Now and at the Hour of Our Death

by Susana Moreira Marques

  Or maybe I always picture her within a painting because, be it in Trás-os-Montes, where her parents chose to move when she was still young, or in Porto, where she was born and where she later returned, she never seemed to belong anywhere I saw her. After living a while in the small town of Mogadouro, her parents decided to move somewhere even smaller. And so they bought a house in a village: a house her father had single-handedly renovated from top to bottom. It was in that house that I often spoke to Elisa. Later – her father had died by then – I met up with her in Porto, in the apartment she had just moved into with her boyfriend. The apartment was in a narrow building with steep stairs leading up to a top floor that felt claustrophobic rather than spacious. The building was located in the center of Porto, on a square with a forgotten air about it, like so many other squares and streets in the center of Portugal’s second most important city. I visited her on a public holiday and there were very few people out on the streets. A couple of kids played ball listlessly. Elisa was fixing up her apartment, trying to make it match her sensibility as closely as possible. Yet she already seemed to know that, despite all her effort, it still wouldn’t be the right setting for her. I pictured her leaving again and starting up somewhere new, in a big city perhaps, since she possessed the intensity of large metropolises. She reminded me of a character who had not yet found her story.

  The first time I saw her she was at her father’s bedside. I was moved by the way she touched him, by the way she squeezed his hand. Every time she spoke, she would wait for an answer. She didn’t expect him to moan or sigh or to make any other strange new sound – the sounds of sickness – but instead expected to hear him as she hoped to later remember him.

  Their youngest cat, Nicha, leapt onto the bed and tried to nestle in between her father’s legs. Elisa shooed her away affectionately. Her mother wandered around the room with a fly swatter and, whenever a fly landed on Elisa’s father, she killed it, not knowing if he could feel a thing.

  In the room, there was an articulated bed for the patient and, beside it, the bed where his wife slept. Those were wearying nights, and recently his wife had been going to sleep convinced that was the night her husband would die. Then, after waking up and checking to see if he was breathing, she’d think of how he might not make it to the end of the day.

  Lately, in the night and during the day, he’d been waking up from dreams or from hallucinations – it was hard to tell them apart – and speaking of Porto, his hometown. He’d ask when they were going to leave.

  In the room, a television stood on a table, always on and always muted; next to it were family photos, and amongst them a photo of the couple standing against a Trás-os-Montes landscape. They are still young in the photograph, which could have been taken on one of their first trips to the region, when they fell in love with the land and made the decision to move there.

  I never saw Elisa against a Trás-os-Montes landscape and I can’t picture her in the countryside. The truth is we never met outside and, because of her doll-white skin, I can’t help but picture her indoors. In the photos of her scattered around the house, the backdrops are impossible to make out. That close-up of her that hangs in the kitchen, from when she was very young, back when she was a goth – short spiked hair, collar around her neck, heavy eye make-up – could have been taken in a studio.

  That day and then a few days later, we talked at the kitchen table. Her mother was always nearby, sitting down and getting up again, wandering between the kitchen and the bedroom. Behind Elisa there was a door that led to the garage, which was her father’s workshop and where he had spent his stronger hours. Her father had not yet died, but it already felt haunted.

  To Elisa’s left was the front door, which friends and neighbors would often knock on to ask after Senhor Rui. There was also a first-floor entrance, which led to stairs that flanked the outside of the house.

  Elisa’s father was a contractor and known for being good at his job. He’d only hand clients the keys to their houses once he was certain there was nothing left to be done. The owner would walk in and find their home finished, perfect. Yet his own house never would be; he’d left things half-done, imperfect. That little window, to Elisa’s right, on the wall above the kitchen counter, was one of his last jobs. The hatch let light from the kitchen into the other ground-floor room. He didn’t know then that they would one day have to turn that room into a bedroom because he would no longer be able to walk up the stairs to his own bedroom on the upper floor.

  Scene: mother and daughter at the kitchen table. Now and then, in the silence, when they stop speaking, they can hear him. (Or is it the sound of his illness?) The other daughter is missing.

  Sara was on her way. She drove alone. And she cried the whole way from France to Portugal, the road distant, distorted, a desert.

  Along the staircase hang pictures Elisa painted when she was younger and had not yet decided she would not be an artist, but a lawyer. One is a self-portrait of a woman with long black hair and large eyes. The background is once again abstract and, if I remember correctly, blue, a shade that might mean night or day.

  We walked up to the first floor. It was Saturday night and Elisa had decided to throw a dinner party, to fill the house with people and noise: a regular occurrence on weekends. No one was allowed to be sad on her watch, not while her father was still alive. She also thought that perhaps her father could, if not hear, at least feel the party, and that he would like the idea that life was still going on around him. But it was the guests who could hear him from the floor below. The family called those sounds wind. ‘He’s howling,’ they’d say.

