T H E D A R K
he found the phrase to be perfect in the resistance it offered
him. "That is as far as I can go! " And it seemed to him that the
phrase had touched his very insides, he felt its resistance with
ecstasy. It was true that a second later, with a glance, Martim
saw to his distaste the great mistake of a writer: it had been his
own limitations that had reduced the phrase to what it was, and
perhaps the resistance that it offered was the resistance of his
own incapacity. But as he was a difficult person to defeat he
thought the following, "It doesn't matter, because if at least
with that phrase I just suggested that the thing is much greater
than I could say, then I really accomplished a lot. I made an
allusion! " And then Martim was happy the way an artist is. The
word "That" contained in itself everything he had not managed
to say!
Then he wrote : "Number 2: how to link 'that' which I may
know with the social state of things."
And that was what he wrote. Having lost the practice of
thinking, and having lost the vocabulary, he could not come up
with any other expression that would show what he wanted to
say except this, "social state of things," It seemed quite good
and clear to him, and it had an erudite touch about it that
Martim had always wanted to have. Erudition, being external,
became mixed up with the basic idea he had had of objectivity,
and it always gave him a feeling of satisfaction to hit the nail on
the head.
When the man reread his work, his eyes blinking from
sleepiness now, reality made him make an about-face, and he
came upon a piece of paper that had the physical and humble
concretization of a thought, and he gave a long and empty
laugh�where for the first time, a sense of the ridiculous appeared, and it undermined his grandeur for the first time. That man who had been trying to build up his grandeur and the
grandeur of others. Then in a painful defense he began to laugh,
a little against his will and showing his own self a little, and a
little out of masochism, and a little to show that he was a martyr
who was making believe that he was not suffering but was
(I 8 8)
The Birth of the Hero
waiting for God to guess with remorse and pity that his son was
suffering and he was only laughing out of heroism, a little so that
God would repent as he offered him his disguised suffering as a
slap, in the way of one who says he does not hurt but hurts and
who is sanctified in his pain. Then Martim ran into a reality less
flattering and less possible to dramatize. He ran into the fact
that he was just a confused person who had forgotten the books
that he had read; but out of them there had remained many
doubtful images that he was pursuing, their terminology was
outmoded, and he had stayed with his first readings. He really
was a man of slow comprehension and not very intelligent. Why
not admit it?-a man with a stumbling way of thinking, an illinformed person and one who did not know what to do with the little information he had, and who, now unprotected, was
obliged to rely on himself. This made him go on living by
rediscovering gunpowder, as if a person had only one way out :
himself. "At least that's the way it is today," and then he was
laughing, which was foolish, because not even God was offended
at the mistake of having created what he, Martim, was. Because
God made up for it with more efficient results.
Out of pure self-martyrdom he laughed again. And as he had
not laughed for a long time he began to cough; he gagged. Then
he stopped laughing because the trail of saliva had gone up into
his nose and had given him the disagreeable suggestion of a
physical mistake : it was as if his body was failing too. He blew
out the lantern and lay down.
But sleep had disappeared with the laughter. And he was
restless in the dark. The rose that he had inadvertently touched
in the garden had left him stamping like a horse whose gallop
was being reined in. At that point things had lost their material
size in some way. No one could ever have faced for even one
second the emptiness from which things come without being
to get close, he was indomitable and daring. "What's wrong
with me?" He was puzzled, alert, sniffing things out. A minute
( 1 8 9)
T H E A P P L E IN
T H E D A RK
later he recognized that the state he was in was one of action or
of love. It so happened that he could do neither. "I'm not used
to fighting without getting hurt." He avoided the creative act;
and the night was empty, without a woman's love. "I've got
insomnia," he said then to his wife in a complaining and
accusing tone.
Martim did not know what to do with his desire or how to
apply it. From one thought to another-most of them were
getting away from him-he reflected that even if he had failed
in the creation of the future, he still had the past that was
already created. With an intense desire he finally wanted to have
something in his hand. And that seemed to him to be the easiest
and least sensitive part of disillusion : the clay out of which it
had already happened was at least a material from which one
could begin. Then, with the same attitude of severe good will
with which he had tried to create his plan of action for the
future, he went back to his memory. "Oh, remember that trees
exist and there are children and that bodies and tables exist," the
man said to himself, trying to reach a maximum of objectivity.
