by Inês Pedrosa
If I move away from you, I hear shouts, a chorus of shouts coming from I know not where; the earth goes out of focus and I collapse in an agonizing inconsistency—which, you’d point out with a cackle, neatly sums up my life.
But your laughter seems to have died with me—go on, laugh, throw your arms in the air and laugh wildly, the way you always laughed at me. Want to know a secret? The world doesn’t make sense—and I’m still here, who knows where, waiting for something to happen. Women never get tired of waiting for something to happen, you’d say, which is why they don’t age as quickly. Or, rather, are born old.
To be born again, have a space to tread, feel my breath on one of Lisbon’s high, long windows—space exists only insofar as it is reduced to the measure of a body, to the glow of flesh. Was I beautiful enough that my presence can remain, illuminating the void I once filled? Was any void ever mine?
The weight of the world. If only I could touch a child’s face for a moment to stanch it, to regain the illusion that such a thing might be possible, to close the doors of pain, torture, injustice. Drive them into that black hole somewhere in outer space. I try to take you by the hand; I take the cold hand of my mother who never died. Hold my hand, Mother—why do your fingers refuse to grasp mine? I was angry with my mother when she died—were you angry with me too? Is that why you never laugh?
Why don’t you answer the phone? The world is calling you—a world of opportunists and opportunities. Of dead children and people who write poems about dead children. Of life that isn’t stanched in the screams of the children who, at this very moment, are being tortured by their mothers. While you listen to St. Matthew Passion and think sorrowfully of me, I think sorrowfully of you while listening to the futile weeping of a little girl whose mother is burning her with an iron. My whole life, I always heard these children’s cries—because I didn’t have children, because I pretty much didn’t have parents, because we’re all orphans. We do odd jobs, struggle to survive, perform theater pieces with the roles reversed. I served as your mother so many times, watched you pasting my smile onto your memories of the miserable mother fate stuck you with. You fell asleep with your head on my lap so many times, elderly son of my own choosing. Pick up the phone, Son. The flotsam of what we used to call “our group” is looking for you.
39
Our friends keep calling me. They say I need to react, tell me to write. To write you. You stay my hand. You don’t want me to write you. You don’t want me to make anything new, anything that alters our history. We planned to write texts fifty-fifty. We set ground rules: we’d steal from each other. But we didn’t write to each other much. We didn’t need that artifice of explanatory seduction. And we definitely don’t need it now. I find you with open eyes—in the voids of silence in my house, in the interstices of evening crowds, in the fog of my breath on the windows when cold crushes the night.
In those first days, I was afraid of gradually forgetting you, but it’s not true what people say about time. God may snatch life away from us—yes, the Big Dude’s easy to point the finger at—but he doesn’t see details. And sanding down time is a matter of focusing on details. Instead of allowing that punk-ass God of yours to keep me down with your irreversible disappearance and our irrevocable mistakes, I pretend that you never existed. I invent you as my own creation, the realest of imaginary friends. I shake you free of time, make you my friend before and after the chronology you were given.
You appear one Christmas Eve, after dinner, with your parents. A huge pink ribbon, almost bigger than your head, hasn’t been able to tame your rebellious curls. There’s no sparkle in your mother’s eyes, which are light in color but dim, and maybe that’s why your noisy laugh stands out so much—as if only that laugh could bring these three people together.
Your parents’ car has broken down in front of our house, and they ask to use the phone. But luckily there is no mechanic available to pick up the family and take you away on this Christmas Eve in 1943. My mother invites you to stay—what difference would another three people make in a house full of aunts and uncles and cousins? We’re both six years old and devoutly believe that the Baby Jesus is going to come down the chimney at daybreak to fill our shoes with toys.
