The Piano Cemetery

by José Luís Peixoto

  ‘At seventy-forty o’clock?’

  For a moment Íris says nothing. She waits. Her narrow shoulders tremble as she laughs. Ana and Elisa know that they’re more grown-up and they’re talking, sitting in little chairs, under the brightness of the window. Hermes gets up, pulls his sister’s arm and says:

  ‘She says her mother’s coming home at seventy-forty o’clock. .’

  Íris laughs to herself. Ana and Elisa look over towards her and smile. Ana says:

  ‘Oh. .’

  Íris, in the middle of a laugh, says:

  ‘She’s coming home at a thousand o’clock.’

  Ana, laughing, looks at Elisa and rotates her index finger against her forehead. My wife, without coming in, calls Íris. She is coming to fetch her to have a siesta. Hermes starts a tantrum. He wants his cousin to keep playing. My wife starts to scold him. He is about to cry, he’s really going to cry, when he picks up the fire engine and throws it on the floor with all his strength.

  Íris is nearly three years old. She comes up to him, puts her finger to her lips and very seriously, so that only Hermes can hear her, she says:

  ‘Don’t cry. I’ll go and sleep my siesta with Granny, but I’ll come back yesterday. All right? I’ll come back at seventy-forty o’clock.’

  And she gives him a kiss on the cheek.

  My wife was talking about how much the baby had kicked between the fifth and seventh months.

  ‘There were nights when it wouldn’t even let me sleep.’

  About how it became absolutely quiet in the last month.

  ‘I ended up being worried.’

  I, however, thought only of my uncle’s words. I thought of my older aunt and of everything her eyes had seen. I thought of my younger aunt, dead, and of all her eyes had forgotten. I thought of my father and all I didn’t know about him. I thought of my father, my uncle, my aunts, alive and together in the same room, without knowing that one day the future would arrive.

  At Easter we always had a picnic in Monsanto. At home my wife would fry cubes of pork and fill a tub with rice. She took fried potatoes. She took tomatoes and lettuce leaves to make a salad. I arranged everything on the truck, putting in a bottle of fizzy water, another of orangeade, a flagon of wine, and placed the blankets over the top.

  With some patience we were all able to fit in. Marta was still thin and she went on Maria’s lap. Then came my wife, squeezed between Simão and Francisco. Then me — driving with my elbows drawn in. A few years later Simão had already started going on the bicycle he’d bought with what he’d earned as a stonemason’s assistant. He’d head off before us and we’d pass him on the road. My wife, seeing him from behind, would get anxious because she thought that Simão, being blind on one side, might more easily fall and break his neck. As we passed him our daughters, one on the other’s lap, would lean out of the window, waving their arms and shouting.

  The rope we used to attach door frames, or anything we were carrying, was always in the truck. When we arrived I’d tie it to the strongest limb of a tree, always the same one, and make a swing. My wife spread the blankets on the ground. We ate pork on enamel plates painted with flowers, and we were together. There was a moment when, all at the same time, we attached some value to being together.

  When we finished eating, our children would head off in various directions. Simão was always the first one up. Marta was always in charge of looking after Francisco. Maria almost always hid herself away to read romance novels. I lay on a blanket under a pine tree. I closed my eyes. Once she’d cleared away the plates, my wife would come and sit by me, craning her neck to try and see our children.

  On one such afternoon, I’d already fallen asleep and woke up to a shrill whining. Maria came pushing Simão’s bicycle, and she was crying. The birds fell silent in the trees. Marta stopped pushing Francisco on the swing. My wife got up:

  ‘So what is it?’ asked my wife.

  Maria didn’t stop crying. From closer up, we could see that her face and arm were grazed. She approached us slowly, fearful. I was sitting on the blanket and asked her, my voice firm:

  ‘How did you fall?’

  Under my voice, she trembled.

  ‘Simão didn’t tell me the bicycle doesn’t have brakes. .’

  I got up suddenly. I tore off a pine branch that was above me and went to look for him.

