The centaur

Literary Review, Summer, 1995 by Jose Saramago, Giovanni Pontiero

The horse was thirsty. He approached the stream which seemed quite still beneath the night sky, and as his front hooves met the cool water, he lay down sideways on the ground. Resting one shoulder on the rough sand, the man drank at his leisure despite feeling no thirst. Above the man and the horse, the patch of sky that was still in darkness slowly moved, trailing in its wake the palest light, still tinged with yellow, the first deceptive hint of the crimson and red about to explode over the mountain, as over so many mountains in different places or on a level with the prairie. The horse and man got up. In front stood a dense barrier of trees, with defensive brambles between the trunks. Birds were already chirping on the uppermost branches. The horse crossed the riverbed at an unsteady trot and tried to break through the entangled bushes on the right, but the man preferred an easier passage. With time, and there had been all the time in the world, he had learned how to curb the animal's impatience, sometimes opposing him with an upsurge of violence which clouded his thoughts or perhaps affected that part of his body where the orders coming from his brain clashed with the dark instincts nourished between his flanks where the skin was black; at other times he succumbed, distracted and thinking of other things, things that certainly belonged to this physical world in which he found himself, but not to this age. Fatigue had made the horse nervous: he quivered as if trying to shake off a frenzied gadfly thirsting for blood, and he stamped his hooves restlessly only to tire even more. It would have been unwise to try and force an entry through the entanglement of brambles. There were so many scars on the horse's white coat. One particular scar, which was very old, traced a broad, oblique mark on his rump. When exposed to the blazing sun or when extreme cold made the hairs of his coat stand up, it was as if the flaming blade of a sword were striking that sensitive and vulnerable scar. Although well aware that he would find nothing there except a bigger scar than the others, at such moments the man would twist his torso and look back as if staring into infinity.

A short distance away, downstream, the riverbank narrowed: in all probability there was a lagoon, or perhaps a tributary, just as dry or even more so. It was muddy at the bottom with few stones. Around this pocket as it were, a simple neck of the river that filled and emptied with it, stood tall trees, black beneath the darkness only gradually rising from the earth. If the screen formed by trunks and fallen branches were sufficiently dense, he could pass the day there, completely hidden from sight, until night returned when he could continue on his way. He drew back the cool leaves with his hands and, impelled by the strength of his hocks, he climbed on to the embankment in almost total darkness, concealed by the thick crests of the trees. Then, almost immediately, the ground sloped down again into a ditch which farther on would probably run through open countryside. He had found a good spot to rest and sleep. Between the river and the mountain there was arable land, tilled fields, but that deep and narrow ditch showed no signs of being passable. He took a few more steps, now in complete silence. Startled birds were watching. He looked overhead: saw the uppermost tips of the branches bathed in light. The soft light coming from the mountain was now skimming the leafy fringe on high. The birds resumed their chirping. The light descended little by little, a greenish dust changing to pink and white, the subtle and uncertain morning mist. Against the light, the pitch-black trunks of the trees appeared to have only two dimensions as if they had been cut out of what remained of the night and were glued to a luminous transparency that was disappearing into the ditch. The ground was covered with irises. A nice, tranquil refuge where he could spend the day sleeping.

Overcome by the fatigue of centuries and millennia, the horse knelt down. Finding a position to suit both of them was always a difficult operation. The horse usually lay on his side and the man did likewise. But while the horse could spend the entire night in this position without stirring, if the man wanted to avoid getting cramped in his shoulder and all down his side, he had to overcome the resistance of that great inert and slumbering body and make him turn over on to the other side: it was always a disquieting dream. As for sleeping on foot, the horse could, but not the man. And when the hideout was too confined, changing over from one side to another became impossible and the sense of urgency all the greater. It was not a comfortable body. The man could never stretch out on the ground, rest his head on folded arms and remain there studying the ants or grains of earth, or contemplate the whiteness of a tender stalk sprouting from the dark soil. And in order to see the sky, he had to twist his neck, except when the horse reared up on his hind legs, lifting the man on high so that he could lean a little farther back; then he certainly got a much better view of the great nocturnal campanula of stars, the horizontal and tumultuous meadow of clouds, or the blue, sunlit sky, the last vestiges of the first creation.