My cousins and siblings and I have been preparing a skit to make the long wait pass more cheerfully. It’s a religion-themed detective piece: somebody has stolen the Wise Men’s gold, incense, and myrrh. Saint Joseph, in what I believe must be the only star turn he’s ever enjoyed, is our Sherlock Holmes. You immediately come up with three songs to weave the story together, insisting that every play needs musical numbers. All of them have the same melody (the classic “Silent Night”), but you say the important part is the lyrics. Even back then, you always get the last word, and I immediately dislike you. You refuse to play the Virgin Mary and write a new part for yourself. In the end, you play Saint Joseph’s assistant, a gossipy shepherdess who discovers it was one of the Baby Jesus’s angel friends who stole the gold to buy shoes for all the barefoot children in the world. The adults clap, we pass a hat as their applause dies down, and only my grandfather refuses to pay up: “Money doesn’t buy happiness, kids.” My grandmother pays double, behind his back, with coins filched from the household budget, which she’s been bilking her entire married life.
The fireplace from that night of my childhood crackles in my flameless fireplace. I see the two of us watching the logs burning on that magical night of our shared youth. Later, when everybody is sleeping, we sit on the stairs that lead up to the bedrooms, waiting to see the Baby Jesus come down the chimney with our bag of gifts. “Does he somehow know I’m at your house?” you ask me. Yes, he knows.
40
If only I could go sit on the stairs of the lover who humiliated me. Feel my heart pounding in my throat, the insolent terror of passion. Because in the end I loved one man, just one, the way I loved God—with the desperate certainty that he was the one and that I’d never be able to live with him. I lost the privilege of disillusionment. If I were alive again, dear friend, I’d go track down that man I criticized to you so harshly, and I’d eagerly embrace the brutal love I wasn’t seeking. The brutal love that belongs only to the places of life, the chemistry of bodies. I can’t return to the darkness of time, the darkness of his stairs, on tiptoe.
Light under the crack of the door, hours spent trying to identify his footsteps, trying to suss out whether the voices in the house were issuing from the fifth dimension offered by mass communication devices or were right there, on the other side of the door, ready to pounce on the brutality of my love. I’d sit for hours there in the dark, at the cliff’s edge, drawing strength from the drumbeat of the rain falling on the skylight. I went there most of all on rainy nights—it was like storms dragged me out of the house, my eyes swamped with tears that turned the city into an intoxication of light. Afterward, sometimes, I’d knock, hoping that surprise might reveal on his face the image of his love for me.
40
I bump into you again beneath a tunnel of cedars sometime in the late sixties. I’ve only recently returned from Africa, and Alexandre has rebuilt a tumbledown house he inherited and invited me to visit. Fall is at the peak of its golden splendor. Alexandre has extended the house to span the stream that flows past it, and the music of the tumbling water pervades the silence of the rooms, which are all granite and pale wood, sketched at disjointed angles. A few yards from the front door, a staircase shaded by a dense tunnel of cedars leads to the vineyards, which, at this time of year, glow like steady flames.
I’m climbing the stairs toward the house when I see you coming down, holding hands with a man whose features I don’t even register. You’re wearing a long-sleeved green-and-pink dress, a pink knitted coat over your shoulders, and the same remarkable pink ribbon in your curls, which are now long. You smile at me and say, “I can’t stay with you now, it’s not time yet.” When I turn to get a better look, you’ve already disappeared. I search, but there’s no sign of you or the
mysterious man in the vineyard. Not even in the stand of trees on the far side. I ask Alexandre who the strange couple could have been, and he insists that we’re alone here—me, him, and his wife.
And I never think about that encounter again until the day I see you standing in front of me in that history class, a completely inadequate (and crooked) blue ribbon tied in your black curls. But of course you can’t be the little girl or the young woman I remember. Unless you’re the female reincarnation of Peter Pan. In which case your death makes no sense. I feel the light of your smile in tiny lacerations on my skin. I know you’re here—but why don’t you talk to me?