  Not much light on our faces. It was earlier than my usual time to go and sit in the kitchen, but I was sitting there already, drinking coffee. My wife, between the things she was doing, held her belly with both hands, looked at me and understood. Later, out on the street, it was still the gloom of early morning. It was colder than my usual time to go out to the workshop, but I took long steps, I thought, and I noticed nothing. There were indistinct, distant people on the pavements, continuing along their way. As I reached the station, as I bought my ticket, as I waited for the train, as I went in, as I sat to watch the landscape passing in the window, I kept imagining all the things I didn’t know.

  The moment arrived — solid and real — when I was standing there, in front of my aunt’s house — the address written by my uncle on a piece of paper, and written on another piece of paper kept amid old envelopes in the drawer where my mother’s documents aged, the written remains of her life. I opened the iron gate, went in, stopped at the door — a solid, real moment — and knocked three times. I waited. Birds perched on the electricity wires. I waited. I knocked three times again. The door was opened to me by a hunched-up woman with startled eyes. We remained in silence. I learned later that she was my cousin.

  I told her my name, told her who I was. She moved away to let me in. We took some steps along a darkening corridor. A mirror hung on the wall, over a table. For a long time it had reflected nothing but shadows. As we approached the end of the corridor, there was a revolting smell, getting worse. It was a smell that was inside the walls, inside the floor, the roof — it was in every object because it was a smell that filled the air, turning solid. As we went into the room my cousin didn’t break the silence, but stopped to look at me. My aunt was sitting on the bed. Her body was enormous. She was leaning up against pillows. She had her sheets tangled at the foot of the bed. She smiled at me with four or five rotten, worn teeth and a paste of food that covered them. Fine networks of veins branched across her round, swollen, fleshy cheeks. Her eyes shone. Her belly was a heavy bulk, tall, overflowing its sides. Her breasts were the same bulk. Her legs, full, stretched out, weren’t the shape of legs and ended in two gigantic thighs that squeezed against one another. Her arms were two arches of flesh, thick at the shoulders, thick at the wrists, ending in a thick hand, ending in narrow fingertips.

  When I made to introduce myself, my aunt’s voice, uneven, weak and strong, interrupted me:

  ‘I know very well who you are.’

  And she reached her arms out to me. I made my way across the carpet. I leaned over, and against my instincts turned my cheeks towards her. As I was giving her two kisses her arms held me. She pressed her rough, warm cheek, her hard, dishevelled hair, against my face. The smell that filled the room, born from the creases of her skin, was a mixture of hot food — soup — and sweat. It was a body lying for years on the same sheets — a brown stain around that body. It was an enormous night shirt — metres and metres of fine fabric — covered with stains under her chin — oil, grease, sauce. When my aunt’s arms let go of me, I took two steps back and kept my expression unchanged.

  Her eyes shone. I answered her questions. I told her there weren’t many weeks left until the birth of my first child. An even bigger smile spread across her face; she congratulated me and told me that it would be a girl. She told me she was quite sure it would be a girl. I talked to her, then, about the workshop and about Benfica. Her gaze was frozen on the space in front of her as though in this invisible air she could see images of what I was telling her. After a moment, she was the one who was talking to me about the workshop and about Benfica. She was a child, and she’d tak
e her father his lunch; she’d go into the carpentry shop and sit with him in the piano cemetery. And then later she was a girl who set her elbows on the window ledge and, as people returned home from work, waited for her boyfriend. Then she was living close to the workshop, she was married and her oldest daughter was born — the woman who was there with us, who kept her eyes on the floor, perhaps because she had already heard these stories many times. Her name was Elisa.

  I took advantage of a moment of silence to talk about my father. My aunt’s expression didn’t change. Time. I told her that I’d only learned a few days earlier that my father was a marathon runner. She showed no surprise, continued to listen to me, and when I finished she turned to my cousin and said to her, naturally:

  ‘Elisa, go and fetch me the drawer from the living-room cupboard.’

