by Inês Pedrosa
I never figured out how to put the brakes on sadness. I died many times to keep from dying. I still find in sadness the comforting whiff of life. I no longer know what it means to be cold or hot or hurting—but I’m still sad, therefore I exist. I need to work the oil paints of my mortal sadnesses to achieve an abstract melancholy. I need that abstraction to fill your pores—I need to inhabit you, shape you, my baroque cubist heart. Sadness prevents me from finishing dying—here, Prof, let your blood accommodate the immodest modesty of what used to be me. Remembering my contours isn’t enough—take the childish nonsense I never gave you, tears discolored by the fingerprints of my chocolate heart. Eat them, let me die inside you—let me choose to die inside you, because death is the only thing I lack.
Having been suddenly reduced to a teenage reject at the peak of my academic career, I had to stop seeing Florbela. Believe it or not, that’s another reason I went into politics: because I’d been unwittingly humiliated by a sweet simpleton. The glory of God doesn’t scorn the least-charted routes—and he takes no pleasure from people invoking the divine or, as we called it, the masses, which is the same thing. I spent less and less time at the university. I claimed I worked better at home, in silence. I stopped going to that nightclub. And four years passed.
I only saw him again a few months before I died, at one of those fundraising galas for AIDS victims. I pretended not to have seen him, and he came up to me, smiling, his hand extended: “You wouldn’t refuse a handshake to a humble constituent, would you?” Son of a bitch, my A side growled in my core. Meanwhile, my B side had already started barking: Who does this bastard think he is? Why is fate putting this lowlife at my table? Did he come here on purpose to see me? Later, my survival instinct persuaded me that this generous servicer of Florbela’s, deep, deep down, had been born to bring me back to life.
He was talkative this time. He’d gotten married but—don’t laugh, don’t laugh—he was about get a divorce. Did I feature in this archeological conversation? you ask. No. But I wanted to be with him again, surrender and then vomit him up in an act of Florbellian revenge. In other words, I wanted to swim in the blue of that parallel world to which only he seemed to have the key. I grabbed his hand and brought him home. He took off in the morning, but he didn’t leave me by myself. He’d deposited death in the wrong part of my body—and my psychic gifts didn’t warn me, careless pragmatist that I was.
43
You couldn’t forgive me for how easily I forgave. I forgave Lia for hurting you. I forgave an old, desperate friend for that fake letter he wrote to try to drive us apart. Unforgivable deeds, I know—but was it not from the unforgivable that the need for forgiveness was born? If I reminded you of this ontological evidence, you’d get mad: that’s just what you needed, an atheist trying to teach you the catechism. And I’d laugh, and we’d forgive each other again.
Sometimes it seemed to me that we got into arguments just so we could enjoy the pleasure of that return to intimacy—in that sense, our anger was no different from the warriorlike doggedness of old married couples. I didn’t care that you railed against my slave morality. What I couldn’t take was when you accused me of getting along with people out of social convenience. Because it was completely unfair, and you didn’t realize it.
When lots of people started whispering that since your entrée into politics you’d become all about strategy and special interests, I stilled their venomous tongues by singing your praises. Never, not even for a second, did your shift to expensive suits and a secretary pool to fulfill your every need make me lose sight of what you were.
I like people with an entomologist’s affection, if you will. Or the mercifulness of atheists, who are better equipped to accept human fallibility. Knowing that heaven isn’t protecting me helps me understand my fellows in defenselessness. I forgave one awful person the awful act of desiring the privilege of my friendship. What you may not know is that I haven’t forgiven myself for having thought ill of you because of that disgraceful letter.
I should have realized immediately that you couldn’t have written it, of course. Even though the handwriting was identical to yours, which it was—I know. But it’s hard to hit upon the perfect amount of faith—especially when that faith is employed only as a fail-safe. Knowing that we are all capable of the very best and the very worst is useful for loving to the last drop, but it doesn’t exactly help a person believe in permanent goodness. It’s only now that I’ve discovered you were the most permanent goodness I had—and I’m endlessly grateful to you for that.
Because you died, I’m experiencing the breath of eternity for the first time—I believe now that there’s a place out there where you’re waiting for me. Don’t smile—that’s still not faith. In my mind, the place where the dead dwell is a plain of ashes. A long stretch of space suffused with the melancholy of those who refuse to let go of life, like you. A place without God—but with you.
And even if that place is just a mirage produced by my grief, life without you doesn’t hurt anymore. I can drag my gouty leg—I don’t need to jog by your side. I can forgo the new masterworks of cinema, dance, music, and painting—they dare to exist without you. I can renounce my parents’ ragged estrangement, my mother’s stabbed heart, my father’s absence. Your whole family is already gone. I see our friends as ghosts of you now—people who are suddenly too young, too alive for my longing for the two of us.
44
I let myself be killed by a child who could never exist. Pascoal can’t accept it—if only you could make him see that I’m the only one to blame. I avoided the hypothetical unpleasantness of his split with Augusto. I was more and more a friend of the world, less and less the friend of any one person. I strove to fix the world’s problems, addicted to my planetary good conscience—to the applause, the present-day trickle and the future waves sure to come. I took refuge in Big Action; I had no desire to see anyone who could wander through the ancient arteries of my youth.
