by Inês Pedrosa
Isabel even criticized the way you dressed, which she declared “drab and unimaginative.” This, coming from a woman who couldn’t dress herself without pictures from fashion magazines taped to the mirror. To whom you’d often lent money you never got back. For whom you worked your contacts, though you hated asking anybody for anything, to find her a job. She had the nerve to tell me the only reason she was staying on as a copyeditor was as a favor to you and your friends at the publishing house, knowing how hard it was to recruit qualified people for positions with so much responsibility. I had to listen to some amazing things, Tink, to escape from those harpies. What good would it have done to tell you all this? It would have fogged over those eyes of yours when I needed them as my beacons. And so I tried, without much success, to get you away from them. I think you hated me for that.
On the other hand, though she wounded you so deeply, Lia was a better friend than you knew. When thieves broke into your house and stole everything—stereo, TV, refrigerator, jewelry, money—she immediately called to give me a TV, a CD player, and a pearl necklace, with instructions to pass them on to you and pretend they came from me. I refused at first, feeling the request put me in an awkward position, but she kept pushing, claiming you’d never accept anything from her (which was true) and that it was the least she could do after everything you’d done for her: “Don’t think of it as a gift from me. Think of it as simply a gesture of remembrance from my daughter for her godmother, to whom she owes her life in the first place.” Expressed in those terms, in their powerful truth, the request felt impossible to refuse. Lia was merely getting rid of a tiny portion of the enormous sums of money she now possessed. So I told you that, by pure coincidence, some of my family’s endlessly complicated inheritance imbroglios had been sorted out and that it was my great pleasure to present you with that small gift.
The anonymous checks you used to receive every month were from Lia too. Thanks to my skills as a postal archangel, you believed they came from an account belonging to your deceased parents that had suddenly come to light. I even took on the task of calling your aunt and uncle to set up that loving deception.
Yes, I know you’d be furious, even today, to find that out. On your heart’s wobbly scales, only pride weighed more than generosity. The pride of a little orphan girl raised by the kindness of an aunt and uncle who were always pointing out how kind they were.
Lia blamed herself, haunted by your retaliatory ghost. If money could soothe the pain of the suppurating wound of that guilt, who was I to deny her that relief? So few people are open to the martyrdom of guilt these days. Most people do without it, hoping to prolong youth, elegance, life. Afterward, they revile themselves for the spectacular life smiling back at them in the mirror—but it’s too late to rewind and try again.
25
For many months we barely saw each other. We didn’t look at each other. Until that moment when I sat down next to you at the movie theater. It was a French musical that hardly ever got screened anymore. It was called Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, and it started with a chromatic essay on the melancholy of dead loves. Your face turned toward mine in the intermittent light. Your clear eyes pulled me under like a wave. Your left arm slowly came to rest against mine, frame by frame.
Later on, we held hands in the movie theater many times, my head on your shoulder, sharing laughter and little secrets like high schoolers. But we never again experienced the pure pleasure of potentiality. As soon as I grasped your hand, I could tell we’d never make our way across the treacherous river of sex. Our temperatures were too compatible. With the great lover of my life, it was the opposite: I desired him from the moment his fingers touched mine.
But I have no doubt that we fell in love in that moment, in the movie theater. And we were in love again on that night when I lay dead in the candlelight, ready for the earthly feast, at the mercy of compassion and speeches about Life’s Fundamental Values.
25
Guilt is what’s left over after funerals—the true face of the dead, which expands and invades us. God is a conspiracy of the dead against the amnesia of the living. Your corpulent God looms over my mind, asking, “Why didn’t you call her, you son of a bitch?” (God is an expert in belligerent vernacular, just as I suspected.) Shit. I used to ask you, “What have you been up to?” and you’d wave the newspaper in my face. The last time we spoke, in the middle of the night, you were gibbering about the death of a baby you didn’t even know. And I, who knew you so well, abandoned you.
You won, Tink: the god of guilt has clutched my very core. But that wasn’t the victory you were looking for, was it? The pleasure of guilt, that gastronomic pleasure of having pain we provoked linger in our own bodies. Or the swifter pleasure of sprinkling guilt on someone else’s body. Guilt always needs a body. Now, for the first time, I need yours.
26
Values. As if they ever did anything for anybody. Some people have souls built for conformity, while others embrace change from birth. Those categories of spirit energy have a much greater influence on our trajectories than do the elaborate mental constructions we call values.
Take the aunt who raised me, for example. Her God was altruism, and she inculcated that supreme value in me. One summer day we were on the esplanade, thirsty, dying for a lemonade. There was just one waiter working the entire place, and he never seemed to make it to our table. After half an hour of waiting, I went up to the counter to order. The employee there apologized for the delay and told me our lemonades would be right out. My aunt scolded me: “We’re not in a hurry—why did you make a fuss? I’ve never behaved that way in my life.” By then, the lemonades had arrived, and I replied, with an irritated smile, “If you don’t want yours, I’ll drink it.” And she snapped back, “I don’t deserve this from you.”