  He was the main topic of conversation throughout most of the dinner. The guests painted a portrait of a charismatic man who hadn’t had an education, but who had learned all the same. A man who loved people, who would leave the house and not return until hours later, having stopped to speak to everyone he met. He had lived as few others had, with real resolve, and he would die in the same way. He didn’t want his doctors to fool him or lie to him, to omit or downplay the gravity of his illness. He knew exactly what was happening to him. He was dying.

  At dinner, they ate seafood rice, consumed multiple bottles of vinho verde and made enough of a racket to scandalize the neighbors. At times, her mother would ask for some quiet and, even though she couldn’t tell whether her husband was calling her, she’d walk downstairs to comfort him, to reposition his legs, or simply to see him. No one knew whether, in those moments when he was more lucid, he could sense the more-or-less forced cheerfulness on the floor above him. But Elisa knew those moments of lucidity were the worst for him. One of the images she would never live to forget was this: the brief but eloquent look in her father’s eyes whenever he became aware of the situation he was in.

  Without meaning to, they would speak of him in the past tense. I never knew him, what a pity, they’d say. The man they described was not the man in that bed.

  There was something literary about that description. As a matter of fact, the family itself seemed to have been lifted from a novel. Both daughters had left home after arguments with their parents, both had fought for their father’s recognition, both had returned. The older sister, Sara, only made up with her father after he fell ill, and that lost time had aged her. It was not so much that their family history seemed improbable, and therefore more convincing when turned into fiction; it was the way in which matters of life or death had altered the family’s composition.

  Sara had once been a hairdresser but now worked with her husband in France. They installed transmission towers along the highway. In the same way she once took note of people’s hair, a quirk of the trade, now, as she drove, she couldn’t help but notice the towers along the highway and the electrical wires that cut across the windows and against the sky or the land.

  After dinner, feeling slightly tipsy, Elisa showed me the room she’d lived in as a teenager. On the walls hung photos of her posing with friends, cutouts of exhibitions she had parti
cipated in, and even an article from a national newspaper about how odd it was for a young goth to be staging an exhibition in Mogadouro, one of Portugal’s most remote towns. The room felt nostalgic to her now because, at thirty-one, she felt she could no longer exhibit herself so brazenly on the walls; or perhaps it seemed particularly nostalgic to me because, being little older than Elisa, I had long felt embarrassed about putting my own world on display.

  As we walked down the stairs, I noticed the painting again, the long black hair. Elisa and her dark mane walked down the steps in front of me, without saying a word. I didn’t know if the picture had been painted many years ago or just a few, but it seemed to me a portrait of Elisa now and not one of her at the time it had been painted.

  Would Sara drive through the night, or stop to sleep along the way? Either way, she would feel afraid in the night.

  The picture I imagine Elisa painting with her back to me, this unfinished portrait, could be as much a portrait of herself as one of her father. I’m reminded of those nineteenth-century photographers who would photograph bodies at the moment life left them, their eyes still open. These portraits would then be placed alongside earlier photographs, creating a certain continuity between the living and the dead. With the magical new technology of daguerreotypes, photographers could even make the dead visible long after the body itself had disappeared. They made white, chalky figures appear in family portraits, at times no more than a veil hovering over the image, a form of communication both artificial and sincere.

  Sara was afraid of waking up to find her father had died during the night and that she had not made it in time to say goodbye. In any case, she knew that even if she did make it – and even if he lasted months instead of weeks, and she kept returning, on time, every fortnight – there would still always be something left to say.

  It was daybreak when Elisa hugged me at the door. She asked after my father and told me to enjoy his company as much as I could. Nursing a hangover the following day, what struck me the most from the night before was the conversation we’d had by her front door, just as I was leaving. I couldn’t stop thinking of how – and it had always been clear – we are the others.

  That week, Sara made it in time to see her father alive, but not to speak with him as they had spoken before. He was incomprehensible. No one could tell whether the drugs were making him hallucinate, whether he was asleep and dreaming, or whether this was just the way men died.

  I never met him – ‘What a pity,’ Sara said. She, the older daughter, once again described an exceptional man, but one who would only be remembered by his family and, for a while at least, in the village and in Mogadouro. All I could see was a body lying on a bed.

  When Sara arrived, Elisa had already left for Ovar, where she interned at a courthouse. The two sisters didn’t cross paths, but in some strange way it was as if they were always together, and I can’t think of one without remembering the other. They were almost opposites, almost rivals, but they shared the intensity of difficult love.

  Sara was not as I had pictured her: a face of sharp corners, almost cubist, more fraught than her sister’s, and even her mother’s.

  And so now it’s Sara and her mother who are in the kitchen, and Elisa who is missing from the scene.

  The last time I visited the village of Figueira, just a few weeks before Rui Ferreira’s death at the age of fifty-six, Sara showed me her father’s office. On his desk stood a computer, and on the shelves stood books, family photos, and Topo Gigio dolls. He’d been nicknamed Topo Gigio and he liked the name so much he’d had business cards printed with the tv puppet on them. Instead of the name ‘Ferreira’ there was a picture of a big-eared mouse on the mailbox next to his front door.

