Читать книгу A Thousand Forests in One Acorn - Valerie Miles - Страница 17

A THOUSAND FORESTS

FROM LAS CIEGAS HORMIGAS

(THE BLIND ANTS)

[A NOVEL]

CHAPTER 21: JOSEFA

I still remember it well. The priest said, “Sabas, do you take this woman as your lawfully wedded wife?” And then, without even turning to me: “Josefa, do you want this man to take you as his lawfully wedded wife?”

That’s what I heard, kneeling next to him, my hands and feet tied up without a rope, subjugated, defeated, and (why not?) devoted—perhaps not out of love, but controlled by some kind of irrational vertigo—furiously subdued, captured, and kidnapped while everyone watched impassively. No longer daring to rebel, even though I’d tried before, despite the fact that I’d known from the beginning it would all be useless, I contemplated what the priest had done, with his benevolent, distant face, loading the ship with cargo he wouldn’t travel with, muttering the words, unrelenting, without looking into my eyes, which were desperately asking him, “Why don’t you do something? Why don’t you ask me, like all the other women, ‘Josefa, do you take this man as your lawfully wedded husband?’”

He appeared one day in Berango, chewing on a piece of straw. Serious, skinny, calm, his hands in his pockets. All put together with his corduroy pants, white cotton socks, rubber-soled sandals, and checkered shirt. And an umbrella hanging on his arm.

It was a workday, a Monday, around twilight. I watched him from the garden plot my family had near the road. He was coming from Algorta, and his steps weren’t quick, but they were steady, insistent, active, each one promising another. By the time I noticed him, he was already looking at me. The distance between us wasn’t short, so he was able to stare at me for four or five minutes without appearing to, without even turning his head, chewing his piece of straw the whole time. When he reached a point where he had to turn his head, he stopped looking at me, walked past me, and continued down the road, and nobody would have said that he’d noticed me.

When I went back to hoeing, I realized who he was: Sabas Jáuregui, from the farm on the beach in Algorta, who’d lived alone ever since he found himself without a family. We all knew the story: a family of father, mother, and two sons, they were all very hardworking and had enough land to show it. Sabas’s brother died, and father, mother, and Sabas took on the work; not long afterward, the mother died, and the two men kept going as well as they could, preparing the meals themselves. When his father died, Sabas was already prepared for it, and he took onto his shoulders the work that used to leave four people exhausted. And he lived there, abandoned near the edge of the beach, completing all the chores every day before going to bed, when he’d no longer hear the undertow scraping the rocks, like before, when all his family members were still alive and he was able to rest a while before sleep would take him. Now he fell asleep before he even had time to lift his second foot off the floor.

I saw him on rare occasions, when I went to that beach with my family to gather coked coal and I’d find him with a scythe cutting grass for the cows, or carrying manure from the stable to the garden, or I’d simply see smoke coming from the chimney and figure he was frying something for dinner.

The following Sunday, six days after I saw him on the road, I discovered him among the couples who were dancing on the pelota court to the shrill music playing on the loudspeakers. He was wearing twill pants, a wrinkled brown jacket, and a white shirt with the collar unbuttoned (no tie, of course). He searched for me specifically, among the dancing couples, and finally spotted me and came over to my group of friends, rigid and deliberate, looking up, walking and moving naturally, pretending he wasn’t bothered by his shirt collar, which was stiff even though it wasn’t buttoned: he’d probably put too much starch on it when he ironed it.

He stopped in front of me and, without moving his lips, without appearing to speak, even though his words didn’t come out timid at all, but whole, determined, firm, said, “Would you like to dance with me?”

It would have been enough to say “would you like to dance?” or even simply “do you dance?” but he wanted to be very clear about the “with me,” and at that moment I had a vague feeling that I was starting to figure him out, finding out what he was like, what he was proposing, how he would make it happen, and even that he would win.

I said no, not because he seemed to be acting like a Don Juan (he could have been: he sort of looked like one, and he was svelte, strong, rather handsome compared to the rest of those rough peasants), but because he didn’t even entertain any hope that I would dance with him; I even suspected that he didn’t want me to; his only intention was to make me start burning through my supply of ammunition, knowing that one day it would run out and I would be defenseless; that I had a certain number of vulnerable “noes” in reserve (it didn’t matter how many: he had enough patience to wait and persevere). Because after that week, he started coming to Berango at least twice a week: once on Sunday, at the dance, for me; and another day during the workweek, to the milkman Benito’s farm, for the cow.

