by Inês Pedrosa
I go hunting for dazzling words, trip over them both inside and outside of life, interpret, get hurt, interpret again, sully myself, wipe the makeup from the face I don’t have, the faces I used to draw on the face I lacked—but oh, never young people. I never knew what “young people” were, never knew what “my day” was.
I was always late to everything, remember? Probably so I’d reach death sooner. I died so many times before my death—I died every time love ended, and love was always ending inside me. It ended and expanded, consumed everything I knew. I imagined new sentences as dams against those empty spaces in which I floated. But the dams would collapse, I’d wash back up on the beach, dead, and be reborn to shiver with cold in the marine night. Then once more I’d construct my dam, clutch my past, present, and future dead to me, grow old and be reborn, wrinkled and starving. I talked. I talked ceaselessly about things I knew and things I didn’t; I waited for people to tell me to shut up so I could just listen to the wind of the fundamental words dancing like a disheveled lunatic in my body’s murky interior.
Where is he now, the imaginary friend from my solitary childhood? He used to dwell in my liver, my lungs, my belly and blood. Whenever I was feeling bad, I’d ask him to change out my fuses, scrub my pitted guts, and he’d obey. The chaos was temporary because that imaginary friend existed, giving my life a bit of reality. There’s so little reality in a life—stray scraps of history, stones flying through the air, crashing into the stratosphere, short-circuiting our aims. I loved that short circuit, used to provoke it. So perfection could be achieved with a single burst of laughter—the mad joke of a mocking, permissive God. Young people don’t think about anything but sex, say those who don’t think about anything but sex; they don’t know how to love anymore, say those who have forgotten the names of the people they used to love, those who have only loved names, those who have only.
You’re not alone—can’t you feel me, your real imaginary friend? Parcel out the pain I left you for the pain-starved, my dear, those who haven’t yet been moved by suffering. In that task of bestowing beauty on posthumous days, you can secure my existence. There was an abandoned child crying behind a door downtown. A child who ended up starving to death, clawing at the door, without the neighbors—though they heard his incessant wails—doing anything. What if that child held the ultimate secret of quantum theory? There are so few people whose talent can save us—and we can’t even find and save them. We take comfort in the immediate beauty of coincidences, while the catastrophic beauty of chance eludes us. At Machu Picchu, the Incas’ descendants—children whose minds are misspent on the coins of poverty, their feet gnawed by cold, hugging llamas, garbed in brightly colored rags that tourists find picturesque—sell fissured smiles. If Einstein had been born in the magical mountains of Peru, would he have had the chance to grant us relativity? Deafness to the suffering of chance remains central to our oh-so-sophisticated animal science. Every tear you shed for me, shut away in your silent house, represents one less day of living for the next child who’s going to die slowly, in picturesque Europe, without being able to know life’s pleasures. The mother had been arrested while trying to buy heroin, and she telephoned a friend from prison, in a whisper, to ask him to go to the house to get the child. The friend wasn’t home, so she left a message on a cell phone the friend no longer used because he didn’t have the money to buy more minutes. One of the prison guards overheard the furtive message from that woman who would rather risk her son’s life than lose possession of him.
It’s in the Bible, you know, the issue of Solomonic judgment—everything’s in there, however much you resist the idea. So the prison guard sent a hasty fax describing the emergency to Social Services, asking them to rush to the defendant’s home to rescue the child. It so happened that the woman in charge of distributing faxes was on vacation. The department head, swamped with work and irritated by the excessive heat and her husband’s laziness at home, bent to pick up the pile of faxes lying on the floor, scanned them rapidly, and tossed them in the trash without spotting the one that mentioned the emergency.
Thanks to this succession of meaningless happenstances, a nine-month-old baby ended up succumbing to hunger and thirst in a European apartment, until eventually the neighbors alerted authorities about the foul odor issuing from that floor.
But you stride toward death and give thanks to the natural order of things on every single one of your cloudless days, so you’ll assign the blame to the organization of society. You’ll sleep easy, nestled in the comfort of missing me. Dying slowly, particle by particle. I hear the sound of death on your skin, a book’s pages curling in the humid chamber of time. Your organs cool—how long has it been since your heart burned?
9
Money. Abstract time, future time that doesn’t exist. They hand it out to everyone, every night, on every TV channel. “Even the audiences,” you used to say, scandalized. Poor kid, you were always getting scandalized. And every time, you’d rush to the computer and write a scathing opinion piece. A miniature tsunami that brought additional spice and readership to the newspapers and problems to your life. You were removed from committees. People stopped listening to you. They listened to you less and less, and you became more and more upset about it.
They almost gave you the boot once. A nine-month-old baby died of hunger and thirst when his mother went out to buy drugs and forgot about him. It took the baby fifteen days to die; he crawled off the bed to the front door and wailed there in a five-story building. The residents called the police only when they began to be bothered by the stink of what proved to be the baby’s decomposing body.
In response, you drafted a bill saying that substance-dependent mothers who refused treatment would immediately and irrevocably lose all rights to their children, who would be put up for adoption. In addition, you decried the country’s ineffective justice system and general civic disengagement, and you said the baby’s neighbors should be charged with failing to come to the aid of a person in danger.
