have related perfectly to a horse before. I remember adolescent-me. Standing with the same pride as the horse and running my hand over its lustrous coat. Over its rustic aggressive mane. I felt as if something of mine were watching us from afar—Thus: “The Girl and the Horse.”

The Fanfare

On the farm the white horse—king of nature—launched high into the keenness of the air its prolonged neigh of splendor.

The Dangerous Horse

In the country town—which would one day become a small metropolis—horses still reigned as prominent inhabitants. Due to the increasingly urgent need for transport, teams of horses had invaded the village, and there stirred in the still-wild children the secret desire to gallop. A young bay had fatally kicked a boy trying to mount it. And the place where the daring child died was looked upon by the people with a disapproval that in fact they didn’t know where to direct. With their market baskets on their arms, the women stopped and stared. A newspaper looked into the affair and people took a certain pride in reading an item entitled The Horse’s Crime. It was the Crime of one of the town’s sons. By then the village was already mingling its scent of stables with an awareness of the pent-up power of horses.

On the Sun-Baked Street

But suddenly—in the silence of the two o’clock sun and with almost no one on the street in those outskirts—a pair of horses emerged from around a corner. For a moment they froze with legs slightly raised. Their mouths flaring as if unbridled. There, like statues. The few pedestrians braving the heat of the sun stared, hard, separate, not understanding in words what they were seeing. They just understood. Once the blinding glare of the apparition faded—the horses bowed their necks, lowered their legs and continued on their way. The glimmering instant had passed. An instant frozen as by a camera that had captured something words will never say.

At Sunset

That day, as the sun was already setting, gold spread through the clouds and over the rocks. The inhabitants’ faces were golden like armor and thus glowed their tousled hair. Dusty factories whistled continuously signaling the end of the workday, the wheel of a cart gained a golden nimbus. In that pale gold blowing in the breeze was the raising of an unsheathed sword. Because that was how the equestrian statue on the square stood in the sweetness of sundown.

In the Cold Dawn

You could see the warm moist breath—the radiant and tranquil breath that came from the trembling extremely alive and quivering nostrils of the stallions and mares on certain cold dawns.

In the Mystery of Night

But at night the horses released from their burdens and led to pasture would gallop exquisite and free in the dark. Colts, nags, sorrels, long mares, hard hooves—suddenly a cold, dark horse’s head!—hooves pounding, foaming muzzles rising into the air in fury and murmurs. And at times a long exhalation would cool the trembling grasses. Then the bay would move ahead. He’d amble sideways, head bowed to his chest, at a steady cadence. The others watched without looking. Hearing the faint sound of horses, I’d imagine the dry hooves advancing until halting at the summit of the hill. And his head dominating the town, launching a prolonged neigh. Fear seized me in the shadows of my bedroom, the terror of a king, I wanted to answer, baring my gums in a neigh. In the envy of desire my face acquired the restless nobility of a horse’s head. Tired, jubilant, listening to the somnambulant trotting. As soon as I left my bedroom my form would start expanding and refining itself, and, by the time I made it outside, I’d already be galloping on sensitive legs, hooves gliding down the last few steps of the house. On the deserted sidewalk I would look around: in one corner and the next. And I’d see things as a horse sees them. That was my desire. From my house I would try at least to listen for the hilly pasture where in the dark nameless horses galloped reverting to a state of hunting and war.

The beasts never abandoned their secret life that goes on in the night. And if in the midst of their wild roaming a white colt appeared—it was a ghost in the dark. All would halt. The extraordinary horse would
appear
, it was an apparition. It showed off rearing for an instant. The animals would wait motionless without watching one another. But one would stamp its hoof—and the brief blow shattered the vigil: riled up they’d spring into motion suddenly merry, crisscrossing without ever colliding and in their midst the white horse would be lost. Until a neigh of sudden rage alerted them—attentive for a second, they soon fanned out again trotting in a new formation, backs riderless, necks lowered until their muzzles grazed their chests. Manes bristling. Cadenced, ungoverned.

