by Inês Pedrosa
I don’t need to tell stories anymore. I’ve dropped all the shiny effects and reached the very heart of love, that thick ink that flows across time’s surface and transforms everything it touches. It might be a crumpled word, a wilting flower, a conch shell in which the sea where I no longer dwell still glitters. It might be your face yesterday, or what’s left of it today. What matters isn’t the plot, the form, not even the color. What matters is the unified circulation of a body and a soul around the bare sediment of their truth.
49
Teresa came across an article of mine in a drawer. She suggests I write more about that “incandescent dream of Europe” I discussed with you so often. The dream of the ultimate center, which loves other centers insofar as they are suburbs of itself. “At least in Portugal,” you used to say, with that glorious laugh of yours, “we don’t have that problem: we’re used to seeing ourselves as the suburb of all of Europe. Which means we see ourselves as Ali Baba’s secret cave.” And then I’d hold forth on how those tendencies fostered arrogance or timidity, unease or fatalism.
And after you left, I’d write a long screed about the human epidemic, Portuguese in origin, of folding the world smaller and smaller until it matches our diminutive dreams. Or of expanding our nightmares to the epic scale of a pocket-size memory. I held forth on the humility with which nationalistic movements irrigated themselves until they eventually burst forth like oceans of pride. But I don’t have the heart to write anymore. I’ve been asked for an article on the history of Portuguese ceramics, and I lack that eager interest in minor arts that glinted in your black tile eyes. I lack, in general, your excitable, anti-geometric perspective, which distorted shapes like the 3-D glasses created for the horror films of my youth.
Maybe I could write a whole book on Teresa’s skin, like Voltaire, who used his lover’s back as a desk. Maybe, like you, I could camouflage the contours of the solitude you’ve left me in.
50
Quick. The girl has dropped her books in the street, and the car won’t have time to brake. Quick—hurl yourself at her. You can save someone this time. You’re not going to redeem your platoon-mate’s death; death doesn’t ask for redemption. Death doesn’t ask for anything, my dear—don’t worry. Life alone points its finger at you, the life of human beings as imperfect as you, heroic and bumbling, camouflaging their original blindness with overweening certainty. Come on, don’t be scared, leap at that girl who’s smiling at you like me, and save her. I’m waiting for you in a place where words no longer hurt, no longer wound, are neither in excess nor lacking. That place does exist.
50
And suddenly you’ve come back. Your running looks like flying, with that furious weightlessness unique to adolescence. The red ribbon dances atop your tousled hair. You’re carrying a wobbly stack of books in your arms, and your white sandals barely touch the ground. There’s a fog of dense heat pressing down on everything, but your smile penetrates that fog, shatters it, drags the blue of the sky through the city streets. Your books spill out in the middle of the road, and you kneel down to pick them up, still smiling. You forget to curse. Yes, it’s you. Your smile advancing steadily across my face. It’s you before I met you. That’s why you’re not upset, why you’re unfazed by everything. Kneeling on the asphalt, you calmly gather each book. Some pages come loose and soar off. You chase after them without losing that smile.
“Watch out, Tink. Run!”
But I’m the one suddenly running in a dream of flight. I shove you into the past, your lithe body leaps toward life at the last moment, I still hear the squeal of the car’s desperate braking. You enter into my flesh, pound against doors and windows, smash me into the glass. And I see you there below, now racing through the garden, the red ribbon in your hair lighting up the green lawn. There will be a whiff of lost youth in that lawn, a scent that comes out only when the grass is wet. But I no longer remember what it was like—it’s far off in the distance, moving farther and farther away.
About the Author
Photo © Alfredo Cunha
Born in 1962, Inês Pedrosa earned a degree in communication sciences from the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa before earning several journalism awards through her work in the press, on the radio, and on television. Her weekly column in the Portuguese national newspaper Expresso was awarded the 2007 Prize for Parity for Citizenship and Gender Equality. She currently contributes to two culture-focused radio shows and a public television show and also works as a literary translator (notably of the work of Milan Kundera). In 2017, she founded her own publishing house, Sibila. She is the author of In Your Hands (Pedrosa’s English-language debut and winner of the 1997 Prémio Máxima de Literatura in Portugal); A eternidade e o desejo (Eternity and Desire, finalist for the 2009 Portugal Telecom Award and the 2010 Prémio Correntes d’Escritas); and Os íntimos (The Intimates, winner of the 2012 Prémio Máxima de Literatura). For more information about the author, visit www.inespedrosa.com.
About the Translator
Photo © Karla Rosenberg
Andrea Rosenberg translates texts from both Spanish and Portuguese. Her full-length translations include Inês Pedrosa’s In Your Hands, Tomás González’s The Storm, Aura Xilonen’s The Gringo Champion, Juan Gómez Bárcena’s The Sky over Lima, and David Jiménez’s Children of the Monsoon. She holds an MFA in literary translation and an MA in Spanish from the University of Iowa, and she has been the recipient of awards and grants from the Fulbright Program, the American Literary Translators Association, and the Banff International Literary Translation Centre.