At six months out from the parliamentary elections, this attitude rankled your party’s leadership and many of your neofeminist friends, who called you a dictator and publicly distanced themselves from what they called your “oppressor’s mind-set.” They tried to placate you by quoting the Constitution, which, your peers claimed, defended freedom, individual self-determination, and family above all else; individuals who were unable to exercise vigorous self-determination and were incapable of choosing their family adequately, as would seem to be the case with babies, had to resign themselves to the consequences of other people’s freedom, up to and including their own deaths. They insisted that substance abusers are fragile souls, deserving of our support and solidarity, and that drugs are a crime created by society, for which All-of-Us-Are-Responsible-Amen. Besides, harsh deterrence methods don’t work—especially because blah blah tolerance blah blah understanding of differences blah blah accidents are always going to happen.
You’d been about to win an award for your tireless work promoting women’s rights, but the jury immediately withdrew the nomination. The lost award actually made you laugh. Over the phone, you let out one of those sudden guffaws of yours: “They hand out awards to anything that moves—cats, dogs, rats, chickens. It’s actually an honor that they’re not going to stick me in that sack. Besides, awards on women’s issues are always given separately, on the immensely convenient International Women’s Day, so as not to intrude on the importance of the male honorees on Portugal Day.”
You used to call me out of the blue when you felt discouraged, overwhelmed by rage. “I can’t sleep, it’s so stupid. For two months now, I’ve been waking with a start in the middle of the night, hearing that baby sobbing even though I never met him. I go out to the stairs in my pajamas, swear to God, trying to figure out where the crying is coming from. One of these days they’re going to grab me and ship me off to the loony bin—but this whole damn country is basically a psych ward for the criminally insane anyway. Wha
t more can you hope for?”
Victory, victory. What did I hope for? Just that rare joy—the one when you’d say I was right. When it came to children, you were worse than me. You took things hard. Foolishly, I told you so once: “Don’t make yourself crazy obsessing over a kid who’s already dead. At least the boy’s up on the playground in heaven now—if not, you should sue that lazy-ass God of yours.” It became clear that had been two hundred and twenty-seven kinds of stupid when you hung up on me. That child was still dying, little by little, inside you. You needed a lap, warm milk with honey. I left you high and dry that night—seeking the pure joy of having you inside us, the way you used to be. But going back wasn’t possible. You never called me again, and I sat crying over you in the doorless dungeon of my own inadequacy.
Sweetheart—that award, they actually came and pinned it to your dead body. Hyenas. I bent over the coffin to kiss you and plucked the medal, with its funereal gleam, from your chest. “Awesome,” you said. “Now go give that piece of crap to that little fucker—he’ll love to know somebody remembers him.” Incense-induced hallucination, I know, delirium in my anguish over you. Unreal reality, whatever, fuck off—I did hear you. Your voice. If it wasn’t you, it was a fantastic imitation by one of those winged transvestites you used to believe in. I went on the internet looking for information on the baby’s burial, found his name, and carried out your wish. He’s got a medal now, your little Unknown Soldier. I’d like to see him in your arms, glowing in the light of that solar smile you’d beam across the clouds whenever he called you Mom. But you forgot to bequeath me that battered treasure known as faith. I don’t see your blood in the sunset—only the blood of the infinite immanence where you no longer are. It is only on the path to your nonbeing that I resound. Without a heaven for your voice to reverberate in, how can I hear you?
10
And we disagreed on so much. You never seemed to do anything yourself, but you’d fiercely defend neoliberalism, claim you were being robbed when you heard about projects to support marginalized populations. You believed competence ought to be compensated, and it seemed natural to you that incompetence be punished with unemployment. At the same time, you railed against the young and wealthy who inherited positions and salaries through favors and recommendations. You got furious with me when I reminded you that you, too, had gotten a high-level job just because you came from money.
You argued for harsh sentencing for criminals, and you considered even people who committed manslaughter—who accidentally hit somebody while speeding, for example—to be criminals. Occasionally, having attempted to tally all the inequity in the world, you’d fly into a rage of corrective justice. “There’s no peace without justice,” you’d insist, and I’d respond, “If we’re always imposing justice, looking for the righteous and the wronged, we’re never going to find any peace.” But I said those sorts of things mostly to get on your nerves, and entering politics actually made me even more justice oriented and unbending than you. Fruitlessly so—like you. Sometimes it was really hard to like you. You did it on purpose—you liked making it harder and harder to like you. It still is, or I wouldn’t still be on your path.
10
On this game show, they’re giving out cars in addition to money. The contestants have to guess how many times people curse, on average, per day. We’re informed that it’s sixteen times, and the person who gets closest to that number will be the winner. These things can go terribly wrong. A few days back, a scrawny girl won fifty million escudos for hitting upon, though merely by chance and with a sympathetic assist from the host, the name of Agustina Bessa-Luís as the author of The Sybil. She did three interviews to apologize to the writer and promised she’d go out immediately and buy that classic. She likes to read, she insists: at the moment, she’s loving the bestseller Five and a Half Flings, by Rosarinho Clero de Sá.
