memory? How difficult it would be for her memory. "How in
the world did I ever play the piano when I was alive? How in the
world?" she would ask herself. So much money spent on lessons
and she ended up playing with just one anguished finger. And
would her audience be just one living woman possibly frightened
by her own imagination?
No, no, she could not think of frightening a woman with her
difficult memories. Really-she reflected with that mania of
worrying beforehand about details-really, she might be content
to find someone's body in which she could sleep. And some flesh
where she could explain herself. Because what would hurt most
of all would be her own absence. For example, there would be
the water in the river just as now-except that she simply would
have no more need to drink, the way an amputated leg will
bother, even though it has no more need to walk. Would she
still have the function of the leg but have no leg? Then-then
all that would remain would be to contemplate the water. But
( l 6 4 )
The Birth of the Hero
would she be her eyes or the countryside itself? And-and what
a bout hearing? Would she not be the sound herself? And little
by little, more and more free, could she at least think? Because
thought is nothing but the child of things, and she would not
have any more things. She would finally be free.
Just as horribly free as the hated countryside. So free that
perhaps she would no longer even be able to be that thing which
in the meantime was so free and was a bird. Because even a bird
was covered with warm feathers and was dirty with all of its
intimate blood.
Most of all-just as one day when she was a girl she had
turned into a young woman-most of all, one day she would get
her first feelings of revulsion like a sign of terrible perfection,
like a sign of progress. In the first place, she would probably
begin by avoiding warm things so as not to defile herself. She
would keep away from everything she needed so that she could
exist, be in the world for even just one second. Until she would
end up being what would make a person feeling it say, "I am an
empty man. I am an empty man."
"Foolishness," she said suddenly, freezing. "When the time
comes, I'll figure it out; who knows even if that's the way it
happens." But that thought did not ease her mind. "What I
need is confidence in myself, that's my trouble." She knew that
when the time came she would not figure anything out.
"Oh, what am I thinking about?" Then she became startled.
How could she have been able to go so far in the freedom of
her thought? And-it occurred to her-that freedom, could it be
just the start of another freedom? . . . Because thinking was
always the kind of adventure that gave no guarantee . . . Then
Ermelinda began to perspire, fully awake now from her daydream, feeling herself standing in the middle of the countryside.
The birds were all that was left, the only real proof of her dream.
She looked at the birds, wondering, as it all she had left out of a
whole dream was a feather in her hand, and she did not know
where the feather had come from. She looked at the simple birds
and did not understand what was happening to her, like one
( 1 6 5)
T H E A P P L E
I N T H E DA R K
who wakes up with anxiety and cannot remember the nightmare
that brought it on.
Suddenly she did not know about anything. And she asked
herself with a start whether the man had really said "noon."
And if he really had been speaking about today. And if Martim
had really understood her. Or perhaps she had been the one who
had not understood him? But, feeling her feet tight inside her
shoes, she remembered with relief that when she had put them
on she had been sure of the reality that was happening to her.
And then she courageously resolved to trust more in her previous
certainty than in her present doubt. "Everything is true," she
and her eyes darkened with pleasure and vengeance; the sun was
burning her-evil, the symbol of being alive. The birds were
flying, gliding about in the bright light. She looked out at them
as if she were shaking her fist at them. They were the opposite of
evil; they were death and beauty and progress.
The sun was making an inferno inside of her head; the
flowers were crackling with light and heat. And inside her highheeled shoes she cursed the day she took them out of the trunk; her tired feet were sweating. All Sundayed-up and unhappy, she
waited. To tell the truth, she no longer knew very well what she
was waiting for. If a certain point had been reached, she no
longer knew very well which point. "But if I were to go away
now tomorrow I would suddenly understand it all, and I could
not come back again." Then, resigned, she bore it, a little
startled. After all, she was a small person put into a big situation.
She had wanted the situation to be big, as big as she could stand.
