Still I Miss You

by Inês Pedrosa

  34

  Writers cut out articles about these cases and think, I’m going to write about this. Words like puzzle pieces—in the end, the world again looks like it did in early childhood, the dead girls lined up on the shelf alongside ghosts and bedtime stories. Writers barricade themselves in storytelling to escape suffering. The suffering comes first, and then they write as a sort of revenge. Eventually they become skilled enough to write instead of suffering—the characters suffer for them and, with luck, for their profit.

  I once came across a writer crying. At least it looked like she was crying, there in the bathroom during a break from an important political meeting. In my naïveté, I thought she was crying because of the way the men always put us down. They’d look right through us. They’d play deaf. They referred to us as “the girls”—the segregation of our school days seemingly irreversible. “On behalf of myself and Madam President of the Chamber, I’d like to state our absolute support for the victims of this flood,” the councilor of public facilities announced in front of the ministers and the television cameras. “The councilor of tourism and I have decided to speed up the development of tourism infrastructure.” The two women blushed and stayed quiet, fearing ridicule—and their subordinates beamed, applauded by the Greats and called to by dueling microphones.

  When I told you about it, you shrugged: “Well, they shouldn’t keep quiet. Speak up, damn it, regardless of how it looks.” And maybe we really should have, talked until we went hoarse. But it wasn’t just that. Since I’d been a teacher, I was appointed to head up an educational field center and, soon after, was named president of the Juvenile Protection Commission. Every day I saw new cases of kids who’d been beaten and whipped. The children of successful parents who forced them to kneel on nails when their grades dropped. Rich children who went hungry and were lashed with belt buckles to teach them discipline and competitiveness. And I’d intervene as best I could, delicately, pondering how little Marx had understood of human nature. Until one day I stopped being able to just ponder.

  “Please help us. He comes home drunk, rapes all of us, and then beats us. At this point we wouldn’t even care if he raped us if he didn’t beat us so badly afterward.”

  She was a twenty-four-year-old woman with broken ribs and a shattered face, the mother of three girls and two boys.

  I called all the powerful people I knew—Minister, it’s extremely urgent; Mr. Secretary of State, do me this favor; Director General, please give me a minute of your time—and managed to rustle up the funding to start a shelter I called the Equity Office. It accepted women and men alike to avoid the temptations of paternalism. Besides, other kinds of shipwrecked souls were drifting in among the successive waves of women with pummeled faces—Eastern European immigrants, exiled Gypsies, the handicapped, the elderly, people without anything or anyone but pain.

  At first, everybody thought it was a fantastic idea with great media appeal. They gave me a cheerful office full of communication devices, arranged an opening ceremony with pomp and televisions, urged me to act. I acted with such energy that they decided to create an Equity Ministry—but uh-oh—the tide ebbed, the threats of economic crisis and unemployment reappeared on the horizon, and the press started talking about the bureaucratization of the state, how politicians were inventing pointless ministries like that equity one, when obviously equity should be a basic principle for every ministry.

  Six months after its birth, the Equity Ministry was dead and buried. And I was brusquely advised to “stop stirring shit up,” to quit making life more complicated for the party and the administration. “Why are you trying to shove all that crap in people’s faces? Violence has always existed and always will—let democracy and the regular authorities take care of it.” Since I wasn’t willing to drop my battered women, my old men, my paraplegics, my abused children, they dropped me from all the committees, removed my staff, my funding, my access to power. They pulled my police protection, thinking that would intimidate me. But the guy who’d been harassing me, flooding my cell phone and home with threatening messages (“I’m going to fill your nose with acid, you whore, that’ll teach you to take women away from their husbands”), he disappeared too, perhaps discouraged by my increasing insignificance. Or maybe he was actually part of the law enforcement structures that were supposedly protecting me—after all, weren’t some of my women and children’s domestic tyrants police officers?

