Thursday, May 15, 2025

Threshold, by Cornélio Penna

When Threshold was first published in 1935, it caused great perplexity in literary circles. The debut novel of Cornélio Penna, simple in form, compact in its succession of chapters—generally short, like scenes or inner tableaux of that nameless city nestled among mountains and the ghosts of the mining cycle—speaks to us of a world in decline, yet one that still lingers to haunt us.

The title Threshold already points to this undefined place between dream and reality, between past and present, between the natural and the supernatural, between belief and disbelief, between lucidity and madness, and gradually builds an atmosphere of suspense and mystery—not resolved like a detective story, but rather as an inner drama.

[This is my own, machine, translation; although I have given it the same title as a professional translation published elsewhere, for consistency.]

I

From the diary:

The maid, whose wrinkles stand out sharply on her yellow skin, illuminated by the light of the kerosene lamp, tormented me with offers of service, disappearing abruptly in the face of my stubborn silence.

I took off the heavy blanket that covered me, weighing down on my poor aching shoulders. It was soaked with water.

I see, in the corner, a huge sofa. I let myself fall into it and only then do I feel the torpor of travel fatigue, which invades my whole body. And then, pushing away for a moment the thoughts that always plague me, I become intoxicated with the intense and confused memory of the long horseback journey, whose sensations I relive with desperate delight.

It seems to me that I entered this city stealthily, like someone returning from prison to their homeland.

The black mountains, streaming with rain, faded by the thick mist rising from the ground, paved with iron and also black, move before my eyes slowly, like in a suffocating dream.

I read, in my lazy memory, a large sign in English that appears suddenly in the darkness, indicating the entrance to the abandoned gold mines.

The stone valley, bare of trees, sinks into the night, menacing. No ambition gave life to that place of mystery.

— We’re close, only two leagues left — says to me at that moment, without irony, the person accompanying me.

Then, the long road, the branches bending to lash my face, moved by silent hostility.

Then, a rough hill, splashing with mud, among loose stones that roll to the sides with a muffled rumble.

And the journey continues, endless hours, up and down, up and down, I want to arrive, I don’t want to arrive…

Two rows of little houses crowd together, pressing more and more tightly, leaning their ruined walls against each other with indescribable dejection.

The windows bang and creak, opening and showing me, at intervals, their interiors full of misery and fleeting shadows. Everything blends with the very low sky, which also seems made of black mud dissolving in the flood that runs everywhere. Shadowy figures approach, coming toward me, and the animal quickens its uncertain steps, struck by the whip.

— We’ve arrived — says my companion, seeing me motionless, without the courage to dismount, without the will to ask anything.

(And supports me in their arms while I murmur to myself, softly: “this is my home…”)

II

My room. I humbly lift my head and look around.

The walls, under the glare of the lantern that guided me here, appear blurred, fading into the brutal, very high ceiling with wide boards.

Here and there, dancing, the reflection of one or another saint’s picture, scattered without symmetry. In a corner, among nameless cloths, I distinguish the whiteness of a pitcher.

I move toward it and plunge my hands into the cold water, which does me good and awakens me.

I lift my head again, humbly.

And I cannot contain a fearful backward movement. Someone is there. Their dull gaze met mine and I saw their stained and livid face…

I turn, trembling, and strain to look at that figure, and it slowly emerges from the shadows, takes shape, becoming solid, stopping in front of me.

And I recognize myself, through the blur of the mirror, with my torso leaning forward, arms braced tightly on the stone backsplash.

The hollow face, matted hair, disheveled clothing, the air of humiliated unconsciousness confuse me, as if throwing in my face a truth I wished to hide.

I open a drawer, afraid of finding papers and memories of others.

It is empty.

They were all emptied for me, but I see, in the worn corners, the work of many hands that passed through, and on the floor, I notice the mark of many feet that walked there, perhaps joyfully!

They left traced paths leading to the door and the window…

(And I do not have the courage to violate the secret of these poor things.)

III

Through the door I hear the murmur of voices.

They are men and women; they are human beings I have never seen and who have never seen me; tomorrow they will be my friends and my enemies, and they will form around me a tight chain of ideas and hatreds that do not yet belong to me.

Beyond the door, everything is new.

New people! And I wish I too could have a new soul, appearing to them in the purity and ignorance of my own life…

And slowly, stealthily, I open the door to enter the new world that lies behind it, to meet the men and women whose voices grow clearer, knowing I have nothing to offer them but my worn hands, my tired body, my used and aimless soul.

IV

I cautiously entered the adjacent room, and later I might laugh at my painfully made decision not to reveal myself easily to those I was walking toward.

Because the first human being I encountered, sitting on a sofa before me, as if waiting for me, was Maria Santa.

She raised her eyes at the sound of my footsteps and looked at me at first with strange shyness, but soon her green, vague gaze—mysteriously searching—passed right through me, denying my presence, erasing me completely.

She stared at the wall behind me, and, feeling the absolute isolation into which I was cast—and which I understood to be invincible—I left without speaking a word to her.

Later, I introduced myself as if I hadn’t seen her yet, and we spoke with the ordinary cordiality of rural hospitality.

But her scattered, absent smile, her ceremonious voice, which seemed to be the voice of the things around her, could not leave me with any illusions about the persistence of the invisible wall that had risen between us that morning, preventing us from recognizing one another.

V

And so I spent a long time without knowing whether she was now a widow, single, or even married.

One day, when I surprised her sitting on the floor, her dress spread around her, holding on her lap an old button box with many small inner compartments, each with its own lid, made of modestly inlaid wood and mother-of-pearl forming fantastically shaped flowers, I saw in her hands two rings, simple and of an old-fashioned design.

I asked her if they were hers.

She looked at me first with the natural suspicion of women from the backlands toward strangers who ask questions, and said, without the slightest inflection in her somewhat hoarse voice:

— I don’t know… I’ve had them for so long that I don’t remember if they’re mine or if they belonged to my mother.

— There’s nothing engraved on them — she murmured next, and looked again at length, pensively, at the two rings that fit together and were made of red, barbaric gold.

I realized her attention was far from everything around us, and some old, dull, monotonous, distant dream had taken hold of her, in a strange inner hypnosis.

VI

The mountains now rush past outside, one after the other, hostile and spectral, devoid of new desires to humanize them, already forgetful of the ancient legendary men who once populated and dominated them.

On their powerful backs they carry the small, decaying towns like a degrading and tenacious disease that has forever nested in their folds. Unable to kill them entirely or tear them away and be rid of them, the mountains resign themselves and conceal them with their dark, dense vegetation, which serves as a covering, preserving their imperial dream of iron and gold.

VII

Suddenly, the vivid glance that Maria Santa shot at me, sharp and piercing through her half-closed eyelids, startled me.

I regained my attention, which had been lulled by the stillness that enveloped her completely, so “habitual,” so in tune with the enormous old house.

Its gigantic, roughly built rooms were furnished with a few very large, rosewood pieces—rigid and coarse—giving the impression that Maria’s grandparents, their former owners, had lived like ghosts, standing before life, only sitting or reclining when ill, to die.

It was a house built in accordance with the surrounding mountainscape, not meant to serve as a setting or shelter for the men who had built it with their own hands.

Everything remained in the same places, for many, many years, and it wasn’t love for the dead, nor longing for them, that kept their memories eternally in the same position.

This became clear when Maria would say, in a flat, even voice:

— They were my mother’s… they belonged to my grandfather… they were bought for my parents’ wedding… they’ve all died…

No one knows why, but no one could give anything a different place, and everything had become immobile around her, indefinitely prolonging the hesitant, obscure, indifferent lives of those who had shaped and arranged it—and to whom she was a distracted foreigner, who had simply remained among them.

VIII

The button box slipped from her lap, and, smiling at the various pieces scattered across the rough wooden floor, made of wide planks, Maria Santa told me it had been brought from Rio de Janeiro by her godfather as a gift.

The lid of the larger box, which held the others, fell at my feet.

I bent down and, out of instinctive curiosity, read the stamp of the store that had sold it.

It was from Ouro Preto.

I placed it back on Maria’s lap without saying anything, and she, who had seen me reading the stamp, did not explain the contradiction between her statement and what was written there.

A violent anger rose to my head. But, faced with the calm green light of her eyes, I grew quiet.

And the uneasiness and intolerable sense of insecurity that afflict me when I question someone made me remain silent.

IX

Many times I had asked Maria about her past, and she would respond with apparent distraction, vaguely, as if referring to someone very far away. Or else, animated and smiling, she would give me endless details about things unrelated to what I had asked, and which did not interest me at all.

Thus, the desperate enchantment I felt growing around me—and in which I felt myself dissolving—kept me from immediately grasping the full extent and importance of the role that Aunt Emiliana would later play in my life.

Had I known the reason for her presence, that fateful spell, which would become yet another shackle, would not have taken hold of me so completely as to turn into a premature remorse, a bitter foreseeing of many things that would only ever happen within my spirit.

X

Aunt Emiliana had come from very far away.

As soon as the news of her niece’s growing sanctity reached her—traveling through the mountainous backlands, across those valleys of silence and mystery—the strange legend woven around her illness and the crimes that preceded it, the old lady set out on her journey.

After a long trip, she appeared suddenly, as if to fulfill a new and imperious destiny.

She entered Maria Santa’s house with the authority she retained ever since, as though she already knew every corner of it and the habits of its inhabitants.

Without the slightest display of emotion, head held high, she crossed herself before the images hanging in the rooms, and, turning to Maria—whom her instinct had already marked as the predestined one—she merely touched her shoulders in a cold greeting.

The nervous rigidity of her body, the lifeless gaze, her movements and gestures—her entire demeanor—had a purpose, a clear and powerful meaning we did not yet understand.

XI

When they tried to lift the small black leather trunk, with brass studs forming patterns and words, she made a distressed gesture with her hands (the first that didn’t seem calculated and deliberate), and the Black maid, who had already lifted it with ease, set it back on the floor with infinite care, as if under Aunt Emiliana’s intense gaze it had become immensely heavy.

That day, Maria Santa was perfectly well.

With a liveliness I had never seen in her, she went to greet her relative. She also tried to help carry the trunk, no doubt deceived by the silent little scene that had just unfolded before us—the maid’s gesture had been so expressive.

Aunt Emiliana remained silent and motionless in the face of Maria’s initiative and allowed both her and the maid to carry the small baggage.

She followed the two of them, casting furtive glances from side to side.

When she saw all the belongings she had brought placed in the room assigned to her, she suddenly turned to her niece and, with a manner at once solemn and timid, as if before the Virgin’s altar, knelt and kissed her hands, saying with a voice choked by strange emotion:

— Let us pray, Maria, for I want to thank the Divine Creator for His protection over this house.

And there, kneeling, she began to murmur some very long prayers that seemed to me little used.

I had never heard them, despite their familiar form.

The two Black maids—Maria’s and the one Aunt Emiliana had brought, who had not yet spoken to each other—leaned against the doorframes with the casualness of country servants. They, too, knelt and, without understanding what was happening, simply placed their hands across their chests and repeated softly, looking at Maria Santa with new fear:

— Pray for us, pray for us…

XII

From that moment on, and always, Aunt Emiliana maintained the same reverent and mysterious attitude before her niece whenever strangers or the household staff were present.

And soon, the whole town was whispering that Maria truly was a saint, and the name took hold and stayed with her until the end.

XIII

The organic intoxication of joy and unexpected forgetfulness brought to me by Aunt Emiliana’s arrival and her ideas vanished one day, suddenly, when I was told that the judge was in the room, waiting for us, as he wished to speak with Maria Santa and me, without the presence of the old lady.

He was one of the people who, to me, represented the entire past of remorse and dark thoughts, and the news of his recent departure had been like the announcement of a coming dawn in the night forming in my spirit, darkened by suspicions and secret fears.

I went to the room where he awaited us, with a question repeating a thousand times in my head, insistent, nerve-wracking.

I decided to question Maria Santa stubbornly, until she gave me a clear answer.

Absorbed in my worry, I entered, greeted the old gentleman, and sat down, my attention dulled, circling around the same question, waiting for the unwelcome visitor—who had recently frightened me—to leave.

In a moment of impatience, I took in my surroundings, suddenly falling back into reality.

The judge was telling Maria Santa about his role in Saldanha da Gama’s revolt, and that magnificent adventure, contrasting with the petty misery of other Republican movements, was becoming, in his telling, a long and muddled ramble.

He must have been repeating his story for the thousandth time, because he spoke with firmness, carefully emphasizing his words, as if, after wandering and losing himself in many unknown and uncertain paths, he had finally entered a wide and well-trodden road—one he himself had walked many times.

On his round, shiny forehead, tiny beads of sweat began to form, remaining still for a moment, then suddenly vanishing, as if reabsorbed by his porous skin.

XIV

Outside, the sun scorched the iron-paved street, and the windows were edged with threads of shining gold.

As always, their thick shutters of old wood were tightly closed, in accordance with Maria Santa’s orders. The mansion was lit only by the heart-shaped or diamond-shaped cutouts, roughly carved high into the wood, and by the immense skylight, made of large tiles, over the corridor that divided the house into two nearly independent parts.

What heat!

Everything blurred in the searing air, like in a daze, and in my mind, thoughts joined together—dense, heavy, as if too lazy to fully form, too entangled to separate.

Instead of standing out, they fell limp, inert, tangled.

I could have sworn a beetle was flying through the room, trying to escape, because its monotonous buzzing echoed in my head…

But suddenly the noise swelled, becoming loud, menacing, frightening, and I had the sudden sensation of a sharp fall, waking with a jolt at the silence that fell in the room for a second.

The judge continued speaking, and the sound of his voice, prolonging the buzzing that filled my ears, gave me, soon after, a sense of unreality, of something fantastical.

Maria Santa’s face and eyes, like those of a resting cat, gradually lost their brightness, completing the strange sensation I was feeling.

XV

Saldanha da Gama, until June 15th, the day of the revolt, had decided nothing, and it was still uncertain whether he would be the leader.

And I followed, seeing it inside me, the endless series of visits to one person and another, the conversations and hesitations, the walks through the streets, the comments—everything so vividly that I could clearly see those solemn, slightly ridiculous men in white trousers, frock coats, high rubber collars, and silk top hats, solemnly strolling through the city, sweating miserably.

But—was it in June? And now we’re in October…

Surely they wouldn’t have been so sweaty, nor worn rubber collars, I thought, silently laughing.

(Saldanha da Gama, Minister of the Navy, had broken with Floriano Peixoto, the dictator.)

The conspirators sought out the admiral and urged him to assume leadership of the movement that was quietly forming against the marshal’s grim tyranny.

The judge’s monotonous voice was lost in the buzzing of the tireless beetle, which must have been trying to escape through the panes of the sash windows.

The heat had reached its peak, and the room seemed to vibrate.

XVI

Only then did the portraits hanging from the walls come into view, suspended by long red cords, attached to hooks deeply embedded in the cornice.

In the largest of them, Dona Maria Rosa, in a pleated black dress with a tight bodice and a very low square neckline framing her yellow, wrinkled neck, her mouth tightly closed like the scar of a knife wound, appeared eternally watchful, with her sideways, scrutinizing gaze.

Her head tilted forward, in an effort to hear well, not to miss a single word or any hidden intent in the speaker’s voice.

And her image, roughly framed, was the judge’s only attentive listener.

Only that striking, dry, and severe figure, painted with naïve precision, enclosed in poor gold trim, seemed to pay attention, in her insatiable curiosity, to the advice and doubts of the hesitant admiral.

From the portrait, my eyes fell to Maria Santa, and I then noticed the strange resemblance between the grandmother and the granddaughter.

Though their features were so different, there was, nevertheless, a visible but inexplicable concordance between them.

Dona Maria Rosa had been a cruel, relentless woman of strange temperament.

And I saw, appearing on Maria Santa’s pale face, as her mouth folded into a crease, the life that was missing from the painting.

The fixity of her pupils, glittering in the shadow of her brow arches, became disturbing, intolerable—even to me, though I wasn’t in the path of her deadly gaze.

I felt the irresistible fascination of that icy look of anger, descending like a razor-sharp steel foil onto the judge’s face.

Suddenly, as if stunned, he lost his composure, his confident calm, and began to stammer, spacing out his phrases.

— The admiral… at the last moment… no one had any hope left… and when he said… placing his hands on the back of a chair…

I watched his poor trembling eyelids, his soft wrinkles, his sticky mouth whose lips moved with difficulty, opening more on one side than the other, as if trying to spare the words.

At last, gradually, he stopped and looked at Maria Santa with anguished expectation.

Instinctively, I turned to her. Her face had suddenly turned red, and her eyes, deeper and deeper, shone wildly, metallic.

She slowly turned them away from the judge, and our eyes followed the path of hers to a heavy brass candlestick, resting on an old orelha-de-onça sideboard, adorned with stained mirrors, which stood behind the judge’s chair.

XVII

I felt a chill run through my body, as if I saw her drawing a dagger from the folds of her dress, and I realized the poor man had felt the same sense of danger.

He remained still and silent for a moment, then straightened up in his chair—he had turned to look at the threatening candlestick—and rose hastily, stammering a few incomprehensible words.

He held out his hand to us, not noticing that he was also extending his old cane, full of knobs, with very large silver initials topped by the emblem of justice.

At the door, as if the nearness of the sunlit street, gleaming with light, restored his calm, he turned, now smiling, and said:

— You already know that the admiral accepted and… the rest. Goodbye.

As he walked away, he called to us from the street:

— I’ll come back and clarify many things!

XVIII

Maria Santa heard those words standing in the doorway, beside me.

Her head was lowered, but when she raised her face, I saw she was pale, with tightly pressed lips. She shut the door leaf impatiently, brutally cutting off the view of the city, which had briefly been framed between the jambs in powerful contrasts.

Garishly colored wattle-and-daub houses stood beside blindingly white walls, climbing chaotically up the steep street toward the jail building—massive, bloated, high above, covered in mysterious marks traced on its old walls by children, time, and humidity.

It looked like the rotting skull of a skeleton buried there many years ago, squatting, in the style of the Indians, at the top of the hill, gradually uncovered by rain and floodwaters.

I had already pointed out this resemblance to Maria Santa, made even more striking by the building’s two enormous, barred windows that stared at us from afar, with hostility.

When it rained, the waters quickly formed a stream that flowed around its base, made of irregular stones like large, decayed teeth, nearly detaching from the giant jaw…

— The skull is drooling — I would say, looking through the windows fogged by rain — and its drool reaches all the way here, to the doorstep.

Maria Santa looked at me in silence, and after a brief flicker in her gaze, I saw, once again, the layers of her soul close one by one.

