No Trouble at All

Plácida had a talent, one only, but she had carried it to perfection: she knew how to give no trouble as others know how to sing or to heal or to make bread. It was her art, the only one in which she was a master, and she practised it with a deftness no one saw, because the perfection of that art lay precisely in not being seen.

That summer, there was the great festival of the churchyard, that of the saint of the village, of the kind where the long table is set up, and the morning of the festival caught Plácida in the churchyard before everyone else, as always, in an apron, spreading cloths over the planks on the trestles. Felizarda arrived when the light was already high, dressed for the festival, and stopped at the edge of the table to look at the work done.

"Ah Plácida, you are a delight," she said, without taking hold of anything. "I arrive and it is all done. One does not even notice you, woman, you do things like the wind, without a sound."

And she went to sit in the shade with the other ladies, who arrived composed, at the hour of being received, and Plácida received the one-does-not-even-notice-you as she received everything, as a prize, and lowered her head to go on setting out the plates, content, without noticing that the compliment that warmed her most was the exact description of a woman who effaced herself.

The festival filled up at noon. The village sat at the long table, the families in the middle, in the wide part, the full life of the land, and Plácida went from one side to the other serving the beginning, filling glasses, carrying and bringing. In the middle of the afternoon, with a platter of meat in her hands, she was passing behind the benches when the woman of the Olive-Press, without turning from the conversation, held out her glass to the side and said:

"Plácida, bring me more wine to this end, if you please."

She said it without looking, in the distracted way one asks a thing of one whom one knows will do it. Plácida set down the platter, went to fetch the jug, filled the glass. The woman did not even thank her, turned already to the joke someone was telling on the other side. And it was all so natural, so much of always, that no one noticed. But Plácida, in that year of the new eye, noticed. She noticed that they had asked her for the wine as one asks a servant, without looking, without thanking, and that she had served as a servant serves, and she stood an instant with the jug in her hand, looking at her own hand, and there hurt her, for the first time in sixty-six years, a thing that for sixty-six years had not hurt her: the suspicion that no one is born to be the wine that is asked for without looking.

When the time came for her too to sit, there was no place. The table was full, and Plácida did what she always did: she managed. She went to the kitchen of the churchyard, took from an almost empty platter the pieces of meat left over from the middle row, scraped what remained of the sauce, added a hunk of bread from the bottom of the basket, and ate standing, leaning against the stone sink, with the plate propped on her hip, while at the door the other women came and went with the full platters for the table outside. One of them, on passing, said, without stopping:

"You have not eaten yet, Plácida? Hurry, woman, or it is only leftovers."

"It will do," answered Plácida, and smiled, and went on eating the leftovers standing, because the leftovers, for her, were no punishment, they were her place, they were what fell to her, and she did not even notice that she had just received, in the midst of the noise of the festival, the exact description of her life: Plácida eats what is left, and hurries, and no one seats her.

And in the middle of the afternoon, when the festival was at its height and no one needed her any more for anything, she felt the first weariness and did what she always did, she began to go away in an undertone, without taking leave of each one so as not to interrupt the festival, with the lightness of one who leaves a room without the door creaking.

There was, however, at that festival, an exception, and the exception was eight years old and was called Bento.

Bento was the grandson, son of Belmira, and he was, of all the people in the world, the only one who noticed Plácida. The whole afternoon he had sought her out, grandmother, come and see this, grandmother, stay here beside me, and it was he, and only he, who saw her leave, and who left the table and ran after her to the gate of the churchyard.

"Grandmother, are you going already?" he said, out of breath, clutching the railing. "And why do you not take leave of anyone?"

Plácida crouched beside him, at the gate, and gave him a kiss, and said, with a smile, the thing she always said, the thing that was the motto of her whole life, without understanding, in that instant, what she was confessing to a child:

"It is not needed, my treasure. So as not to bother. Grandmother goes without bothering, which is the best thing grandmother knows how to do."

And she went, in the growing dark, and Bento stayed at the gate watching her go, and had, with the sometimes terrible wisdom of children, a serious face, of one who did not quite understand but understood enough to be left sorry, without knowing of what.

This art of not weighing, like all arts, had its rules, and Plácida kept them without ever having written them, because she carried them in her body since childhood. To arrive to help and not to be served, so as to catch the work before they obliged her to sit down. To have no preferences, because one who prefers gives trouble. And to go away before weighing, for there was, in every visit, an exact point from which presence begins to cost, and Plácida had for that point an infallible nose, and she always got up an instant before it, with the excuse ready. To keep these rules her whole life had cost her a thing she never added up: it had cost her her whole life. Each anticipated arrival, each swallowed preference, each hurried departure, was a little bit of Plácida that did not happen, and the sum of all those little bits, at the end of sixty-six years, was a woman almost wholly unlived, who had served all the festivals and been at none of them. But this Plácida did not add up, because she had, for her own life, the same delicacy she had for that of others: she did not bother herself with accounts that weighed.