  Whenever I complained, they told me to shut up. Or they’d toss me a little crumb of power, a scrap of funding, a few personnel. “Just keep quiet,” you’d tell me when you started realizing you actually liked me. “Because of who you are, you have to keep quiet, or you’ll never get anywhere.” “Because of who I am, I can’t keep quiet,” I fired back. “I’m the only safe place I know.”

  You insisted, though. I shouldn’t declare myself a feminist in public. Or at least I should wear a tight, low-cut dress while saying it. I should smile instead of criticizing. Or at least smile while criticizing. Poor friend. It was for my own good, I know. Everything we’re supposed to give up being is for our own good. Couldn’t you see that the only good I wanted was simply the freedom to be who I was?

  The writer was crying, holding a mascara brush in her hand, and the mascara was turning her tears black. The writer was a member of the European Parliament, a respected jurist, a critically acclaimed author. In political meetings, no one listened when she spoke, just like with the other women. But she was used to it—or maybe she wasn’t. Those men never made me cry. It was a point of pride for me. I stopped crying when I was eleven. My father used to come home in a rage and slap me. He stopped the day I decided to ignore the slap. I just kept doing what I was doing, as if the violence had never happened. Politics was very similar to my father’s homecomings.

  “Let it go,” I told the writer. “Place an op-ed in a newspaper. They’ll have to read it if it’s in the paper.”

  She laughed.

  “I’m crying because Sousa Neto dumped me. I’m crying over him, practicing how he’s going to cry in my novel when he tries to come back to me and it’s too late.”

  See why I ditched our childish plan to write novels? There are so many of them these days, so many just a hyperrealistic falsification of reality. Oh, my dear—at least you were never a Sousa to me. You big lunk. Old thing. My dear. Baby. Fathead. Baby’s the one thing you couldn’t stand me to call you—which is why I did it so often. Your name was already worn out when I met you. Too many women, too many secret codes cracked too many times. And I never called you by your last name the way my girlfriends did. That writer even called her lover by his last name, Sousa. And he called her by hers, Fraga, like a man. That’s what they called each other, and she felt respected somehow.

  34

  I bury myself in the books you left me, in the many books I loved because of you. Dazzling books where others wrote your dreams and nightmares, your anxieties. I underline the few sentences that haven’t been underlined already. But none of them comfort me, now mere literature in the deadly tidying of history. I owe so much to you: Several lives, the multiple lives that appear in books, my life as a web, a map of shortcuts between nerve endings that came to make sense through books. My youth, restored at rock concerts or Brazilian nights at the Coliseu theater. My dancing skills, which warmed my body. Above all, the illusion of desire in the eyes of the women you reeled in for me—a redemptive illusion for men of my generation, raised with a religious obligation to love. You, the militant Catholic, taught me that it’s not a sin to seek nothing more than the purity of mutual desire—you taught me to see purity in everything around me.

  You appear to me now in dreams, sobbing, asking my forgiveness for the dissertation you “copied” from me. I want to respond, but in the dream, my voice won’t work. And there are lots of people; I lose you. We’re at a massive party on a verdant mountain with scattered ruins where all of our friends and acquaintances have shown up. All I want is to tell you this: if even once I
was able to improve the orchestral arrangement for your melody, then I’m the one who should be grateful.

  35

  What is respect? The antechamber of fear. The back room of love. The tissue that remains after the body is gone—death, stitched tight to the terror of life. Don’t respect me—don’t forget me. “I respect the choice you’ve made,” you told me one day, sitting at a table in one of those fancy restaurants where we’d meet from time to time once I went into politics. As if you were saying: “Now that you’re exchanging our adolescent boardwalks for this well-heeled life, I’m not interested in the things you do.” You stopped criticizing, no longer took leering delight in needling me, which a person does only with those he loves, the pleasure of guilt-free wickedness, the absolute erotic pleasure of conquest without victory.