The deep of night—while men slept—found them motionless in the dark. Stable and weightless. There they were, invisible, breathing. Waiting with slow-witted intelligence. Below, in the sleeping town, a rooster was flapping and perching on a window sill. The chickens were watching. Beyond the railway, a rat ready to flee. Then the gray stamped its hoof. It had no mouth with which to speak but gave a little signal that resounded from space to space in the darkness. They were watching. Those animals that had one eye to see on either side—nothing needed to be seen head-on by them, and this was the great night. A swift contraction rippling over the flanks of a mare. In the silences of the night the mare gazed ahead as if surrounded by eternity. The most restless of the colts still bristled its mane in inward neighing. At last total silence reigned.

Until the fragile luminosity of dawn revealed them. They were separate, standing atop the hill. Exhausted, fresh. They had passed in the darkness through the mystery of the nature of beings.

Sketch of the Demon Horse

Never again shall I find rest, for I stole the hunting horse of a King. I am now worse than myself! Never again shall I find rest: I stole the King’s hunting horse on the enchanted Sabbath. If I fall asleep for an instant, the echo of neighing awakens me. And it is no use trying not to go. In the dark of night the panting makes me shudder. I pretend to be asleep but in the silence the stallion is breathing. Every day it will be the same thing: at dusk I begin to feel melancholy and pensive. I know that the first rumbling on the mountain of evil will make it night, I know that the third will have already enveloped me in its thunder. And by the fifth rumble I shall already covet the ghost horse. Until at dawn, at the final faintest rumblings, I shall find myself without knowing how by a cool brook, without ever knowing what I did, beside that enormous weary horse head.

But weary from what? What did we do, I and the horse, we, those that trot through the hell of the vampire’s joy? He, the King’s horse, calls to me. I have been resisting in a crisis of sweat and won’t go. The last time I dismounted from his silver saddle, my human sadness was so great at having been what I should not have been, that I swore never again. The trotting nonetheless goes on inside me. I chat, clean the house, smile, but I know the trotting is inside me. I long for it like one dying.

No, I cannot stop going.

And I know that at night, when he calls to me, I shall go. I want once more for the horse to guide my thought. He was the one who taught me. If thought is what this hour between the barking is. I grow sad because I know with my eye—oh not on purpose! it’s not my fault!—with my eye unintentionally already glinting with evil glee—I know I shall go.

When at night he calls me to the attraction of hell, I shall go. I descend like a cat down the rooftops. No one knows, no one sees. Only the dogs bark sensing the supernatural.

And I present myself in the dark to the horse that awaits me, royal horse, I present myself mute and flaring. Obedient to the Beast.

Fifty-three flutes chase after us. In front a clarinet lights our way, we, the shameless accomplices of the enigma. And nothing more is given me to know.

At dawn I shall see us exhausted by the brook, not knowing what crimes we committed before arriving at the innocent dawn.

On my mouth and on his hooves the mark of the great blood. What did we immolate?

At dawn I shall be standing beside the now-silent stallion, the remaining flutes still coursing through my hair. The first bells of a faraway church make us shudder and flee, we vanish before the cross.

The night is my life with the diabolical horse, I enchantress of the horror. The night is my life, it grows late, the sinfully happy night is the sad life that is my orgy—ah steal it, steal that stallion from me because with each theft until dawn I have already stolen for myself and my fantastical mate, and of the dawn I have made a premonition of terror of demoniacal unwholesome joy.

Relieve me, quick steal the stallion while there’s still time, before dusk falls, while it is shawdowless day, if there really still is time, for in stealing the stallion I had to kill the King, and in murdering him I stole the death of the King. And the orgiastic joy of our murder consumes me with terrible pleasure. Quick steal the dangerous horse of the King, rob me before night falls and calls to me.