Soon the whole town knew what he was up to. The cow he wanted belonged to one of our neighbors: Benito, the milkman, who kept himself afloat with the seven he fed (and milked) in the stable on his farm. My late father and my mother used to say that it wasn’t fair: the man already had six cows, and on top of that, God gave him those inexhaustible udders that, to everyone’s astonishment, produced thirty liters of milk a day.

He wouldn’t sell it, he wouldn’t trade it, he wouldn’t rent it, he would hardly let anyone see it; he never had to say it for his neighbors and the inhabitants of nearby towns to know it; it was something you understood if you knew Benito (his whole life among cows and knowing everything there is to know about them) and the cow. And if it didn’t become a source of pride for our town, that was because it apparently wasn’t that even for Benito himself. Distrusting, suspicious, alert, he knew a lot about things other than cows: he knew that good things are covetable, and that even though he acquired his treasure through the most legal and definitive way (Nature made the donation when one of his cows gave birth, a cow who, in turn, was the daughter of another of Benito’s properties, who, in turn . . .), he had a feeling that maybe that block of legality and rights could crack: an error, a low blow, in the form of a new municipal ordinance or a jealous complaint inventing a trivial offense (witchcraft, even). The only thing Benito didn’t take into account was the colossal tenacity of men, of one man.

He kept coming to find me every Sunday, in the middle of the dance, asking me the question, and I kept giving him the same answer. He never talked to any other girl: he arrived, he saw me, he asked me the question, I answered him, and he went away without tilting his head an inch, trying not to notice everyone looking at him, the slightly mocking looks (just barely, and surreptitiously: there was something about Sabas that commanded respect) from everyone who waited all week for that inevitable moment at the dance on the pelota court. After three months, we performed the scene to perfection, without error, everyone in their role, he in his and I in mine, and the people discussing whether our performance was better than the one last Sunday.

But then there was a small change, a tiny new development that broke the monotony of those three months. Sabas hadn’t shown up at the dance yet that Sunday, and it was already dark out and the court lights were on. But then the lights suddenly went out and everything went dark. This happened frequently: the boys would cut the electricity and the girls would start screaming, and then you’d hear quick steps chasing others that were running away, and, every once in a while, you’d hear a slap in the face, and when the girls’ protests turned serious the lights would come back on and reveal a scene of laughing, breathless, flushed faces, and more than one red cheek. It was one of those times, after three months, when, in total intentional darkness, I felt someone gently take my hand and encircle my waist; I never could have imagined a more delicate contact between a man and a woman. I wasn’t frightened, despite the darkness, nor did I resist. The music had stopped too, since the electricity was out, but we started dancing, in the middle of that whirlwind of shouts, chases, and insults. An instant before he spoke (I’d just asked him who he was) I noticed that the hand holding mine wasn’t just gentle, but also firm, and the arm around my waist was feathers and iron at the same time, and I felt like I was enclosed in something, a prisoner: it was a strange sensation, but not new, I realized as I remembered what I’d felt the first time Sabas had asked me to dance . . .

And then he spoke, before I could free myself from his arms, as soon as he realized that I’d recognized him.

“Wait,” he said. “I wanted to tell you that my father left some nice tools in the attic and I’ve started building the bed and the wardrobe.”

By the time the lights came on, he had left me, and he went away slowly through the boisterous crowd.

That same night, at dinner, I asked my father:

“Benito’s cow . . .?”

“What?” he asked, rolling his cigar.

“Is it possible that . . . that the man from Algorta . . . that Sabas, will get . . .?”

“Benito said yesterday afternoon at La Venta that he was thinking seven cows might be too many for him . . .”

The only thing I asked for in my prayers was a little time to believe that nothing could possibly happen if I didn’t want it to. But that oppression didn’t abandon me, and I spent all my time thinking about it. I was already heading down a path that led to something I didn’t want in my life. Whether I liked him or not wasn’t important. Of course I liked him. (Sabas: young and virile, full of life, indefatigable, skilled, protective, able to rise from any difficult situation, determined, sufficiently attractive and desirable.) But that wasn’t love, the love I’d dreamed of ever since the idea occurred to me, without understanding it at first. I’d only intuited it, having to believe that it must exist in relationships between men and women so that they would be more than just a series of unions like the ones between the male and female animals around me that I knew; that wasn’t the love I longed for and that I wanted to be a part of more than anything. But that wasn’t the reason either, since I could accept Sabas without distorting my intimate and unspoken desires, hidden then even to me; it was that I wasn’t included in the situation. I was thrown into it violently, without remission, and the one who decided ought to have considered that, perhaps, I didn’t want it; but he didn’t, he simply wrapped me up in his irrational vertigo of invincible tenacity and turned me into a manageable, even tangible instrument, so that, at that moment, I didn’t know if my desire to accept him was mine or if it also belonged to him and to that blind strength of his.

