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BY THE FINGER THAT JOINS US, your death has entered me like a progressive disease. I feel my hand as cold as yours, I feel your blood passing through the veins of my hand and coldly flowing throughout my body, I feel my body as cold as yours. Brother, I heard you before you died and you can’t hear me now. These my words are like words written on a blank sheet that remains blank with those words, invisible since there’s no one to read them, words that grow old since there’s no one who understands them, words that lose their meaning, blending imperceptibly into a breeze that no one notices. Brother, my gaze is completely wasted, knowing as I do that you see nothing. My gaze is entirely useless in your silence, transforming entirely into that silence that remembers your life and your death. The morning light, silent because you are dead and it was you who gave it a voice; the morning light, illuminating each dark corner as when you smile…If now your eyes were open, you would enjoy seeing this morning. It wouldn’t be sad, we’d feel this morning on our faces, warming us up. I’d like to be little again and to play with you. To sit with you on the ground and have a morning like this one light up our play and sit down next to us, playing with us and being perhaps our plaything. I’d like to fall asleep with you as when we peacefully fell asleep on nights of an August so distant from this one. We, naked in bed, with the sheet rolled up at our feet and the window open to the night in the backyard, and when the first breeze of early morning entered, we’d wake up at the same time and pull up the sheet, and in those childhood days we slept as long as we wanted, waking up together when the sunlight hit and opened our closed eyes. I’d like to be with you on Senhor Marcos’s tract, our father opening furrows with the plow and telling us go and take this bunch of collard greens and this bunch of turnip greens to Senhor Marcos; and when we reached the large door, it was I who lifted the little iron hand holding a ball and struck it against the door, it was you who talked to the housekeeper, saying our father sent us with this bunch of collard greens and this bunch of turnip greens for Senhor Marcos, and the housekeeper would say I’ll take them, not thank you, not you needn’t have troubled, just I’ll take them, and she’d shut the door. Your voice is what I’ll never be able to hear again, and I just wish I could hear it say let’s rest now, or hear it say brother, brother. Brother. I’ve cried so much, and last night was the eternity of many suffering lives, the same despair repeated in many despairing lives. I know the taste of tears. Remember when it rained? Remember our father, at the market, buying us two identical black umbrellas? We’d walk down the street with our two umbrellas together, circling around puddles, the rain turning the irrigation ditches into rivers, our two umbrellas together, the rain trickling down from the ribs. My tears remind me of that rain, but your absence from this morning and everything in it makes this morning and everything an encounter with sadness, and there are no tears here that can compare with being in the rain at your side. Everything with you was good because you, brother, were good. And last night killed and buried me. Last night without you was a long time, it was years, many years. I’m older than if I’d died centuries ago, more worn out than if I were now just a memory remembered by no one. You have departed for the eternal place of your infinite solitude and have left me alone in this place of so many people so distant from me. Brother, if as a dead man I could remain attached to you, I’d want to die now so as to keep living. But what I want doesn’t count. A night awaits me which is different from and the same as the one you’ve already entered. For all of us there’s a death which, being different from person to person, just as life is different, makes us walk through all that for us is black, through all solitude, screaming out to no one all that we’re able to love. Here, the morning, the oblivious mornings. Now and then I look at your body stretched out on the new bedspread that we never used, in this bedroom that isn’t ours and where we got used to waking up, and it pains me that you’re now cold, it pains me that your skin is limp, it pains me to see people come look at you and you’re dead: your gaze never again, your smile never again, you hearing me never again, you existing and being witness to what I was and we were, never again. Brother. The new, still un greased boots that you were saving for winter but that now cover your feet with the toes pointing upward, the soles clean and perfect: the boots you wear today and forever, since they’re of no more use here, since nothing that was yours and that you cared for is of use to anyone anymore. Your ironed trousers, your jacket, the white shirt with the pointy tips on the collar. Your transfigured face: its forehead more serene than any living man’s forehead; the eyebrows sparse, since they’ve ceased to serve a purpose; the eyelids thick and heavy, covering forever your blind eyes like a tombstone; the nose lean and inert; the lips, washed of dried foam and of words and of unconscious laughs, now thinner, thinner; the useless chin. To look at your face wearies me inside my weariness. My body and what isn’t my body but still is me, everything in me, I, the black piece of sky or stone, sky within the interior of a stone, shut up in the compact solitude of a stone, never having seen the sun, never having breathed, I, I myself, I am a terminal exhaustion. I’m the long-distance runner who went around the world to take a letter to himself and who, now that he found himself, is no longer the same, and who now, out of breath, desires only to lean over a precipice and breathe, and they cover his mouth, and many people with many hands cover his mouth. My heart is the emptiness in the eyes of a condemned man. My shadow is my solitude. I’ve wearied all of me out. All my weariness collided with my weariness, and all of me is just this. The night in which you died fell on what I am. Morning has begun, and last night is a rotting corpse inside me. Brother, my arms are impotent, and daylight is the darkness now controlling them. I’m worn out, I’m spent, as if I’d been trampled by a thousand feet, and I wish I had been trampled by a thousand feet. I’m dead, as if I’d died in the hour you died, and I wish I had died with you. I’m the one who is only a brother and has no brother. I’m the one who’s still waiting. At least a final gaze from you, at least the small hope of a final gaze from you. I’ve lost everything. We’ve lost everything, brother. I’m weary. I’m waiting for a word to roll off your lips. Tell me, please, that I can rest.
IT WAS A HUMBLE BEDROOM. With no pictures on the walls, no calendar, no mirror. It was a bedroom of white walls. While the brothers were being brought from the oil press the neighbor women, weaving through the cook’s grief, removed the crib from the bedroom, changed the sheets on the bed, and placed as many chairs around it as they could find and that would fit in the room. The women marveled at the size of the bed, and it took three of them to tuck in the sheets and the bedspread. The women moved like ants around the widowed cook, who was lost in the far reaches of her mourning, where she would remain during the watch and the funeral. The widowed cook, Elias, and the deceased Moisés passed the night alone and in silence. When morning broke, their skin looked duller, as if coated by a layer of dust that was a layer of sorrow. And with the day’s arrival the first women arrived. Little by little their number swelled, women dressed in black who whispered and looked on with pity. Elias wept until midmorning. Then the tears rolling down his cheeks in meandering paths stopped. His eyes dried, and his face was one of silent, steadfast suffering. When the first men arrived it was already past midmorning, the bedroom was full of women, and Elias was wrapped in silence. In pairs or alone, the men entered with caps in hand, looked at Moisés for a suspended moment, said my heartfelt condolences, my heartfelt condolences, and went out. On the street, near the door, the men stood around in an expanding circle and rolled cigarettes glued with their tongues, pondering their own death while they smoked them, and someone said that’s life.