The wife, under the continuous spell of fantasy, not only arrived at this bold conclusion, but found her life transformed into something broader and more disturbing, into something richer and even superstitious. Each thing became the cipher of something else, everything was symbolic and even vaguely spiritualistic, within the limits permitted by Roman Catholicism. Not only did she come to this rash conclusion but — provoked solely by the fact that she was a woman — she began to think some other man would save her. The idea was not all that absurd. She knew it was not. To be half-right confused her and plunged her into meditation.
Her husband, influenced by the anguished masculinity of his new environment, and by his own waning masculinity, which was timid but real, started to believe that endless love affairs would bring new life.
Dreamers, they began practising tolerance: it was heroic to be tolerant. They silenced any suspicions, disagreeing about the most convenient hour to dine and arguing freely, the one making a sacrifice for the other, because love is sacrifice. What love?
Until the day arrived when the woman was finally roused from her dream when she bit into an apple and felt one of her front teeth breaking. With the apple still in her hand, she examined herself closely in the bathroom mirror — and thus losing all perspective — she saw the pale face of a middle-aged woman with a broken tooth which made her look pathetic, and her own dark, mysterious eyes… At rock-bottom and the water already up to her neck, in her fifties, and with no message to leave behind. Instead of going to the dentist, she threw herself from her apartment window, a person for whom one could feel so grateful, so deeply grateful, because she was the pillar of our disobedience.
As for her husband, once the river-bed was dry and without any water in which he might drown, he walked over the bottom without looking at the ground, as nimbly as if he were using a cane. The river-bed had suddenly become dry. Bewildered, he walked over the river-bed with the false confidence of someone who is about to fall flat on his face at any moment.
WHAT LOVE CAN LEAD TO
— (I love you)
— (Is that what I am then?)
— (You are the love which I have for you)
— (I feel that I am about to see myself … I can almost see … I am almost there)
— (I love you)
— (Ah, that’s better. Now I can see myself. So this is me. Portrayed in full.)
ENLISTMENT
The footsteps are growing louder. They are getting nearer. Now they sound quite close. Closer still. Really close. Still approaching. Now they are not simply close, they are inside me. Will they overtake me and carry on? I hope so. It would mean my salvation. I am no longer sure with which sense I measure distance. For those footsteps are no longer simply close and heavy. They are no longer simply inside me. I am marching with them. I have enlisted.
SUBMISSION TO THE PROCESS
The process of living consists of errors — most of them essential — of courage and indolence, the despair and hope of inert awareness, of constant feeling (not thought) which leads nowhere, leads absolutely nowhere, and suddenly what you thought was nothingness turns out to be your own terrifying contact with the fabric of life. And that moment of recognition (akin to revelation) must be accepted with the greatest innocence, with the same innocence with which one is born. The process is difficult? But that is like saying that the extremely capricious and natural manner in which a flower is made is difficult. (Mummy, said the little boy, the sea is beautiful, green and blue, and with waves! It’s all naturalized! Nobody made it!) The nagging impatience (standing beside a plant to watch it grow yet without seeing anything) is not in relation to the thing itself, but to this monstrous patience (the plant grows at night). As if one were to say: ‘I cannot bear to be patient for another second’, ‘the patience of the watchmaker puts my nerves on edge’, etc.: it is an impatient patience. But the greatest burden of all is torpid patience: an ox pulling the plough.
MORE THAN SIMPLE WORD-PLAY
What I feel, I do not put into action. What I put into action, I do not think. What I think, I do not feel. I am unaware of what I know. I am not unaware of what I feel. I do not understand myself yet behave as if I had no difficulty in doing so.
A MERE SPECK OF DUST
And all of a sudden that terrible pain in my left eye, tears streaming down my face, and the world becoming sinister. And distorted; for on closing one eye the other automatically halfcloses. No fewer than four times during the past year some strange object has got into my left eye: on two occasions a speck of dust, once a grain of sand, and on the last occasion an eyelash. All four times I was obliged to consult an optician. On my last visit I asked this man who is entrusted, as it were, with our vision of the world, why it should always be the left eye. A mere coincidence?
The answer was in the negative. He explained that, however normal a person’s eyesight, one eye sees better than the other and is therefore more sensitive. He referred to it as the guiding-eye. And because the latter is more sensitive, it picks up any foreign body in the atmosphere and there it remains.
In other words, our best eye is at the same time more powerful and more delicate: it creates problems which are not imaginary but all too real. As in the case of this unbearable pain when a speck of dust is grazing and irritating one of the most delicate organs of our body. I remained pensive.
Does this only happen to our eyes? Could it be that those who see things more clearly are also those who feel and suffer most? And those who are afflicted with pain as real as that caused by a speck of dust? I remained pensive.
Suddenly I have remembered that a New Year is about to begin. Let us hope that nineteen seventy-four will turn out to be a happy year for all of us.
NOTES
* Publisher’s note: New Directions’ Selected Crônicas presents about two-thirds of the chronicles contained in A Descoberta do Mundo, and were selected from the complete U.K. edition of Discovering the World (Carcanet Press Ltd., 1992). This introduction by translator Giovanni Pontiero has likewise been adapted.
P.S. — I am united, body and soul, with the students of Brazil in their tragic plight.
* Zapateodo: the tap-dancing peculiar to Spanish flamenco.
* maja: low-class woman (especially in Madrid).
* An old Carnival song associated with the late Carmen Miranda.
PS: Could I ask the kind person who converts my column into Braille for the blind to omit this particular article. I have no desire to offend eyes which cannot see.