The Thunderstorm

Tranquilina had a courtship that the whole village envied her, and it was that very courtship that was making her ill, because it was a courtship without a storm, and Tranquilina did not know how to live without a storm.

Brando — the gentle one — was a clockmaker, and he had his shop on the lower street, beside the café of the old station, with the window full of clocks stopped at different hours and only one, in the middle, true, telling the time to those who passed. He was a mild man, and his name said so. When Tranquilina came into the shop, he did not at once put down what he had in his hands; he finished the pivot, the wheel, the tiny screw he held between two fingers with a pair of tweezers, and only then did he raise his eyes, with that calm of a man who works with small things and has learned, through them, to be in no hurry about anything. He cared for Tranquilina in a tranquil and deep way, without dramas, without jealousy, without those storms she had known in the loves of before; he treated her well, spoke to her low, never raised his voice to her, never left her waiting, always turned up when he said he would turn up, and loved her with a serenity that was, to any woman of sense, the dream, the harbour, the rest.

And Tranquilina, who had no sense in these matters, or who had a crooked sense, built upon a crooked house, instead of resting in that serene love, went about with it anxious, restless, feeling that something was lacking, without knowing what, and the thing that was lacking, she would discover over the course of this book, was the storm.

There was an afternoon, at the start of the book, when this began to take shape, and it was in Brando's own shop. Tranquilina came in, and Brando was bent over a pocket watch open on the bench, with the loupe screwed into his eye, and she stood watching him work. It was an old watch, somebody's inheritance, and it had stopped years before; Brando had taken it apart piece by piece, and the pieces were all laid out in rows on a black cloth, in order, dozens of them, tiny, and he was cleaning them one by one, in no hurry, with a serenity that, that afternoon, instead of calming Tranquilina, gave her a nameless itch.

"Don't you get bored?" she asked, and there was a barb in the question that she herself did not recognise. "Hours and hours with that, without saying a word, without moving."

Brando raised his eyes, took out the loupe, and smiled that smile of his that asked for nothing.

"It's the opposite of being bored," he said. "A watch like this stopped because somebody forced it, or dropped it, or wound it too tight. Haste ruins them. What they want is a calm hand." And he went back to the work. "You settle me too, did you know? You're like the bench on a good day."

Tranquilina smiled, and said thank you, and inside, with a shiver that shamed her, she thought: I don't want to be a bench. And she did not know where it came from, that absurd longing to be no one's calm, to be instead the fall, the over-winding, the thing that makes the watch stop all at once, because a thing that makes you stop is a thing that is felt, and a bench is a thing that is not felt, it is there, silent, true, and no one notices it while it is doing well.

There was a Sunday, right at the start of the book, that showed her sickness full length to anyone who could see, and at that time no one yet could, not even she. They had gone, the two of them, to walk by the river, to the gentle spot, where the water runs low and clear over the stones, and Brando had brought bread and cheese and a bottle, and they spread a cloth in the shade, and it was a perfect afternoon, of the kind one keeps. And Brando, lying on his back with his hat over his face, said, halfway through, with the lazy voice of a man who is content, this is what living is, Tranquilina, a Sunday like this, with nothing more. And she looked at him, and looked at the gentle river, and looked at the perfect afternoon, and instead of being content, she felt rising in her, there, in the middle of the perfection, a nameless anguish, a sense that this was too little, that something was lacking, that so much calm hid a threat. And what she wanted, in that moment, beside a happy man on a perfect Sunday, was for something to happen, anything, a quarrel, a fright, a crash, because the calm afternoon was suffocating her, and she did not know why, and was ashamed not to know, and held her tongue, and made out that all was well, and inside she thought: what woman is this, who has paradise before her and wants to set fire to it?

Because love, for Tranquilina, had a shape, and the shape was that of the storm. The loves she had had, as a girl, and she had had them intense, had all been like that: quarrels and reconcilings, shouts and kisses, partings in the middle of the night and returns at dawn, jealousies, dramas, reconciliations that were worth all the quarrels, and Tranquilina had lived them the way one lives a fever, spending herself, suffering, but feeling herself, in each crash, intensely alive, intensely loved, because for her the crash was the proof: if he shouted, it was because he cared; if there was drama, it was because there was love; if he left her and came back, it was because he could not live without her. Intensity was the measure of love, and the more it hurt the more it was worth, and Tranquilina had come out of those loves shattered and, deep down, with a kind of longing, the longing for the fever, the longing to feel herself as alive as only the storm made her feel.