I met Pascoal the year my parents died. He’d lost his father three years earlier. We talked so much that we started swapping nightmares: he saw my parents screaming as the car rolled over the bank, and I saw his father suffocating, his body wasted from cancer.
My father saved me from death twice. Pascoal’s had never saved him, and he saw that as a bad omen. For Pascoal, the rigor of science and the exactitude of presages danced in each other’s arms like diligent debutantes. You thought he was “lyrical”—yes, I know you aren’t homophobic, but you always considered gays to be different. Or maybe, in Pascoal’s case, you were discomfited by the remarkable resemblance between the two of you—because Pascoal was an erudite conservative, like you. To sleep easy, he needed order, his music, and the conviction that history moved in a circle.
Pascoal had never swallowed two candies at once, like I did at three years old—my father shaking me hard, grabbing me by the feet and shaking me till the candies fell to the floor, shaking me and berating the women screaming beside him, my mother and grandmother—don’t you see you’re just upsetting the child, you selfish women? My father slowly climbing up to the roof where I’m clinging somehow; I’m five years old and I feel my fingers give, too weak to hold my body suspended over the void, his voice frighteningly calm and sweet—
“Just hang on a little bit longer, sweetie, Daddy’s coming to get you.”
My father’s embrace, afterward, a compact wall against my mother’s nervous rage—
“Shh, shh, it’s over now, Mommy’s not going to spank you, I won’t let her.”
My father slapped me over everything and nothing, until the day I decided to ignore him, to pretend that slap had never happened—
“Mom, can you pass the salt, please?”
—and yet he loved me, and I loved his love. I loved his love and my mother’s, a putrefied love with the doughy consistency of immensely trivial things. They quarreled in that love as if they wanted to be rid of it, and whenever they reached the exit, they retreated. Some days they seem
ed to hate each other, swelling with recriminations, hurling things through the air, shouting defiantly.
They only rarely managed to love each other at the same time; it seemed that only in rage were they in sync. I used to feel pity as I watched him flapping around her like a sparrow fallen from its nest, asking her endless questions, patting her on the back, hemming her in with pinches and tickles, with the clumsy improvisation of emotional illiterates, which the vast majority of men of that generation were. Molded for war, trained in the transparent blindness of killing, with their organs for loving sliced out. And whatever mother I still had left from his disheveled love would pass me the salt.
44
If only I had the awkward consolation of a son or daughter. With your friend Teresa, for example. You thought she got on my nerves, didn’t you? And you were right: the only reason I didn’t bicker with her more was so I didn’t have to stop bickering with you. You brought me so many women, and the only one I was interested in was the one you’d have considered off-limits. Your alter ego. Your sister. My sister’s sister—oh, delicious incest! Yes, I like vain, stubborn Teresa, despite her green-painted fingernails and her stridently cheap dresses. I often fantasized about the texture of her adolescent breasts—did you know that? They were too perfect—or maybe that’s exactly it, because people get tired of human perfection too. At least old people do.
Teresa was constantly undergoing exterior remodeling in rebellion against her unguarded interior. Teresa admired you more than you would even be capable of—were you aware of that? And, naïvely, she urged you not to be so hard on yourself. Teresa embraced all the Lias and other stray dogs in your life—starting with me. I always said she lacked wit—the English word seemed to cover it more neatly than Portuguese—more to convince myself of that lack than to reassure you. But what Teresa actually lacked was malice, and that made her one of the most seductive women I ever met. She was utterly without the snarkiness that is so fashionable these days. I think of her now as if she no longer exists. Because even Teresa died when you died on me. You were the one who sprinkled the air around her with stars. But then dead Teresa rings my doorbell. Eager for the pleasure of my surprise.
“I was afraid you’d died too. But you’re smiling. You smile like her.”
“I’d say I am her.”
I beg you to let me love Teresa with the now-idle tenderness I once devoted to you. For no reason. Because it was for no reason that I loved you—merely to perch on the raw diamond of your soul and discover from that vantage point my life’s residual glow.
I see Teresa through your dead eyes, fires in the aftermath. I hear you inside my voice. Words charred by longing for life, words that weep like ballads, words tangled in childhood music. Crashing to the ground like windowpanes, bursting in the air like balloons, like fireworks. Maimed bears growling in pain over a glass eye that was yanked out because of love, to see what that love is made of, that warm love without which we cannot fall asleep. Teresa removes her sandals with the stupidly high heels that make her teeter through daily life, and she dances.
She’s singing. Don’t you hear her? She’s singing all through your house. You really can’t hear her?
And I dance with Teresa, in my darkening living room, as if you hadn’t died on me and I could still use your heart to love. If only the angel of jealousy would snatch your skinny body back to earth and bring you to this room where Teresa is dancing in my arms. If you could see Teresa tug at my masculine desire, this pleasure sullied by my longing for you. In Teresa’s flying body I remember your own flights, the flights of other women I’ve loved. I remember the limpid choreography with which they summoned love. That radio journalist I had such a thing for and then cheated on when she was out of town for a couple of nights, with that lost university student who looked like a mannequin—remember? And remember how, months later, the two of them collaborated to make a TV program—one that happened to have been my idea? I remember how angry you got, jealous angel, when you found me talking with the girl with the mannequin body, who turned out not to be lost at all.
