The Man the Floods Brought

Rosário knew the waters were coming before the river knew it.

She felt them in her body, two or three days before, as the old women of the serra feel the rain in their knees: a disquiet that rose up her legs, an inability to stay seated, a going to the window for no reason and staying to look at the other bank, on the far side of the Fundo, where the fields lost themselves in the mist and where there lived, among the other things of over there, the man whom only the swollen river brought her. The village said that Rosário foresaw the weather. She did not foresee the weather. She foresaw Aniceto, and Aniceto came with the waters, and so the waters and Aniceto were, in her body, the same thing: the rising of the river was the rising of him within her, and the two grew together, every winter, since she was twenty.

That winter was no different. It rained on the serra three days running, up there, where the village did not see but the river knew, and on the fourth day the Fundo began to swell, to change colour, to bring branches and foam, and the Bridge, the old stone Bridge rebuilt after the Great Floods, was first with the water lapping the piers and then with the water over the deck, and the village was cut in two, the near bank from the far bank, as it was cut every winter when the waters were great.

And it was then, with the Bridge under water, that Aniceto came.

He came as he always came: by boat, against the current, with that skill that was half courage and half display, rowing standing at certain points, laughing at the river, making of the dangerous crossing a fairground act. The whole village came out to the windows and the doors to watch him cross, because Aniceto's crossing in the great waters was one of the spectacles of the winter in Véspera, and there were those who said he was a madman and those who said he was a brave man, and the two were right, and Rosário, at the window of her house on the near bank, with her heart beating in her throat, said nothing, because for her it was no spectacle: it was life beginning again.

He leapt to land, on the near bank, soaked to the bone, laughing, and the first thing he did, before greeting anyone whatsoever, was to seek with his eyes the window of Rosário. He knew where she was. He always knew where she was. And when he saw her, he made her the gesture of always, a small gesture, only for her, an open hand in the air, and Rosário, from twenty to thirty-four years old, melted entirely for that gesture, every winter, without fail.

"You came," she said, later, when he appeared at her door, dripping, with the easy laugh and the eyes the colour of the river.

"I came, for the river brought me." It was his phrase. He always said it. The river brought me, as though he had no will of his own, as though it were a thing the waters did, and not a man who chose to come. "I was not going to leave you to spend the winter alone, Rosário."

And he came in, and Rosário's house, which during the months without him was a darkened house, lit up entirely, and during the days the great waters lasted it was going to be so: Rosário alive, Rosário whole, Rosário laughing and cooking and singing low, a woman no one would recognise as the same one who went about the village, outside the floods, with the slow step of one who walks waiting.

It must be said, in fairness to the truth and to Rosário, that Aniceto did not deceive her. He had never promised her to stay, never told her he was hers alone, never pretended to be anything other than what he was: the man of the floods, the one who came with the waters and went with them. The deceit, if there was deceit, was all from Rosário to herself: it was she who took a man of passage and made of him a love of a lifetime, it was she who turned his vague promises into seeds, it was she who settled into the waiting and called that love. Aniceto was what he was, and was it in sight of everyone, with an honesty almost cruel for how clear it was; it was Rosário who needed to see him another way, because she needed someone to wait for, and Aniceto served, because he came and went in just the right measure to feed a waiting without end. They were, the two of them, perfect for one another in the disease: he needed banks that waited for him so that he could depart, she needed a man who departed so that she could wait, and they fit like a key fits a lock, and they had fit fourteen years, and they could have fit a whole lifetime, two sick people feeding on one another's disease, if a small thing, that winter, had not begun to unfit them: the fact that Rosário, for the first time, had begun to suspect that she was sick.

There was, in that first winter of the story, a night that stayed, and that was the portrait of all of them. Aniceto had brought, from the other bank, a bottle of an aguardente that was made over there, and lit the fire high, and told, until dawn, the story of a crossing he had made years before, in a river much greater than the Fundo, in a land whose name Rosário had never heard, where the waters carried away whole houses and he, Aniceto, had saved who knows how many people, rowing who knows how many hours. Rosário listened, with her eyes shining from the fire and the aguardente and him, and the story was beautiful, and she believed it all, and only years later, on recalling it, did she notice a thing: that it was always a story of another place, of another river, of another time. Aniceto never told the present. He always told the far off and the before. His life always happened somewhere else, and the place where he was, whatever it was, was only the stage from which he told the other places. And Rosário, that night, found herself wishing to be one of those stories, wishing to be the far off and the before of Aniceto on some future night, by another fire, told to another woman: because she understood, without knowing how to say it, that it was so that Aniceto loved things, after leaving them, turned into a story, and that to be present, beside him, was to be in the one place where he did not know how to love, which was the now.