And now she had Brando, and Brando gave no storm at all, and Tranquilina, instead of thanking heaven, went about wasting away from calm.

There was a night, still at the start of the book, that showed it to her in a way that frightened her. They were the two of them at the door of her house, sitting on the step, on a calm night of late spring, and it was a good night, of the kind anyone would want. Brando was speaking to her low about their plans together, about the shop he wanted to move to the upper street, about a house with a yard he had seen for sale, and he went on speaking slowly, in no hurry, like a man laying out the pieces of a watch on the black cloth, one by one, in order, and halfway through he would say, and what do you think, and he listened to her truly. And Tranquilina, instead of being content, felt rising in her a restlessness she did not know the name of, an itch, a longing to break that calm, to say something that would provoke, to find a cause for a quarrel, and she caught herself, with horror, searching Brando's talk for something to take offence at.

"And the house with the yard," she said, with a sharpness that came from nowhere, "you decided all on your own that it was that one, did you? You didn't even ask me."

Brando stood looking at her, without understanding, because he had just asked her exactly that.

"I'm asking you now," he said, mild, not taking the bait. "If you don't like it, we'll look at another. There's no hurry at all."

And there was none, and that was what put out the spark, because Brando did not take the bait, did not lose his temper, answered with his usual mildness, and the spark, with nothing to feed it, went out. And Tranquilina was left with the restlessness unsatisfied, sitting on the step beside a man who was offering her a house with a yard, and she went home that night feeling ill, without understanding why on earth she felt ill on so good a night, with so good a man, in a love the whole village envied her.

And Brando, who saw more than he said, gave her one day a sentence she did not know how to receive and that stayed working in her like a seed beneath the earth. They had been through one of those nights when she had gone about wringing herself for no reason, and in the morning he said, without bitterness, getting the breakfast ready: you are not used to peace, Tranquilina, that is all it is. There are people who are not used to peace, who grew up without it, and when it comes, instead of resting, they wait for it to spoil, because that is what always happened to them. You look at calm the way one looks at a good sky and says this won't last. But sometimes it lasts, you know. Sometimes the sky is just good. And he went off to the shop, and Tranquilina was left with the sentence, you are not used to peace, and there was in it an understanding so exact, so without blame, that she almost wept, because it was the first time anyone had named her sickness without accusing her of it, and she still did not know what to do with it, but she kept it, the way she kept the shards, only that this, unlike the shards, was a thing whole.

Because this was what Tranquilina could not understand about herself: that she felt ill in the good. That a calm night with Brando left her more restless than a night of quarrelling had left her, as a girl, with the stormy loves. That peace, instead of settling her, put her on guard, as if the calm were a threat, as if the quiet hid a danger, as if, in the silence without storm, she awaited at any moment the crash, and the crash did not come, and the waiting for the crash that did not come was worse than the crash itself. Tranquilina did not know how to rest in peace; she knew only how to rest after the storm, in the truce, in the lull between two crashes, and a love that had no crashes had, for her, no truces, because a truce is the rest from war, and where there is no war there is no truce, there is only a continuous peace that Tranquilina, raised in war, did not know how to inhabit.

And it was not the first time the calm had put her like this, though it was the first time she stopped to see it. Years before, there had been a young man, Telmo, the miller's son, a serious, calm young man who had wanted to court her, and who was good, and who treated her well; and Tranquilina, who then did not even suspect her sickness, had found him dull, had found him too little, and had dropped him at the end of a month, with an excuse not even she believed, and had gone off after a storm-man who made her suffer a year. And yet another, later, a widower from the upper street, settled, who had offered her a good life, and for whom she had found, without understanding why, quarrel after quarrel, until she drove him off. The village said that Tranquilina did not settle, that she was made of fire, that what she liked was to suffer, and it said so almost with admiration, because the village too was half-sick, also thought a woman of fire worth more than a settled woman. And Tranquilina heard that, you don't settle, and took it as a compliment, without understanding that it was a diagnosis, that each calm man she had dropped had been a warning, a door that had opened and she had shut, and that life, patient, had gone on sending them to her, one by one, the men of peace, and she, faithful to the storm, had gone on sending them all away, until this one, Brando, the clockmaker, who was the one she most risked losing, because he was the one she most loved, and what she most loved was what most frightened her, because it was what she had most to lose.

