YOUR GAZE WILL REMAIN IN MY GAZE when I die and when, already dead, I stare blankly at the plains that will be your gaze slowly turning into night. Your gaze will remain in my forgotten hands, and it won’t occur to anyone to look for it there. I think: no one ever looks for things where they are, because no one ever knows what the clouds, or smoke, or a gaze might be thinking. And you. You’ll keep losing your silence through forgotten hands, you’ll bury your silence inside my chest. Wife countless times over. Wife repeated in the breathing of a place that’s no more. Time and life. Wife, I don’t know what we were, but I know this day that you are mine. Today I know you. Your gaze and your silence are my own. Uselessly my own, for I’m going to where men cease being men. I’m going to take the lonely road that wends through life’s wreckage. The road where everything is scarcely anything, and each tiny thing is too much. At my side lie the vestiges of days with sheep and thoughts I don’t remember. At my side lie bits of you, of my son, of my father, my mother, my sister. You hanging up laundry, you on the devil’s lips, on everybody’s lips, abortion, she had an abortion, sweet girl, lying under the giant, feeding our son, sweet girl, sweet girl, your soft skin, that late afternoon we made love. My son when just born, with his serious, infant gaze, the first time I held him in my arms, in my heart, such a warm thing, sleeping in his crib. My father faithfully teaching me all he knew, hitting me with his belt, crying, pulling up on his trousers, looking at me and talking to me, sitting in front of my sister’s chicken coop, taking me with him into Judas’s general store, taking me to the cattle fair. My mother sending me into town on errands, giving me kisses, dying in bed, alive, then dead, in the coffin, telling me stories in the backyard. My sister helping my mother, wanting to get married, playing grown-ups and children all by herself, my mother prancing around her while sticking pins into her dress, the hopeful glimmer in her eyes, always talking, taking care of our father, getting married to the blacksmith who was drunk at the wedding, weeping, taking care of their child with awkward tenderness. I walk alone but have all of you with me. I’ll take you with me always. I look at the last ray of sun before the sun disappears. I think: a man is a day, a man is the sun for one day. And he has to keep going. My feet move forward over the earth. You’re still sleeping, my son, and I wanted to show you the sunset. I wanted to show you the earth, to teach you the color of earth on the inside, because to know the color of earth on the inside is to know the world and to know men. Now the sun has disappeared, leaving a bloodred aura over the summit where it sank, and I wanted to teach you that tomorrow will be a hot day. I wanted to teach you, son, that if you don’t see stars at night, you can expect rain the next day. To know these things is to know everything. These are the few things we’re given to know. The rest, son, are inscrutable mysteries. The rest are pointed daggers in the fog. The rest are daggers we see flying toward our chest, and our hands are tied, son. You’re still sleeping. Your mother has me in her gaze. I have her gaze. Wife, who watches and sees me, know that I respect you. And in telling you this I’m telling you many things I don’t understand, I’m telling you of a red sky over the summit of my heart, I’m telling you what I feel even if it’s impossible to tell what we feel. And what you are in me will be crystallized in the face I become. And you won’t be a bitter regret, you’ll be the sweet girl I saw hanging up laundry. You’ll be what I wrote in the notebooks of my yearning to have you, the notebooks I know by heart, for they’re the pages of my own skin. Saturday, six p.m., she watered the garden, held a rose in her fingers, smiled to herself. Friday, five thirty p.m., she came out of the rich people’s house, looking at the ground. Thursday, five p.m., she came to the door, the skin of her face so peaceful, her eyes like the sky. And wherever I end up, I won’t be able to touch you, as I’ve never been able. And my frustration will be greater, since I’ll never again be able to see you, never again be able to hear your silence, and all the hopes I ever had will be obliterated. When dead, I’ll know the absolute blackness that no living man can bear. Not one gleam. Not one glimmer. No man alive can bear darkness without a glimmer of light. And that’s why I must keep walking. Just a few more yards separate me from the endless infinite distance of that place. My suffering will be a continuation of suffering. I’ll continue not to have the will that I never had. And my steps are no longer mine, nor were they ever. Everything is final. The fields have lasted one more day, and tomorrow doesn’t exist. The red sky will remain forever red, and the sky I once knew will forever be a memory of what I once knew. Goodbye, wife. Goodbye, son. Goodbye, father, mother, sister. Your faces hover before me. They will hover there forever. I think: forever and never again are the same place. Wife, son, father, mother, sister, don’t cry for me. The wheat fields still exist for children. Children still exist. Save your tears for a worthier occasion. Save your tears for when the wheat fields die in the eyes of children. Save your tears for when the children die. Today, I’m dying. And my death is nothing in the implacable order of things.
JOSÉ APPROACHED THE GNARLED HOLM OAK, the only one on the hilltop. It was a holm oak whose trunk zigzagged this way and that. José patiently made a slipknot in the rope, then tied the rope firmly around a strong bough. He climbed to one of the steps in the trunk. He placed the noose around his neck and tightened it. He didn’t look at the world for one last time. He jumped forward. His neck made a cracking sound of bones separating. He swung for a few moments until coming to a standstill, as still as the un-stirring breeze. A sparrow that flitted about looked at him and saw his eyes emptied of hope, saw his hands empty, and swooped up into the sky. José became smaller, smaller, and when the sparrow looked down from on high, José was just the gnarled bough of an oak tree against a bloodred horizon.
Book Two
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THE EARTH WAS ITS OWN SILENCE on fire. The sun was a blazing heat lighting up the flame-colored air: the aura of a fire that was the aura of the earth, that was the light and the sun. The small stones and weightless pebbles dotting the skin of the plain were hot embers in a closed fist. José and his sheep, the sheepdog, the big old cork tree, and the smaller corks were figures etched into an exhausted asphyxia, shapes frozen in the blaze of an instant that was a very long time and no more than an instant. The south wind blew through a wheat field, and its blowing shriveled the stalks of grain, suddenly old and dry, because that slow breeze was a sweltering hell that filled the atmosphere, forcing all breathing things to breathe it, since there was nothing around them but that heavy, scorching breeze. And the south wind was the horizon advancing, slow and inevitable. Inevitable. It blew past the last stalk at the end of the field, drying it out even more, then past a clump of thistles that withered beneath and inside its heat. José could be seen in the distance, standing in the shade of the big old cork tree, and the sheep could be seen, gathered into little bunches of many little bodies in the shade. The south wind advanced within the light and over the earth. José and the sheep were slowly drawing closer together. Closer and closer. And the south wind blew past José and past the sheep and past the big old cork tree and the smaller corks. In the south wind every gaze persisted, skin scorched, blood seething.