A couple of lemonades sparked an argument that was, at bottom, about how we saw the world. For my aunt, the rules were not to be questioned, and a person’s attitude should be one of silent acquiescence. The ideal world was one in which everybody conformed to the established norms, making as little ruckus as possible. I think this accommodation of life was reinforced by having grown up in poverty, guided by a proud sense of honor whose first commandment was “Never complain in a commercial establishment, or they’ll see you as inferior to other people. Plus, the employees are poorer than you, and you have to be magnanimous with the poor.”
The other pillar of this worldview was spiritual accounting: everything given is noted down on the parchment of other people’s souls so that, at the first opportunity, it can be duly repaid. As a result, the sums of the accumulated debt subtly gleam in any particular action, however trivial. “I don’t deserve this from you” means “You owe me a great deal, so you have to give up this argument that I can’t win.” In balancing the ledgers of a relationship, there’s no room for the unpredictability of temperament or the enigma of love.
Altruism—what does that word mean? It can refer equally to the systematic rectification of injustices or to the furious energy of revolution.
26
Another horror story—would God be in headphones at the beach while somewhere in a Chilean dungeon a little girl was being tortured in front of her mother? Answer me that, Tink. Can’t you hear me? You feel far away. Remote and wrathful. It’s like I can feel you, but I know I can’t really. I’m just collapsing into my brain, which is drained from the ceaseless din of the television. I should have turned down the volume—where did that remote go? Silence might be even more painful. Music, sure—Wim Mertens’s blue palette would be better. But making that improvement would require me to move, and just thinking about it wears me out. No, Tink, you can’t make me move anymore. There’s nothing I can do to change the spectacle of suffering, the hole that’s left where your laughter used to be. Do you realize I’m starting to forget the sound of your laughter?
27
Truth. Another supreme value plying the seas of society like an empty luxury yacht. I lied to you so many times in f
aithfulness to the truth of my love for you. Or your love for me, which is basically the same thing.
It wasn’t because I got tired of my last boyfriend that I left him. It was because I’d used up my youth, that capacity for, even when starting from ashes, nurturing a renewed and absolute belief in everything. For his part, he fell for that young assistant you were suspicious of. And she encouraged that fall. Darling. I had to be strong so you wouldn’t worry about me. I had to be strong to be worthy of you—to annoy you, unsettle you, deserve your love for me. What are we supposed to call that, if not love?
It doesn’t matter what we love. It’s the substance of that love that matters. The successive layers of life incorporated into it. Words are only a beginning—not even the beginning. In love, beginnings, middles, and ends are just pieces of a story that continues beyond itself, before and after a life’s brief blood flow. Everything is in service to that real obsession known as love. Dirt, light, roughness, smoothness, failure, persistence.
27
Belated angel, my jackpot, give me your wings and I’ll give you happiness. Homeless, senseless angel, play hooky from heaven, keep me company. Fugitive, narrow-headed angel, perch on my lap and tell me “Good morning.” Deceived angel, color of my life, come back to me or show me a way out. Angel of darkness, fearless bird, carry my sorrows away, tell me your secret.
28
The substance of love. In Lia’s case: pearls, a TV, money. Substances she had to hustle for, and which she, ashamed, offered to me through you. It’s only now that I see it. There’s a photo of me in Lia’s daughter’s room, and I’ve only discovered that now. She will forget me more efficiently than you will. Or, rather, she’ll evoke me with the sincere, garbled deference granted to founding heroes. She doesn’t need me in order to breathe, like you do. But she needs to know I existed; she needs her daughter not to forget the godmother she no longer remembers. And that’s love too.
When my house was broken into, she went to you, devious friend, to offer me consolation and comfort through you. A TV, some pearls, a little money. She did what she could—which wasn’t much since I no longer let her anywhere near me. It’s all written down in her diary, where she stores those memories that serve her no purpose in life.
Dearest God, how can a person wish to exist in you and yet be so blind in loving other people? You gave me the freedom to judge for myself, I know—and I turned that freedom into a prison, unable to escape the fish tank of my notion of love. Corrupt, career-driven Lia knows about love, about the transcendent forgiveness that sculpts its contours. Forced to choose between memory and affection, she opts for affection without a second thought. There was too much barren resentment in me, this parched desert, far from heaven and earth, from which I cry out an apology that she will no longer hear, especially since she never needed it. Lia forgave me a long time ago.
28
So many men killed you before you died—at least you didn’t leave life without having experienced your share of euphoric suffering, that feeling we call happiness. I pointed out the faults in all of them to make sure you’d remain available to me. It wasn’t jealousy; I found your romantic trials amusing, and I wasn’t the least bit bothered by imagining you in their arms. But I had no interest in putting up with any of them for good, those mystery men you found so alluring even when you realized they were dopes. I didn’t want to become your go-between. The most I was willing to accept, in terms of tripartite cohabitation, was a cat.