The village, which saw from outside, did not understand. Felismina, who had been a neighbour of her parents on the Ladeira and had known her since she was a little girl, met her one morning at the washing place and said it to her face, with the frankness of old women:

"Do you know the luck you have, child? A man who doesn't drink, doesn't shout, doesn't leave you out in the rain. I saw your mother at the window on nights you can't imagine. Take hold of that clockmaker with both hands."

"I know, Felismina," said Tranquilina. "I know."

And she did know. But inside she thought, but something is lacking, and she told no one what it was that was lacking, because she was ashamed, because she knew, deep down, that what was lacking was a wrong thing, that what was lacking was the storm, and that a woman who misses the storm in a serene love is a woman with something crooked inside, and Tranquilina felt the crookedness, and was ashamed of it, and did not know how to straighten it.

And the worst, the thing that frightened her most, was a thing she was beginning to understand and did not want to understand: that she was going to blow up that love. That if that restlessness went on, if that longing to provoke a storm went on growing, she would, sooner or later, get up the storm, would provoke a real quarrel, would make Brando lose his calm, or would herself do something that blew it up, only to feel, in the crash, that she was alive, that she was loved, that this was a real love and not a lukewarm calm; and that in doing so she would destroy, with her own hands, the first good love that life had given her, and would destroy it precisely for being good, for being calm, for giving no storm, and that this, blowing up the good for being good, was a thing so absurd, so against her own self, that Tranquilina, glimpsing it, was afraid of herself, of what she was capable of doing to Brando, for nothing, only for not knowing how to live in peace.

That night, lying down, Tranquilina did a thing she did not do: she tried to understand herself. Instead of pushing the restlessness away, as she always pushed it, she stayed with it. She got up, went to the chest of drawers, and opened the bottom drawer, where she kept, in a glass jar, a thing she had never shown anyone and that she did not even quite know why she kept: shards. Shards of crockery, tiny, some still with a remnant of a painted flower, that she had picked up from the kitchen floor of the Ladeira, as a small girl, after the storms, when her mother swept up the broken plates and she, on the sly, saved a shard or two and slipped them into her pocket. She had kept them her whole life, without knowing why, and only now, with the jar in her hand, by the faint light of the lamp, did she begin to suspect: she had kept the storms. She had kept the proof that there, in that house, someone had cared enough to break the crockery.

And she remembered, with the jar in her hand, a thing that said a great deal and that she had never put together with the other. She remembered that, at home, alone, with no one there, she always set something making noise: the radio, or the water running, or she talked aloud with the hens, or she sang, anything that filled the silence, because the silence of an empty house gave her a distress she had never known how to name. And she understood, that night, that she was afraid of the silence in herself, not only of the silence with Brando; that silence, for her, wherever it was, was the desert, was the Ladeira on the lukewarm days, was the hearth her father looked at over her head; and that she had spent her life covering the silence with noise, with the radio at home and with storms in love, out of the same fear, the fear that the silence was the proof that she was alone, that she was not loved, that the world had emptied out around her the way the house had emptied out in the lukewarm winters of her childhood.

And she asked herself, in the dark, with the jar of shards making a small weight in her hand, why on earth the calm frightened her, why on earth she, who had the dream of any woman, a man who loved her in peace, went about wasting away from peace and dreaming of a storm. And she could not answer, that first night, because the answer came from far off, from the house, from the storm she had been born in, from the shouts and the reconcilings of her parents, and Tranquilina had not yet gone down to that depth; but she kept the question, for the first time, instead of covering it, and she fell asleep with it, and it was a restless sleep, the sleep of one who senses she is going to have to look at a thing she has been avoiding for thirty-one years, which is the place where she learned, before she could speak, that love is a storm, and that peace, the silent kind, Brando's kind, is the silence that came, in her house, after the storms, and that she had learned to fear more than the crashes themselves, because it was the silence in which her parents, worn out from shouting, did not speak to each other, and the house became a desert, and the little girl, in the desert of the silence, felt more alone and more unloved than in the middle of the worst shouting.