I searched for a solution and thought I’d found one when I thought that, up until then, my refusals hadn’t been emphatic enough, and I tried to make them so. But he kept on, oblivious, going to the dance every Sunday (even though, after he told me about the furniture, he never asked me to dance again, not because he thought it was too ridiculous to keep doing it after three months of failure, but surely because he knew that the first phase was over, the first fortifications were destroyed, and it was time for another mode of attack). Desperate, I trusted in the ultimate “no,” that of the church (I could already see myself there, kneeling next to him, kidnapped), trusting that the situation would give me strength. But when I started thinking about the cow, I knew that he had also rejected that extreme consolation.

The cow. I asked myself: what could be stronger: my will to resist, or Benito’s repeated refusals to sell the cow? Because Sabas kept insisting, obstinately. He would show up at the milkman’s farm once a week, or twice, talking to him about who knows what, trying to convince him or interest him in some sort of exchange or sale or promise; that’s what we all thought; not a swindle: he wasn’t capable of doing such a thing. Benito didn’t even tell anyone at La Venta what Sabas talked to him about, nor how, nor what he promised or offered, as if he were ashamed of having to listen to him, of not being able to refuse him, of admitting he was defeated before he really was. And that’s how I came to trust that cow with my salvation, believing that if he didn’t get it, if the cow could convince me that he was vulnerable, that he could be defeated, there would be some hope for me.

Then, in May, the Catalan salesman came to town, with his two big suitcases covered in oilcloth, full of colorful fabrics, lace, buttons, and ribbons. He visited the town every year and stayed for a couple of months, not because he had enough customers there, but because he used it as a general headquarters, from which he would embark on one-, two-, or three-day trips to the other towns in the area, returning to his departure point to recover his strength in the station house, where he stayed, ate, and slept. Chubby, red-faced, always smiling, talkative, insincere, whose other life (the one he lived the remaining ten months of the year, in Barcelona) was a complete mystery to us, even though he talked about it excessively and frequently, and for that very reason we never believed a single word he said. Surely he was married with several children—even if we never saw a wedding ring (he must have carried it in his pocket, since when he said goodbye to his wife he would have to show it in its place, on his finger)—hoping in vain for an easy fling with a married woman or a single girl, making the stories he always told his friends back home true, for once.

I used him, to put it simply, because I wanted to make a decision too, rather than wait around for whatever was in store for me. Yes, I started going out with him, shocking the town and my family, since everyone knew that no girl would have done what I did, let herself be accompanied by that traveling stranger who was outside the circle of possible suitors for more than a dozen reasons: among them, the certainty that he was foreign and untrustworthy, the probability that he was married, or at least had promises scattered throughout Cataluña. I used him. I needed a sort of shock treatment, a flashy explosion, a storm that would raise the water levels and then change course, altering what I thought was inevitable. And I wasn’t disappointed because, as far as I could tell, the only person who wasn’t concerned about my relationship with the Catalan salesman was him, Sabas, who kept coming to Berango every Sunday (although, now, he had to wait for us to walk down the road, when that man and I used to walk the same route all the couples in town did, all the same places: the church portico, the rudimentary sidewalks, and down the road a kilometer outside of town; when he saw us he’d stand there staring at us, staring at me, rather, since there was no indication he even saw the salesman, and he even waved at me slightly, serious, inscrutable, infuriatingly tenacious, until we walked away, and I wouldn’t see him again until the following Sunday). I was counting on another source of strength, the certainty that a girl’s first kiss sealed something eternal, or at least lasting until it became apparent that the man would refuse marriage or that he was already married; and that, in any case, I could count on a period of precious time, a pause, in which I could find whatever there was to find, that I would make the most of it somehow, that at least Sabas couldn’t enjoy it, and it would be time that would go by uselessly, that would escape his immovable plan of waiting, in which time was fundamental.

Then came July, and on the night of the 30^th, when I was on my way home with the donkey carrying grass for the only cow we had, I saw him on the road, waiting for me. He moved only when I reached him, after the donkey had passed him.

“Wait,” he said, pulling a piece of straw from some brambles and starting to crush it with his fingers. He’d positioned himself in the middle of the road, so I was forced to stop. “I’m not upset. Listen. I need to talk to you. Everything is already decided and we haven’t even talked. I’ll come get you tomorrow and we’ll go to the San Ignacio festival together.”

When he finished speaking, he stuck the broken piece of straw in his mouth and turned around, walking away silently in the dark.