“Don’t you see that woman was using you?”
Yes, she was using me, Tink, just like I was using her, like we all use one another. Ultimately, that’s what life is: we all use one another, as best we can. Did I use you the way I should have? Why is there still so much of you left?
45
At least I didn’t leave any parents or kids behind—at least I never experienced the madness of the death of a child. The only person I abandoned was you—that’s it. If you were my son, you’d have known that letter insulting you couldn’t have been written by me. You sent it back to me with a curt note: “Most esteemed madam, I imagine you must have sent this to the wrong address.” I didn’t respond—what response could I give to that kind of nastiness? I became suspicious of all our mutual friends—and that was the thing I really couldn’t forgive you for. And even after you learned the truth, when the guilty party fell gravely ill and decided to come clean, you kept protecting him. You apologized, but you refused to tell me his name.
“It’s not anybody you like. Not one of your friends.”
And what about liking you—what should I do with that feeling, which could evaporate with the first misstep? How could you protect a guy who went through your papers and read my letters so he could write you distorted lines that debased my signature? What kind of friendship needs to destroy other friendships in order to exist? I found out about all of it really quickly—spite travels at warp speed, you know. You didn’t want to tell me who the scoundrel was, but you told Fish Stick, who then told me, in a well-meaning effort to calm me down. The inadvertent bile of good intentions.
“You demand too much of people. You want your friends to be perfect, and nobody can stand up to that kind of pressure.”
No, I didn’t want you all to be perfect. But I wanted friendship to be an island of perfection in the turbulent oceans of our lives. An island that only Teresa showed me, despite her countless faults—or through them. Proud, mouthy Teresa whom you disliked, her voice strident and her head held high, a no-parking sign—here I come. Teresa who is amazed by any hint of novelty—she was always like that, even at eighteen. Teresa who spends the money she has and even some she doesn’t on clothing, beauty products, and plastic surgeries, and who likes painting the nails on her fingers and toes black or lettuce green, to your horror. Teresa who was fired from her job at the library on my say-so because I was afraid the director was considering replacing me with her. Naïve Teresa—the director chided me a few times for having hired her, but she was skilled at getting what she wanted. And it’s not like I even wanted to stay there—the quiet work was a good fit for me when I was writing my doctoral dissertation, that’s all. But Teresa liked feeling that she was sacrificing herself for me. Teresa with the non-soundproofed walls who heard my most shameful secrets with a smile of infinite love, without moralizing or pity. Teresa who always tried to choose first and snag the best spot—at the movies, in people’s homes, in life—but shrugged her shoulders, unbothered, when we teased her about it afterward. Teresa who lent me clothing and jewelry, who used to show up at my door to turn my wardrobe inside out whenever she read in the paper that I was going to be participating in a TV debate. Teresa who provided me a bed, sleep, and cigarettes after every one of the major disappointments of my life, and who never left anything unsaid.
If Teresa had received a letter insulting her in my handwriting, she never would have believed I’d written it. She lacked wit, as you said, using the English word; she was no genius. But she had laserlike accuracy even when I was racked by doubt. She knew a lot of about the unspoken things we’re made of; she had X-ray vision from navigating between lighthouses through the caves of night. And I couldn’t stand hearing you run her down—I knew one day you were going to make me cry, and she’d be the one to dry my tears.
Like she’s drying yours now, look—she called you a million times, got worried when you failed to an
swer, and here she is knocking on your door. SOS. Depression—yes, the Teresa you see as mushy and useless spends eight hours a week taking calls from hopeless people she’s never met, preventing suicides, bringing light to this world that you view with such scorn. Open the door to her, go on. Give her the smile I gave you. She deserves our love, the love I bequeathed to you, threadbare love, the old gold of beauty that does not fade.
“You’re smiling. You smile like her.”
“I am her,” you say. And I start looking at Teresa through eyes you’ve lent me. Teresa whom you never wanted to see and who was like a piece of me. I loved all of your pieces; I even loved that jealous old man who wrote to you pretending to be me in an effort to drive you away from me. Why? For no reason. No reason. Because it was for no reason that I loved you—I discovered in you the resplendent uselessness of my soul. In you, I discovered what I was beyond everything I’d so far been. This friendship has never known the limits of perfection or retreat. It only echoes, whispers to us, endlessly delivers us to the soil of nonexistent affinities. With my eyes that are no longer eyes, you start to see Teresa’s soul—the part of Teresa that doesn’t have green or black fingernails or carefully highlighted curves. Teresa now has what you are lacking, and it is the best of me, what I ceased being because I was so focused on doing.
I hear you inside my voice, words rumpled by time, words that roar like a conch shell, words that contain tumbling marbles and glassblowers’ rhythmic breathing, words that restore a sound that precedes meaning. Teresa removes her high-heeled sandals and dances in the silence of your vast living room.