I see you reading. You used to devour books, with your hands, your eyes, your entire body. You’d fall asleep on top of them, on the beach, in bed, on the sofa; you’d underline them, add phrases, exclamation points, question marks. You read everything, you said, but it wasn’t true; I never saw you reading anything like Six and a Half Flings (or was it seven?). You were racing to catch up on all the Tolstoy, Cervantes, and Proust you hadn’t been forced to read when you were young. Your reading was eclectic, that’s for sure. You mixed Deleuze and Ruth Rendell. Castelo Branco and Duras and Chekhov’s short stories and Montaigne’s essays. Even—supreme heresy!—Shakespeare and Berthe Bernage. You were thrilled when, at a used bookstore, you came across all five volumes of The Romance of Isabel, which you’d loved as a teenager: “Just think, this is out of print now because it’s politically incorrect. What’s wrong with the story of young love between a war hero and a nurse who wants to save the world? People complain it presents a reductive view of women and blah blah blah. They’re even harder on the Famous Five series. Those are being rewritten because everybody’s decided it’s bad that George is a tomboy. Do you think that’s OK?”
My dear, dear Tink, how I miss having someone around who doesn’t think everything’s OK. You’d laugh at me whenever I grumbled, “This crap only happens to me.” I got enormous pleasure from tallying affronts: power and water outages, potholes, traffic jams, incorrect change, bad service. I’d tell you all of it, in voluminous detail, and conclude: “This crap only happens to me.” You’d laugh. “Poor baby. Let it go, it could be worse. You could have been shipped off to fight in Africa, you know.” And I’d laugh, but I never told you the war stories you were hoping to hear. I’d tossed them into a coffin of silence and buried it far away from my life, long before I was reborn by your side.
There’s a dog barking in the night. I’m that dog. Actually, I’m worse off than him because I know I’m going to die, and I know that my death is of absolutely no importance. Just like yours. Will I live long enough to forget you? Is your laughter on a carousel something a person can forget? Your voice on the telephone didn’t last long—they deactivated your number within a week: “I can’t answer the phone right now, but leave a message and I’ll call as soon as I can. Thank you.”
I should write the book we planned to write together. Or, rather, you planned—planning was always your department. After a well-irrigated lunch, I’d go off to digest my repast and you’d head up into the clouds and start planning. It pissed you off when I pointed out that no work of any merit had been written by two people. “So? Electricity hadn’t been invented yet before Edison. If you can’t make the leap, just let go. Buck up, son.”
You could spend hours at a time worked up about Portugal’s problems. You never got used to the outsize malice in our diminutive country. And politics drove you batty. Without realizing it, you took the fado singer’s traditional turn down the alleyway of victimization. You saw conspiracies and persecution everywhere. You wanted to be Spanish. You wanted to be English. You wanted to emigrate to Australia. And yet you’d roundly chide me, your old friend, when I complained that we’d had the misfortune of being born to the guys who stayed behind, not the ones who set out to discover the world. You moved straight from the World of Absolute Possibility to Obstacle Alley. But oh boy, when I said it.
11
What do you do in that prison? The sun is setting behind the buildings, cars honking in the city’s clogged arteries, eager to return home. You’re walking slowly—that’s how you got here, on foot from your house, absorbed, oblivious to everything. They open the gates to you immediately, like they already know you. A few inmates wave to you from the yard. You go into a room with a blackboard on the far wall, the students sit down, and you pick up the chalk and write: “Introduction to Feudalism.” You were a teacher too, much more than I was—you offered that gift voluntarily, and I never knew. You’re still a teacher, even knowing that all knowledge arrives too late.
Too late. Those are the saddest words in any language. And yet you dance through your lesson, make the words into visible beings, entities in transformation; th
e students follow you, free once more, dancing with you to the marvelous music of history, the tremendous fiction of time that allows them to invent reality. Your students include murderers, thieves, drug addicts; one of them is practically a kid—you lightly stroke his hair.
In that moment, Marc Bloch’s caress appears in yours, the hand with which he stroked the head of a boy sobbing, in the imminence of death, on June 16, 1944. That day when the Gestapo, which had arrested the historian and tortured him for more than three months, made him climb into a truck with other prisoners, including the weeping sixteen-year-old. Marc lifted his hand, stroked the boy’s hair, and consoled him: “Don’t be afraid, it won’t hurt at all.” And as if the boy were contesting the veracity of that claim, Bloch insisted: “I’m a professor at the Sorbonne, I can’t tell lies.” And the youth dried his tears to die at Bloch’s side. The tears that now, by Bloch’s side, you turn into light. You, my disciple, who dwells in the night of my devastated thoughts.
11
You never knew I taught classes too. In the frank eyes of these amateur criminals (because if they were professionals, they wouldn’t be behind bars), I read the hope-filled outline of your own eyes, my oh-so-mistaken professor. Why would I admit to you my weakness, probably naïve, clearly petulant, for feeling useful? These men cling to knowledge as if it might be worth something. The feudal wars carry us far beyond these bars to the happiness of better and worse fates than theirs. That’s what history’s for, in the end—a tonic of courage that we dole out in doses proportional to our bodies. But where is your body?