I had made up my mind and I felt strong for the first time, bolstered by a single, unpleasant kiss from the Catalan salesman. But when I saw Sabas the next morning, coming down the road from Benito’s farm, with the cow on a leash following behind him, walking slowly, without any hint of triumph on his face, stiff and serious, I understood that everything had been useless; all there was left to do was look at the sky where it touched the sea to know whether I should take an umbrella to the festival that afternoon.

I wanted to see the salesman and I went looking for him, but they told me he wouldn’t be back until evening. Therefore, I couldn’t tell him I was breaking up with him. And I waited for Sabas and he took me to Algorta, to the San Ignacio festival. I didn’t know what was happening to me; I couldn’t think, as if he’d already taken possession of me, even my inner self.

There he had me, not listening to him but just hearing him, forced to do so because I had two healthy ears and I was next to him (I still couldn’t believe it), and not even the bedlam of the carousel, the stands selling churros, French fries, beer, and soda, the municipal band in their blue uniforms or, on their breaks, the shrill loudspeakers, managed to get between us, to interrupt his clipped sentences, through which I found out that the bed and the oak wardrobe were finished (he even described the carved decorations they had), and that the wedding date had been set—August 31^st—so I wouldn’t even get to have the engagement that every woman dreams of, with enough time and all the necessary formalities. He would yank me out of single life and, with no transition, I would be sharing a bed with him, captured, kidnapped, and, in a way, enslaved, since he also said it was a good date because then we could harvest the corn together in September. He would also be denying me a honeymoon, transplanting me in a single day from a single woman’s house to a married woman’s house, from the convent to the brothel, without the purification that the honeymoon trip means to every woman (the first night and the following nights, up to seven or fifteen—or even just the first—under a different sky, in a new room in a new city, far from our hometowns, with our nice new white clothing debuting that first night, so that we can more easily believe that we’ve entered a fantasy world, where not only everything is possible, but even logical and forgivable, including the obsession that has dominated us since we were thirteen or fifteen—sex); wanting to purify what needs purifying, since we were born pure in the moment the man and the woman, upon admiring one another, admired their unborn children, and the rest is superfluous. I wouldn’t even get that.

We were sitting in the field near the fair, and it was getting dark. I stood up and said: “He hugged me and he kissed me. Are you upset?”

“It’s alright,” he said. “I was counting on that. But no more than that.”

He was so confident about what he said, so sure of himself, foreseeing everything, domineering, with nearly enough power to pull the strings of everyone else’s lives.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

But I was already running away from him, desperate, elbowing my way through the crowds, and probably sobbing. The whole way back to Berango, to the house where the Catalan salesman was staying—nearly an hour—I didn’t once look behind me to see if he was following me. I climbed the stairs and knocked softly on his door (he lived in the loft, alone) and he opened the door and looked at me strangely, but then he smiled and his face suddenly turned repugnant. He moved to one side, inviting me to come in. But I didn’t move. And then I looked behind me, though that wasn’t exactly it: I looked at the stairs, then down, trying, at the same time, to hear something. He looked at me, looked at the stairs, looked at me again, and smiled, moving back to the center of the doorway.

“It’s a shame he didn’t follow you,” he said, his little eyes smiling. “At the very least, you would have stepped inside the door and I would have closed it behind you. Even though that wouldn’t change anything, since whatever you told him afterward couldn’t be taken into consideration; he simply wouldn’t have believed you; and whatever I told him—if you chose this approach—wouldn’t matter either, because whatever a man says about such things, and certainly if he’s a tramp, is just taken as bragging. He would have had to see it and then be sure he hadn’t dreamed it. He needed to have followed you and seen it with his own eyes. Because a man who was capable of getting that cow from Benito, even if it cost all that money, is capable of disbelieving any sort of logic pertaining to men . . .”

So that was it. The cow. The reason I couldn’t plan a honeymoon, not even a brief stay in San Sebastián. He had spent all his savings, figuring that in order to have a wife he could cut out a lot of things, including money, but if he wanted a cow, especially if it was like that cow, he had to pay for it.

And I stood there, in front of the open door, rigid, bewildered, once I’d understood that even if I took one step across that threshold and gained a power much stronger than a simple kiss to be able to resist him and—I imagined—defeat him, I wouldn’t accomplish anything, since he was invincible. Not even by resorting to all that a woman is capable of giving up in order to get something, would I liberate myself from his stubbornness.

The traveler was still looking at me, and I lifted my head and, no longer using a casual tone with him, asked, “Do you happen to have a pattern for embroidering sheets with an interlocking J and S?”

Translated by Emily Davis