And it gave her a feeling of punishment and irretrievable advance. And, as can happen in moments of great importance, the moment itself did not seem to have any importance. She was so
much in contact with the moment that she could not even see
it. This was the basis that made dreaming superior to reality :
when she dreamed she knew quite well what was going on. And
( 1 6 6 )
The Birth of the Hero
still in this terribly real moment the real feeling came from her
shoes. And in a mistake of reason that was so common to her,
she asked herself if it had been worth so much trouble dreaming
for it to end up this way : taking her shoes out of the trunk. She
felt like taking them off so she could rest her feet. But she knew,
as if it was the result of a great experiment, that if she took them
off, her feet, relieved for a minute, would never again fit into the
shoes. And, by analogy, if for an instant she were to get out of
the situation into which "they had put her," she would never fit
into it again. The bones in her toes were sore.
That moment was noon. The flowers were illuminated from
within and the red roses were a trumpet-blare; from far off
Martim saw the girl as a dark patch in the air.
The garden was lengthened by two or three cutting shadows
that the clothesline laid upon the ground. The motionless sun
left the plants heavy, in a watchful silence where anything could
happen. Martim kept coming closer, with the axe in his hand.
The things were waiting, deserted. But the honeysuckle was
quivering the way a lizard does before he dies.
Then-looking at the bright, motionless roses and walking
toward them, as if looking and walking were the same perfect
act, looking at them and what there was red about them-a
wave of power and calmness and listening passed through the
man's musc
les. And a man walking in the sun is a man with a
power that only one who is alive can come to know.
From afar he saw her standing in the sun, a woman's face
hardened by lights and shadows, with splotches of light on her
dress. With interested eyes he asked himself how can it be that a
person can put so much into another person. And he thought
that because, while he had been working, it seemed that in a
short time he had transformed the simple girl into something
vague and enormous. Only when he got closer did he discover to
his surprise that the girl's face was really cold and colorless. In
some way that discovery reconciled him to the fact that she was
just herself and not the repository of some great hope. And it
seemed to him that the murmur of the cold water among the
( l 6 7 )
T H E A P P L E
I N T H E D A R K
rocks also ran inside of her. Not that he was in love with her.
But it could have been because of love. Attentive, he drew near
and looked at her, so snuffed out among the mischievous flowers.
Without any disillusion then he saw her exactly as she was.
And she, she looked at the stranger. Before that the girl had
had within her a kind of silent heat of communication from her
to him, put together from begging, softness, and a kind of
confidence. But face to face with him, to her surprise, love itself
seemed to have ceased. And thrown into the situation that she
had created, feeling herself all alone and intense, she was held
there only by determination. The way she had spent a whole
exacting week getting ready for a dance, and just as then, left
waiting, had taken a taxi and gone to the dance : exactly what
she had wanted. Ermelinda was sad and surprised. And just
when he was finally right in front of her, she looked at him with
resentment, as if he was not the one she had been expecting, and
she had been sent an emissary with message : "The other fellow
could not come."
Martim had not thought about his own timidity, and he was
ill at ease. So there was nothing Olympian between them. It was
quite difficult to create the solemn situation that Ermelinda had
wanted all her life, and into which the man, without any feeling
of it, had hopelessly joined himself. The girl lowered her eyes
with a sigh; she was not up to the level of great love affairs. In
just that .. moment when she wanted most to be herself, her
whole personality collapsed as if it was not real, and just the
same it was, because that invented personality would come to be
the maximum of herself. And what she now felt was only a base
anxiety that had taken on the form of the ideal she could not
reach by at last taking off her shoes. And in a disheartening but
yet disconsolate softness she hid behind a smile in which there
was no glory; she had wanted so much to have a lover! But now
it seemed that she did not want to any more. And even to the
truthful point where the question of dying or not had lost all
importance, it suddenly seemed to her a faraway and softly
uncomfortable thing.
( l 6 8 )
The Birth of the Hero
Why did she not tell the man the truth, then, and go away
immediately? She felt the truth as a weight upon her heart, and
she did not know what it was-even though she had been
thinking more and more, as if all of her was the sleeping heart
itself. Why then, if she was to open her mouth, would this one
truth not come out in words? Ermelinda did not even part her
lips. Not wanting to lie, she would say to him, "I don't love
you." But she seemed to know something else : that she did love
him, she did love him. It was only that it seemed as if the things
in this world were not made for us, it was only that it seemed as
if in the meantime we had to compromise with the thing we are
born for, it was only that it suddenly seemed as if love was the
desperate, clumsy shape that living and dying take on just as if
even in that very moment the absolute were abandoning us. And
the truth, still untransmittable in her heart, was the weight with
which we love and do not love. And yet, the solution for all of
that was precisely love. "Don't offend me," she thought, looking
at him, less to protect herself than to save what they both had
created almost outside of themselves and which they were
offering each other at that moment.
