“They’re coming, aren’t they?” she asked the animal, stroking the painful area around the irritated flesh. “Yes, there’s no doubt about it; many more pairs of eyes will come and they’ll judge me in their murky ignorance and brash stupidity.”
The animal looked at her quizzically from under its gray-blond eyelashes, an old curtain that had long forgotten how to shed its dust.
“But no, that won’t happen, don’t worry,” she reassured herself. “I’ll escape. No matter how slim my chances, I’ll get away. Right from under their noses.”
She would have liked to venture something more calculated, maybe a whole defensive strategy, but she was heading into unknown territory. For reasons she didn’t quite understand, she was unable to marshal the kind of ideas—like ants marching grimly along in single file—that lead to concrete actions. Coherent thoughts eluded her. She must be guided by yes-or-no decisions, she told herself, without examining this line of reasoning too closely. She looked at the horse again, relishing the uncertainty. The only proof that life went on as usual was the sound of its teeth munching the grass. She had in no way affected its primitive plans.
“If anything, anything at all, occurs as it should, like a planet following its orbit, it is because God approves,” she declared, setting off quickly to make up for lost time.
Her scandalous amorality, like acid in a jeweler’s dark workshop, dissolved all that was worthless before it had a chance to sully the precious metal. “Either this is the summer sun or the gold that appears at the end of the process,” she told herself, sprinting across the warm field like a white mare.
By now, the alarm had been raised throughout the village nearby. The high-pitched, hysterical squeals of the twin brothers were drowned out by the voices of the local residents, whose doors all opened at once as though blown out by a supernatural earthquake. The houses were not large; despite their conventional little gardens, the customary single tree in front, and their naive checkerboard layout, they weren’t entirely lacking in charm. The entire village seemed to have come into being all at once to meet a collective need that had no time for the niceties of urban planning. Beyond were the fields of labor, which had a somewhat picture-postcard look. Behind were the cowsheds, a major part of the lives of each family group. The distinctive smell of the village emanated from them: a compelling cloud of maternity, milk, straw, and manure. Nearby, separated by a rarely used path (the main street to the train station led everywhere) were neglected vegetable gardens. They had belonged to a previous generation of settlers, whose fate was a mystery. The new arrivals had allowed them to run wild, unable to decide whether to turn them over for grazing or tend them. Maybe they were keeping them in reserve for future municipal growth. It was in this very ordinary place, where the only things that ever happened were the milking of cows, the delivery of pails of milk to the milk train, the sowing of crops, the act of marriage, and the bearing of children who would grow up to do exactly the same ordinary things—which also included going to church on Sunday, dying, and passing on one’s surname—that the first thing of consequence they had ever experienced beyond their poverty of spirit occurred. The news borne by the twins began to spread.
One man, the first to hear said news, took the precaution of grabbing his pitchfork. This act was significant in that it served as an example. More men emerged from doors and milking stalls, initially empty-handed given the nature of the news, but when they saw that their neighbors were armed, they ran back inside and returned with hoes, shovels, rakes, and whatever else they could lay their hands on. Then they strode forward with their weapons on their shoulders, barking instructions and shooing the women and children inside. Some primal instinct told them that they had been drafted into a private war, in which the opposite sex and the young would only be a hindrance.
Soon the barbarian army was fully assembled. It seemed very important that they head out on their expedition en masse. Although the bounty would ultimately be individual, or at least impossible to divvy up, a sense of victory could still be shared and the presence of so many men served as justification in itself: they were a united front. No one quite knew who it was that might be judging them, but their numbers undoubtedly helped keep the fear nipping their ankles at bay.
Eventually, the procession arrived at the epicenter of the phenomenon: the place where the twins had left their plough and horse, and where they expected to find the stranger and her shameful femininity, her arms across her chest and her eyes pleading. But what they found instead left them astounded; the look the rubbernecked twins exchanged was a fair indication of the general sense of awe. There were no opportunities here for prurience or sainthood, only the rather different, robust image of a horse that had been set free and was busy grazing, whisking flies away with its tail. Although their private fantasies had been dashed, it was only now that the story became truly real for them, for now it had actual substance. Something conjured up in the minds of the twins couldn’t possibly have removed the harness from the horse. That would have meant missing out on a day of the only work they were capable of doing, not to mention laying themselves open to general ridicule.
One man, who was well versed in crime literature (a mysterious package of books would often arrive for him at the train station), made his way through the crowd, saying words that nobody could understand but the smartest among them believed to be related to something beyond the comprehension of the ordinary man. They opened a path for him in the same way that people do when someone declares, “I’m a doctor,” thus immediately earning themselves a greater say over the patient gasping on the ground. The man, enjoying his sudden prominence, started to examine the rudimentary wooden plough, a contraption that must have represented the earliest stage of the tool’s evolution. Ignoring the crudeness of the implement, he ran his hand over every part, inspecting each joint and rivet as though he were coaxing out their secrets. He did so with a specialist’s touch, very different from the rough, utilitarian motions of ordinary labor. This demonstration of analytical expertise, not dissimilar to the way a blind person becomes familiar with an object, was a revelation to many. They realized that even an insignificant tool, a two-cent plough, was built according to a plan, by an intelligence that was also capable of creating a gun, a table, or a milking machine. Each part was built for a purpose that would be repeated over and over again. The investigator, oblivious to the admiration he was arousing among some for the very first time, suddenly bent over to focus all his attention on a fixed point. On the horizontal axis of the bar to which the harness was tied, caught at the corner where it met a vertical plank, something was glinting insolently in the sun. The tip of a woman’s nail, painted with red nail polish. The man extracted the tiny shard with the delicacy of a watchmaker removing a hair from the mechanism. Then he held it out in his palm for all to see. He finished his demonstration by wrapping it carefully in a handkerchief.