My allusion to the last crime had been too direct…

First, her eyes dimmed; then her mouth, which slackened gradually, sagging at the corners—impersonal, impenetrable; finally, her hands, which froze in a bizarre gesture.

XIX

Crime? Its memory had faded in me, like a sound growing distant.

Many times, I asked myself in surprise, not knowing how to answer my own questions.

Surely no one would remember anything anymore…

But something always lingered in my life, and the contradictory figure of Nico Horta lived latently at my side, hiding in the winding passages of my memory, surrounding and confusing me—disguised as the idea of death, of suicide, or in vague, mysterious premonitions.

And his warm, dense breath had often brushed my face in the silence of restless nights…

Now, the judge’s final words resounded in my ears, penetrating my mind and engraving themselves there, carved in by those short, hairy hands.

(I’ll come back and clarify many things!)

Are they the same “things” that torment us? I asked my reflection the next day, staring into the old mirror in the bedroom. And I immediately resolved to question Maria Santa.

I went looking for her, hurrying through the empty, echoing rooms.

XX

I found her lying in the hammock, in the garden, as motionless as everything around her.

The shadow of the tree where the hammock was tied—its iron hook deeply embedded in its trunk—was like a jaguar’s hide spread on the ground, dappled with golden patches of sunlight trembling as they filtered through the leaves.

The house, the tree, the other plants on the sloping land we called a garden, even the river itself, and beyond the mud-brick walls covered with large blackened tiles, the entire city still slept, suffocated by the morning heat.

I sat on the ground beside her and also remained still, overtaken by the drowsy, irresistible heaviness of that hour.

Next to the curve formed by Maria Santa’s body in the hammock, there was a strange bulge, as if an oblong box were pressed between her arms and the fabric.

I reached out and realized it was my guitar, which I had left there, and which I had never been able to play, since Maria Santa, ever since her first episode, refused to hear any sounds beyond the usual ones.

I asked her to give me the guitar, and I saw her begin to move to hand it over—but suddenly, her fingers curled, turning her hands into trembling claws, and her face distorted horribly.

I waited in silence and looked away, because the anguish I saw in her eyes, the immeasurable desire to hide what was happening in her soul, was so painful and so clear that I felt it my duty to pretend I had noticed nothing.

Soon after, I heard her softly sobbing, her head buried in the long, fringed ruffles of the hammock.

A painful curiosity jolted my nerves, and without thinking, as if some demon spoke through me, I repeated aloud and harshly the question that had haunted me since the evening before, now slightly shaped by new reflections:

— Does the judge really know something?

XXI

I still heard her sobs for a few moments, but little by little, they faded, and Maria Santa calmed down.

At last, I could see her face—very pale, but, as always, indifferent, without even a trace of the tears she should have shed abundantly.

Her features had the characteristic look of the women from the mountains: very prominent cheekbones, a straight mouth, slanted eyes—accentuated by her intensely black hair—that gave her a vague resemblance to Mongolian women.

This resemblance became striking when she kept her eyelids lowered.

But her unmistakable, haunting green gaze—illuminating with its mysterious light the dark arches of her brows, as though scorched by it—immediately revealed her mixed origin, refined through the miseries and prides of adventurous men, tellers of fantastic tales, and of silent, suffering women who followed their husbands and lovers through the endless forests, exposed to fevers, beasts, and serpents of the indecipherable, threatening, and boundless backlands, driven by the single ambition for a resting place where they might, for a few days, live the illusory life of home and family, always trailing behind men fevered by the pursuit of gold and diamonds.

The whole town, in its long eighty-year decline—eight centuries in young America—was nothing more than one of those resting places, perched on ironstone hills, enormous and massive lightning rods.

Maria Santa sat up in the hammock and adjusted the ruffles of her dress with studied meticulousness.

She seemed naively bewildered, and soon her lips tightened, as if holding back a smile.

— Aunt Emiliana — she began — back then…

— Don’t speak to me of your Aunt Emiliana — I interrupted harshly. — She wasn’t in town back then!…

XXII

— I don’t know why you worry so much about these things — she said lazily, after a long pause, suppressing the smile that had risen to her lips — I’ve already forgotten everything…

And she fixed her large, distant eyes on me, and under their green light, I felt myself freeze, realizing we were merely two people who had traveled side by side, very close to each other, but without ever seeing one another, and who, suddenly, shaken by an external jolt, glance at each other with astonishment—coldly and with hostility—without a single thought in common, united only for a moment by the difficulty that had arisen.

Once it passed, they continue walking together, but now with the secret certainty that they are strangers, and perhaps enemies.

— I haven’t forgotten God — I murmured bitterly, after a slow and useless reflection — and even though I feel that the words of those who come close to me narrow and fade the divine image, making its idea ever more distant—even though I’ve fought, in my weakness, to be loyal to myself and to the truth—I haven’t managed to find enough pride to sustain me, and this “everything” you’ve forgotten so quickly and so easily weighs upon me, suffocating any future joy, any new beginning…

“There, in the big city where I was, the past should have ceased fleeing, and, immobilized like that, it only made me feel its return drawing near.

“I had moments of peaceful unconsciousness… — I went on, as if dreaming, not knowing exactly what I was saying — but later, like the bothersome flight of a fly, always ready to land, something reappeared in my life, and soon that nuisance, instead of weakening, grew and returned more and more often.

“What strange work seemed to be completing itself within me, beyond my will!

“It was the slow, progressive, irresistible advance of a hidden reasoning that surfaced now and then, without my being able to stifle it. The invisible evil, continuing its relentless work, sent ever-closer warning signs, in unexpected and painful sensations of unease and distrust.

“Quickly, the small anguish would leave, but it wouldn’t take long to return, pulsing, reviving with rage the same long, scattered past.

“The pain of having lived it, the unsatisfied urge to tear it from my flesh, returned in a single day to the place abandoned beside my poor bed, where I had lain peacefully for a few years…

“From afar, the facts connected and became clear, revealing the hidden thread that linked them, and I became convinced that I had not only deceived everyone—but above all, myself, in the calm of someone who, deliberately, had failed to understand his own guilt…”

XXIII

— It’s true — said Maria Santa.

And I woke as if from a nightmare and realized that I must have recited what I’d said like in a play, unconsciously adopting the intonations and conventional gestures of actors.

Maria Santa, abstracted and still holding her faint smile, had interrupted me with slight impatience, and now took on the discreet, awkward attitude of someone who wants and doesn’t want, at the same time, for you to notice that they find you laughable.

— I know you’ve suffered a lot — she continued, mimicking my same gestures and adopting my same tone of voice — I know you’ve suffered, and that “the dark mystery of suffering and moral evil” that you’ve spoken to me about so many times…

She stopped speaking and closed her eyes, blushing, as if reliving a shameful memory, and her voice suddenly became sincere and trembling when she murmured, “I feel sorry for us…”

Then, opening her eyes again, she said to me, with calm disdain:

— But you went on — and repeated — you went on…

XXIV

— Do you want me to tell you the truth? — she asked, now with her usual firm and hoarse tone.

I understood she was armed and ready to lie — coldly, deliberately — and I felt a sudden anger cloud my mind, before the humiliation of the useless and perhaps insincere confession into which I had let myself be drawn.

— The judge knows everything! — I shouted hatefully.

Maria fell silent and seemed to reflect, and at that moment, as if she had heard her name, as if someone had called her, Aunt Emiliana cautiously descended the steps of the staircase and came over, with her stool hidden in the folds of her skirt, to the shade where we were and sat down with the greatest calm.

She pulled from her pocket a piece of cardboard cut in the shape of a star, onto which she had previously pasted an image of Saint Peter, and, holding up a thick ball of scarlet thread, began winding it around the star’s points, thus making a laborious and endless frame for the little holy picture.

— I’ve been praying my litanies, and now I’m going to rest a little — she explained.

“What were you talking about?”

I could swear she had been spying on us and secretly listening to our conversation. But surely that was an absurd suspicion.

How could she hear what we were saying, if she was inside the house and we were in the middle of the dismantled garden, with no plants to hide someone, and surrounded by tall stone walls?

But those tiny eyes, which seemed to peer out from deep within the little flesh and bone of her thin, dry face, evoked the idea of spying and betrayal.

— What were you talking about — she repeated with affected suspicion — what secret is that? — and made a scoffing sound of contempt.

— The judge brought a receipt from the former solicitor for me to sign — Maria Santa answered calmly — but I didn’t want to because I still don’t know the reason for the request, why he wants that paper. I explained carefully to the judge that I couldn’t make that decision without first consulting a lawyer — and especially you.

And I watched in astonishment as Maria pulled a paper from her bodice, one I didn’t recognize, and recounted many things she had done and said, which I had neither seen nor heard, despite my eyes having been wide open and my ears attentive.

Aunt Emiliana set aside her complicated and useless craft, carefully took from her skirt pocket a pair of silver-rimmed glasses, always kept in a matching silver case, and examined the paper at length.

— You need to be very sure of what you’re signing — she said through clenched teeth — that man is certainly trying to deceive you, and it’s no coincidence that he’s in a hurry to get away with a document like this!

— But the judge told me I should sign it… — Maria observed, suddenly taking on an interested air, like someone comparing two opposing opinions to determine which is best.

— The judge wouldn’t advise you to do that if he had religion! He doesn’t go to church and doesn’t give alms to anyone.

— You mustn’t sign anything — Aunt Emiliana went on, in a peremptory tone, turning red with indignation. — Let the judge go away, and everything will stay the same.

She stopped speaking for a moment.

Then she took on her usual desolate expression, like someone forced to constantly repeat irritating things before the incomprehension of those around them, and added:

— Besides, you shouldn’t have gone to the room… it’s not proper for you to talk with just anyone. What goes on in this house already is more than I approve of… and more than Our Lord would wish.

And she resumed wrapping the red thread slowly around the image of Saint Peter, her measured movements sharply contrasting with the many tics that had appeared on her face, and with the rapid motion of her lips, which moved quickly, as if reciting long-memorized prayers.

The glasses, pushed up onto her forehead, reflected flashes of light — like a beacon indicating dangerous rocks — with each rhythmic nod of her head, back and forth, following the direction of the thread.

The sun was softening, and behind the walls, the little town was waking from its midday nap.

XXV

Maria Santa had not left the house in many years, and perhaps many people thought her bedridden, for not only were the windows of the large building never opened, but the Black maids told their neighbors, as they left mass, that she spent entire days shut in her room, receiving her meals at the door on a silver tray.

And the whole little town began to look with instinctive respect at the enormous façade of the house, from which so many funerals had departed—so often discussed and commented upon—and it seemed surrounded by tombs itself, for among the sharp stones of the street pavement, the slabs surrounding it gleamed white like large gravestones, with a sepulchral appearance.

Aunt Emiliana had brought a new and mysterious life to the dormant house, which soon became the intimate center of the town.

Every day, she appeared at the low window at the back of the house, which extended into a grassy lane ending in the open valley of the nearby river, and at first the few passersby would stop to talk with her.

When she spoke, she made a strange motion with her mouth, as if trying to hold a loose denture in place with her lips, like people unaccustomed to a recently fitted device.

But she had no teeth at all, and one could sometimes see her very white, completely bare gums.

And the little low window in the back, in its empty valley, quickly became the meeting point for the old, the sick, and all the unhappy people of the town and its surroundings.

Aunt Emiliana advised them and received them, never showing the slightest sign of boredom or fatigue, asking only, with infinite patience and care, as a reward for her help and remedies, that they pray for Maria and for the perfect fulfillment of the Mission she had received.

Huddled on her stool, she looked deathly pale.

But her anger passed quickly, and with weariness and an indescribable sadness, she raised a finger and said:

— It’s your thoughts that aren’t Christian, my child, and they even harm those who hear them, and you mustn’t think or speak such things…

Then, as if speaking to herself:

— Especially out loud…

And turning to me, with infinite disdain, she added, moving her dry lips slightly:

— Fortunately, no one hears us… But you must never repeat what you said; I must always warn, and one day, when I’m no longer here…

XXVI

I watched her now, with her steady movements, back and forth, winding the thread around the holy image.

I vaguely remembered my old readings, filled with witches and sorceresses from distant lands.

She measured the movements of her arms with admirable precision and gestured only as needed, causing a multitude of gold and silver bangles, worn around her wrists, to jingle.

— Manuel Tropeiro should arrive today with the orders I placed — she remarked after a long silence — and I’m not sure what I should do… Perhaps it’s best to consult someone who can help and advise me — she added with feigned humility, looking at me.

— Send for Father Olímpio — murmured Maria Santa timidly, as if afraid of appearing too interested, awakening from her usual dreamlike state.

— No! — replied Aunt Emiliana sharply, and her impassive face turned gray, two cruel wrinkles suddenly hollowing out the corners of her mouth.

— And why not Father Olímpio? — I asked, with calculated impertinence, trying to revive the conversation abruptly cut off by that harsh refusal. But the old lady gave me a poisonous look and lowered her head with a coldness even more deliberate than my imprudence.

— Father Olímpio is a poor man — said Maria Santa in a half-voice, looking at no one, as if telling herself an indifferent story that had happened long ago, with people long dead — and he’s a poor priest too… He’s not virtuous, he’s like Jesus… but the people here don’t know what that means and can’t understand how someone can be unhappy without anything ever happening in their own life. He suffers from other people’s remorse, without knowing for what or why he lives…

Aunt Emiliana laughed, and I looked at her with alarm, for it sounded to me like the rattle of a snake.

XXVII

I watched her mockingly, studying with insolence her melancholy, reserved, and very humble demeanor.

But she soon adjusted herself on the stool and, resuming her usual authoritarian and harsh manner, continued, glancing sideways at me:

— I don’t want anyone, no one, to receive my deliveries but me, myself. You must give orders to that effect immediately. It’s essential — and she stood up.

“Father Olímpio is a child of the devil. God forgive me,” she added as she passed by me, and went inside, leaving behind a faint scent of incense, vetiver, and other aromatic herbs.

— Aunt Emiliana goes into the drawer — I said, repeating an old joke, because it seemed to me the poor lady didn’t go to bed at night like everyone else, but was stored away by some wicked fairy in the bottom drawer of her swollen dresser, with little bags of camphor and herbs all around her.

Because her room was furnished with one of those enormous chests, the kind that backcountry churches use to store their sacred objects and vestments like a vault.

— I’m curious to know what’s inside those boxes.

— What boxes? — asked Maria Santa, with her head once again hidden in the hammock’s frills.

— Manuel Tropeiro already unloaded Aunt Emiliana’s famous deliveries, and they’re two very large pine crates, long, and they seem full of straw. They’re very heavy, must have something breakable inside. Manuel Tropeiro unloaded the ox cart in the dark, during the night, with men he brought from another town, and they went back immediately.

Maria had pulled her head from the hammock’s frills, and, raising her face, listened to me with visible annoyance, like a sick person hearing a description of the knives and lancets that will torture them.

— The men were paid and dismissed the same day, so no one knows anything arrived here — I insisted. — But the interesting thing is, Aunt Emiliana has no idea I was at my bedroom window and saw everything that happened in the courtyard.

— She wants to deceive me — I went on, growing bolder — but I know very well that…

— She doesn’t want to deceive anyone — Maria Santa interrupted me abruptly, and the impatience agitating her made her voice tremble — no one wants to deceive anyone… The judge brought the paper for me to sign, and I refused!

— I don’t doubt it — I said, smiling despite myself — but I know perfectly well that Aunt Emiliana detests me, and doesn’t want me to know anything that goes on in this house.

XXVIII

One day our eyes met while we were in one of the inner rooms. And we felt they were betraying us, simultaneously.

— But nothing happens here! — exclaimed Maria Santa, with feverish impatience. — And I don’t want to know about the lies that surround me, or have anyone come tell me about them!

There was something strange in the growing disturbance of her voice and in her eyes, which now fearfully avoided mine, while I followed her, keeping pace with the mechanical rhythm of her long, slightly dragging steps — for she was oblivious to her surroundings — removing from their places the glass shade, the candlesticks, and the mother-of-pearl flowers, which never left the sideboards.

We walked like this for a while, until her agitation suddenly calmed, and, with a faint smile, she stopped in front of me, enveloping me with the emanation of her body and clothes, which formed an exquisitely mystical scent:

— You hate Aunt Emiliana and you want…

And she drew very close to me, almost brushing me with her monastic dress, and added in a whisper, full of mystery:

— I know what it is, but not everyone receives the Grace.

I stared at her in astonishment, and only then, like a revelation, noticed that she had changed the hairstyle she had worn for so many years — hair pulled tightly back, without a wave, without a parting to soften its harsh simplicity.

Now her face appeared framed by two very smooth, black bands, like those in popular lithographic images of the “Madonna,” of a touching banality. But in Maria, the contrast between her dusky, pale skin, her very green, inwardly lit eyes, and the blackness of her hair falling heavily at the nape in a single large bow, erased any banal or vulgar impression one might have had.

Maria Santa was visibly disturbed under my gaze, my questioning look, and instinctively brought her hands to her head, while a wave of hot blood flushed her face with intense redness.

And again she grew impatient, waving her hands wildly and tightening her lips in a sharp grimace.

— Demon! — she murmured without turning to me, and after a while, moving her lips quickly as if praying, she withdrew in silence.

XXIX

We went some time without exchanging a word, until one day I found her standing in front of the dresser, and she pointed out to me, with a gesture, what she was so absorbed in looking at.

She was staring at a large oblong case with a glass lid, framed in cabiúna and peroba wood, in a bold and simple design, forming a piece of heavy and ostentatious bad taste.

Through the glass, one could see creatures with golden reflections, some red like embers, with intricately detailed shells carved with infinite patience. Others, green and shaped like antique jewels, seemed to slumber inside, such was the gentle and naive naturalness with which they had been arranged.

I looked closely and spotted in one corner, as if lurking there, pinned to the backdrop made of huge, glued-together orelha-de-pau wood slices, a sort of enormous beetle, spider, or scorpion of unusual size—evoking all three at once, and from each one, with terrifying simplicity, taking the most disturbing features.

Maria Santa, following her irresistible habit, immediately told me the story of the case:

— It was made by the Marchioness of Pantanal, when she came to her Meireles estate after her husband died… She gave it to my grandmother, who placed it there against the wall many years ago. Look at the mark its weight left in the plaster.

As Maria spoke, I observed the dead little creatures, arranged without symmetry, without the slightest concern for artistry, and as I followed them with my eyes, I relived the anguish of that distracted hand pinning here and there, seemingly at random, the golden and curly “little lambs,” the hummingbird with the fiery head, another bronze-colored one, and higher up, among shells and faded butterflies, all in vivid colors, the corrupião, the familiar bird, the domestic companion of the old ladies, which would learn their whistling and imitate them lovingly.