"And do you not tire, Aniceto?" she asked, that night, half joking. "Of always going from one side to the other? Do you not feel like, one day, stopping?"

"To stop is to die, Rosário," he said, and said it laughing, but in earnest. "The river that stops rots. I am like the river. I have to run, or I rot."

And Rosário found that beautiful, that night, and kept it as one keeps a truth. Only much later, beside Justino, was she to learn the rest of the phrase that Aniceto did not know: that the river that runs also goes away, and that for the water not to be lost a bed is needed that stays, and that to stay is not to rot, to stay is the hardest work there is, and that one who calls staying death is only because they never had the courage to try it.

Aniceto's days were days of festival. He brought stories from the other bank and from farther off, from the places he went about when he was not there, and he told them well, with wit, and each story had in it a danger overcome, a river crossed, a night in the open, and Rosário heard them as one hears music, and it never, in fourteen years, occurred to her to ask herself why all Aniceto's stories were of departures and none was of arrivals. He cooked with her, slept with her, filled her house with a noisy joy, and at night, lying down, he spoke of what they were going to do together one day, when, one day when life settled, a day that was always on the far side of something, and Rosário fell asleep in that one day as one falls asleep in a tale, without noticing that the tale never got past the promise.

To understand what those days were to Rosário, one must know what the others were, the eleven months without floods, because a thing is only measured by the other. Outside the great waters, Rosário was a darkened woman. She got up, tended the kitchen-garden and the hens, went to the largo, to the fountain, to Benvinda's Grocery, did what the women of the village did, and did it with her hands and with half her body, because the other half was always turned inward, to the waiting. She ate little. She slept much, or badly. She had conversations in which she was and was not, and the village had grown used to seeing her so, slow, absent, and said, with that gruff goodness of villages, there goes Rosário counting the days. And she counted. She had in her head, without need of a calendar, the count of the months until the winter, until the rains of the serra, until the waters that brought her the man and the life, and she lived the eleven months like one who lives in a doctor's waiting room: the body in the chair, the soul in what is to come.

And then came the waters, and the darkened woman lit up in a way that frightened whoever saw her for the first time. It was as though a light were switched on inside her. She ate, laughed, sang, had colour in her cheeks, spoke quickly, slept little for not wanting to lose the counted days. Benvinda, of the Grocery, who had known her since a girl, said that there were two Rosários, that of the summer and that of the winter, and that it was hard for her to believe they were the same woman, and she pitied both: the winter one, who burned too quickly, and the summer one, who went out too slowly. But no one said anything to Rosário, because Rosário's love for Aniceto was, in the village, one of those things that are respected and lamented at the same time, like a devotion to a saint who works no miracles.

The village looked at that sidelong. The village liked Aniceto as one likes a festival: while it lasts. But the village also saw the rest, saw Rosário in the months without floods, and there were those who shook their heads and said, low, that that was no life for a woman, to live from winter to winter like the river, full and dry, full and dry, waiting for a man who was more of the waters than of her.

The one who most saw it was Justino.

Justino was of the near bank, of the village, and he worked the river: he was among the men who cared for the Bridge, who watched it in the floods, who knew when it held and when it did not, and who in the winters of the great waters did not sleep, because the Bridge was the life of the village and the Bridge in the floods was an animal that had to be watched. Justino had known Rosário for ever, since childhood, from the school, from the largo, and there was in him, for her, an old and silent thing that the whole village saw except her. But Justino was not a man of gestures in the air nor of stories of dangers overcome. He was a man of staying. And what stays, in Véspera as everywhere, does not draw notice.

That afternoon, with Aniceto already settled in Rosário's house and the waters at their height, Justino appeared at her door, drenched, with a rope on his shoulder, in the midst of the work of the flood.

"Rosário." He greeted her, and greeted Aniceto with his head, without warmth nor coldness. "Your threshing-floor is flooding on the wall side. If you do not divert the water, you lose what you have there. I would open you a channel there, if you wish, for things on my side are safe for now."