And he really did become objective and clear. But what had
he succeeded in doing? Pebbles-he looked curiously at the
pebbles of facts, centennial, hard pebbles, unswallowable, irreducible, imperceptible. He was drowning in a sea of pebbles.
Not only reality but memory too belongs to God. The man
rolled over in the dark. He had been held prisoner within the
structure of his own past. He had never left the world, he had
never entered the world. It was always the same pebbles; the
roulette wheel had always been spun, and improvisation was
impossible! Those were the elements-the ones already thereand all at once they had closed the door, and nothing could come in or go out. And if he wanted to make a new construction
for the future he would have to destroy the first one so that he
would have some pebbles to use, because nothing more could
come into the game and nothing else could leave. The material
of his life was precisely that. But, he thought, "what infinite
( l 9 0)
The Birth of the Hero
variations! All with the same pebbles." One could go to a
fortune-teller; she would shuffie the pebbles, a pebble would pop
out, and she would say mysteriously behind her glasses and her
wig, before she died of cancer, "I'm looking at a pebble."
"But the fact is," he reflected with an intense desire to stop
thinking about the future-"the fact is that there is at least
&nb
sp; something definitely organized about those pebbles. And that is
where we fit in. True, sometimes we fit in with an arm that was
paralyzed in the building or with an eye closed by the hardened
mortar that dried too quickly; but something is at least definitively organized. And even if we just barely fit into it, the fact is that we do fit. What shall we do? Use the same pebbles to build
another definitive organization, demolishing the earlier one first?
Or shall we sensibly make up our minds to fit into the first one?
It is true that in order to fit into the first we shall have to eat
less. Because if we get fat we will not fit, and if we grow we will
not fit; and we will be left there with pants that are too short,
staring meditatively at our exposed feet. But we will be careful.
It is a question of being careful. Oh, how good it is that we are
very careful. Until we forget how much we have grown and got
fat lately, and we give an absent-minded yawn, and the construction is too short. That is what is called being upset."
It was what that man called being upset. Had that man
committed a crime because he had grown too fat? Martim rolled
over with a cramp in his stomach; he did not fit. At that point
his thought had begun to echo inside a church and that gave
him a respect that was made of love and respect in its true
meaning. And just as every time our feet make noise and for
some reason we instinctively try to walk quietly the man now
tried to advance on tiptoe. His thoughts had taken on the
echoing grandeur of a nightmare, and he suddenly struggled
against his old distaste for thought. Oh, would he never reach
beyond just being a creator of truths?
Until, fortunately, he perceived that the creation of the
world was giving him a stomach ache. Then, happy with the fact
( l 9 l )
T H E A P P L E
IN
T H E D A R K
that finally he could give in to a pain, he lay down on his belly
and, with the warmth of that contact, began to fall asleep.
But that night had many lessons. One must be patient;
sometimes a night can be long.
The fact was that in the shadows the birds had perceived the
acidity of dawn, and long before it broke through for a person,
they were breathing it in; and they had begun to wake up. There
was one bird especially that drove Martim almost crazy. It was
one who would call for its mate in the dark. Patiently and calmly
it called and it called, until things reached the point at which
Martim jumped up and shoved open the window. At the open
window he was met with the sudden silence of the bird. More
with his nostrils than with his eyes he perceived that the darkness was unstable and that the bird was already living in a dawn that for him, Martim, was still in the future. And in a vague way
it seemed somewhat symbolic and satisfactory to him. He turned
around and lay down again, and the patient bird began once
more. The calm song of summons drove the man into a paroxysm; he covered his ears.
After covering his ears he could not hear the bird.
It was only then that the man realized that he was really
burning to hear it. It seems that so many times people love a
thing so much that they try to deny it, so to speak, and so many
times it is the beloved face that makes us so ill at ease. And it
occurred to Martim, who was trying so hard to find explanations
for his crime, that he might have fled from the world because of
a love which he had not been able to bear.
Now defeated and weak, he took his hands away from his
ears, suddenly accepting the beauty of the pebbles, accepting the
maddening song of the bird, accepting the fact that dawn
preceded the perception of dawn. The man began to listen
sentimentally to the plaintive bird. And more than that : with a
little timidity, Martim was also plaintive. He smiled in the dark,
amused and hurt, because Ermelinda was not a name that one
went about shouting, nor would his manliness allow him to
( 1 9 2)
The Birth of the Hero
perch up in a tree. And still, if he were to call her, she was quite
capable of coming. But he did not love her to the point that he
wanted her to come. Martim smiled again, quite sad. Since his
stomach ache had returned he rolled over on his belly again, and
this time he fell asleep.