  Thanks to politics, I got used to living life as a sort of respectable game of chess: I’d let two of your pieces advance and then counterattack. I’d spend your birthday in silence, waiting for a complaint I knew wouldn’t come, and then surprise you a month later with a bouquet of flowers. The first time we spent my birthday together, you gave me a videotape of Visconti’s The Leopard and a postcard of Venice on which you’d written, “Good for two plane tickets and two hotel rooms in Venice.” You wanted to be able to teach me something too, I think. Maybe you’d noticed that I—like the rest of the female sex, of course—had succumbed to the power of your beauty, and you wanted to show me that you were more than a handsome face. But you never took things any further—that’s how manipulators behave and dominate, through faintly sketched gestures, like the dancing of fireworks under the impassive blackness of the heavens.

  I’d call you out as a way of drawing a distinction between us—mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the purest of them all?—but I was no less skilled than you in the art of manipulation. “Disciples aren’t enough for you anymore, you need voters,” you told me with disillusioned rage in your eyes. My cheeks burned as if slapped; I felt insulted, as people do when their truth has suddenly been demolished. As we were walking into a café one day, you tossed a five-thousand-escudo bill into the hat of a beggar who was always sitting on the sidewalk by the front door. The man thanked you, overwhelmed: “May God carry you to paradise, sir.” You explained to me that you went to that café every week, but gave the man alms only occasionally: “I prefer to give him a large amount every once in a while, to make sure he doesn’t forget me.”

  Was I anything more than what that poor man was for you, a useful paving stone on your road to eternity? Were you anything more than that for me—isn’t it teaching that brings us closest to eternity? Yours was a futile effort in the end—when I died, it was too early for the alms you occasionally tossed me to have secured your future.

  My funeral was packed with pathetic souls—some five hundred people dressed to the nines so they’d be seen paying me their respects. Real pros in perfectly calibrated condolence and auspicious beginnings, who weren’t stingy in their praise and harbored no embarrassment on their faces. I longed to kick them out, the way my fiery Jesus did the money changers in the temple. But you, my poor friend, with disheveled hair, a black scarf askew, and mismatched socks, were the flamboyant, flesh-bound image of sorrow. And I never said thank you.

  I should have done so at the end of my dissertation defense. Even if it was only after the committee’s decision, only after I’d been given summa cum laude honors. It was your research on prehistoric fertility cults and the increasing centrality of sex goddesses and priestesses in them that served as the foundation for my study of prostitutes’ pioneering role in the struggle for women’s liberation. It was your passion for ancient Greece that led me to discover the real Greek tragedy of the daily life of Athens’s women, and the avant-garde influence on classical philosophy of the hetaerae, or “men’s companions,” highly educated and independent prostitutes, considered to be emanations of the goddess Aphrodite. You were the one who made me see the extent to which postfeminist movements had revitalized the stereotype of the repentant prostitute, promoting it via a marketing campaign identical to that of the Catholic Church. You were the one who made me see that, contrary to popular belief, the unrefined Middle Ages, by keeping men busy with wars and crusades, actually increased women’s freedom of movement, while the much-lauded Renaissance kept them trapped at home.

  I copied your work and called it inspiration. When everybody stopped clapping, you hugged me with the strength of an unshaken affection, an indestructible pride—and I nestled there, lost in happiness, relief, and shame in your arms, with the words thank you shuddering in my throat. And I didn’t say them.

  35

  I never threw you that surprise party you fantasized about, kid. An optimist, or an unrepentant cheat, I was going to do it for your fortieth birthday. With forty friends, obviously. But once you got involved in politics, things were more complicated: I had to comb through the mass of people around you to figure out how many were actually friends. You’d become a woman of influence, which really means a girl to be sucked dry.

  People even started asking you to write forewords for them. And you’d do it—puffed up at first with academic-literary flattery, and later exhausted, with the disquieting sense that you were being hustled. Some even rounded out their requests with a Góngoresque tangle of words to make sure you realized what an honor it was for you. And you, out of breath, kept saying yes to everything.

  You sunk your teeth into those who loved you and put them to work making phone calls. If only you’d stopped thinking about yourself for a second and wondered how many of those people would have kept hovering around you, hoping for another lunch date, if you hadn’t had any favors to do for them. You had things backward: you said your mission on earth was to improve people’s living conditions, but most of your work involved improving the living conditions of those who’d had it made since birth. And that was your surprise party.