Surely that display had been the companion and distraction of the marchioness in her long, empty years that led her to understand the emptiness of the hereafter. In her endless hours of solitary anguish, it must have helped her escape the dark, silent temptation that would suddenly approach, like the wingbeat of a nocturnal bird.

A long time passed before Maria Santa, without looking at me and smiling faintly, said in a low voice:

— This one here is the sawyer — and she pointed to the monster, its back mottled like that of a venomous snake. — It’s capable of cutting through a thick branch in no time.

And as she said this, she turned to me with her smile:

— But you really liked my display! We’ve been here so long!

XXX

Then, with concern, she grabbed my arm and asked:

— But what’s wrong? It looks like you’ve got tears in your eyes…

— It’s a silly thing, which you surely wouldn’t understand, Maria Santa — I said, smiling, even as I felt my eyes wet. — I’m remembering the irremediable melancholy of that marchioness, losing her husband at the height of his prominence in the Empire, in the full splendor of the bourgeois age, and withdrawing to a remote estate, where she must have made this horrible decoration, managing, with a heroism I cannot grasp, to ward off dark, restless thoughts through forty sorrowful years.

— I don’t believe in that kind of incurable sadness, which seems to me also without cause — Maria replied, now with unusual attentiveness, looking curiously into my eyes. — I don’t know if I told you that, as a child, I used to go into despair and pace around the house like a jaguar in a cage (yes, that’s how I felt), and I would cry out to myself, in a persistent and anguished question: what do I do? what do I do?

— Well, look — she continued, tightening her lips in a shy smile — I’m still that way today, but I’ve never found anyone who understood me, who grasped my madness, which has become a prison for me, where I struggle alone, ever more alone, and I’m afraid of myself. All the women I’ve known have never been troubled by a lack of purpose, by this general, absolute lack I vaguely feel, which makes me think and say things that shock me and seem spoken by someone else. I saw that same shock on the faces of those to whom I tried to explain that I hadn’t yet found — and still haven’t — a meaning, a use, a definition for myself.

“Since I met you, I understand better what afflicts me, and it seems to me that our eyes — mine and yours — descend into me, searching together for the truth. And instead of feeling comforted, I feel even more distant from my own conscience.

“I don’t even know how to explain it… Aunt Emiliana says it’s a sin, a worldly vanity, this concern I have with studying myself, with seeking explanations for my ‘madness,’ but she gets nervous and impatient when I speak this way, involuntarily, and once she screamed — and Maria Santa came closer to me in a confidential tone — that if I didn’t stop talking like that, she would kill herself…

“But I’m telling you things that don’t matter… My point was only to explain that I don’t feel the anguish you say is stored in that case of dried little creatures, for seventy years. The Marchioness of Pantanal would probably look at me with the same astonished eyes as the other women, if I asked her why she made that display, and how she managed to control herself so completely. But, God help me, I promised Aunt Emiliana I would never talk like this again, and I’m afraid…”

She fell silent and seemed to wait for me to urge her to go on. Faced with my silence, she had a moment of abandonment, of weariness, of cowardice — who knows? — and she whispered softly:

— She promised to reveal, in a few days, what my Mission is.

XXXI

I looked at Maria Santa with admiration. She had never told me so much, and that moment of closeness and confession also frightened me and made me want to flee far away and never see her again, nor her remorse.

Lately, growing ever more somber, she always avoided even lightly touching on the subjects she knew interested me relentlessly.

But all her animation from earlier had vanished.

Her gaze became fixed, her face serious, impassive.

She too was fleeing, terrified. She seemed far away, as if her spirit had suddenly withdrawn, leaving only her motionless body near me.

Many times I had caught this strange behavior in Maria Santa, who usually came back to herself in a few minutes, as if nothing had happened.

But this time it wasn’t like that, and something was definitely about to happen — something I had been expecting for so long. At last, I felt the anguished shiver I had so desired, and which would mark that moment in my life, and I too stood motionless before her, staring anxiously into her dull eyes, waiting. I stayed like that for a long time, until suddenly, without noticing the transition, I felt Maria clutching my arm convulsively, and saying with anger, with pain, in an outburst that — I don’t know why — seemed sacrilegious to me:

— I am not worthy! But I’m not worthy! Now it’s too late! After what happened, it’s too late! It’s too late!

But something called her back, for she soon calmed down and pointed to the door of a room that opened into the inner sitting room where we stood, and said with dry irony:

— You’re watching me? You want to know everything? You want to see the truth? There, behind that door, in that room, is the truth.

And suddenly, she knelt down and kissed the floor without speaking a word, and I couldn’t tell whether her movement was automatic or inspired by some religious intention. On the opposite side, the image of Our Lady of Victories, from above, dominated an entire wall of the room, but it was before the door she had pointed to that Maria prostrated herself.

Then she stood up calmly, her face tranquil, and went out into the garden, carefully closing the half-door behind her.

I remained in the same position for a long time, and the thoughts of every kind that assaulted me weren’t enough to silence the struggle between curiosity and the shame of going further, both of which overwhelmed me. Finally, with a sudden gesture, and feeling all the blood rush to my head, I flung the door wide open…

XXXII

At first, I saw nothing. It was the same room as always, with its very wide and heavy cabiúna bed, a low, empty dresser, and two nightstands.

What secret could those old, weary pieces of furniture be hiding?

I approached the bed and stared at it suspiciously.

The mattresses and pillows, enormous, lightly covered in dust, were in order, the fabric faded by time. But little by little, before my eyes widened by concentration, the flowers — a distant red — began to move, growing and spreading, now clustering into strange patterns, now separating in rapid flight and hiding in the deep edges of the headboard.

They looked like dried blood, remnants of a crime…

They looked like tired, pale, weakened blood…

They looked like frothy blood, a memory of ignoble pleasures…

They looked like blood!

I stepped back in disgust and felt, as if my hands had touched the mattress, the hollows left by bodies in sweat, shaken by unspeakable tremors. What maddening moans must have echoed against those wooden cushions, with their dark, vein-like streaks, like the back of the devil’s hand, mingling with the warm odors of lust and brutality.

The entire room now seemed intensely alive, and in my ears I heard a clamor of sinful life, trembling, indecent — the human crime of reproduction — and its overpowering atmosphere, dizzying in its rawness and nudity, swept over me in a bitter wave.

I stepped back further, and feeling the door behind me, I opened it and fled, aimlessly…

XXXIII

The days passed, and when I finally reached the window of my room, I saw, through the trees in the courtyard, Aunt Emiliana’s “consultation.”

This was the direct and living contact of that huge, locked house, sealed like a vault, with the little town that lingered in boredom around it.

A man caught my attention by his more refined clothing, almost city-like, though slightly outdated, suggesting he was one of the “respectable people” of the area or nearby.

I couldn’t resist the sudden desire to know about the life of the outside world, what was happening out there, far from the enveloping silence of my current existence, which was wearing on me, and I signaled to him, trembling a little, to come speak to me.

To my astonishment, he responded with perfect naturalness to my gesture and, without letting the others gathered at Aunt Emiliana’s little window notice, he made his way through the women with shawls on their heads and came toward me, telling me simply that he had known me for many years and understood my situation.

I was so unsettled that I didn’t even reflect on those unusual words.

— You came to consult Dona Emiliana? — I asked ceremoniously, not wanting to use the title “aunt” that I had no right to.

— Oh, it’s to indulge my wife’s whim — he replied with a certain affected nonchalance — but I must admit, I’m very curious to meet Dona Emiliana up close, and especially her niece.

— You don’t know Maria Santa?

— Everyone in town knows her, but only by her reputation for holiness and for the miracles they say she’s already performed. I saw her once, about ten years ago, and at that time everyone was talking about her martyrdom and the crimes of her brutal family. They even said she was going to get married and that her fiancé stayed here, and left this house only to be buried, which caused quite a stir. But you’ve heard all those stories, haven’t you?

— No, I haven’t… — I said, unable to hide my distress.

— Ah! I already suspected that, and just a few days ago I mentioned it at home…

“But how?” I thought. “How can they know about my most intimate thoughts?” And a dull fear made me momentarily forget that it was at my own signal that the man had approached, and it felt like I was undergoing an interrogation — pleading, terrifying — about things I could not possibly confess.

My companion, unconcerned with what was happening inside me, kept speaking as if it were a matter long discussed and beyond resolution.

Looking at Aunt Emiliana, he calmly observed:

— What amazes me is that lady’s patience, tending to all the loafers and vagrants in this town, of whom there are many, and being as wealthy as she is.

— But — I exclaimed, almost in terror — Aunt Emiliana isn’t rich, she’s poor!

— Poor? — and the man laughed silently, shaken by small, discreetly muffled chuckles.

— She came from the Serra do Grão Mogol, where the rivers carry precious stones, and from there she brought two little leather trunks with many yellow studs. They’re full of high-value gems. Not long ago, I overheard my son telling other children that Dona Emiliana didn’t polish the furniture in her house with river sand like everyone else here, but with gold dust from the Serra das Bandeirinhas. They’re not sure whether there’s really gold in the Serra das Bandeirinhas, but that Dona Emiliana has it — that’s beyond doubt.

And he laughed calmly, showing very small teeth, widely spaced. One of them caught the corner of his lip.

— But I know nothing about this! — I exclaimed, unable to hide my agitation.

— Oh! That’s natural… Dona Emiliana doesn’t like it and forbids anyone to talk about it; everyone pretends to ignore her wealth. But it’s not for nothing that every religious fraternity seeks her out, and she’s a supporter or president of them all — when she’s not their honorary patron — but never the treasurer.

“But forgive me, I’ve gone on chatting, and I’m forgetting I have to bring medicine and messages home. If you’ll allow me, I’ll return next Wednesday to talk a bit more.”

He stepped away from my window, bowing slightly and not daring to extend his hand. But he soon returned, as if something important had just occurred to him, and added:

— Thank you for the kindness with which you’ve treated me. I always enjoy meeting people from our capital cities and appreciate discussing matters that this poor local folk can’t grasp.

“And so, we can talk about the very interesting things that are about to happen here… and the people who are arriving… And I may even come back tonight!”

XXXIV

That same night, much later, while walking in the silent and desolate garden, I felt a mysterious presence, and the darkness seemed to be alive, pulsing slowly and revealing its muffled breath.

— It must be from the river, or some dead animal nearby — said Maria Santa, answering the question I had asked inwardly. — But the cold is strange. It passes by us and then comes back, as if it were someone who wanted…

She suddenly fell silent, because at that exact moment the invisible presence passed by us, and the same shiver that made me tremble shook Maria’s shoulders in a sudden jolt.

I murmured, controlling my nerves:

— Let’s go back, if you’re afraid…

— But you’re the one who’s afraid… — she replied, and gave a clear laugh, but immediately froze, rigid, listening, as if waiting for a response to her challenge.

Then she moved away from me, disappearing into the shadow, which had grown thick, dense, as if a block of black mass had fallen over me.

I stayed there for a long time, waiting, spying, anxiously searching all around me, feeling more and more distant, more and more abandoned.

Perhaps I, too, had left — and only my ghost remained there, among the other ghosts that seemed to stealthily haunt the garden.

Then I felt a trembling hand grab my arm, and claw-like nails dug into my flesh. A warm breath reached my mouth, sweet and soft, and I felt my whole body pressed against another body, in a painful and long ecstasy — unfinished and unsatisfied…

When I came to myself, I tried to violently push away the monster that had come from the darkness, but I was alone again, and I returned to the house without trying to explain what had happened to me, and once in my room, I washed my mouth, my face, and my hands, as criminals do, erasing the traces of their crime…

XXXV

Seated in a high-backed chair, which surely once belonged to some convent in the mountains, Maria, very upright, in the stiff posture of someone paying a formal visit, was crying.

With her head held high, calm, she had listened to what I had said before, and, suddenly overcome by bitter memories, she surrendered completely to a mysterious sorrow, and her heart broke.

Tears ran down her face and neck, disappearing into the modest neckline of her dress, and, without sobs, without sighs, without moans, that calm weeping lasted a long time.

She was so absorbed in her pain that surely she no longer saw me beside her, and it wasn’t to me that she murmured:

— I am the last of women…

At first I offered words of comfort, which then turned into pleas, and from her rose a warm breath that reached my face, mingling with the slow scent of her hair.

But her tears only increased in response to the reflection of my nearby sorrow, which I could no longer contain either.

It was clear that she had reached the depth of her misery, feeling stripped of the veils of her modesty.

From the uselessness of words, I instinctively turned to gestures — the irresistible need of great compassion — and my arm encircled her waist… and my lips touched her shoulder, brushing aside the scattered strands of hair…

In a mechanical movement she embraced me, and without a word, without desire, in a poor gesture, I felt fate pass over us again.

Then, stepping away from me, without anger and without dignity, she said with indifference, as if repeating an old thought:

— We are two wretched creatures…

She looked at me then, for a few moments — which felt to me like hours of humiliation and weariness — and then burst into a fit of laughter.

And she began to speak quickly, with the feigned enthusiasm of someone who finds themselves with long-lost friends, with whom one must first test the subject at hand to truly recognize them, despite the joy of reunion.

In slightly disjointed sentences, she told me she felt unhappy and ridiculous.

But she had plans and said I’d see how amusing it would all be, for it was foolish to think, as I secretly did — though I had betrayed it many times in conversation without realizing — that life was only possible in the big cities.

No, that wasn’t true, she said, after all, she was still alive, hadn’t died of boredom or her incurable idleness… And besides, she wanted to learn many things! Starting with English, and then she’d teach me too, because Miss Ann, from the Golden Mining, knew far more than I did and was her friend. Then we would read the poets of that language, whose verses seemed mysteriously beautiful to her, through the incomprehensible words she saw in some of my books.

On rare occasions, we had laughed together, secretly from Aunt Emiliana, I reading aloud, and she listening, from an old edition of Paradise Lost, its leather cover all eaten away in intricate patterns by termites slowly devouring the whole city of Rio de Janeiro.

Each page we turned released a fine black dust that spread over our knees and clung to our hands. When, with my fingers between its stuck-together pages, trying to separate them, I looked at her, Maria Santa would murmur, eyes wide and round with wonder, delightfully naïve:

— It’s a book of magic… And how beautiful must be what you’re saying. Tell me now, everything you read.

Faced with my hesitant translation, stammered and full of impatient interjections, she would gaze at me with a long look, with tireless attention, in respectful and unmoving silence.

When, with sudden suspicion, I would stop abruptly and search in her eyes or mouth for any shadow of irony or pretense, in her unwavering interest she would become animated and immediately, without transition, begin to speak, taking the book from my hands, flipping through it with childlike curiosity, marveling at its ruined illustrations, riddled with countless tiny holes, always with the same undisguised, uncontrollable, smiling desire to guess everything, to know everything.

Then, with natural solemnity, very serious, she would hand me the book, holding the poor tome as ancient pages once presented royal jewels — on velvet cushions — thus giving unexpected gravity to her gesture and reviving, for a moment, the old luxury of the tattered and ornate binding, whose gold details would shine once more, renewed for a moment in that act, like a miraculous spark of life in the atmosphere of death and distrust that surrounded us.

— But now — she went on, laughing again in a muffled burst — but now I’m the one who’s going to translate, and I’m sure I won’t keep saying: “that is,” “that is!”…

And suddenly she grew serious again, returning to her usual distant look and sinking into her invading sadness.

A bitter, fleeting contraction distorted the grave line of her mouth, and she added slowly, hesitantly, her thoughts far away:

— And you will stay here forever… and you won’t ask me any questions…

XXXVI

— I already know you’ve made new acquaintances — Father Olímpio said to me — and surely they’ve told you that Dona Emiliana possesses a treasure — he added with a kind smile. — Our friend never tires of claiming that she, coming from so far away, from the land of precious stones, must have brought her little chests full of cloth pouches, each containing a great fortune in gems wrapped in cotton.

“Even my catechism boys know about it, repeating what their parents say. To them, the poor lady has ended up being a kind of magical being, of great power, and her black skirt and her patchwork jacket must have been sewn by the Moon or by the Saci-Pererê…”

And he laughed, examining me attentively.

— For me — he continued — what attracts me is the aquamarine, so pure, so clear. I’m from Araçuaí — the land that once produced one of those stones, weighing one hundred and eleven kilos!

As he walked away, I began to think about the region of the fabled rivers, whose yellow waters slowly carry gold and diamonds, wrapped in silt and mud, and crash against rocks encrusted with garnets, chrysolites, and beryls.

In the street, between the paving stones, in the black sand left by the rains, the overflowed gold of the rivers sparkled, and I felt the dizzying sensation of living inside a gigantic sealed treasure chest.

XXXVII

The closed windows let in only a dim light, shutting out the faded sunset and the ever-absent city beyond.

Maria Santa had fallen silent in a corner, her eyes dozing, as usual.

Yet despite the visible languor of her arms dropped along her legs, lost in the wide sweep of her brown dress, everything in her revealed a restless anticipation.

Any distant noise from outside caused her pupils to dilate visibly and violently, despite the slow fall of her eyelids, which cautiously reestablished her dormant impassivity.

Aunt Emiliana, mouth half-open, shuffled her bobbins and, from time to time, slapped the lace pattern in front of her with a sharp smack and raised her hand very high.

Suddenly, turning to me with irritation, she exclaimed:

— Well! Say something! Please make Maria Santa speak, because I can’t get a single stitch right this way!

— You’re probably just nervous… — I said indifferently.

— Nervous! — the lady burst out, making her countless bangles jingle. — Well, I could be! Mind you, Holy Week is approaching, we’re in the middle of Lent! But who told you I’m nervous?

“God is my witness that I fear no one. You must understand, once and for all, that I’m not easily deceived!”

I looked at Aunt Emiliana in astonishment, then at Maria Santa, for I couldn’t grasp the meaning of her words, which seemed directed at me, and in a hateful way, with a hidden meaning that completely escaped me — despite everything making me sense that something important was about to happen. Something interesting, no doubt, as my impromptu friend from the “consultation” had declared.

But I couldn’t understand, for nothing had happened in the little town, and none of those rumors that arise from afar — without anyone knowing where they come from or how they begin — had disturbed the sleepy and habitual gossip that reached me, eternally tied to the minor events of local life. They were the same as the previous week, and the troops from the last revolution, encamped far away, had shown no sign of their intentions. Even the old maid no longer had stories to tell.

The heat and the usual drowsiness had grown heavier over everything and everyone, prolonging the city’s siesta, despite the hour being already late by local custom, slipping into the night, which cautiously wrapped it in its first shadows.