And without waiting for much answer, he went, with the hoe, to open the channel that was to save what Rosário had on the threshing-floor, under the rain, while Aniceto, inside, lit the fire and told a story of a flood much greater that he had seen who knows where. Rosário stayed at the door a moment, between the two of them: the one inside, by the fire, telling; the one outside, in the rain, digging. And she felt nothing special for the one outside. She thanked him, distracted, with her head already turning inward, to the fire and to the story, and Justino finished the channel, and went, without waiting for more thanks, to his work of the Bridge, and Rosário closed the door and went back to Aniceto and did not even notice that the one outside had gone.

It was so. The one who came with the waters lit her up entirely; the one who was always there, that one did not light her at all, and she did not know why, and she did not even put the question, because for Rosário it was the most natural thing in the world: Aniceto was love, with its fire, its comings, its enormous longings; and Justino was Justino, was the Bridge, was the near bank, was a thing that was there as the stones and the river were there, useful and silent and with no mystery at all.

If someone made her stop, that winter, and asked her what love was, Rosário would have answered without hesitating, with the certainty of one who repeats a truth learned in the cradle: love is the lack. It is the longing. It is the house that lights up when he comes and goes out when he departs. It is the heart leaping to divine the waters. It is to love a person so much that it hurts when they are not there. And never, in this definition, would it occur to her to put the peace, the quiet, the being well beside someone with no alarm at all. For Rosário, that was not love: it was what there was between neighbours, between brothers and sisters, between a woman and the Bridge. Love, the real kind, had to hurt, had to be lacking, had to depart in order to be able to come back. A love that did not depart, that was always there, that gave no longing, that would not even have a name in the dictionary of Rosário's heart, because no one had taught it her, because the mother had not had it, because in four generations of women of that house there had never been one who loved a man who stayed, and what was not seen cannot be named.

And yet, that winter, a small thing stayed. When Justino opened the channel that saved the threshing-floor, Rosário, from the door, saw his hands. It was only an instant, and she did not even notice that she had noticed, but Justino's hands, digging in the rain, were sure hands, calm, that knew exactly where the water wanted to go and where to divert it, and there was in them a kind of practical goodness, a goodness that did not announce itself, that only did. And something, in the depth of Rosário, in a place where she never went, registered those hands, and kept them, without the head knowing, for a day when they would come to be needed.

The Bridge, in that first chapter of the story, was still only the Bridge, the place by which one crossed, and Rosário gave it no more attention than one gives an everyday thing. But the Bridge was to be, in the end, the most important place of her life, and perhaps for that it is worth saying, while we are at it, what it was. It was of stone, low, wide, with three arches, rebuilt after the Great Floods that had carried away the old one, fifty years ago, and it had, in the middle, at the highest point, a widening, a kind of balcony over the river, where people stopped to watch the water, to converse, to court. It was the heart of the village, more than the largo, because the largo was of each bank, and the Bridge was of both, it was the place where the two banks ceased to be two. One who was on the Bridge was neither on one side nor the other: one was in the middle, in the one place from which the two banks were seen at the same time. And it was to be exactly that, to be in the middle of the Bridge and to see the two banks, the gesture that was going to save Rosário, years later, but that winter the Bridge was only the Bridge, and Rosário crossed it without noticing, with her eyes always on the far bank, without knowing that the place where she had to learn to stop was not either of the banks, but the middle, the height of the Bridge, the place of Justino.

That night, lying beside the sleeping Aniceto, Rosário did a thing she always did when he was there: she stayed awake watching him sleep, so as not to lose even a little of the presence, because she knew it was short, that the waters were going to fall, that he was going to depart, and that afterwards came the months of the void. And it was that night, perhaps for the first time in fourteen years, that a small and uncomfortable thought crossed her quiet: that she loved Aniceto sleeping, about to depart, more than she would love him if he stayed for ever. That it was the imminent departure that made that presence so precious. That, if Aniceto said, that night, I stay, I stay for ever, I stay here on the near bank with you, perhaps the house would go out, perhaps he would turn into Justino, a thing that stays and so does not count.

She pushed the thought away, for it was ugly and frightened her. She nestled against him, against his warmth, and fell asleep, and dreamed, as she always dreamed on the nights of the floods, of the other bank in the mist, on the far side of the river, where all she loved always lived on the point of arriving or on the point of departing, and never, never, simply there.