  Children’s laughter lacerates me the way your parboiled cat would have liked to. I avoid parks so I won’t hear their chorusing shrieks—you rise out of that laughter, wearing a pinafore, with a scrape on your nose, and you laugh, your front teeth missing. Your death has brought me my imaginary childhood. I’m playing marbles with you in the courtyard of an unfamiliar house, and your mother is scolding you—“It wasn’t enough to be a tomboy, now you’re bringing boys home”—and I give you a kiss on the forehead, and your forehead is a sea of rough wrinkles, you’re missing your front teeth because you’re very old, and you start laughing again: “Yeah, I am a tomboy.”

  I know so little about you. Our friendship was made of the present, of comments on the today shifting around us. Neither of us had family to visit—your parents, who’d been dead for so many years, were just a pretext for fabulations; the aunt and uncle who’d raised you, mere ceremonial figures for you to honor at ceremonial events. The only member of your family I met was the jealous God who took you away from me. Don’t ask me to forgive him, because I can’t. The only way I’ll do that is if the Big Dude someday carries me to your feet—pull some strings, would you?

  36

  Why do I choose you, in this endless thrumming? Why do I long for you in my sleep, when you illuminate primarily what I never was? You died on me before I died—and I can’t manage to die without you. I never could. Every day of my life I was with you—as if all my prior friendships had been merely the path leading me to you, as if all my later friendships were merely your absence. More delicate, more rhythmic, more clear-cut—less you.

  I organized my love affairs. That’s the primary rule in life—you’ve got to know how to file them, understand them, recount them, forget them. But nobody tells us how to survive the fading of a feeling that refuses to fade. Friendship, like one’s homeland, is lost only through betrayal. On a battlefield, during active operations. There’s no explanation for the disappearance of desire, the last and only lesson taught by the most extraordinary love. But when love is shielded from the deterioration of the body
, nothing but scent and contour choreographed around the rainbows of that animated hope that we call soul—why does it vanish? How is it that, from one day to the next, your voice stopped seeking me out and I allowed my life to stop seeing itself reflected in yours?

  We used to spend hours on the phone. Detailing all the day’s events. Speculating on the hidden causes of our lovers’ every gesture and word. Planning ambitious projects that would make us immortal geniuses. Listing the bad characteristics of good people. Methodically skewering bad people. Tallying up the ways we were the best and the worst in the world. Listening to the most beautiful tracks on the records each of us had acquired most recently. That’s why I was never able to see the difference between men’s conversation and women’s. You were as much a woman as I was, and I was as much a man as you—and the two of us had sex, of course, everything between us was sex, sublime sex, without the creaking of springs, the fatiguing of bodies, without the melancholy ritual of frenzy and rest that reduces passion to ashes.

  Did you get tired of my body, even in the abstract? On what day did you abandon me? With what word did my voice take its leave? What darkness opened within your eyes to shatter my image? In my nightmares, a vulture used to circle around you and eat your brain. You’d laugh if I told you about it, and say, as you often did, “Shrinks are never going to get rich off of you. No offense, but your subconscious is like a porno. Everything’s all out in the open, all moans and whips.” I was never able to live without you—I encountered you in all my dreams, on the brink of an explanation that never came but that I knew existed. One day, at our next lunch of convenience, you’d say, “It pissed me off when you did this or said that.” And I’d tell you it wasn’t intentional, and we’d go back to being a tightly tied knot.

  It wasn’t intentional. If I stopped moving you, amusing you, inspiring you, darling, it wasn’t intentional. If I lost the ability to hurt you and make you bleed, it wasn’t intentional. It wasn’t my intention to copy you to avoid losing you, to keep you from realizing I might not be capable on my own. It wasn’t my intention not to be capable—lazy, timorous, hiding in the cave of impossible perfection. It wasn’t my intention to die, instead of swallowing some pills and picking up the phone to tell you I was killing myself.