Maria Santa remained still, her eyes dull and slow, her gaze thick, motionless, like that of nocturnal birds.

The silence that followed Aunt Emiliana’s outburst became unbearable, and we felt like foreigners who spoke different languages, gathered by chance.

— But who’s trying to deceive her? — I said, trying to break that dark enchantment. — I can’t deceive anyone, and Maria is a saint, as you make your friends and clients believe…

And I waited for the old lady to once again spring up from her low chair and reply violently to my remark, letting her slowly building anger erupt.

But that’s not what happened. She grew very pale, her wrinkles forming a sharp pattern, and her dry, shriveled lips trembled like those of children unjustly scolded. And from the tears that fell onto her fingers, I realized she was crying — but crying without rage, without pride, in an abandonment I had never seen in her.

She was a simple unfortunate woman, without hatred, without ambition, without hidden agendas — the woman who wept before us — and when I turned to Maria Santa, I saw in her eyes, in the clarifying pity that illuminated them, that she too had felt the same unexpected revelation as I had.

I wanted to rise and say something, but I remained still, my gesture suspended by an imperious signal from Maria Santa; that moment of exposure and surprise had to be respected, and perhaps any attempt at comfort would be dangerous.

I felt my tenderness freeze and awaited the reaction to that weakness, which was bound to come when she realized she had exposed herself, had shown herself unarmed.

And I saw how right my friend’s imperative signal had been, and how prudent she had been in imposing her way of thinking — for after a few minutes, I felt a strange sense of dread, and I looked again at Aunt Emiliana, and still caught, in time, her piercing, bloodshot glance quickly fleeing from my face.

I thought of leaving, a chill running through my body, and the image and desire came to me of going to the miraculous spring in town, Água-Quente, walking along the sand paths still warm from the sun, and feeling on my hands the dewy kiss of the ferns.

Then… then I would return slowly, in the full night, in the full embrace of nature, crossing fearfully through the deserted woods, and when I heard the sound of horses, I would run aimlessly, my head lost in terror, for it might be the gallop of the Headless Mule…

And at that very moment I heard the rapid, strong trot of two horses approaching, and they stopped with a loud noise in front of the house, and a sharp, strident laugh reached us, deliberately exaggerated.

The door burst open, and the traveler entered, stopping at the threshold, still dazed and blinded by the contrast between the dim room and the bright light from the street.

XXXVIII

Since the traveler’s arrival, Maria’s somber pallor had deepened, and she wandered silently through the rooms and corridors like a ghost of boredom, intensified by the growing legend of her superhuman abstinence.

That was why Aunt Emiliana received me as if I were divine Providence itself appearing with its light in that dark and sinister room, with its mysterious trapdoor of heavy iron rings, dusty and rusted, showing how many years they had remained unmoved, intact, barely covering the murmuring stream that passed beneath the arcades of the old house, its constant murmur unnerving and irritating me. A staircase rose abruptly, penetrating harshly into the very thick wall, leading up to the attic, where a large Archangel Saint Michael, crudely carved and painted, served as both a ceiling support and a pillar for the rough banister.

In a corner, the Black maid, seated on the ground among friends — also Black, with headscarves — seemed to be conducting a quiet ceremony of her primitive and confused religion.

— You’re going to do me a great charity! — said Aunt Emiliana, raising her arms to the heavens with display. — It’s been many, many days since Maria Santa has eaten, or taken anything at all! Tell me, isn’t it enough to drive one mad? She’s going to get sick, isn’t she? No one could go that long without taking anything.

“I know well,” she added, lowering her voice respectfully, “that she is a true saint, but I don’t want her to fall ill and be taken from us!”

Maria sat at the table, after much insistence and dramatic pleading from Aunt Emiliana, and suddenly became absent, her gaze fixed and distant, her mouth bitter, drooping at the corners, her hands pale in her lap, entirely in a state of hard and complete serenity.

She already seemed marked by dissolution, and there was something eternal in her pathetic desolation, in the dull and monotonous trance that surrounded her, and I felt how impossible it is to grasp the mysterious flow of souls into which we shall never enter.

That’s how I saw her, with a huge basket of orchard fruits in front of her, so withdrawn that she didn’t notice I had arrived, didn’t perceive my entrance, greeted by Aunt Emiliana’s exclamations, and didn’t seem to hear what we were saying.

The Black women murmured among themselves and cast sideways glances at us. In the dimness of their corner, I could see their very white eyes sharply outlined in their shiny black faces.

I took a few steps and was about to speak when the door opened, and the bright sunlight cut through the room in a dazzling stripe, making the Black women shrink back into their corner, moving like startled bats, and someone entering called out:

— Is anyone here? For heaven’s sake, why don’t you open the windows? This place looks like the house of remorse!

And the same loud laugh from days ago was heard — in three very clear notes — and the traveler crossed the room, rushing up the stairs to the attic rooms.

Maria Santa stood and, making a large sign of the cross, began praying in a muffled voice.

Aunt Emiliana immediately knelt and said, turning to the Black women:

— Kneel! It was Our Lady who passed — and as if to give me an explanation I hadn’t asked for, nor even thought to ask, she added solemnly, turning to me:

— The Blessed Virgin could not allow this house to be stained by that demon, and She Herself came to purify us with Her Presence. And Maria had the happiness of receiving Her.

Maria Santa passed by me and left silently, without looking at me, her head bowed.

I remained with my hands resting on the edge of the table for a long time, without seeing or hearing the maid and her friends, or Aunt Emiliana, who had covered her face with her hands.

A monotonous chant, a kind of endless prayer, gradually roused my dormant attention and curiosity, and I listened closely, barely making out scattered phrases, interspersed with exclamations spoken with sudden force, yet alternating with perfect regularity.

I saw that the Black woman leaned over a large clay jar, covering its sides with the long ends of her black shawl, whose sparse fringe reached the ground, forming a sort of speaking horn.

And she said:

— Maria my ta’i… Maria my ta’i… the city will die… everything will die… the devil’s inventions too… she as well…

Her companions chanted a song that sounded more like the wailing of witches.

And at that moment I noticed that, in the dark corridors, many people, silent and withdrawn, were watching us with astonished and dulled eyes.

XXXIX

From inside the house came then a penetrating scent of incense, and along with it, as if in a single slow wave that overtook and amplified it, the singing of the Black women turned into a true liturgical chant, sung by veiled voices, in a beautiful and weary harmony…

I went out and suddenly came face to face with Father Olímpio, whom I saw every day in our chapel.

He, upon seeing me so suddenly, became extraordinarily flustered, saying with unusual harshness:

— Who is singing? What music is this?

— Go in and see for yourself! — I said angrily, abruptly. — This house is most fitting for a priest like you!

XL

And that was when I wanted to flee, to cast off the suffocating atmosphere that weighed on me like a heavy veil. I wanted to leap over the magic circle that encircled me ever tighter; I wanted to see the outside world again — the everyday world, the days that pass without analysis, faces and eyes with no hidden depths, that weep and gaze all the same, with the same light and the same tears as always…

I longed to hear words that struck only my ears, that made me hear what each one meant; I wanted to feel the contact of inanimate things, that live and harmonize with human things, without the imbalance that threatened and bound me, with weariness, to my own unfinished thoughts.

And one very calm morning, when my anxieties had quieted and the usual fear had only throbbed faintly in my chest, I went out with a delicious sense of adolescence and renewal.

I felt light in spirit, and my heart seemed not to beat, relieved by the bile it had spent, nearly exhausted, having carried to the limit the torment I took pleasure in renewing, turning my self into a companion of misery and remorse.

In the streets, I would suddenly turn my head side to side and back, with a shiver, trying to catch the poor mystery of those houses so bright in appearance, with their silent façades, painted white and hollow, some playful, their roofs slanted like a drunkard’s hat, others dark, sinister, with gaping, toothless mouths sagging at the corners, and others still peering, half-hidden, with a timid eye behind their fat, slumped neighbors.

I felt an urge to know what was happening inside them, and I surely could have, if I leapt suddenly at any one of those shutters, patched with hideous rags, and flung them open violently…

And for what? Surely only to see impassive, indifferent faces of men and women who would then, astonished, gossip with feigned pity and wicked insinuations about my impulsiveness and evident madness. Already the friendship shown me by Senhora Gentil and Didina Americana, who sought me out in my isolation, had firmly established my reputation as “crazy,” as they said, between fits of laughter, spicing and poisoning their curiosity with the extraordinary appeal of those two sick and wounded spirits.

And I recalled their figures, one with her eternal air of frivolity and nonchalance, hiding cigarettes she’d forgotten on her bedside table, with great exclamations and gestures, thus casting suspicion on her solitary widow’s bed and deliberately allowing doubt to linger over her irreproachable mystic chastity — and the other, terribly unhinged, hiding with diabolical cunning her mental derangements, locked in her house for weeks of hidden madness, only to emerge and hurl insults, in long and ferocious acts of revenge, premeditated during her days of darkness.

XLI

So deep was my self-absorption that I was startled when I realized I had been brushing against the same formidable, massive wall for some time — it seemed to want to crush me with its intense shadow, sharply cast on the ground in shades of purple and yellow.

I walked faster, suddenly eager to find the end of that endless weight, and I nearly stumbled upon some stone steps that unexpectedly crossed my path.

They belonged to a side door, which must have been merely closed, for it gave way to the pressure of my body when I leaned on it, and I found myself, without transition, in the church choir — at once shadowy and bright, for the dim light within could not darken the radiant whiteness of the walls and the excessive gold of its carved ornaments.

I walked a little, hesitantly, in a mechanical motion, without understanding why I didn’t turn around and leave the deserted nave.

My pupils were still dazzled by the light outside, by the afternoon sun, and I didn’t hear the sound of my footsteps, as if I were walking in a dream, or perhaps in death.

And I had the sensation that I had truly died, and was now opening my eyes in a distant world.

I was in the realm of death, for what had muffled the sound of my heavy shoes — suited to the jagged stones of iron-laced streets — were the funeral “cloths.” I had entered precisely on the side of the nave where the wealthy and still-new graves lay, the last ones dug before the law forbade burials within churches.

On those large black woolen squares spread across the floor, with geometric patterns made from brass-headed nails, some forming words, I read the Latin inscriptions distractedly, murmuring the commonplaces of death, and remembered that, among them, perhaps lay the name of my father.

On his grave, where the vilest hatreds and most fervent passions had come to rest, his remains had released an intense balm. By a special arrangement, which had closed the church forever, we, his children, had the right to be buried beside his body.

With instinctive humility, I walked quickly and silenced my thoughts — some vile and slanderous — and my desire to return, to tread upon so many men and women of our name, in hurried and confused prayers.

I entered a kind of rotunda that opened to the side, and found myself before a narrow spiral staircase.

I climbed it at first slowly, placing the full weight of my body on each step and gripping tightly the iron banister fixed to the wall with large hooks.

The absence of curiosity or any thought made my steps heavy, as if someone held my shoulders with huge, weary hands.

In passing, I saw the dusty choir, with some old music sheets, worm-eaten and softened by time, abandoned on a stool.

XLII

I kept climbing, higher and higher.

Through the arrow slits, I saw the city pass by in varied, successive frames, like in the peep shows of old. Then I found myself on a wooden platform, with huge beams descending vertiginously from the ceiling in dizzying, incomprehensible diagonals, giving the impression of a gigantic and violent stick-fight, its staffs suddenly halted mid-blow, frozen in incomplete menace, as if to block my way.

I heard an irritated murmur, a burst of clapping, as if someone applauded my timid retreat or clapped to warn others of my intrusion — and that jolted me back with renewed fright.

Two doves flew past me in erratic flight, as if confused, their path disrupted by my unexpected presence.

Soon many others began to circle, weaving tight and daring loops among the beams and iron rods, and striking the bell ropes, they made a light, distant sound that flooded me with uninhibited joy. I pulled, laughing, the rope that hung in my hands, as if ringing out some unexpected happiness.

Below, the two angled streets disappeared into a massive ravine, and the church, rising heavily from its foundations like someone with swollen, dropsical legs trying laboriously to rise from bed, seemed to brace with its mighty back, at the apex of the angle, the entire overwhelming mass of earth and stone. If it were to falter in its effort, part of the city would collapse into the valley.

I moved closer across the creaking boards that shifted beneath my feet, toward the window sliced vertically by the still-vibrating bell, whose distant harmonies filled the air, and I came face to face with an owl staring at me with its green, phosphorescent eyes.

It didn’t move. It only relaxed one of its claws, which clutched the iron beam, and we stared at each other for a long time.

— Eye of the dead — I murmured, and laughed softly, as if hiding from someone, remembering the terror I would’ve felt as a child before that clear and lifeless gaze that, nevertheless, seemed to peer deep within me with intense pity.

I felt well. A sudden and absolute well-being made me hold my breath, despite the gusts of fresh air coming from the valley entrances, reaching me unspoiled at that height.

But a suspicion — faint at first, then uneasy, then increasingly anguished — made me grip the iron bar of the shutterless window, and I felt as though I were floating, suspended between sky and earth, in that blue light, then ultramarine, and finally purple, and for a long, long time, I forgot myself.

When I returned to the world, I felt the exhaustion and old age of a century.

— Who’s there?

And the man’s voice rose through the stairwell, as if searching for me, wrapping me in its invisible waves. A vast, panicked terror seized my nerves, and I descended the swaying steps, crossed the now darkened nave, and fled — forgetting that I was running straight into the heart of the city, into the arms of the very remorse that pursued me, and its traces…

XLIII

My visit to the church had left a new kind of remorse within me, and among the confused, quickly stifled accusations I made against myself, the strongest was that I had not found God there because I had gone involuntarily.

And one day, I slowly dressed in black and made my way to the main church, where missionaries were preaching as they traveled throughout the forest. I walked trembling, as if going to meet the Lord, without humility and without purity, but with an entirely outward desire to find Him, even at the cost of my reason.

I knelt and spent long moments with my eyes closed, feeling utterly alone amid the crowd also kneeling—alone, horribly alone, far from all life, from all understanding, and above all, from all goodness. And the warm breath of fevered solitude, that sickly stillness, that pain of everything that lives, slowly intoxicated me, and I never wanted to awaken again…

In that hour of total prostration, I remembered that all the people I had loved had drifted away—some out of boredom, others with a different dream dozing in their hearts, others with the truth in the depths of their clear eyes—and I realized that I no longer had the strength to create a new love or a new friendship, and any effort in that direction would be criminal.

XLIV

The words of terror and threat still echoed through the church, and the men leaving in noisy groups, and the women slipping away, pulling shawls over their faces and wiping their tears with the fringes, seemed to carry away, piece by piece, that heavy atmosphere of dread—dividing, thus, the great phantom conjured piece by piece by the missionary, which would now revive in fragments in distant outskirts, on farms and in far-off huts.

The temple became empty again, returning to its habitual silence, to its solemn and humble tranquility.

Only someone dressed in black added a bit of mystery to the dimness of the nave, leaning against the side railing.

Some time passed, and Mr. Martins, who had surely been lurking in the sacristy, reentered the church and walked straight to the figure who, when he moved, revealed a pale and unremarkable face.

— Sir — said Mr. Martins, with the familiarity of brotherhood stewards and secretaries — would you care to dine with us? I’ve heard you were sent by the bishop.

The guest seemed to finish a prayer and then walked toward the door, still silent. Only upon reaching the churchyard did he speak, slowly:

— I was not sent by the bishop.

— But do you accept my invitation? I noticed during mass that you looked tired.

— Very tired… very tired… — he murmured, and his voice seemed to come from very far away, as far away as he himself had come.

— Surely the missionary didn’t see you, busy with the sermon—it was splendid, wasn’t it? If he had seen you, he would have surely taken you along to the Mission, where there are two priests, though they’re not such good preachers. Have you spoken with him, or with the parish priest, Father Olímpio?

— … no! I just arrived now, and I believe I will continue my journey later today.

— What city are you headed to?

— The roads must be very bad, very difficult…

— Like the paths of virtue — joked Mr. Martins, piously.

A deep crease cut vertically across his companion’s forehead, and a wave of blood flushed his face.

— They are above all very long. Everything is so far…

— Well, it’s simple: stay with us in the city. The parish priest and the missionaries will be delighted.

— Do they visit you often?

— Well… They can’t come to my house because it’s far — replied Mr. Martins, blushing deeply — but when the bishop comes on his pastoral visit, he’s already promised to come to the Brotherhood’s headquarters, of which I’m the treasurer.

— Oh? The bishop is coming to this city…

— Yes, but only in a few months.

XLV

And so Mr. Martins had his guest of honor who, before long, imperceptibly became an indispensable fixture, a detail of his home.

Isolated, silent, sad, always praying, he never visited the missionaries, and his encounters with Father Olímpio were brief, abrupt, as if both were always eager to free themselves from the obligation of seeing each other.

Mr. Martins appeared radiant and at ease, and the Brotherhood elections were shaping up excellently — it seemed to him that all of it was due to his guest.

Aunt Emiliana wanted to meet him and sent one of her pious women to invite him to visit her, using the authority of an influential member of all the religious confraternities, but days passed without him responding to the imperative invitation. One day, as I strolled absentmindedly through the deserted courtyard, I saw him cautiously approach the shutters — tightly closed at that hour — and slip a letter between the slats.

Seeing me, he became so flustered that he let himself be led by me to my room like a captive, without a question, without a gesture of refusal.

And I did bring him like a captive, such was my intense need to have near me some kind of feeling, a life that would notice me, eyes or hands that would look at me or let me touch them.

I walked hurriedly, mechanically, and when I stopped, I would lose myself in a strange stupor, a kind of desperate enchantment, entirely made of calm, of uncertainty, of vague sufferings once lived, of past pleasures I thought completely forgotten.

The sense of isolation that had pressed against my temples the whole time, and suffocated me within the walls of the room, had awakened in me the irresistible desire to hold that ordinary figure near me, and to hear his banal confession, and suffer his poor suffering, merging with it to escape the dialogue that had played out, unresolved, within my mind.

Some time later, I said to him, leaning on a piece of furniture:

— I ask your forgiveness.

But he, head bowed, his eyes suddenly swollen with tears, said nothing, withdrawing humbly.

In the following days, at the same hours, I saw him arrive, always with a long gaze in which one could read all of human sadness, all resignation, and at the same time, all joy…

XLVI

I wanted to make him my companion, and I called him friend, and I forgot about the others who lived around me, and who drifted away like figures in a book when the page is turned.

We went out together, and I would speak aloud of the hours of my childhood, whose sad memory, swaying in the heavy and feverish atmosphere with the approach of the big rains, lulled me painfully. I wandered the mountain that overlooked the city, speaking with my shadow, telling myself endless stories, just as the child I once was had done years before.