So Ermelinda only realized that she loved him when he took
a step and she thought he was going away. With a start, she
stretched out a hand to hold him back. And she knew that if he
went away, she would not be able to bear it. She saw then that
the truth was that she loved him; she resigned herself to not
understanding. Then she smiled at him, fawning, hopeless.
Intimidated, the man sensed that he had to do something.
Then he took her hand. The woman's hand was freezing cold.
"Are you afraid of me?" He was sincerely startled, because
after all, the girl was the one who had offered herself to him.
"Yes," she said as her voice cracked, abandoning pretenses.
"But don't get upset over my fear," she said wearily, calming
him down. "I'm not upset, you see," she said as if she were the
mother of both of them, or pardoning nature.
"Afraid of what?" he asked, very curious, prepared for some·
thing trivial.
T H E A P P L E
I N T H E D A R K
"I don't know," she said confused. "I don't know, afraid
because-because you're made a different way from me, I don't
k now . . ."
"What?"
"Oh," she said desperately, "but it has to be just like that!
Of course! Otherwise how could it be?"
"Be what?" the man asked stupefied.
"Oh, Lord ! " she said crying, "I mean that you're a man and
I'm not a man, and that's just it! " she exclaimed, making a
great effort at conciliation.
"Oh," he said, puzzled.
Martim's curiosity, increased now by ignorance, was growing
blindly, instinctively. He had let go of her hand when he had
felt it so cold, but this time he took it again without effort. And
the little hand was light between his hands hardened by those
calluses of which he was proud and which were there like a
stigma. His pride in himself filled him with emotion then. And
with pride he was able to take that hand with assurance.
When a man and a woman are close, and the woman feels
that she is a woman and the man feels that he is a man-is that
love? The sun, ninety million miles away, was burning both their
heads. "Oh, free me from my mystery!" she implored him inside
herself. And as if everything were entering into the same serene
and violent harmony, life became so beautiful that they looked
into each other's eyes with the tension of a question, the
incomprehensible eyes of a man and a woman. Sometimes
people feel like that when they are all alone and with the
question. But it does not hurt-or if it does hurt, that is the way
in which th
ings are alive. "If you knew how much I love you,"
the girl looked at him, "and it's for ever." She, who at least once
in her life wanted to be able to say "for ever."
And Martim? When they went into the woodshed, after
going through hedge after hedge as through so many doors, what
he loved in her had already become mixed in with the freshness
there was among the shining flowers, mixed in with the smell of
rotting wood, the good smell of the damp earth that comes from
( l 7 0 )
The Birth of the Hero
logs-as if he had been thrown into his first human love. In the
woodshed the incandescent flowers lost their sway. There it was
like a stable, and people became slower and larger, like animals
who do not accuse or pardon themselves. He looked at her, and
she seemed to have been storing her body in a cool, dark place,
like a fruit that must get through an adverse season without
damage. There were golden hairs on her arms and that gave her
the value of golden things.
But it was certain that in the disorder of a first encounter
there was a moment in which they both finally forgot what they
were painfully trying to copy for reality; the moment had not
been prepared for either of them. It was a gift of nature in which
both needed to know why the other one was the other one, and
they forgot to say "please"; it was a moment in which, without
abuse, they both took for themselves what was owed them, not
stealing anything from the other one. That was more than they
would have dared to imagine; that was love with all its selfishness, and without which there would have been no giving. One gave to the other the need to be loved, and if there was a certain
sadness in submitting to the law of the world, that submission
was also their dignity. It was selfishness which gave itself entirely. And although the girl's desire to give was greater than what she had to give she did not know what to give him. She
remembered mothers giving to their children but she did not
feel maternal toward that man. With the great strength of the
irrational she wanted to give him something, simply so that
ultimately she could go beyond what one can do and in the end
break the great mystery of being only one. She gave him her
completely empty thought within which her whole self was
contained. In the wanting to give, rather than in the giving
itself, something had been accomplished. She had gained the