They sat there without speaking. Each looked in a different direction, at nothing. Behind their sad faces, they pondered. In his mind Moisés said words to his brother, hoping they’d be heard; in his mind he said it will be an instant and bring solitude. For the first time we’ll shout each other’s name. We’ve never needed to call each other by name, have you noticed? I don’t know how my name sounds in your voice. In your voice, brother. Brother. I don’t know how your name sounds in my voice. For the first time we’ll shout each other’s name, and our despair will be the prelude to a painful sorrow that we’ll get used to, as a man without a heart gets used to the black void in his chest. You’ve always lived in my life, and I’ve always been with you when you smiled. Today we’ll know solitude. We’ll vanish from each other’s life. But we won’t forget. And to remember will be the greatest suffering, to remember what we were wherever we end up and not to be able to be anything anymore. To remember speaking in the way that only we spoke and to remain with that language in our heads, that way of speaking which we’ll never use with anyone else. Today I’ll leave you, knowing that I’ve always loved you for you having always been with me. And I’m no longer ashamed of that word we never said, love, that word, love, which we never once said but which today I need to say. Sincere, true, brother. I’ll miss you. With no one to explain it to, since I’ll have no one at my side, I’ll miss you. And however black the plain may be where I’ll roam for eternity, it will always be the painful memory of a sunset, it will always be the grief of only being able to remember you.
And with a sudden light that made his insides flare, Moisés’s bowels ignited in a rampant fire, kindled by an overwhelming asphyxia, a fire and a light that burned holes in his belly, that hammered nails into his belly, that slashed his belly like an ax; in Moisés’s belly a thousand armies walked barefoot over live coals, a thousand armadas ripped with razor-sharp rudders through fiery tides; Moisés’s belly was light and fire, light and fire, a sudden sun born with the intensity of midday, the blaze from a match fallen on oil poured over his guts. Moisés was bent over his stomach, and Elias was bent over his stomach. Both brothers felt the same hell burning the inside of their skin. The walls of the oil press shouted a chorus of screams that, to the brothers’ hearing, were a single scream scraping the inside of their ears with a pointy firebrand, and the brothers imagined that the voice sounded throughout the world: that the water flowing in brooks was that shrillness, and that the silence of birds and crickets on the plains had been replaced by that deafening intensity which was toppling trees, uprooting houses and stones, and driving people mad with the voracity of a cyclone. Moisés was burning up inside, and Elias felt the same flames. But they both knew it was Moisés who was dying. Moisés fell to his knees, Elias fell to his knees. And in the bowels of both brothers a bloody-eyed witch stirred a cauldron of flames and embers, a river overflowed its banks and flooded the fields with flames and embers, a multitude of madmen shot off fireworks and transformed the night sky into flames and all the stars into embers. Moisés was throwing up foam. And they both closed their eyes as hard as they could, and both saw a perfect blackness swallowing them: not the blackness that comes from lowering the eyelids and that’s speckled by luminous dust, nor the blackness of it being night and us imagining, as we go to sleep, the day or even the morning, but the absolute blackness of solitude, indifferent black, absolute solitude, eternal black, eternal solitude. Moisés was throwing up foam that, against his will, rose up in him and issued from his mouth as a round, continuous substance. It wasn’t a white foam, for it contained blood and yellowish bits from his insides. And the pain, increasing, became unbearable. And the brothers struggled against the fire that burned more than fire, against the inaudible scream that deafened them, and against the black blackness of death that blinded them, to look at each other one last time. And in that long, significant moment they stopped burning inside, they looked at each other, and they said no words in their gaze; they entered each other, they exchanged bodies, and in that way hugged each other. At the end of that moment Moisés, destroyed, fell dead.
That evening, when they didn’t show up for dinner, the cook asked the migrant who lived opposite to go fetch them. It was this man who found Moisés with his head lying on Elias’s lap and Elias crying with a face already ravaged by many tears. It was this man who found them in the darkness of the oil press and struck a match to light up their faces, not realizing that it was impossible to light up that darkness. He looked at the water that formed wide rivers on Elias’s face, at his eyes that were the springs of those rivers, and saw only that he wept. He didn’t see that Elias had experienced death without dying; he didn’t see that he had died and survived death to keep suffering. And this man returned with other men in silence, grave and dark men, sad men who lifted Moisés and laid him on a wagon. Elias always at his side, crying. The wagon’s iron wheels rolled over the dust and stones of the street, and it was the only sound heard in the night’s funereal silence. The wagon rolled and the streets slowly lit up, because every house door opened and everyone, full of sorrow, came out to see the brothers. The men standing in the doorways with their caps off and their arms outstretched, unmoving; next to them their wives, with the same mournful gaze of uncontainable sorrow. The men who had gone to get the brothers walked through the night, themselves like pieces of solemn and black night, pulling the mule by its reins; on top of the wagon lay the corpse of Moisés and bent over it, the ruins of Elias’s body, his tears. They walked for many nights in that night to reach the cook’s house. And the wagon came to a halt. The widowed cook, dressed in dark black, waited for them at the door, overwhelmed, weeping. Forever in silence, as if they were immobile, the men carried Moisés inside and laid him on the new bedspread. The baby’s crib was empty, for as soon as the migrant had returned from the oil press to ask for help, as soon as he had broken the news to the cook and the neighbor women gathered around, one of them took the girl to her house to sleep. The men pulled Moisés’s legs together, placed his right arm over his chest, and left. The brothers and the cook were alone, and sadness seized the whole house. Like a shadow above ground, the cook went out and came back with a cloth and a basin. She stripped the brothers, one as spent as the other, and washed them with the cloth that she dipped into the basin. She dried them and clothed them in a pair of fine, very white shirts and in their dress suits. The suits weren’t black, but they had no others. She buttoned the gold buttons one by one. She figured out the system of buttons and straps for the joined sleeves and fastened them. She combed the brothers’ hair and sat in one of the chairs that the neighbor women had brought and placed around the bed. The light of the kerosene lamp flickered on the room’s sorrow until morning. At daybreak the first woman arrived. She expressed her condolences to the widow and to the brother, and no one heard, she propped open the front door with a piece of wood, blew out the lamp, and opened the shutters to the window. Elias wept all that he had ever lived, for his whole life lay dead on a bedspread before him. The cook wept for having lost her husband, realizing, more than ever, how much he meant to her, and that only made her suffer more, for she’d lost forever her friend, the man for whom she lived and whose happiness she so desired. A second woman arrived. After saying my heartfelt condolences, my heartfelt condolences, and staring for a long time at the corpse of Moisés, she sat next to the other woman. One of them whispered it was some poisonous mushrooms that he ate. Elias ran his hand over his brother’s eyes and over his brother’s lips as very clear tears ran down his own cheeks. The morning entered slowly, sadly, through the window.