For a while there you had a remarkable cat: large, white, imperiously arrogant. When a human being approached—including you—the cat would hold its tail aloft and make off with a slow, determined gait. It didn’t allow any kind of affection, hissing if anyone tried to pet it. Similarly, it refused to sleep on the floor—it slept beside you, on a pillow of its own at the head of your bed—but woe betide you if you attempted to pet it. I identified deeply with that cat’s solitary personality; whenever you tried to put it in a basket to bring it to our weekend home, the cat fought so fiercely that you abandoned the effort.
I remember there was one time I wished the cat dead: you were making soup, and the aroma of chicken and mint was warming the house. We were chatting in the kitchen, by the stove, while the cat watched us with its polar-blue eyes, motionless on top of the refrigerator like a piece of china. One of your neighbors knocked on the door, and you opened it. The woman came in (she was retrieving a piece of clothing that had fallen down onto your clotheslines), and the cat panicked and dove straight into the pot of soup.
You laughed for a good hour once you’d managed to dump cat and soup into the sink and subdued and soothed the animal. Occasionally you’d say, “I’m surrounded by aesthetes everywhere I look. Even the cat, bless him,” and then you’d start laughing again. That neighbor of yours was like the living incarnation of the evil queen in Snow White. Even her voice. “Can I grab a piece of clothing that fell onto your clotheslines?” she’d ask in the bleating voice with which the famous witch offered that poisoned apple. But your cat’s aesthetic standards doomed me to a dinner of sausage and eggs instead of your soup, which was one of the few, if not the only, culinary strengths you had.
I don’t know if it was because of the soup trauma that your standoffish cat escaped down the stairs one day when you went to put the trash out. It never came back, and you never wanted another one. You said you wouldn’t be able to find another cat like him. Fish Stick tried to give you a pair of cute, gentle Siamese kittens anyway, and you immediately declared them “squishy and cloying” and gave them back. After that, you surrounded yourself with men. Chosen based on the same criteria of aloofness and self-involvement that you applied to cats—bless them.
29
I wanted you to forget about me. I know that wasn’t right; I felt it acutely when the telephone stopped ringing, when the voice now sobbing inside the husk of what I used to be became choreographed. “What did you do yesterday?” I’d ask, and you’d spin three times and take four steps back, impeccably graceful. Damn you. You traded me for someone else, a new toy—that’s how love goes. I was still in you, but you stopped needing me, which made me need you all the more.
I’d forgotten you so many times already—but they didn’t count. I crawled into bed and cried for a week straight. Afterward, my boyfriend accused me of having “neglected” him. Nobody neglects anybody, nothing passes and nothing stays—that’s just the illusion of time. It’s still my love that lights up your face in the next moment of wonderment, like your first childhood crush, your marriages balled up in the pockets of old jackets that served as the candles for our platonic and carnal union. Flesh isn’t sex, nor is sex as effective as it’s claimed to be, you know. And you forgot me—I was already under your skin. You forgot me the way a baby forgets his mother. Or even the way a mother forgets her baby. The last time I spoke to you was during a bout of insomnia triggered by the heartbreaking story of a baby forgotten by his mother behind a door. I know that seems elementary; life is quite elementary. Death, believe me, is even more so—certainty, shadow, solitude.
Did my boyfriend fall for another woman because I neglected him, caught up in your abandonment of me? Causes and consequences, artificial comforts, sofas we use to furnish the windswept passageway of life—a false passageway, planks balanced above a motionless precipice. I’ve tumbled over the precipice now, my dear; nothing’s going to happen to me. “The farthest you can fall is the ground,” my gymnastics teacher used to say as I stood shaking with fright before the balance beam. And it’s true, especially since there is no ground. Nothing’s going to happen to me now, which is how I know that nothing ever happened to me—what events do we truly remember?
If you hadn’t forgotten so much, you never would have remembered to like me. Most people choose memories to use as buoys: I was happy here, so here I’m going to stay, anchored in the middle of an immense, unknown sea. Or instead: I was happy here, so I refuse to leave. That’s how you can tell them apart in day-to-day life, op
timists and pessimists—professional rememberers.
How many friends did you have to forget, incorporate into your skin, to arrive at your love for me? How many words did you have to forget so you could say them for the first time? How many people are you able now, because of our love, to love better than the two of us once loved each other?
There’s an exercise of feelings that can’t be carried through to the end. A place where eternity sets in and the novelty of victories fades. A familiar place in a revival cinema that can exist only after death—as radiant remembrance. We had already been in that place. We were already only light, only stars, and, like stars, dead.
29
I can’t really capture how much I miss you. Your friend Pascoal told me I should write down everything I remember about you. Even the insignificant things. The insignificant stuff is easy—that’s the stuff you don’t forget. The way you sought out every puddle and hopped in them like a child. Your love of rain, fireplaces, crashing waves, and the wind that made you whirl around on winter days. The noise of your lighter, which served as my alarm clock. Back when you smoked, the first thing you did when you woke up was light a cigarette. I used to hassle you about it because I didn’t like smoke indoors and because, like I said, your lighter used to wake me up, there on the other side of the wall—the walls were so thin and the silence so deep in our peaceful home. Most of all, I hassled you because I was worried about your health. Pointlessly, I know—in the end, you died with your health intact.