She was the perfect guest, the perfect friend, the perfect patient. When someone, rarely, noticed some lack of hers and offered to supply it, Plácida always had, on the tip of her tongue, the four phrases of her life, said so many times that they came out of her on their own, as the breathing comes out: it is not needed, I manage, do not trouble yourself, leave it, I will see to it. And with them she had built a wall around herself, courteous and impassable, that kept everyone on the outside of her needing, and that she took for delicacy and that was, seen from outside, the best-mannered solitude one can imagine: that of one who never lets anyone in to help, and stays, for that, for ever, on the inside, alone, managing.

She went home, in the end of the summer afternoon, alone, and at home she did what she did, fed the cat, watered the pots, and sat at the door to watch it grow dark, rested from the duty fulfilled. And it was there, at the door, in the growing dark, that the thought came to her that was going to change everything, and it came to her not as a pain, but as a curiosity, almost amused at first: she asked herself whether anyone, at the festival, would have noticed her absence.

And she knew the answer at once, and the answer did not hurt her in that instant, because it was so old, so much her own, that it was already part of her: no. No one would notice her absence. The festival would go on the same, with or without Plácida, because Plácida was not at the festival a presence that was noticed by its absence. She was a help, and helps, when they go, leave more work for the others, but they leave no absence. At most, the next day, someone would say Plácida helped so much, poor thing, and it would be the compliment of custom, the one of always: Plácida gives no trouble at all, one does not even notice her.

One does not even notice her. The phrase came to her mouth, at the door, in the dark, and it was the first time in her life she heard it not as a compliment, but as what it was: an exact description of a woman who, by dint of not wanting to weigh, had achieved the terrible feat of not existing.

Brando, the husband, in life, had been the only one who sometimes checked her. He was a meek man, of the fields, of few words, and Plácida remembered an old festival, many years before, when she went about jug in hand, from bench to bench, and he, seated, saw her pass for the third or fourth time, and stretched out his arm and held her by the wrist, slowly, without force, and said, low, only for her:

"Sit here, woman. Beside me. Rest. You serve everyone and never stop. Leave the jug be, the wine will not run away."

And she sat, for him, a little, leaning against the husband's shoulder, and he said nothing more, only stayed there, at her side, content to have her seated, and it was one of the few moments of Plácida's life when she was at a festival without serving. But the moment Brando was distracted in a conversation with a man at his side, she got up again, and took up the jug, because seated she did not know how to be, seated she felt herself weighing, and rest, for her, was a discomfort greater than the weariness. Brando had died some years before, meek even in dying, without giving trouble, and since he had died there was no longer, at any festival, anyone to take her by the wrist and say to her sit down, woman. Brando had been the last to notice, and had taken with him, on dying, the only pair of eyes that saw, in Plácida, the woman beneath the help.

The cat came to rub itself against her legs, at the door, asking for its supper, and Plácida got up at once, without hesitating, and went to put its food in the bowl, and saw to the cat's hunger before her own, as she saw to everyone's hunger before her own, and the cat ate, and she stayed watching it eat, and thought, with a sad smile, that even the cat asked, that even the cat knew how to rub itself against someone's legs and say give me to eat, and that she, in sixty-six years, had never learned to rub herself against anyone's legs, had never learned to say give me, and that she was less than the cat in that, she who served the whole village.

And there was, still that night, a small moment that contained everything. Plácida went to the kitchen to set the table for supper, and set it, by the habit of a lifetime, for one person, with a single plate, hers, at the corner of the big table. She took from the pot what was left over from the day, ate standing at first, leaning against the counter, and then sat at the corner, in a hurry, like one who dispatches a formality. She lit no candle. She put no cloth. She did not give herself the trouble of a meal set as it should be, because she thought, without ever having put it in words, that a woman alone does not deserve that trouble, that that is for one who has company, for one who counts. She ate at the corner of her own table as she sat at the corner of the tables of others: everywhere at the end, even in her own house, even alone, even with no one to efface herself for. She had become so good at not weighing that she effaced herself even when she was alone, that she served herself last even when she was the only one at the table, and not even to herself did she give the trouble of setting the table as it should be, because even herself she treated as she treated everything that was hers, as a thing not worth the bother.

And at the door, before going to bed, it was the grandson's face that stayed with her, more than the question about the absence that no one would notice: Bento's serious face at the gate, of the only being in the world who noticed her, watching her go away alone, sorry for a thing he did not yet have a name to name, but that Plácida, that night, for the first time in sixty-six years, began, very lightly, to have.