That night had been a great experience, one of those that
cannot be explained in a court of law because words are lacking
and a man could be constrained because, in the end, he has the
obligation of being responsible for what he says, of knowing
what he is talking about, and of understanding what is happening to him.
The truth is that he did not give up entirely. In his agitated
sleep, that stubborn man tried to build in his dreams another
house with the same stones, since now there were no others to
be used. In every piece of the construction that he attempted he
would forget something outside or then put something too far
inside, and the construction would collapse. And then, for the
first time, the man seemed to see some advantage in the fact
that the stones were harder than our imagination, that they were
immutable and intransigent with that human nature that stones
have; the nature that is our own nature. For the first time he was
relieved that the creation of the world was not his task. In his
construction he suddenly saw himself as a man who had built a
room without a door and was a prisoner inside.
In his agitated sleep he sat up in bed once or twice. But his
haste was the useless haste of a man on a train that he is not
running. Sitting on the bed he was devoured by a thought that
had not been so strong during the day: that the time was near
when Vit6ria would go to Vila and see the German. Time was
passing, time was passing, time was passing; and the future was
ripening in a way that could be defined.
Chapter 9
ONLY WHEN Vit6ria went again with Francisco to the cornfield
did Ermelinda have a chance to put in an appearance with a
basket of food.
"For a picnic in the woodshed," she said, waiting for him to
give a sign of joy at the surprise.
But he murmured dully something about the mania women
have for picnics, and for an instant she shriveled up in disappointment. Just for an instant she had to make the vague effort of pretending that "everything was all right." Because
even though she ate all the sandwiches herself she recovered
rapidly, and now she was talking volubly, intoxicated with the
joy that "whether they wanted it or not," it was a picnic.
Without blinking, Martim cynically received several spurts of
saliva on his face. For some reason, he tried to be ironical and
keep himself above the situation.
But it was really a relief to him to have that woman who
gave herself so easily, as if having her at his disposal were a
milestone he had already reached. He had been in command up
to that point. The more foolish she was, the more she belonged
to him. She compensated for the diffic
ulty that Martim was
having with himself. And with a relief that he realized must
have been the one man had felt when woman had finally been
created, a relief that at last brought him freedom and had at last
made it impossible for him to be formidable, he smiled and
scarcely listened to her. The girl was one of those women who
do not take offense at the absence of a man, and he was being
absent as naturally as if they had been married. And soon, absent
and smiling, he was flattered by the foolishness that flowed
sweetly out of her and lulled him into peace. The girl had the
smell of powder about her, and that made him a little nauseous.
( l 9 4 )
The Birth of the Hero
"Wouldn't you like to take a bath?" he had said to her one
day with great delicacy. "I really can't take the smell," he said,
ill at ease.
"But it's only powder! " she said, surprised.
"Well, I can't take it."
"All right," she said thoughtfully. And she never smelled of
powder again.
Now she was caressing his hair attentively, insinuating, distracted, small. "Do you believe in another life?" she asked him then, immediately becoming more tense as she smoothed his
hair, as if she were blowing on a cut so that it would not hurt so
much. For an instant he was surprised as if, with the look of· a
bird who pecks with its beak, she were capable of a thrust. But it
was only an instant of mistrust-his mistrust. And he smiled,
grabbing her, foolish and soft as she was, and so curious in the
way a woman is curious, and it made him remember his wife.
"No, I don't believe in it," he said.
"Stupid !" she said laughing. Because people have the habit
of insulting each other in intimacy; insulting one another could
·be a form of intimacy, and therefore they felt very close. With a
certain amount of speed they had already gone beyond the
cowardice of simply tolerating love, and they had entered into
familiarity; and with relief had lost the larger size of things.
There, familiar at last and all of her revealed to him, the
man examined her. She would be pretty only if a person was in
love with her. But she had the beauty that can be seen when one
is in love with what he sees. "All mothers of ugly daughters
should promise them that they will be pretty when the wisdom
of love enlightens a man," he thought. Around Ermelinda's dark