41
You never liked groups anyway. “Herds are the worst!” you always said. But you were so theatrical in saying it. I eventually came to see it as a cry for help. The world was one long SOS, and I loved it—you were right about that. Now that I was no longer writing books or sculpting statues, at least I was leaving my mark on other people’s happiness. I’d seen the world that could be saved. Even, or especially, the people who didn’t want to be saved.
What did I save you from, though? You were a staunch loner when I met you, and even more solitary when I left. You started out as what Musil would call a “man of the real,” apt to inflame the possibilities hidden in the folds of reality. You eventually slid into the Musilian territory of the “man of the possible,” for whom everything that exists, visible and invisible alike, has the same weight. And that made you an impossible man—lighter than a leaf on the wind, the infinite leaf that every autumn returns on the wind of mutant cities.
You became addicted to my laughter, addicted even to those happy herds I dragged along with me from the movies to the theater, from the theater to the cafés. Fish Stick and Silver Tongue. Joana the Mad (whose name wasn’t even Joana) and the Three Little Pigs, always whining about the wolves that ruined all their endeavors. None of them were aware of their nicknames.
When you ran into the group of us eating dinner at the seaside one summer night, you tossed me a wry smile: “So the whole zoo’s here, then. All that’s missing is the old gorilla—and here I am.” You rebuffed my timid invitation for you to sit with us, saying you didn’t have the patience for political discussions or stories about people’s kids, which would ultimately lead to the same place. One of the Three Little Pigs had recently become a father, and I don’t think he appreciated the direct allusion to the presence of his newborn son. But it was actually me you were talking about—or was that just me feeling more important than I was? I wanted to change the world, and yes, our friends sought me out because they wanted better jobs. And I truly believed that what they wanted was to help me change the world. At least at first. There was a precise chronological coincidence between my party’s decline in the polls and the intensifying silence of my answering machine. But it was only months later that I made that connection.
When the Three Little Pigs finally managed to start the art history magazine they’d been dreaming of, they called you, not me. And you, you bastard, wrote a perfect essay about my beloved Georgia O’Keeffe. With all the best ideas from my classes you’d attended. And you started your radio career by expressing your gratitude to the Three Little Pigs, talking about your long-standing friendship as if it had been born thanks to the efforts and grace of the Holy Spirit.
How you fumed about those Little Pig bastards at first. One because he was always bumming other people’s cigarettes, another because he always ordered the last crème brûlée at restaurants, and the third because he always had to have the last word. Anyway. You dog. Ugly, angry, rabid dog. Let me tell you everything, now that I can’t tell you anything. I couldn’t see you the way the others did, so I spent my life erasing from the tape any scene that would ruin my vision of you. I stopped calling you so I could love you like I used to, pretend you’d become invisible but were still by my side. Toothless dog. It’s only now that you’re missing me. When I couldn’t believe in you as an invisible friend, I imagined you ailing, deathly ill, fetid. The elegant perfume of cigars in your house replaced by the infectious stench of illness—and you, at death’s door, revived when you heard my name. God exists, don’t you see? He took revenge on me for that Camillian fantasy.
Look, that robe I bought you—do you remember that was me? You got sick for real once—not terribly sick, just enough to start yelping for me. I never met a man who dared fight off an illness without some kind of stand-in maternal figure. You’d stopped phoning me every day by that point. Your voice weak, you begged me to go out and buy you a warm robe before the flu consumed the heat of your life force. You’d only just realized you didn’t have one. You never wore one, even in winter. And so I went off on that rainy April afternoon to find a robe made of pure wool (as specified), preferably in a blue-and-green tartan.
It took me three hours to track one down—the stores weren’t selling anything but warm-weather clothing—but I managed it. And then I crossed the city in the opposite direction, on my own initiative, to buy you some fresh-baked puff pastries, oranges from the Algarve, and Bravo de Esmolfe apples—because you refused to eat any other kind. But I’d forgotten to bring the key to your house.