He listened to me in silence, and that was enough for me…

I was a new child with a new toy.

XLVII

Midway up the slope stood the Pox House, half of it crumbling into ruin.

I remembered how fearfully I used to look at it from below, from afar in the valley.

Old tales circulated about it. The slaves who built it worked day and night, whipped by overseers with long lashes tipped with iron, and the blood that flowed from their wounds mixed with the cement and plaster in great spurts.

My childish imagination made me see in the dark stains on the walls huge coagulated patches, still bleeding, and the rain, dripping in rapid and numerous drops, took on a reddish hue, forming small rivulets that would then rot slowly, for days and days, in the nearby swamps miraculously preserved at that height, on the black earth strewn with large stones enameled with mica.

But beyond its old legend — involving a martyred lady, a loving and strong overseer with the timidity of an inferior, dismembered in tiny pieces by the cold wrath of many small revenges in service of one great vengeance, and then buried beneath the loose floorboards now rotting — there was another story, far more recent and very real, which was more terribly impressive than the others due to its unromantic simplicity.

When we approached the house, even on clear days, encouraged by sunlight and the noisy song of birds, while other boys and girls whispered among themselves about “the poor woman who suffered for forty years,” as the old ladies of the town would say — and they repeated without even imagining what that meant — and remembered with traditional dread the murdered overseer, I would think silently of the pox victims and look at my hands in terror, believing I saw the signs of pustules forming.

They had been abandoned there in the midst of fever and came shivering, covered in live sores, to the gate of that improvised and barbaric lazaretto, to fetch the food thrown to them from a distance.

It seemed to me that a deformed, bloodied face watched me through the broken door, anxiously waiting for the bread and meat wrapped in old newspapers — so thoroughly read that not even the most wretched wanted to use the dishes brought there.

XLVIII

Many years ago, when smallpox swept through the interior, following the major roads and skirting the mountains, devastating towns, villages, and farms, a great wooden cross was erected at the top of the hill facing the forest, from where terrifying news arrived.

— The cross’s head must be at the same height as the arms — said the drawing teacher at the time, who, it seemed, had come from Rio de Janeiro.

— Why? — asked the then-vicar curtly, a young, tall man from the backlands, only slightly tempered by the discipline of the Caraça Seminary.

— Because of perspective; it’s a drawing rule… for the illusion that the head is only slightly smaller than the arms… If the top is actually made smaller than the arms, it will look, from down here, very small, truly insignificant, and, I repeat, one won’t get the perfect illusion of the cross — explained the artist, with his false air of a Latin painter, but a bit timid and flustered under the vicar’s healthy, penetrating gaze.

— Oh, sir — murmured the vicar after impatiently hearing the artist’s explanation — it’s not with illusions that we’re going to stop the smallpox epidemic. The cross will be like Our Lord Jesus Christ’s!

And the cross was raised, appearing to have oversized arms, opened in a broad gesture of protection, facing, in the heart of the mountains, the vast area already ravaged by the disease.

Only two laborers with hoes, in the city and surrounding areas, were stricken with smallpox. The three local police soldiers were summoned by the municipality, which had the two poor patients taken to the abandoned house halfway up the mountain, in the heart of a desert of black, glittering stones, where they were thrown along with straw mats and old blankets.

Every day, someone went to deliver food and medicine, which were tossed through the garden gate, which still stood, with its long palm fronds and rosemary bushes, in the small enclosed yard.

And so it went, for some time.

At first, both pox victims came to the broken gate, still secured by a heavy chain, suspicious of each other and thinking the other might try to escape or hide some delicacy or medicine to avoid sharing.

Later, only one came — the Black man — who, when asked about his companion, would say:

— Sir… don’t know, sir… don’t know… — repeating it often, chattering his teeth and wiping his sores with a dirty rag.

But one day, he too stopped appearing, and whoever brought provisions found the previous day’s supplies scattered on the other side of the fence, as if flung there in a fit of bad temper.

And no one ever entered the Pox House again — except for my childhood imagination, which accompanied, many times and for many years, hour by hour, minute by minute, the miserable anguish of those dying agonies…

XLIX

At the summit, the mountains opened in all their splendor, vanishing into the vast horizon.

Whichever direction I turned, they rushed in a dizzying escape, disappearing into the sky, far away, blending into a single blue.

Seven towns faded into the immense dust, now clinging to the mountain slopes, now hastening along the long meanders of the old bandeirante roads—those enslavers of enchanted ore and mysterious Indians—now withdrawing pensively into shadow-filled valleys.

— Let’s leave this place — I murmured, already having reached the break in the high ridges, and very softly, as if afraid my words, echoing, might disturb that immense and unsettling silence.

But a bell toll rose from the valley and plunged, crystalline, into the vast space, vanishing.

— I feel vaguely — I continued, in a painful agitation that made my heart throb in rapid beats — I vaguely feel emanating from all of this a gigantic and continuous yearning for redemption, a millennial plea for help, an immense cry for love, for understanding and for magic, which we, like murderous foreigners, cannot hear or comprehend.

— Well then — my companion replied, raising his chest and looking at me with irritation — I feel good here, and I feel like throwing myself toward those mountains so they might receive me…

— I envy the Indians — I continued — who, in this same place, looked upon all this without astonishment… They were the better part of this whole, and their morality was one, in a great rhythm and a great march that we destroyed and broke through death and lust, while for me this monstrous panorama represents only a foreign and hostile motif, which frightens me, which fills me with dread for its excesses and its magical death.

“I don’t want to see it anymore; I feel myself going mad, remembering that I have to live within myself, like in a small dark prison that gradually closes, in an isolation of illness and wickedness!

“I feel powerless when I try to find any connection between me and this cheerful and sinister festival, which seems prepared for strange gods, and I am crushed by my unworthiness to take part in it.”

— Et dixit ei: haec omnia tibi dabo, si cadens adoraveris me — my companion pronounced maliciously, shaking the wide sleeves of his black garment.

— That same thought was had by your own demon, which I now read in your eyes — and the greatest temptation he found for the Son of God was nature…

— But Jesus wanted nothing, and that’s how he became more human, Son of Man.

— I too want nothing from nature nor do I want to know its little secrets — I replied bitterly, with a bitter laugh.

— But Jesus left himself, and chose to worship His Lord — he answered me with extreme vehemence — and you see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing but the wretched doubt or certainty you carry within!

— But who are you? Who are you, what are you doing here, and what do you want from me? I don’t know… I don’t know… — I exclaimed, putting my hands over my face to see only that creature, who suddenly ceased to exist for me and returned to the silence and forgetfulness from where he had come.

He turned his eyes away, fixing them far off in the distance, horribly humiliated.

— That’s why I’m going to Catas Altas — he said — I’m going to that town there, so near and yet so far… Between us there will be an unbridgeable void, even for truth… which you will never be able to understand…

And his tears dried up, as if my gaze had burned them.

L

At night, when I saw him pass by my window, riding a sad horse and followed by a sleepy “camarada,” the two forming a somber specter, lazily trailed by the pack animal, I had the urge to call out to him, to humiliate him once more with the bitter pleasure of a causeless revenge.

But it was with indifference and startled repulsion that I saw him remove his poor hat, so worn by time and road dust, now without tassels or trim, and his farewell meant nothing to me, as if it were addressed to someone else, someone who had become as strange to me as he himself now was—fleeing entirely from my mind and from my life.

LI

Shortly after, I was returning from church, where hymns of superhuman joy and the final jubilations of Lent had thundered in my ears like the nearing sign of my defeat, and I walked along the main street of the town as if I had a placard of disgraceful words pinned to my back, and the book I held in my hands weighed on me like the heaviest of shackles.

It was useless to shift it from one hand to the other, or to hide it in the folds of my clothing when someone came toward me.

Everyone looked at me askance and continued on their way with a strange disapproval in their mouths and gestures, and even those who greeted me raised their hats slowly, in a certainly insulting manner.

When I arrived, I went to the garden, still unwilling to see anyone from that house, continuing in my resolve to flee, to free myself from its atmosphere of obscure enchantment, and to rehumanize myself, forgetting its miseries and lies.

I read without attention one of the books that always accompany me, and from time to time, I dropped it with invincible boredom and rested my poor eyes by gazing at the house—silent, immense, sinister in its peace.

And irresistibly, I found myself once more waiting for something—that feeling so familiar to me, of useless and anguished waiting for “something” that I had never been able to define, and which now burned painfully inside me, heightened by the anxiety brought by the obscure future opening before my eyes, “neither king nor rook,” as said, piously, the only human creature who had long ago peeked behind my unchanging and stagnant life, in its apparent disorder.

I had fled from Maria Santa and the drama that now resumed, already so near, and I had destroyed with incredible ease what had presented itself beside me and could have been turned into small purposes. My desire for support and understanding, the ever-urgent need for a friendly climate, had once again been defeated by the involuntary skill with which I knew how to carve out solitude and create a desert around me.

And, as always, when I saw myself before myself, without defense and without self-respect, I felt the approach, with silent and invisible steps, of the unforeseen and irresistible event that would open before me an irremediable horizon—or someone who would force me to abandon forever my only defense against madness and death: the chains I had forged with my own hands, whose rings had closed forever around my wrists.

The garden then filled with phantoms, and I felt that the truth was with Maria Santa, who surely could save me from the terror that made me glance fearfully in every direction.

And I stood up, to go in search of her, without even having the voice to call her…

LII

Thus, it was a wounded and rejected creature, a poor being full of pain and reverence before misfortune, who opened the door and sat down before Maria.

And that was how I sat before her, before her figure, before her incomprehensible attitude, as if awaiting from her a reproach—violent and abrupt—that would forever banish me from her presence, casting me once more into my anguished and incurable moral isolation.

Intense and irresistible shame rose to my face, and when Maria Santa emerged from the dark corner where she had taken refuge, in whose shadows her body was lost, and advanced toward me like the figure in an old painting stepping out of its bitumen background, I stretched out my hands, as if to stop her, as if pleading for mercy.

She did stop, in fact, as if silently obeying my gesture.

And now she was fully illuminated, in the full light, bathed in brightness.

Only then did I notice that her shoulders and arms were bare, barely covered by a narrow black lace cape, through whose patterns her very pale and polished skin shone with a strange gleam.

LIII

“What does this mean?” I asked with unease.

“Do you think I’m beautiful? Do you think I look well?” she asked in turn, in a hissing voice.

And she stood very still, pushing her belly slightly forward, with lowered eyes and her hands resting on the large lace sleeves.

I stood up and leaned on the back of the chair, as if leaning over the edge of a cliff…

And a warm, human scent, a mix of blood and sandalwood, rose to my nostrils, seizing my throat in a sharp intoxication.

I dropped to my knees, trembling, and said in a suffocated voice:

“Perhaps this sacrifice you’re making is to save me, Maria Santa, and I bless you for this intention of mercy…”

She pulled away swiftly, as from a scalding touch, and, growing even paler, muttered through clenched teeth:

“Perhaps?… Perhaps… perhaps I want to save myself!”

And she paused for a few moments, reflecting, as if painfully searching within herself for something to say to me, something that would either hide her thoughts forever or explain them completely.

Then, in a whisper:

“Or perhaps… I want to damn myself…”

And making a great effort, summoning all her strength, she walked like an automaton to the door, where she stopped, and before leaving, added without looking at me, without turning:

“Salvation or damnation, I am certain that I curse you, with all my heart.”

And she knelt down, in turn, abruptly, as if a spring had forced her to do so, far from me, who had already stood up and remained standing, not knowing where to go, what to do with my arms and hands, unable even to look at her.

She kissed the floor with infinite humility.

Then, the door slowly, cautiously closed behind her figure, which looked like a dead body, entirely wrapped in black lace…

LIV

At first I heard a harsh, violent whisper, rising and falling, irregular and abrupt, like a secret, brutal argument of life or death, one that seemed to be deciding the fate of all the poor ghosts struggling around the same criminal dilemma.

It was a strange, bitter dialogue that reached me through the closed door, in which the words sounded like dry, fatal blows—like a duel fought blindly with utmost violence—but whose meaning I could not grasp.

Insults must have alternated with accusations, and I couldn’t tell which of the voices dominated the argument, as there were no turns or inflections—it was all in one violently restrained pitch, seemingly made up of loose phrases, not questions and answers.

I tried to open the door, but the bolt had been slid shut, and I was left to listen, unable to know what was happening behind it.

All my attention, all my effort focused on that confused murmur, whose whisper continued for so long, maddeningly, never rising enough for me to understand, and I waited for a break, for a clash to alter it, to break that sinister monotony.

Unable to hold my thoughts together—forming and fleeing in turmoil—my back against the door and my hands moving unconsciously, I felt I was about to lose the balance I had so painfully maintained.

I had come, unguarded and unexpectedly, to the extreme frontier of my reason.

So many urges, so many instigations, pleas, and imperatives of all my agitated emotions, all my convictions, regrets, and fears, the understanding of my human, dignified, and even simple duties—it all pulled at me, and I felt myself slipping, irrevocably, into the high waves of the storm rising within me as I listened without comprehending…

Everything darkened in my mind, and I saw no path to escape, no return to normality or calm, which now seemed a distant and impossible dream. At the very least, I wished for a new transformation to make me forget the too tangled miseries of the old…

When, running my bewildered hands over my face, I stared at myself in a kind of inner vision, with terror and strangeness, from the other side of the door came a muffled and terrible sob, and I could not tell whether it was of rage or anguish.

Then, a great cry—long, trembling, desperate—tore through the air and was lost in the other rooms.

Immediately, there was a great silence.

Then, another scream—now a superhuman howl, like a defeated beast’s cry for help…

LV

I heard that cry with sudden delight, like salvation arriving; a point of support and reality that I finally found at my side.

Everything became human and vivid around me.

I stretched out my hands and rejoiced to see that they now obeyed me, and I pressed them against the door panels, as if to convince myself, with their cold touch, that they truly existed, and I understood once again that behind it had unfolded a drama I must ignore, one I would never truly know, for its characters would always be armed and ready to lie, to explain in any way—except the truthful one—what had happened between them, and what bloody reason had made them morally tear each other apart in a few moments.

Perhaps even they couldn’t say, if they wanted to tell the truth…

I had to flee again, live other scenes, breathe another climate, if I didn’t want to lose forever the already faltering sense of my own unity. I wanted to return to myself and could no longer find me, incapable of reconstructing any of my aspects.

LVI

The rains began to fall, insistent, endless, isolating with their immense and thick curtains—first the town, the roads lost in mud, where carts and mule trains sank, the barriers of the nearest railway line, flowing heavily down the hills and burying the tracks under great soft masses that clung to and penetrated everything—then the house, transforming the front street into a river of black, swift waters, and the lower back part into a vast lake of trembling waters, constantly drummed upon by the unceasing rain, sounding on the roofs like handfuls of coins thrown by ancient demons.

The leaves on the trees murmured day and night, and the stones groaned, like the echo of an innumerable and shadowy crowd closing ranks around us, in a tenacious and phantasmagoric siege. The shadows only paled slightly with the passing daylight, and the whole town loomed confusedly within the low clouds that enveloped it, vaguely threatening.

Eventually, the siege forced me to retreat to my room, where I shut myself in, between sky and earth, with only the confused memory of a life both near and distant as my companion—one I no longer recognized, through the indistinct psychic fog that separated me from everything, dominating my new world like an indefinable, multiform phantom, and filling my solitude with vague terrors as I anxiously awaited the supernatural week.

From time to time, as if emerging from mystery and nothingness, letters came to me, which I first examined with astonished eyes, trying to decipher in wonder the words and postmarks, gazing at them for a long while without deciding to open them, holding them in my trembling hands.

What would they tell me? What new sorrows, what new doubts would their foreign words awaken?

Perhaps they carried a desperate, secret summons, urgent, resounding, that would bring me back to life…

Perhaps, with indifference, without drama, without beauty, without romance, they contained the final severing of all connection with life and the distant lands I came from, which had already died in my memory…

And I opened them, with belated eagerness, tearing their envelopes with clumsy fingers, and read them all at once, without understanding what they said—and only after an effort, painfully composing myself, would I reread them carefully, already with weariness and disillusionment, as if I hadn’t known beforehand they could contain nothing, could say nothing but the simple, indifferent, faded truths of what I had left behind.

Far away lived—if they lived at all—only the formless remnants of incomplete sensations, of careless attempts, of obscure and sterile struggles, and all that had been most alive and most real in them I had brought with me, in my restless and ailing imagination.

LVII

The days passed by, mute, uncertain, in a constant twilight of indifference, calm, and vague boredom—hesitant—that made me wander aimlessly through the room, bumping into furniture, opening and closing doors and windows without seeing what was happening outside.

I had already forgotten all those creatures inside the house, who moved and lived, whose footsteps and sounds I heard like the distant and inexplicable echo of the forest that cloaked the foothills of the mountains surrounding us.

When I strained my ears, I could vaguely perceive that the whole house had filled with whispers and murmurs, with the approach of Holy Week and the miracle foretold by Aunt Emiliana. At times, as in a dream, a distant chant would rise, but I heard its melancholy undulations as if they came from the void, like the moan of the wind or the muffled rumble of thunder, repeating with majestic regularity.

And it was on a gray, endless day, still lost in the mists that surrounded me, on a day when I thought I saw—through rain-blurred glass—a phosphorescent, deathly gaze seeking my eyes, obstinately fixed on my book, it was on a gray day that I received the news of the judge’s death, and a large envelope containing papers left to me by him, with the express instruction that only I should open them, and that their contents concerned me alone.

I did not dare to see what was written in them and stored them in a small iron safe that always accompanies me.

And the sleep that overtook me for many hours erased all memory of them from my remorse.

LVIII

Only then could I look at the faces around me…

And I did so cautiously, gradually gathering the scattered pieces of my personality.

But how changed they were! How saddened and aged they had become, in me, in my imagination…

Even my own face, now startling in the depths of mirrors, everything seemed to me to have died, to have lost its true meaning, carried away by the long storm, lost in the raging mountains, echoing with thunder and lit by solitary lightning bolts fading toward the forest and the vast hinterland.

I left my room to tell Maria the news of the judge’s death.

In the dim light of the room, barely lit by the still undecided and heavily humid day, I looked at her with suspicion, knowing she too had been shut away in her room, lying in bed, the whole time during the long deluge.

Her skin no longer lived… even her voice had somewhat died, and the cheerful skeleton had begun to emerge, slowly and surely breaking through the weary flesh, with its great hidden and mysterious grin.

We were on the eve of the miracle.

And Maria, upon seeing me, sat up in bed, hair loose over her shoulders, wrapped in white covers, like a cold, hostile specter from a bad dream.