  We waited together for my cousin’s footsteps, the sounds of the drawer opening in another room, time. And my aunt’s gaze fixed on me. My gaze not knowing where to stop — the pile of dirty plates on the bedside table, the bedpan on a stool, the flies changing direction in sudden angles over the bed. My cousin came into the room, holding the drawer between her wrists and her chest. She passed in front of me. It was a drawer filled with papers. She put the drawer down on top of my aunt’s belly. My aunt lifted out pieces of paper and postcards with writing on them, and took out a stack of folded papers tied with a piece of string. For a long time she pulled at the ends of the bow. She held out a yellowed newspaper cutting to me. I approached the bed, held the cutting in both hands and began to read.

  My father. Dead too early, and too far away. Dead and exhausted on the same day I was born. Time. As I returned the cutting to her, my aunt examined me. After a pause, she showed me other cuttings. Before the day I was born — they described races my father won. A deserving winner. Going through a spell of really good form. An example to those who were starting out in this event. As my aunt folded the cuttings at the creases, as she arranged them, she began to talk about my father. Her face wanted to break into a smile that never came, and that remained balanced in a limbo of almost existing and not existing. In her voice my father was a human being, and living again, he was a man, he was a young lad. He might perhaps have passed me in the street, I could have noticed him, could have looked at him and imagined his strengths and weaknesses. And then, silence. The light came through the damp-stained curtains. My aunt’s nails scratched the bottom of the drawer. She was holding up a photograph. She looked at it a moment, smiling at it as though smiling at a person, and held it out. I took the photograph in the palm of my hand — its weight. And I don’t know how old I was at the moment I saw my father’s face for the first time.

  Time. I held the image of his face looking at me, and believed with sudden impressions which stuck into my skin like needles that he could see me. My dead father was younger than I was, and he was looking at me. Sudden impressions, skin, needles; I didn’t know if it was me looking and seeing my father in a dead time or whether it was my father, alive, looking and, for the first time, seeing me.

  My aunt insisted I keep the photograph. I refused and wanted to give it back to her. She kept insisting. It was as though the photograph were burning my fingers. I tried to give it back, following her hand. She evaded it with brisk gestures. Slowly I placed the photograph inside the drawer. On top of letters, pieces of paper, my father was still looking at me.

  With the tips of her fingers my aunt chose one of the envelopes and took out another photograph. Seeing it, her face saddened. She remembered the story that was too sad to tell. She held the photograph out to me and said it was her late sister, my other aunt.

  I handed the photograph back to her. She took it and placed it in the drawer without looking at it again. Her silence was real.

  When I began saying my goodbyes, my aunt asked me to stay a little longer. I continued to say my goodbyes. Then, amid the words, she said: ‘This bed.’ And they were eternal words. My cousin Elisa said nothing, but she lifted her face. I left my aunt, the centre of that room, and went out, thinking I would never see her again. At the door I said goodbye to my cousin with a gaze deep into her frightened eyes, and I thought I would never see her again. I never saw them again.

  I walked to the station. The whole of the walk, and later, too, through all the streets that took me home, I remembered my father — the shape of his face, what he was thinking — and I remembered my aunt — lying there, waiting for nothing — and I remembered my cousin taking care of her mother — afraid, alone, waiting for nothing.

  I went into the house and found women from the neighbourhood walking back and forth. My wife was about to give birth. I moved chairs out of my way, shoved widows aside and went into the room. My wife stopped writhing on the bed. Her face drenched in sweat, as though reflecting a fire, she turned to me and smiled at me just exactly as I was smiling at her.

  On Saturdays the nights take longer to fall. Marta’s husband comes into the house. It is early at night. He sits at his place at the table, rests his head in his hands and Marta’s movements get faster. My wife greets him, her voice faint. Maria doesn’t move.

  With all the speed she’s capable of, her legs alternating very quickly and her body hovering slowly, Marta does the calculations of the number of plates and begins to lay the table. Maria, seated, is her own shape in stone, and thinks that her husband will choose dinnertime to phone her, to ask her to come back, to tell her he misses her. My wife is leaning over the stove. I know her face. Marta’s husband is sitting at the table and he is too far away, all he has left here is his body and his silence. Wanting to call the children to dinner, Marta shouts into the hallway.