  After their father’s death and after the funeral, Sara stopped traveling between France and Portugal every fortnight. And yet I still can’t help but picture her in a car, permanently in transit. She never stops leaving.

  Later, the house in Figueira was left vacant, a still life.

  Last time I saw Elisa, she was wearing a tank top and jeans. Her hands were dirty and the toolbox lay open – she’d just finished installing a shower in the bathroom of their new apartment in Porto. The afternoon light struck the dust floating in the living room, making it visible, magical. It was very hot on that early October day and her mother sat on the sofa fanning herself with a magazine. She was tired. She had slept poorly, having dreamt her husband wanted to go back to work again and that he was angry with her for having thrown away his work clothes.

  As we spoke, Elisa lit one cigarette after another. Nicha, the cat, crawled into her lap, and Elisa petted her as she talked about her father and about the details of his funeral without once saying: death, died, dead. I kept hearing the words she’d said that morning, standing at her front door in Figueira: we are the others.

  ‌Sara

  I’ve cried a lot over being so far away. I spent all those years claiming I didn’t miss a thing. I’d come to Portugal once a year, because I had to. I’d come to see my parents, not the country.

  In my head, my parents were young. I couldn’t picture them being old. If my dad was eighty, like my father-in-law, who died recently, I’d think, well, that’s normal… If he was old. But he isn’t old. My dad’s always been in good shape. I even thought that maybe he was just making it all up to see if I really loved him. That he’d asked my mother to lie to me – to see if I’d come, because we’d been fighting.

  I don’t believe you,

  that’s what I’d say to him, to keep him quiet, to stop him from telling me those things. And he’d say

  look, it might be this or it might be that

  and I’d say

  no, no, no, it’s nothing.

  Then he read me his test results. I came back here, to visit him, convinced it wasn’t true. And I could see he wasn’t well, but he didn’t seem as sick as they’d said. As far as I was concerned, it was everything but cancer – that was impossible. I don’t know how it was that I woke up one day and saw things for how they really were. My dad’s always grabbed the bull by the horns. It was us who didn’t want to face the facts. He wanted us to cooperate, but we just wanted to hold on to hope. Not that he’d be saved, necessarily, but that he’d at least live a few more years. We’d heard of people with his kind of cancer who’d carried on living for two or three years – or even four or five more. We’re always waiting on a miracle. Like, what if tomorrow there’s a test that shows he’s been cured? Even though the doctors are always saying there is no cure… But we just carry on hoping for a miracle.

  He made us plan his funeral. In the beginning it seemed ridiculous, but it was out of the question to go against him. He got us all together here and he asked

  what kind of funeral do you want me to have?

  a regular funeral?

  a cremation?

  It was unheard of, what he was doing. He wanted to know what we thought, but he never expressed his own opinions. I said

  if it were up to me, I wouldn’t cremate you.

  My sister said

  I can’t get my head around the idea of cremation, but it’s cleaner and I can’t help picturing bugs in the ground.

  He wanted to see if he could get us to agree.

  Do you want it to be here?

  in Figueira?

  or in Mogadouro?

  It didn’t make sense for it to be in Porto – we’d left so many years ago…

  Did we want there to be a mass?

  a priest?

  We talked about it in the same way we talked about everything. Me and my sister went to speak to the man at the funeral parlor. He was a friend of my dad’s, but he said he didn’t like to go to people’s homes, he said

  when they see me, they immediately think business, and I don’t have the heart to go see Rui.

  But my dad wasn’t the kind to send messages. He wanted to speak to him in person, so the man from the funeral parlor ended up coming over. They spent a few minutes in
his room – I was on the phone to France, my mother was busy with guests – and suddenly everything was settled. He’d planned everything. I felt like crawling into a hole. Sitting with my dad and hearing him talking to this man about his own funeral…

  He was in control of everything until the end. Now he can’t control anything anymore. Yesterday, when I got home, he didn’t recognize me. It was so painful. Every time I came home from France, he would get really excited. My sister would say

  I’m actually kind of jealous, Dad never cries when I come home.

  The last time, he clung onto me and cried, and he said

  stay here, I’m never letting you go.

  I felt like my trips home brought him strength, like he was holding on to see me. This time I’d hoped to bring him just a little more courage again. On the phone, I’d always say to him

  just one week to go now

  just two days to go now

  I’ll be on my way tomorrow

  I thought he’d be waiting for me, that he’d be full of energy. I was looking forward to seeing his reaction… If only for just a few more days, or even just one more day… He’s seen that I’m here, but, the state he’s in, I don’t know if he can remember: he forgets everything from one minute to the next.

  My mom lives with this night and day. I come and I’m here for a week. She’s been living with this for months. At his worst, he can spend days on end like this, half-unconscious. My mom, she’s got to listen to him moan in pain all night long. She chose to keep sharing a room with him. It’s not a choice just any woman would make. I respect her even more for that – I didn’t know she was capable of making such a sacrifice.