She said to me hoarsely, in a muted voice, her eyes clouded with tears and burned by illness:

— I already know what you’ve come to say. It was so good… I was so calm, and everything was so serene…

“Why have you come here? Our Lady was before me, and you were in her place, in the spot where she was.”

I moved away from the direction her eyes indicated and sat in silence, waiting for her to better explain what was happening, for my shyness—always a prison in which I struggled, made impossible to escape by the indifference or incomprehension of those around me, left within me like a bitter aftertaste—did not let me question her, as I felt I should, bluntly, as accomplices who speak without masks.

I needed to educate myself through reality, to gain the experience of everyday life, but when the opportunity arose to face it, all my movements were hindered, and this time, as always, my usual and useless reserve dulled and broke the contact that could have been direct and complete with the soul of Maria Santa.

So, I watched with mute and helpless irritation the cloud of enchanted dream that covered her eyes, which had been hard and fixed just moments ago, the supernatural ecstasy that her face now expressed, causing her head—swaying on the trunk barely supported by her stiffened, bent knees—to become entirely illuminated.

I couldn’t say if the spectacle I witnessed before me was real, had its own existence, or if my imagination had invented it, transformed it, making it live only from the reflections of my own misery.

Now all of Maria Santa’s body swayed and seemed to lift from the bed, raised by the invisible force I “felt” entering through her eyes, and I saw in fear a mysterious halo forming and enveloping her entire figure, lighting the room with a pale, slow glow.

A long shiver ran through my whole body and, without realizing it, I began to pray, not knowing exactly what I was doing, because the disbelief and almost animal rage that her behavior had awakened in me had quickly spent themselves and were replaced, with obscure cunning, by the disordered thoughts born of fear and moral suffering.

Her eyes now stared at a distant point, outside and higher, beyond the walls, far away, and they must have been following someone retreating gently, with an unearthly grace.

Suddenly, Maria Santa collapsed backward onto the pillows and closed her eyelids, very pale, as if struck by a mortal faint.

But I saw her chest rise and fall deeply, and her temples moisten.

Blood pounded violently through my veins, and I murmured softly:

— Maria, did you see Her?

— No — she said quietly, inexorably, and I felt the final bond of shared scruple between us break.

LIX

Aunt Emiliana prowled around the door of her room, and the black maids, when passing near her, rose up on tiptoe under the scrutinizing gaze hidden behind the old lady’s flashing glasses.

Every night, the enormous bolts—like those of ancient fortresses—and the heavy bars of the house, nearly rendered useless by years of rust, were carefully inspected, cleaned, and oiled. They were drawn and set into place with extraordinary caution.

On her nightly rounds, when she tried thus to wall us in within the enormous house, Aunt Emiliana was always accompanied by a little black girl, drunk with sleep, who followed her steps like an unsteady automaton, spilling on the floor—according to her wide movements and the sway she gave to the copper candlestick held between her numbed fingers—large drops of tallow here and there across the wide planks veined with dark streaks.

No one knows how the legend of the precious stones she jealously guarded grew and spread, but in the seven towns visible from the peak, people spoke in wonder, in endless whispered conversations, of Aunt Emiliana’s immense wealth.

They asked her for donations in every form: in writing, by messengers from afar—some by mail, others on horseback with enormous empty saddlebags ready to return filled with treasures, unmatched sacred objects—others came in person, in unexpected and prolonged visits.

They asked her for alms for the halos of saints, for candles and the rebuilding of churches and chapels, for hospitals, shelters, and homes of all sorts, for destitute families and needy sick, for orphaned and abandoned children…

Brotherhoods, widows, the poor, and gypsies came under incessant rain, along roads and trails turned into rivers and torrents, in search of her alms.

And the low window at the back became a place of pilgrimage, where beggars jostled, soaked to the bone, with the sick.

But the old lady gave only medicine…

As for money, she always promised, promised generously, but with such certainty, with such firmness in her gestures, that everyone returned home as cheerful as if the coins already jingled in the pouches, bags, and wallets they brought and took back empty…

LX

São Gonçalo do Rio Abaixo! São João da Borda da Mata! Itabira do Campo! Just the naïve and mysterious music of those long and undulating names—towns from which caravans of cloaked travelers arrived, shivering from damp and exhaustion—revived me and made me see things on the other side of the windowpane, streaked with endless rivulets of water running swiftly down.

And they made rise before my eyes, in the fascinated vigil that kept me there, fleeting landscapes of peace and forgetfulness, alternating with the real but phantasmagoric vision of the vast courtyard of livid stones, washed by foamy torrents, with its heavy roofs dripping in a thousand places, its pale windows, and the dark, shrouded crowd that lightning would reveal suddenly from the darkness, only to vanish again behind the misted glass, along with the thunder’s rumble, fading beyond the mountains, not daring to cross them.

In vain I wiped the panes with my fingers, in nervous gestures, but everything returned to the earlier mist, and again I heard only the neighing of horses, shouted orders—brief and sharp—and the banging of doors opening loudly to those who came from afar and waited in the reception rooms for hours, while Aunt Emiliana attended to the sick.

And when all quieted, and everyone had left, the house seemed to sigh and moan with unexplainable noises, interrupted now and then by the loud fall of a stone in the attic, or by the sharp creak of boards cracking.

Opening my eyes in the darkness, it seemed I need only wait for death, which would come silently, without a single word of approval, as if even “absolution” could no longer be hoped for. And I felt longing for the calculating, reasoning, indolent, and untamable child I had been, always fleeing in horror from the dishonesty she felt growing silently within, destined to pass from life into death, in those days, as from one bad dream into another.

I pitied myself, and great peace visited my soul…

LXI

One day, the traveler entered the room where I was, and, noticing the movement I made to leave, said to me with indescribable gentleness:

— You’re leaving when I come in too?

— Why do you emphasize that “too” so much? — I asked sharply.

— Aunt Emiliana because she’s a gypsy, Maria because she’s a saint, and you?…

— And me?… — I insisted, more resentfully.

— Oh, you — she exclaimed quickly — you, because you’re overly fond of saints and holy ones of any kind.

— My friend — I said, sitting down and preparing to listen to her — you laugh too much, and I don’t like it. I don’t know if your laughter is cunning or bitterness. In either case, it repulses and frightens me. It even seems to me that you’ve already understood your strange situation here.

— Strange and absurd — she murmured darkly.

— It’s true… You have nowhere to go?

— No, I don’t. Anywhere I go, I would have to start a new life. I must avoid that at all costs.

“Here, one way or another, I can expect or fear nothing new, and that calms and consoles me.”

— Consoles you for what? — I asked, laughing.

— For having been so wicked, or too good, depending how you see it. Here, I lose myself in endless reflection, because everyone is holy, or on the fast path to becoming so… but they won’t be of my devotion!

— My friend! — I replied impatiently, at her persistent laughter. — Your revolt and anger at Maria’s holiness make me laugh too, because I see that you don’t understand it. And I also laugh at the temptations and paths taken by the saints of your devotion.

“The gold mountains, the brutal food, the naked women who appeared in their beds on stormy nights, torn with prayers and self-flagellation, seem to me like toys. These visions and the terror they inspired fill me with amazement, and I see, with amused eyes, before me, dirty old men who blow horns and ring bells, begging for help with their crises… It seems that the satisfaction of their naïve, anodyne, and saintly instincts was a high and unforgivable crime… And their thoughts got lost in the outer world, never remembering the inextricable meanders, the peculiar temptations they would find inside themselves, to the point of losing the understanding of the impossible, of the true end, of the one ideal.

“Then all vanity, all lust and all wickedness seem to us laughable and petty trials. Without a limit to our horizon, without a goal, we walk in all directions, without finding one another and without achieving the explanation of our own meaning,” I said, remembering certain words from Maria Santa. “This is the real temptation, and whoever overcomes it and still keeps their reason is a greater saint than the others, even if they have walked the worst paths.”

— But my saints… — she tried to say, now very serious.

— Your saints — I interrupted — serve only our need for lies, as a counterweight to the too-wondrous reality that exists within us. Holiness, today, can have only one face, which is that of reeducation — more difficult and slower, because it is a learning of small suffering. Saints pass unnoticed beside us because man does not understand pain, which is always a surprise, an unexpected humiliation.

“The most terrible temptation is the spirit with no way out, without possible explanation, which ends up becoming just a sterile instrument of destruction, plunging life into a vague fatality.

“True humiliation and irredeemable misery, voluntarily accepted, carry within them the little monster that slumbers in each of us, but that only awakens in the elect, forgetting those whom life itself repels, because of their unearned serenity, their incomprehension of its mysteries, their involuntary renunciation, which is a sad divine crime…

“Don’t try to create an atmosphere of artificial madness and disturbance around yourself,” I continued, looking nervously in all directions, “because that would be a human crime, and its punishment lies in itself, in that very environment, which later becomes dense, suffocating, and does not leave us when we tire of it, and clings to us like an indelible stain. It’s true that all this turmoil, all this immense misfortune cannot last very long, and suffering is not the same…”

And I laughed again, at memories that came in disorderly flocks, rising from the depths of my nearly dead memory. They were remnants of old sorrows and reflections of ancient joys, arriving in confusion, afraid of being, as always, violently repelled and sent again into their tired silence.

The tears, finding the creases of laughter, flowed more easily…

LXII

— Was it Father João who taught you these things? — she asked me suddenly.

— Don’t say that name because you don’t deserve such a thing — I said, feeling deeply the humiliation her words caused me.

— I’m not angry — she said — mainly because I don’t understand what you’re saying, nor can I guess what you’re really thinking.

Then, with a sudden gesture of sympathy, in which pity and contempt were vividly blended, she exclaimed:

— Maybe I can be of help, if I understand. Tell me your life story, and maybe then I’ll better understand everything that’s happening here, with you.

— It’s impossible and useless — I replied, with dry eyes — and no one can do what you’re asking of me, with sincere truth. My life, like everyone else’s, is a disjointed series of episodes without any continuous meaning or logic.

“My childhood, my adolescence, and now have nothing to do with one another, and in each of these phases — and during spans of time that don’t even coincide with them — I had different ways of thinking, different sensitivities, different manners of acting, and from my point of view right now, I couldn’t possibly connect everything that happened to me during that time, and besides, I’ve forgotten the causes of some events, and the effects of others, and they’re now completely inexplicable to me.

“Inexplicable and profoundly hostile — and that’s why I watch, with suspicion and confused admiration, the tenderness of those who visit, emotionally, just at the thought of what they’re going to see, the house where they were born or where they lived for some time, or even the city where they spent their childhood or any period of their lives.

“For me, I walk through rooms and halls, streets and squares, cities, fields, and mountains, encountering only small regrets or petty pains and worries that had been forgotten in their corners, on their walls, in a detail of their paintwork, in a stone of their pavement, or in the landscape that, suddenly, returns to my memory and fits into a vague uneasiness that still lingers, but whose origin I no longer know.

“Many times, I recall a gesture that I thought insignificant at the time, and yet, as I realize many years later, it was the ultimate end of that portion of my existence. And when I come across any of my portraits, I see in it only an image superimposed on mine — a strange creature who looks at me with inexplicable eyes, whose inner life is unknown and unpleasant to me.”

— But — asked the traveler, who had listened to me clearly obsessed with a thought and was attentively trying to find in my words points of reference, clues, and grounds to justify and confirm her obsession — but what about the people who surrounded your childhood, whom you loved, who lived or still live at your side? Did nothing of them remain in your memory?

— Oh, there’s another source of hatred and sadness for me — I continued, as the words came easily, plentifully, as if they were the overflow of my solitary reflections — Those who cared for me or tried to love me, I tormented them with my insatiable distrust, with my truth always different from theirs, with my friendship that exceeded their limits. A gesture convinced me more than reasoning, because it exhausted me less and better satisfied my thirst for tenderness. The three figures who leaned over my bed — I adored them without my affection ever reaching them.

“How could I recall all this with pleasure, or even with a kind of voluntary sincerity? Of it all, what remains is the restless and invasive memory of a long and mute agony, degrading, which I endured for many years, silently, under the constant weight and pressure of the perpetual threat of new and unknown crucibles, beside which I would have to pass without seeing or hearing, just as we pass by the microbes of dreadful diseases, which wait for the moment to strike their designated victims.

“It is with fear, with ambiguous and sorrowful dread that I remember the past and meet the different beings who live in it, who knew my life and perhaps have gained rights over me — rights that I do not recognize nor forgive… Some disappeared, and it was with laborious pain, endlessly reconstructed and retouched, that I watched them go…”

LXIII

At that moment, our eyes met, and our gazes became entangled with each other, their oblique and fleeting rays crossing.

Immediately my voice failed me, and with it all the thoughts that had been pouring forth, as if from outside, that had inspired and given it life.

We looked at each other for a moment, and I felt the bottomless duplicity that had also been listening to us, like an intrusive eavesdropper.

Then an irresistible fit of laughter overcame us, suddenly, and we laughed for some time without saying anything, until she, to hide the sudden embarrassment that prevented her from leaving me without humiliating explanations, murmured:

— It seems to me the chapter of… useless confidences is closed.

LXIV

At last the first day of Holy Week arrived, and also the first day of Maria Santa’s miracle, which was now being repeated after several years of interruption.

The whole town already knew that she had been lying in her bed for five hours, motionless, very pale, unconscious, with her fingers intertwined and her head sunken into the pillows, illuminated only by a candle.

I had already seen her in the morning when the miracle began, and the entire household had been moved by the news, with messengers leaving the courtyard—already filled with pilgrims—for all corners of the town, announcing the good news. Aunt Emiliana accompanied me, watchful and suspicious, shaking her head and raising her eyebrows with irrepressible impatience and fear.

I decided to return to her room, knowing I would find her alone, as visits wouldn’t begin until noon and all the doors remained closed, keeping the house in a heavy and respectful silence.

When I opened the door, my hand trembled slightly, and I felt that the anguish pressing on my heart was real, despite myself.

To my astonishment, I saw Maria Santa had risen and was coming toward me with deliberately calm steps, yet taken painfully, with the desperate energy that only extreme fatigue gives.

Seeing my silent smile, she was deeply moved, and it suddenly seemed as if a tunic had fallen over her body, covering her, bristling with nerves that trembled and stirred in turmoil beneath her pale and glowing skin.

Her eyes, wide with astonishment, her hands clenched violently, twitching endlessly, and her chattering teeth revealed the immense, unacknowledged pain that possessed her, abruptly halting the mocking gesture she had made upon entering. And I felt a great, calm sadness take hold of me, one I had not anticipated.

With unexpected gentleness, which I emphasized with cruelty, I tried to draw her away from the doorway where she had stopped for a moment, as if to summon all her strength in a final effort, to continue walking in silence, without running, without screaming, without flailing her arms in wild motion.

But she could not take a step, and I saw that something had already left her—forever…

She finally managed to concentrate all the life that had been unleashed in her into her eyes, which fixed on me, hallucinated, superhuman, burning me with their light and giving me the strangest sensation of nakedness and helplessness.

Sobs rose in my throat and choked me for an instant like a sudden breath.

I knelt with anxious joy and stretched out my arms to her, but as if facing a terrifying vision, she slowly turned her gaze away and repelled me, with fearful slowness, murmuring in a hoarse, almost human voice:

— Not you… not you…

And, stepping back, she lay down again, taking exactly the same position as before.

Kneeling, I let myself be overtaken by the thoughts of hatred and envy that live in the world as a heavy cloud, lying in wait for our moments of misery, blending in one single despair all the disillusioned, all the betrayed, the unlucky and the exploited, who gather, strangers, into a suddenly unified group.

LXV

Maria Santa had begun to speak softly things that cannot be repeated, and I listened in silence, my face in my hands, leaning against a chest. I feared interrupting, if I uttered a single word, if I made the slightest gesture, the dream in which she was lost, whispering to someone who wasn’t me, but rather her habitual and invisible confidant, to whom she seemed to be trying to explain the painful confusion of her desires, her body, and her spirit.

He was between us, but he was only within her, and I perceived the sacred pain of that confession, the trembling pride with which it was made, the slow, superhuman joy of the liberation it represented, in its marvelous simplicity, in its absolute clarity, in communion with the earth.

And I couldn’t resist for long the violation I was committing involuntarily, and I stirred to prevent the atmosphere between us from becoming crystallized.

In her cold delirium, in her ghostly fever, her eyes—despite the visible unconsciousness in which they were submerged—were so strange and profoundly human that they frightened me when I leaned over them, and I felt a vague desire to extinguish somehow that luminous ray, so pure, so transparent in its divine innocence, in such contrast with the words my ears heard, which confused and maddened me in their sickly ecstasy, in their slow delight.

I remembered then so many things I had done involuntarily, under the impulse of many reasons, all contradictory, and I became irritated, realizing that I would likely do many others still, and perhaps the same ones—but deliberately…

LXVI

I rose with difficulty and dragged myself to my bed, heavily, as if I were carrying an inert and foreign body that, in its indifference, refused to obey me. And I passed from that nightmare-like vigil, without transition—hardly feeling my limp limbs stretched beneath the covers—into a tranquil, absolute sleep that overcame me all at once, leaving only the sensation in my ears that I had heard, far off, out there in the sleeping mountains that encircle us, the solemn and solitary toll of a bell.

And its echo lingered throughout the time I slept, expanding and transforming into a distant chant accompanied by a harmonium, which awakened me with gentle slowness.

Lying on my back, I then saw my entire room dance the new dance of dawn, in a very white, milky light that flickered, uncertain, and was saturated with the vague aromas of the earth in its eternally renewed virginity.

The indistinct music, as if it were merely the confused murmur of that resurrection, continued, unbroken…

The large ceiling planks creaked, stretching themselves, and I saw them shift, now rising, now falling, now undulating in indistinct and fantastic movements. And I began to count them, vaguely recalling that only a few would be needed to enclose me, to make a coffin like one I had seen, covered in velvet, but revealing inside the crudely planed boards from which it had been made.

And it came to mind, like an old dream, the night the only person who had made me see and understand life with other eyes than my own had died.

Fiber by fiber, nerve by nerve, each organ, each limb had rotted before my eyes, implacably open in the darkness.

I saw her skin first lose its glow, as though the mysterious light that had illuminated it in life had withdrawn, then stiffen, becoming almost unreal in its marvelous youth, and with fearful slowness, it opened in livid sores.

I saw the flesh emerge and fall, side to side, with a certain muffled sound that reached my ears—precise and clear, despite its wet softness.

I saw the worms form and emerge, in greedy clusters, here and there, beginning their task methodically, solemnly.