  My wife moves away from the stove, holding a pan which she puts down in the middle of the table. Slowly Marta’s husband fills his plate and begins to eat. There is a calendar on the wall, there is a fruit bowl with wizened peaches, there is a lit lamp hanging from the ceiling. Marta begins to get impatient as no child has yet appeared. My wife fills Maria’s plate and asks her, wordlessly, to eat. Marta goes to call the children from the sewing room.

  She opens the door and the four of them are sitting on the rug. Íris is talking to her sister:

  ‘Now you’ve grown up and you’re a lady.’

  Marta, her cheeks red, starts to say something and only Elisa looks at her. She says to clear up the toys and go and have dinner. Turning to Hermes, she says:

  ‘Get a move on! Your father’s already eating.’

  As though still muttering, Marta returns to the kitchen. My wife puts the bread on the table. There is the silence of small sounds, there is age, there is light. Marta notices that the children aren’t coming and asks my wife to go and fetch them.

  My wife goes into the sewing room. She rounds up the grandchildren and starts pulling them up under their arms. Íris objects with her knotted eyebrows. My wife continues to hurry them. They go down the corridor. Elisa is in front. Behind her, Íris allows herself to be pushed along by my wife. They go into the kitchen. Marta’s husband has already eaten, and he has already gone out. Maria hasn’t yet brought her hands up to touch her cutlery.

  It was almost the end of summer, and Marta was just a few months old. My wife was breastfeeding her. Marta closed her eyes, and she was innocent. I was on the other side of the kitchen, watching them. It was almost the end of summer, I was alive, I was so utterly alive, but my heart was apart from me, breastfeeding and innocent, on the other side of the kitchen.

  Maria has said a couple of things. Having given up on waiting for her husband’s call, her arms stopped weighing her down and, at last, she was able to breathe. Inside her, she repeated the certainty she had that her husband will call tomorrow. Or it might be that her husband will choose the moment when she arrives at the workshop, that he wants to say sorry in person, wants to look her in the eye to show her he’s sincere. Maria has convinced herself of these certainties and, lighter now, freed from the need to wait, she has said a couple of things.

  Mart
a approaches and answers her. My wife looks up. It’s time. The three of them walk to the sewing room. They don’t have time to think, but there is serenity in their faces. It’s not the same serenity in each one’s expression, but in all of them it’s genuine — the same truth in different illusions. When Elisa, Ana, Íris and Hermes see them, they already know bedtime has arrived. The end of Saturday is a warm feeling that the children know how to accept.

  Elisa is the first to get up off the carpet. Without saying anything, any shouting, Ana, Íris and Hermes get up immediately after her. They follow my wife out. On the bedroom floor, between the beds, my wife will arrange folded blankets and sheets for Hermes to sleep. Ana and Íris will sleep together in his bed.

  Marta and Maria, sisters, tidy away the toys that are spread around the sewing room. They tidy away the final remnants of the day. Marta bends down with difficulty, places the palm of her left hand on her knee, and sweeps her other hand in an arc across the floor. The blankets are piled up on the bench in front of the sewing machine. These are the blankets, folded, which my daughters will arrange as mattresses. On top of the blankets, on the bench, are the sheets and the pillows. When they finish arranging the beds, Marta will walk to her room and get ready to sleep. Her husband won’t have arrived yet, but Marta will know it’s Saturday and it’s not worth waiting for him. She will think of other things. On the sewing-room floor, their heads on the pillows, their bodies covered by the sheets, Maria and her mother will keep breathing — the silence, the darkness, their breathings. My wife will think of Francisco. Maria will think of her husband and she will be sure that he will ask her, tomorrow, for forgiveness, and he will ask her, please, please, to come back. My wife will be asleep in minutes. Maria will fall asleep later. On the black floor of the sewing room she won’t know whether moments have passed, or hours, since she lay down to sleep.