São Bernardo by Graciliano Ramos

Author:Graciliano Ramos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2020-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

19

MADALENA was good to a fault, I knew, though I didn’t see it right away. She revealed herself little by little, and never completely. I’m to blame, or maybe I should say this rough life is. It gave me a rough soul.

I’m wasting time, talking like this, I realize. If I can’t grasp my wife’s character, what’s this story for? Nothing, but I still have to write it.

The crickets sing as I sit here at the dining room table, drink coffee, light my pipe. Sometimes no ideas come, sometimes too many—but the page remains half-written, just like yesterday. I reread some lines. They’re not good enough, but it’s not worth it to try to fix them. I push the paper aside.

Vague emotions stir in me—a terrible turmoil, a crazy desire to go back, to talk once more with Madalena, as we did every day at this hour. Nostalgia? No, it’s not that. It’s desperation, rage, an enormous weight on my heart.

I try to recall what we said. Impossible. My words were just words, imperfect reproductions of exterior facts, and hers had something about them I can’t express. To feel them, I used to switch off the lights, letting shadows envelop us until we were two indistinct figures in the darkness.

Outside, the toads declaimed, the wind moaned, the trees in the orchard lost their outlines in the dark.

“Casimiro!”

Casimiro Lopes was in the garden, squatting under the window, keeping watch.

“Casimiro!”

His shape appears in the window, the toads scream, the wind tosses the trees, barely visible in the gloom. Maria das Dores comes in, meaning to flip the switch. I stop her: I don’t want light.

The tick-tock of the clock fades, the crickets begin to sing again. And Madalena appears on the other side of the table. I say softly, “Madalena!”

Her voice reaches my ears. No, not my ears. Nor am I seeing her with my eyes.

I lean on the table, my hands crossed. Objects melt together, and I can’t make out the white tablecloth.

“Madalena . . .”

Madalena’s voice continues caressing me. What’s she saying? Of course: she’s asking me to send some money to Mestre Caetano. It irritates me, but this irritation is different from the others, an old irritation that leaves me utterly calm. Crazy for a person to be angry and calm at the same time, but that’s how I am. Irritated at who? At Mestre Caetano. Never mind that he’s dead, he better get to work. Lazybones!

The tablecloth reappears, but I don’t know if it’s the tablecloth I’ve crossed my hands on or the one that was here five years ago.

A sudden racket of wind, of toads, of crickets. The door of the study opens slowly, and Sr. Ribeiro’s footsteps move away. An owl hoots in the church tower. Is that really an owl’s hoot? Could it be the same owl that hooted two years ago? Perhaps. It could even be the same hoot.

Now Sr. Ribeiro is talking with Dona Glória in the living room. I forget that they left me and that this house is practically deserted.

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