The mark of her mouth, in its simple sinuous curve, turned pale and livid, then black, parting into a horrible wound from which yellow fluids oozed.

I once again reached the depths of that old anguish—not dead—and again it seemed I had exceeded the limits of my capacity for belief, and, with painful effort, as if dragging myself by the hand from a dense, tangled, fearsome forest full of secret whispers, anguished calls, and long darkness where I had lost myself, I managed to bring myself back to another, purer region where peace and forgiveness might exist.

LXVII

— Who knows, maybe it’s all just a misunderstanding of yours? — I said then, very softly, with melancholic tenderness, not recognizing my own voice.

Looking at the window, I saw the moon peering at me through the trembling leaves of the mango tree, which covered it like a heavy curtain.

— Your problem — I went on, as if someone were beside me — your problem is that you go beyond the object and the purpose of everything, giving it a meaning, a remote intention barely perceptible to others.

“Perhaps everything is a mistake of your will, a reality that isn’t your own… because you’re not an exclusively material being, and surely you have a soul that is smaller than your body, and not in harmony with it, exceeded, suffocated, outmatched by it in every way…”

— It’s better, and I have many reasons to believe so, though all contradictory — I continued, in a more human voice, less otherworldly, in a sententious and advisory tone that seemed ridiculous to me — it’s better you return to your past, search for another starting point, relabel your feelings, and perhaps you’ll find your lost simplicity…

LXVIII

It was the second day of visitation, for the first—on the eve—had passed far from me, since I had fallen asleep when the first visitors arrived after midday, and I had not left my room again.

At dawn, after long prayers led by Aunt Emiliana and accompanied on the harmonium by Didina Americana—who seemed seized with intense religious fervor, forgetting both me and the world—the doors were opened to visitors from the small town and surrounding areas, and to pilgrims from afar who presented themselves at the house, soon filling the street, then the courtyards, in a peaceful but unstoppable invasion.

Hearing the muffled murmuring of the crowd passing through the dark corridors, feeling the hands brushing the old wooden door that closed my room like a prison with only one exit, I rose, dressed quickly, and stepped out cautiously, trying to lose myself among all those passersby who, I soon realized, had not yet been admitted to Maria Santa, and for now merely filled the rooms and antechambers leading to the room where she lay. I entered, furtively, through another inner door opening from a deserted and sealed room.

As soon as I entered, I stopped, surprised by two strange figures posted on either side of the headboard of the large black bed where Maria Santa lay, who seemed to be attentively guarding her sleep.

I approached on tiptoe, careful not to wake her and not to attract the attention of anyone who might be there, hidden in the prevailing dimness.

And to my greater astonishment, I recognized that the figures were two statues, one of the Lord of Sorrows and the other of the Virgin of Sorrows, which had been placed there without anyone seeing when or how.

Behind one of them, I spotted Aunt Emiliana, who, in a quick seamstress-like gesture, as if putting the final touch on her work, adjusted the folds of the great mantle of heavy purple velvet, trimmed in gold, of the first statue—Jesus kneeling, crushed under the cross, dressed in purple silk speckled with gold dots and golden fringes, with his head bowed, showing, through long locks of real hair, in the style of backlands churches, his terribly expressive face.

The Black maid, the old nurse, was also there, and when they saw me, they stood side by side in a suddenly defensive posture, as if in intense and anguished anticipation.

Only much later, realizing that I neither saw them nor wished to see them—and that I then examined the other statue, dressed in white and dark blue, with lace and silver embroidery, and finally turned to look at my friend—did they lower their guard and silently resume their arrangements, pretending to ignore my presence.

And my eyes were held by the gaunt and serene figure of Maria Santa, whose calm features were composed of no voluntary expression nor concealed one, and who now seemed to rise before me, from among the coarse lace that surrounded her, like the ghost of another woman until then unknown.

The feelings that form within us and that confusingly prepare and precede the new reality about to appear before our eyes and hands—explaining and guiding our sensations, connecting them to our consciousness—abandoned me suddenly, and I found myself helpless before the new truth emerging before me, feeling powerless against the unbearable sense of exile brought on by the abrupt change of scenery taking place around me.

Again I felt the swift approach of the border of madness, and I sought, desperately, to satisfy the imperative need for presence and normal reality that invaded me.

I looked again at the statues, at Aunt Emiliana and the nurse, always avoiding the face of my friend, which drew me in from the shadows like a vague and sinister enchantment.

I examined, while my heart slowly found its rhythm, the rough carving of the statues, the theatrical exaggeration of their garments and poses, and finally Aunt Emiliana’s plain black dress, with her large silver rosary hanging from her neck, and the Black woman, with her white headscarf tied and the ends dangling behind, stained with oil.

They were waiting for my departure, watching all my movements with impatience, holding two silver trays, which would likely be placed on the pedestals of the statues.

One of the trays was already filled with coins, and Aunt Emiliana, who held it in her hands, quickly hid it behind the tall headboard of the bed when she noticed I was looking at it.

LXIX

I returned to my room, managing to pass unnoticed through the now-crowded and suffocating halls and corridors, full of people waiting for the visitation to begin.

It was with deliberate relief that I locked myself away again, completely isolating myself from the crowd, and in the animal-like silence that followed, I was able to laboriously reassemble my calm.

But soon, after the dry snap of Maria Santa’s door being flung open, the entire house came alive, and the heavy sound of visitors’ footsteps entering the room, their muffled exclamations, the sobs that broke out in loud, uncontrollable wails upon seeing that Maria Santa, very pale, with closed lips and a slightly bluish mouth, showed not the slightest sign of pain as pins were stuck into her bare arms, laid out along her still and stretched body. And the prayers, the pleas for a better life, the requests for healing, made between moans and sighs, formed a strange music that filled my ears.

I felt that all that despair, all that yearning, fascinated and entranced me, making me doubt my own real existence, in a strange release, in a painful separation between the internal and external, which became isolated, forming a monstrous and involuntary artistic creation.

Alone, outside of myself, the reality that my premonitions and suspicions had long been quietly announcing now appeared before my disordered mind with brilliant truth and clarity.

Wanting to flee, to take no part in the imminent struggle, I tried to relive the forgotten years of my life, when I had only had the strength to live, always seeking some form of liberation, and unknowingly sacrificing to it the small joys that make it up, in a long and subtle chain that only much later connects and unfolds.

On my knees, face in hands, leaning against my bed, I saw myself again as a child and remembered the transformation that occurred, in moments and with great disturbance to my childish soul, when the house shifted from gaslight to electric.

Replacing the soft, diffused glow of the gas mantle that was always lit in my room, its blue and gold flame flickering and crackling mysteriously, came the new light—very white, slicing the shadows into dry, solid blocks.

The nights became long and anguished, and I felt myself outside the world, inside a magical prison, and my wretched childhood became even more inert and sad, startled and frightened by that sudden brightness that swept away my beloved little ghosts and left me exhaustingly alone in my own presence.

(It is an unrecognized drama, quickly forgotten—the childhood without God.)

From my bed, curling up and shrinking to make myself even smaller, I watched the dark corners of the room, where they waited silently for a long time, in a watchful silence that was both amusing and terrifying, and then rushed toward the bars that enclosed and protected me, my nighttime friends; and now I saw them very clearly, sadly distinct and without mystery.

If they turned off the light—since I didn’t sleep with it on—I began to cry from the sudden blindness, the anguish, the fear of total darkness, and soon the crying turned into a childish nervous crisis. I ended up begging them to let me sleep with the lamp on, and I would close my eyes so they’d think I had truly fallen asleep.

And I was afraid to open them and see the new room that had formed around me and seemed foreign and hostile.

And I dreamed, wishing for another age, very different from the one I faced, and I dreamed of buying a lamp, a different lamp, that would have another light and show me a different room altogether.

But little by little, the brightly lit rooms of our house began to seem even more mysterious and terrifying to me, and the nightmare of clarity and brightness, surrounded by the vast outer darkness, became my last companion.

Time had passed, and as I heard the footsteps of the last visitors slowly retreating, whispering prayers, I felt, with my head buried in the covers, a great and icy fear—because I knew that Jesus had accompanied me, without my seeing Him…

LXX

The next day, I wanted to see with my own eyes how the pilgrims and visitors behaved, and as I crossed the room that preceded my own, I saw Aunt Emiliana coming out of hers, closing the door, then suddenly stopping and leaning against the frame, as if strength had left her in a daze.

I looked at her with apprehension and had the intuition of a catastrophe—irremediable, final—because, by the expression in her eyes and her pallid face, she seemed to have shut a crime behind that door.

She stood still for a few moments, like a vision of terrifying surprise, and her appearance was so striking that a warm silence fell, silencing everyone in the room, in all positions, their clothes revealing they had come from all places, from all classes.

At last, she managed to compose herself, and with effort, her expression returned to its usual severe composure. Then, turning quickly, she gave the key two turns, removed it, put it in her pocket, and crossed the room with incomparable dignity—so simple and so natural that the immense effort it required was hardly noticeable.

Passing in front of me without looking, head lowered and lips sealed, she slowly made her way to the room where Maria Santa was displayed, already crowded with people who had remained inside while waiting to be pushed forward by others in the outer rooms, who were in turn pushed by those coming from outside—all without impatience, without protest, amid whispered murmurs like prayers, in an oppressive dream.

Aunt Emiliana made her way through those men and women weathered by sun and rain, seasoned by a harsh and disproportionate nature, armed only with the halo of her moral authority, which even strangers from far away immediately recognized at first glance.

Reaching the bed where Maria Santa lay, in the center of the empty semicircle that formed, she knelt, striking her knees hard on the floor, and began to pray intensely, her head hidden in her arms, crossed over the bedcovers.

LXXI

I had followed Aunt Emiliana and stopped in a corner, for right after she passed, the path that had opened before her closed again, irresistibly, and I was unable to accompany her up to the bed.

Over the shoulders of those in front of me, I watched curiously, attentively, the movement of the old lady’s shoulder blades, waiting for a sudden and immense sob to shake them, because I dimly understood what was happening in her soul, and I was waiting for an imminent explosion, an irreparable crisis, that would make her betray what had happened in her room, her retreat, her secret refuge, between her and her mysterious hoard.

And I forgot the presence of Maria Santa’s body, still motionless, with purple lids lowered and livid skin animated only by the flickering reflections of the large wax candles, which made the air of the completely closed room even heavier and thicker.

The visitors around us, indifferent to our concerns, were praying—some kneeling, eyes fixed on Maria’s face—while others, drawing near, furtively stuck new pins into her arms, with cold curiosity and under the pretext that they would become, later on, precious relics to bring aid and relief from many ills.

But, just as no one had been able to see what she kept in her room, just as no one had entered it after her installation—for she had arranged everything by herself, without the help of anyone, with the doors carefully locked from within—so now she let nothing reveal what was happening in her innermost self, and only a prodigious fatigue made her movements slow and measured. Her body, dry and frail, remained always upright, without the least abandonment.

Then, lifting her inert, expressionless face from her arms, she rested her hands on the edge of the bed and rose, silently, as if the room were completely empty and she should be far from what was happening, from the atmosphere of supplication and miracles that surrounded us. As if meticulously calculating her gestures, rhythmizing and regulating them with minute care, she respectfully held Maria Santa’s hands, which had been piously placed in a cross, and kissed them slowly in a solemn, bizarre ceremony.

Then, turning, always with the same majestic slowness, she walked and came straight to me, without hesitation, without lifting the eyes she kept obstinately fixed on the floorboards.

It seemed that someone had secretly whispered to her of my presence and had led her by the hand to the spot where I stood, among so many other people, unknown and indifferent, as in a safe and well-guarded refuge.

— You will watch over Maria tonight — she told me, with gentle authority, letting the large beads of her rosary fall one after another —, because I feel extraordinarily tired.

“I am exhausted and my head is lost, for so many nights I have not slept, I have not rested a single moment. So, you will stay here alone, throughout the whole night, with the body of our Saint.”

She paused for a few moments, as if looking for something more she ought to tell me and that had suddenly escaped her memory.

Finally, she went on in her whispering, sweet, warm voice:

— No one will disturb the sacred quiet of this room, nor will you allow them to do so.

LXXII

Since I heard those words and sensed in them a secret intention, I no longer had the will to leave Maria Santa’s side, and I stayed there until the last visitor, after glancing at us sideways and furtively sticking a pin in my friend’s arm, left like a thief, bumping into the furniture and not knowing where to hide his hands.

The house, little by little, grew silent, and soon everything seemed to sleep in the darkness that surrounded us.

Only the crackling of the candles and my hurried breathing interrupted the absolute calm that settled after the hoofbeats of the last pilgrim’s mount faded completely.

I sat on one of the large black chests that leaned against the walls and that, with their enormous handles, hanging and shiny from many hands, seemed ready to be slung onto the pack animals’ harnesses.

They gave the room the air of a rest stop, a provisional point of brief pause in a long and heavy journey along endless roads, without a set path, in search of treasures that were to fill them, to be carried off on new and unending treks.

I contemplated Maria Santa’s face for a long time, impassive, motionless, like a funerary statue in an ancient European cathedral, and suddenly something about her shoulders caught my attention, making me rise from where I sat and approach quickly.

She was wrapped in a wide white flannel robe that covered her entirely in large folds, modestly shaping her form, making her seem very tall, all in simple lines and of severe harmony.

At the shoulders, the tunic was fastened with ties, and as my eyes fixed intently upon them, I realized—and then saw—that they had come undone, revealing the pale brown skin of Maria’s shoulders, between the two edges of the immaculate garment, which, merely touched by my cautious fingers, fell aside with surprising ease…

LXXIII

A slow renewal, like a chant, the successive, rhythmic awakening of new forces, the pulsing that first felt distant and muffled but then very close, very clear, flowing through my veins like water that first murmurs hesitantly, then in wild tumult, flooding the irrigation channels of a field, the pulsing of a more human and generous blood awakened in me an entire new life, involuntary and terrible, like a funerary feast.

I spent many hours like this afterward, my body voluptuously sprawled, limbs limp and dangling over the edge of the chest where I had again taken refuge, and whose heavy, studded lid now seemed to me of inexplicable sweetness.

I enjoyed, with indescribable tranquility, the pacification of all my anxieties, of all my old terrors, and that animal life that had been born and now stirred in me, in secret, awakening the most hidden sources of my energy, no longer dependent on my will or the morbid desires of my spirit, which had retreated into the shadows from where they had come, in confused flocks.

It seemed to me that the future opened before me, illuminated, and I saw, in front of my steps—now to be conscious and steady—another domain, healthy and sacred, and it felt a sacrifice to tread it in any way other than that indicated by the successive order, only now revealed, of destiny.

The divorce that had occurred within me, and which had become clear and palpable, was the cause of my inviolate remorse and of the impossible forgiveness of my own senses.

And I understood then that I was, that I had been until now, a poor miserable creature, and from the height of my old misery, I watched with serene hope this mysterious rising up, this lazy and belated sublimation taking place beyond my control.

I saw, with delicious dread, the birth, the very complex and difficult creation of the animal that, in one leap, was to dominate me, flattening and destroying—perhaps forever—the curves and angles of my incomplete, unfinished character…

LXXIV

I got up and, going once more to Maria’s bed, sat on the wide wooden edge, leaning over with anxious caution.

I now discovered that another world coexisted with mine, and in it, beings moved, felt, loved, and lived in a way I had not yet understood, although I had suspected its existence, like someone hearing indistinct voices and footsteps in inns and travel lodgings.

Before Maria Santa’s unconscious body, I remained motionless for eternal minutes, before extending my hands and touching with them the tangible proof of what was happening inside me, and I was finally able to run them—now without fear—over her strong breasts, extraordinarily strong in the elongated line of the profile of her outstretched body, all lit by a soft, magical, and diffuse light that made visible, like old ivory work, the skull barely hidden by her pale, translucent flesh.

Tia Emiliana’s statues, wrapped in their sumptuous velvet mantles, stared at me with their exaggeratedly pathetic eyes, from which thick paraffin tears hung, sliding down their cadaver-colored faces despite the patches of rouge, and the heavy bouquets of metal flowers, like bishop’s miters from a nightmare, the tall and stiff wax candles, the golden and silver laces and fringes in profusion—all made everything around me unreal, strange, supporting with their naive and bizarre artifice my poor attempt at life and humanization.

It did not seem to me that I was committing a moral crime, slowly unveiling, one by one, the melancholic secrets of that body which offered itself to me and denied itself at the same time, in its distant immobility.

It was an immeasurable charity that it practiced, unconscious, but for that very reason more valuable and almost divine in its purest, superhuman innocence.

And to my lips came, in confused and irresistible waves, redemptive and forgotten words of universal love, which I murmured as in a dream, a vast dream of fertility, of presence, of human and eternal sap pulsing violently within me, frightening away the suddenly faded and aged phantoms…

What intense, total joy, what pure, intoxicating happiness made my warm and increasingly daring fingers tremble.

The deep resonance I felt awakening and rising within me, through them, caused the doors of life to open slowly before my resounding steps…

LXXV

When Tia Emiliana found me unconscious the next morning, she carried me in her frail arms, dragged me through the still-empty hallways, without calling, without asking for help or assistance from anyone, and, opening my eyes, I saw I was in my bed, and she was watching me with her night-bird eyes, wide open and expressionless.

She said nothing to me, and after covering me, she left without a sound, locking the door and taking the key with her.

And I spent the whole day between the restless sleep that suddenly overtook me and a confused wakefulness, where I vainly tried to remember what had happened to me, the sequence of events escaping me entirely, presenting themselves in my memory as rapid but disconnected scenes, without a precise meaning, despite their momentary clarity.

When night completely invaded my room, I then fell deeply asleep, and only much later, when the slats of the shutters were already mysteriously glowing, did I wake with the foreknowledge that she had returned and had already left again, after silently inspecting everything.

An aura that slowly climbed up to my throat, gradually trying to suffocate me, had interrupted my deathlike sleep and brought me back to reality, with the exact and immediate awareness of what had happened in the shadow that reigned around me.

When I got up, managing to master my disordered nerves, without anything—no sign of her passage—making me understand the truth, the absolute and clear understanding of her actions was already within me, without being produced or suggested by my senses, along with the justification of her spying.

My trembling fingers did not reach for the candle that should have been on my bedside table, because I knew it was unnecessary to light it, for I already had the certainty that everything around me was meticulously in order, everything had been minutely, methodically returned to its place, with such naturalness and skill that I would not in any way be able to distinguish what had been done by my own hands from what had been restored by enemy hands…

And I was certain, too, that the papers left by the judge were no longer in their place…

LXXVI

I found my door ajar and, with a light touch of my hands in the darkness, it opened, allowing me to see the rooms and hallways lit by the distant, fantastical reflection of the candles always burning around Maria Santa’s bed since the beginning of the miracle.