I knocked on the door, and a friend I’d never seen before answered. A man nearly your age, but even taller and almost better looking. I immediately considered him a friend; being so taken with you, I naturally believed that all of your friends were part of you. A tendency left over from my high school days, afternoons spent sitting on stairs with my fingers twined in my best friend’s blond hair and my head on the shoulder of a boy who liked her. But my brand-new friend eyed me suspiciously and told me you couldn’t see me because you were sick. I smiled again, displayed my treasures, explained that I was there to take care of you, and ducked into the house beneath the closed gate of his arm.
You complained about the color of the robe (which was blue-and-black plaid instead of blue-and-green) and about how the pastries had gotten cold. You whined about how long I’d taken and kept arguing with your friend about all the different interpretations of Bach. Afterward you sent me flowers with a brief note of apology. But I didn’t want your flowers. It’s not like I was dead.
41
Maybe it was the disease of eternity, which always ends up infecting history lovers—even the ironic types, like us—that knocked our clocks out of sync. You were still attempting to show up on time to your scheduled obligations. You gave it your all and almost pulled it off. You’d noticed that punctual people tended to be respected. And respect was something you were obsessed with. Respect is one of the traps women stumble into. If you were looking to subvert the world’s chauvinistic order, wouldn’t it have been better to start by disrupting the way time is regimented? That time you threw a public fit in front of the TV cameras because you’d arrived at Parliament too late to vote on the priority-setting bill, wouldn’t it have been better to give a dignified, disdainful shrug instead of babbling excuses?
Somehow you managed to appear to me before you’d even been born, kid. You were generally even less punctual than me because you always had an endless list of things to do and refused to accept the finitude of each hour. You lacked war experience. Just as I lack experience with the guerilla warfare of the day-to-day, darning this and patching that, the struggle to endure that wards off the smell of death.
I’m an old man—and already was when we met. But you never noticed that. I tire easily. If it weren’t for my young criminals’ thirst for knowledge, I wouldn’t be interested in anything at this point. My body is retreating from me—it hardly ever responds to my concerns, slides toward the earth’s horizon. I was afraid my skin might start to smell stale, that my dentures would tumble into my soup. That you’d start showing up at my house just one Sunday a month, to find me sitting in a wheelchair, waiting for you to play cards with me. Old people my age emigrate, take up residence in anecdotes about that time when they were happy, in wartime forests or childhood games of marbles.
When you were a
live, even in those final years when we were only the memory of what we used to be, I fed off the ups and downs of your life. The jokes, the sarcasm, the euphoric rage of seeing my muse trip on the false-bottomed staircase of power. I was so resolutely your friend that I was also your fiercest enemy—always expecting more and better from you. An asinine enemy who failed to keep you alive.
I wish I knew your killer’s name. Something tells me it was that seraphic prowler for unwary women, like a dead gecko on sunny walls attracting a foolish fly. That bourgeois Adonis who seduced both you and that waifish Flor chick from the department. I don’t remember seeing him at your funeral. Pascoal whispered something to me about an old flame, but I didn’t listen, unwilling to accept that I was no longer your confidant.
But in matters of the heart, you were supremely predictable, practically meteorological. If a boyfriend dumped you, you’d move on to another so you could forget the first. Your outings were always returns to the past, and your men were just corpses in the making that you struggled to resuscitate. Your God gave you the soul of an undertaker. He probably called you away early so you could help him bring the dead there on the other side back to life. Now you’ve left me here with this ignominious detective work—waiting for death to come solve my case.
42
I am moved by your slumber. Who am I to find it moving? Your breathing in the green light of dawn. I open incandescences in your dreams—I always knew them better than you. Or at least I believed in them—in your capacity to be that dream. You are bereft of God. The limping God who created me, that God you roundly mock. Poor suffering atheist—excuse the redundancy. Go on and laugh—God is laughter. Since the world’s initial explosion, he’s never stopped laughing at his creation.