I crossed two rooms without the slightest noise, tiptoeing, and, stopping in the middle of another corridor, I began to listen, with terrible calm, for the scream or the dreadful moan I had been expecting since I awoke.

I stood before the traveler’s room, and remained there for a long time, heart pounding, in the same position, for I knew the floorboards in that spot would make a sudden and resounding noise if I made any abrupt movement.

I was waiting for what had to happen, what was essential, for my understanding, to happen.

At last I sensed that the door of that room opened, silently, and, invisible in the darkness that gathered there, almost tangible, I perceived that she had passed by me like a breath, perceptible only by her mysterious radiation of ancient hatred.

I extended my arms with unspeakable fear and, advancing blindly, with the staggering movements of someone about to fall without support, I reached the door before me, which suddenly opened, and the traveler appeared, lit fully and starkly by a kerosene table lamp she held with both hands, having surely kicked the door open with her foot.

— Ah, it’s you — she said to me, eyes wide, in which the kerosene light made many sparkling, mocking points gleam —, I thought it was her…

— She’s already gone — I murmured, with infinite cowardice and fresh fear —, but she was here, she went into your room, and mine too, examining everything that was there…

The luminous points in her eyes began to dance, and the lamp trembled in her hands. I saw that she was laughing, shaken all over by little sobs, for she was holding in her laughter in prodigious secrecy.

That laughter seemed sacrilegious to me, and, feeling all the energy that still remained in me abandon me, I realized I was now only a poor, masterless thing in her hands.

— Come — she said to me.

And, passing her arm around my waist, she made me enter her room, leading me close to the bed.

She set the lamp on the table, and instantly, a scene of calm intimacy formed before me.

Without letting me go, she carefully lifted a glass dome, moved the image that stood beneath it, and took from under its carved pedestal a small chamois pouch that I knew had to be there.

She poured it out on the bedspread.

A mysterious light, very pure, sprang forth, sparkled, hesitant, and then fixed itself for a second, suddenly changing color.

Other sparks appeared, here, there, over there, and began to throb: they were precious stones.

— I took them to a jeweler — she explained, speaking softly, her face very close to mine so that none of her words would be lost in the darkness —, and the poor man told me they are amethysts, topazes, beryls, aquamarines, chrysolites, heliodores, what do I know!

“They’re rubies, emeralds, and diamonds of the poor — she went on, laughing again. — These are tourmalines, sad tourmalines, good for Turks! And the funniest thing is that she already knows everything… The stone buyer who came from the capital, and who every time he came here kept insisting to see them, never managing to do so, finally obtained that incomparable proof of trust, and told her everything, everything!”

— But you — I managed to interrupt her, unable to hide my intense repugnance —, you can’t keep them with you forever.

“You must know that will become extremely dangerous.”

— You think I’m a thief — she hissed, even lower, and, with violent scorn marking her lips, added:

— And perhaps you’re right. I’m indeed a lost woman. There’s no use hiding it from you, because you know it…

Suddenly, tears sprang from her eyes, and she covered her face with her hands. I approached, and our bodies touched.

But without raising her head, without putting her hands on me, she pushed me away, simply through the immense incomprehension that raised a wall between us. And I felt her eyes, burning with astonishment and unease, rest on my nape as I withdrew…

LXXVIII

— Because this is a joyless city — I told my friend from Aunt Emiliana’s consultations that day, at a moment when we managed to be alone in the receiving room, while pilgrims and onlookers crowded into the other rooms and corridors.

“Everywhere man has managed to lay bare his iron stones, black and glossy. And on top of them they built their houses, where families slowly degenerate, and in each one madness lies in wait for new victims.

“Walk at night through these lethargic streets, among these endless electric-light posts, illuminating with silent pomp miseries and ruins, and you will hear moans, coughs, howls, and maddening cries—you will truly hear all this, as if wandering the avenues of a great asylum, among your barred pavilions.

“Have you noticed the sinister voracity of beggars, in despairing contrast with the sobriety of the rich? Do you know, surely, Mrs. Coura ‘because she sings in the choir,’ as our hillfolk explain? Have you ever been to Mrs. Zé Julio’s, who has a huge cancer, blossoming open, devouring her leg, because a woman with a black shawl dripped water behind her bedroom door?”

“And Maria Alvim, who cannot sew because the wheel of her sewing machine begins to groan with her husband’s voice? And the left door of the chamber, which will not open because it was shut by a ghost?

“And this whole masquerade that forms around me and terrifies me!

“Do you not feel that we can never walk together with the things that surround us here, that we move toward absurdly different ends and disregard one another?

“Do you not hear the curse that rises from each of these desolate mountains, do you not shudder at the threat that lives in each of these valleys, which close abruptly after we pass; the hatred of their trees, the contempt of their poisoned waters, heavy as a remedy?

“We live as besieged, as prisoners who glare at one another, enraged, sensing the arrival of a disaster they do not know but which must be, unfailingly, painful and unforgiving?

“Who will defend us? Who will soothe our fear?”

I stood, unable to contain my agitation, and paced the room to the window, to find a little calm that might let me leave without looking at “my new friend,” as Father Olímpio called him.

I stared through the glass at the ever-renewing crowd and had already forgotten his presence when I felt his hand rest on my arm, and, turning, I faced his curious, smiling face.

— It seems to me that you are unwell, that you are ill — he said to me kindly. — Why not consult Mrs. Emiliana or pray for the Saint to grant you health?

And something fell between us, like a thick, black curtain, excluding my interlocutor and closing off my heart.

LXXIX

Left alone, I clumsily felt my wrists, for it truly seemed I had a fever.

And I began to recall the mute boy who had stayed in our house, and we, as children, at each of his grunts, would shout to one another: “he’s hungry!”, “he’s thirsty!”, and we would rush to bring him fruit, sweets, bread, and water…

The mute boy would cry, humiliated and irritated, and would push us away indignantly, humiliating and irritating us in return.

But I must have had a fever. And the house, in silence, echoed entirely, like a great music box, with the slow, spaced creaking of the ceiling, the floorboards, and the furniture.

Through the window, which I had left wide open in the darkness, came the breath of the houses, human and warm, in gusts, rhythmic like someone’s breathing, and it brought me a sense of rest and companionship.

Again I heard silent footsteps…

Then, something was murmured, as though persistently questioning a sick person, whose answers I could not hear, lost in the distance.

Then, the nearly imperceptible sound diminished further, ceased for a moment, began again, broken by a faint convulsive cough, and everything dissolved into my restless, exhausting sleep…

LXXX

But I soon awoke, and I could no longer close my eyes in the darkness, such was the weariness and discouragement I felt. An inhuman joy chilled me, clinging to my bones, and my cold head went on, monstrously, calculating and reflecting, without my being able to retain the formulas and reflections that came in disorder.

An invisible figure, in the shadow before me, seemed to be questioning someone who had taken control of me, demanding meticulous explanations that were given beyond my awareness.

My atavistic fear had surfaced once more and refused to descend again to drown at the bottom of my soul, where it would meet terrifying enemies.

To guide me through that terrible labyrinth, into which I was being led by the two interlocutors, I would need to accept Christ as a starting point, but I could not find Him near me. And I felt myself sinking into solitude, losing my way among the strange things that had attached themselves to me and had always accompanied me without ever fully merging with me.

I thought I had not slept, but someone spoke three words next to my face, and those words answered clearly, precisely, completely, the questions that had arisen within me during that endless night, in a painful antinomy that devoured me.

I sprang up and scanned the shadows of my room with questioning eyes. Feverishly I paced it, and opened the doors of the heavy wardrobe, which, it seemed to me, had moved; then, on my knees, I stretched out my arms and verified that there was no one beneath my bed.

My poverty frightened me, and if not long ago I had been the victim of my own frenzy, I now mastered it with meticulous and ironic patience, and I burst out laughing, seeing that my room was tightly shut, but this time from the inside, making it a safe refuge—but a suffocating one—of isolation.

— Surely — I thought aloud, speaking to those who seemed to be watching me in the shadows — someone else would say all this is nonsense and would laugh at these doubts that seem unsolvable to me… But the truth — I continued very softly now, so that not even I would hear — is that nothing ever truly becomes mine, really mine, and the moral zone that follows me destroys or drives away everything, without my being able to see and touch what surrounds me and comes with me, and weighs on me with its incomplete and disturbing presence…

And I remembered reading, or someone telling me, that God does not halt those who walk together…

LXXXI

I approached the window that looked out over the entire city, in its tumultuous descent of pallid rooftops, illuminated by the violent moonlight, and, leaning on its sill, I breathed deeply, in great gulps, that sleeping air, with its slow undulations, rising and falling in rhythm with all those chests, hidden from my view.

— Perhaps I didn’t know them well enough — I murmured, and now my voice seemed familiar and friendly to me — and if I drew closer to them, and listened to their secrets, surely I would understand myself better and rid myself of this illness of reserve and unhappiness that follows me everywhere, like a dry fruit clinging to its tree, and perhaps I would spend this vast love that exists, unused, in my heart.

“The confusion and the evil are in me, but they have an independent and involuntary life, beyond my reasoning and will, and strangers must help and free me.

“But who will free me? — I went on, encouraging myself. — I can’t inoculate them with my suffering, and that wouldn’t cure me.

“Transposing life into another mind, perhaps I’ll find the rest I lack…

“But who could have spoken so close to my pillow? It wasn’t a Brazilian voice, because it was fair and clear. Our nature says one thing, and our men another. How could I have heard it?”

I went to the door, and rested my face against it, straining my ears to try to understand what was happening inside. But now a transparent silence reigned throughout the entire house, without mystery, as if it were completely emptied of the lives that breathed within it.

LXXXII

That was the night of waiting for the great miracle, and in the courtyards, men and women, old people and children crowded together in patient, silent groups that I could see from my window, which looked out over the back of the house, in one of its recesses, and to where I had gone in the restlessness of my insomnia.

I could see only their dark forms, in motionless and confused masses, for lying down on the blankets and saddles they had brought, they covered themselves—two, three, sometimes an entire family—with the enormous woolen ponchos they had brought from afar.

And I knew, sensing it, that among them were the sick of every kind, who were there in anxious hope of relief and salvation, which would come to them with the sun. Faith formed a halo around those inanimate bodies, and the whole courtyard seemed inhabited by a single sleeping soul.

Gazing in the dim light—for the moonlight had not reached there—at all those miseries, divinized by a common hope, I gradually detached myself from all the agitation that had anguished me moments before, and, entering imperceptibly into a purer realm, I found myself before my own eyes, turned inward.

Far off, in my heart, an uncertain song began to rise, remembered without surprise. It was like an adolescence of poor blood, languid and touched by the lights of spring, very gentle and very humble.

And with the image of Maria Santa, pure joy arose in me for the first time…

A curious smile played within my spirit and guided me, in my slow and confident advance toward final, long-sought tranquility.

With a movement of forgotten fear, I tried to wrap myself once more in my shroud, which had crumbled into ashes, and I cruelly felt its laughable insincerity… The rebirth of my body was taking place, slowly and with painful pauses, but perhaps it would be completed, forever dispelling the shadows that had covered me with suffering and confusion.

It was a secret and bitter smile that opened within me, and it seemed I had left behind on the path, far behind, a burden that would return to my shoulders only much later.

And I saw myself, as in a foreign vision, in those now peaceful hours of solitude, I saw the renewed and profound joy of my own gaze, lifted toward me, and fading away, receding more and more, as if weighed down by the power of the many years that had passed.

I saw myself act, as if I were someone else, and only the memory of the facts and gestures came back to me. I did not recall the impressions, none of the reflections awakened in me by the events of those times, which had slumbered, until then, in a sleep of mortal peace.

The confused feeling of my weakness and the poverty that frightened me made dearer to me the support I had finally found in Maria, and a new sun illuminated my ideas, once somber, now vague and very white.

Death should come very gently, very lightly…

But I am afraid of…

The blood, stirred by the great blow of memories that suddenly assailed me in a tumult, suffocated me. Rushing up in a whirlwind from the depths of my forgetfulness, they were like a slap full in the face that I received, a bloody, unforgivable insult…

LXXXIII

At that very moment, as if obeying a given signal, the whole house awoke and filled with noise.

Doors slammed violently, there were calls and cries, hurried footsteps, and a loud, long, and mournful weeping, like a mysterious chant, dominating the confused chorus formed by the noise of the pilgrims and visitors who awoke with a start. And the sun broke through, radiant, without my having sensed its arrival, illuminating and transforming everything.

I rose quickly from the bed where I had reclined, and where I seemed to have dozed off, and, not fully aware of what I was doing, instinctively obeying the call of life coming from outside, I threw on a few mismatched pieces of clothing over my shoulders and rushed to Maria’s room, from where that incessant moaning seemed to come, modulated like an inhuman wail, awakening in me a dark and ominous certainty.

When I arrived, I understood that it was too late.

The halls and corridors were empty, and beside the door to the room, I first saw an old man, dressed all in black, the weariness and poverty visible in the seams of his clothing.

He was writing in a large book and taking notes on scattered papers beside him.

Then I recognized the doctor, who spoke a long and broken sentence to Aunt Emiliana, who listened to him, very pale, with downcast eyes and hidden hands. She seemed to be trying to accept something sad that the old lady heard with effort and willing resignation.

As he left, he shut the door behind him violently, and only then did I see Father Olímpio, who, seated with legs outstretched, prayed deeply, casting me only a distracted and vague glance, without noticing my astonishment and the new attention with which I now observed everything around me.

The huge images, draped in velvet, lace, and fringe, the bouquets of silver flowers, stiff and aggressive, the candelabra dripping wax, the silver trays with their offerings, the believers kneeling or standing, collected and in ecstasy—everything had disappeared, and before me was only a common mortuary room, a poor funeral chamber where my friend’s body rested.

Once again, my mind turned inward, questioning itself with unease…

Women dressed in mourning entered, with ceremonial gestures, and were also received ceremoniously by Aunt Emiliana, who wore a black lace over her head, the symbol of widows, and offered a glass of holy water into which they dipped a sprig and sprinkled the corpse.

They entered in silence, in order, embraced the lady, whispered something in her ear, and, after kneeling for a few moments before the bed, sat in the chairs symmetrically arranged against the walls.

Everything was done as if it had been studied and prepared long in advance, and so regular was the spectacle that I suddenly realized the strange figure I made in the middle of the room, in my improvised clothing, with a face bathed in tears that fell, scattered, without my feeling them.

Aunt Emiliana approached and extended her hand to me as to a stranger, and it seemed to me that her arm was a serpent, whose cold head I held between my hands, letting it fall with invincible repulsion.

The loud, howling cry continued, and I decided to seek refuge near it, as one seeks a friend and support in moments of sadness and abandonment.

And I found the smiling traveler, now in sobs, cut by spasms, unable to contain the hoarse moan that rose to her lips, irresistible, in a paroxysm of pain and fear.

She did not see me arrive and did not notice my presence at her side, where I remained for a long time in silence, with dry eyes and a smile playing on my lips.

Suddenly, my premonitions gathered and, in a second, took on real existence, like a prophecy or a curse.

I ran back, then, to Maria Santa, as if the ground were burning my feet.

LXXXIV

Father Olímpio stood and with a broad gesture placed something over his shoulders, heading solemnly toward the body, and the women, rising all at once, formed a group, chanting prayers, and also drew near the bed, accompanying the priest’s movements.

Aunt Emiliana, who had remained standing in a corner, took a few steps and was about to kneel when she noticed that I, slowly obeying an order inexplicable even to me, had placed before her an old, dark velvet cushion, faded and worn, all bordered with silver beads, which I had always seen at Maria Santa’s bedside.

She halted her gesture and did not kneel…

She remained standing, very pale, with clenched lips and lowered eyelids, and following her gaze, which shone through her lashes, I saw in the weary velvet a vague profile, fading slowly, slowly…

EPILOGUE

I hesitated a little in giving this chapter the title of epilogue. Here ended the diary which I transcribed in full, resisting the urge to correct it, to soften its morbid introspection, and to make Maria Santa the main character of the book.

Because I came to know Maria Santa through a single gesture of an old relative of mine, in whose house I stayed for a while during my trip to the depths of that marvelous Minas Gerais, and if it satisfied me, it would certainly not please those who, like me, believe that a novel should be based on the “strict observation of real facts,” as was said in the past.

It is not, then, an epilogue, because I do not know the end of this novel, and, when I asked my relative who had written the journal, and what became of them, she only crossed herself and turned her eyes away from my face.

Much later, one day she told me that her maid had been the same as Maria Santa’s, and perhaps the only person in the city who still kept her cult, and religiously preserved one of the pins used in the torment of her former mistress.

And she told me, with the frightened simplicity of an old Black woman, that the ladies of the town, as soon as they heard that Maria Santa’s burial was to be simple, had gathered together, bought meters and meters of white velvet and silver lace, had ravaged their gardens and backyards, and after covering the poor black coffin with the precious fabric, had carried on their shoulders, first its lid, overflowing with lilies, from which the corpse’s face alone emerged, amid those same flowers, and almost concealed by the veil and the great crown of orange blossoms.

The young women and girls, in virginal garments, with blue ribbon bows at their waists, walked singing through the city’s streets and slowly carried their Saint to the cemetery, having a grave dug in the middle of its main avenue, still entirely empty. The blessing was given by Father Olímpio, who wept, looking disturbed at three figures in black, speaking softly and laughing in secret.

They were Sinhá Gentil, Didina Americana, and the person who wrote the diary, about whom the maid would say nothing to me.

Of Dona Emiliana and the traveler, she only told me that they had both left, and took with them the other maid, who, she added, must not have lasted long, because “that malungo was cursed.”

And since I could only come to know Maria Santa’s life through the papers entrusted to me, I was unable to write her story as I had wished, and the author—or authoress—of the manuscript gives us only the reflection, the projection of Maria upon their own soul, and placed themselves, in my view, from a perspective outside of reality, hence the transposition of all the characters to a plane different from mine and far from my intentions.

The opposition between the real world and the inner world resulting from this voluntary retreat became an anguished struggle on the border of madness, and thus the title I chose to give this book.

In speaking often with the maid, I could not take a single step backward into her past or into that of those she had known and served in their intimate lives, but I clearly understood that she had found in her total and tranquil faith a shelter, a refuge of love and protection so strong that it would defend me from the fear I felt lingering within me, unexplained, when I saw that the papers left by the judge were together with the diary.

How had they come to be there? I cannot explain, and I do not wish to know the secret they hold, bound by a ribbon and the pin the old maid gave me…

Rio de Janeiro, 1933.

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