Candida began rattling the pots louder and then slammed a cast iron frying pan on top of the stove. They all turned toward her but it wasn’t enough to stop Manuel. He was now drunk and his words became tempered with bitterness.
“She was so proud of her well-oiled machine. But it was all based on fear!” He shouted these words down the hallway.
Terezinha stood there, bathing in the silence that followed her father’s outburst. He saw his daughter take hold of a dead chicken that lay on the kitchen counter. She clasped the headless animal by its feet. Terezinha bit her lips as she swung the chicken and tried to spell her name on the kitchen floor with droplets of blood.
Manuel then looked at Antonio, still in his pajamas; he sat cross-legged in the corner winding his wrist with the thin ribbon that had once held on to his balloon. So gentle, so empty of the spirit Manuel had wanted the boy to possess.
Manuel stood outside his mother’s bedroom looking through the half-opened door. It wasn’t his place. They washed her pale body by candlelight. Smoke and the smell of beeswax filled the room and wafted into the hall where he stood. Manuel could see Georgina through the haze, passing a cloth along his mother’s neck, pulling the dead woman’s frail arm out to the side as she washed the white skin on the inside of her wrist, elbow. Candida, resolved to her final duty, gathered the burial dress in her fists, like a sock just before it’s pulled over one’s foot. She placed the opening over her mother’s head, struggled and fought to pull it down her already stiffening body. Candida then reached for a neatly folded parcel of tissue paper. She carefully unpacked a tortoiseshell comb with scalloped edges, a gift from Manuel that had never been worn. She looked at Manuel before plunging it into the side of her mother’s hair. Georgina covered the woman’s head with the traditional burial wimple as Terezinha, who had been standing by the shutters, came over and smiled at her father as she helped to fluff her grandmother’s dress. Georgina caught him looking and raised her hand to ward him off, to leave the women to their job. He stood fixed. They garnished her with branches of pine and cedar, tucking them under her, framing her. His mother’s knobby fingers were forced together across her stomach and her beaded rosary woven between her stiffening hands.
Manuel felt Antonio lean against his leg.
“The cedar helps cover up the smell of death,” he told his son. He raised him up, kissed him on the neck and lost himself in his son’s familiar sweet smell, away from the putrification that wafted from the contained room.
As the moon sank into the ocean, the day began to fill with villagers lining up outside to pay their respect. Some wanted to see it for themselves—could she really be dead? Others just wanted to touch her—a saint, some said.
Manuel wasn’t sure of their names. The women were shrouded in veils and the men wore no hats, their hair parted and wet. People knelt by the dead woman’s bed and whispered prayers. Some were brave enough to bend over and kiss her pallid forehead or adjust her clothing, a collar or sleeve. Some even cried, interrupting the steady hum of communal vespers.
There is comfort in death, Manuel thought, the freedom to behave in a way that could not have been possible if someone were alive.
They would then make their way around the room, offering the family their prayers and whispered things. Manuel saw how the women would cup Antonio’s face in their rough hands and prick his cheek with their lips. Terezinha held on to Thumbelina, repeatedly tugging at the string in hopes of reviving the doll’s head. Some of the women tried to kiss her cheek but most just tapped her head in recognition.
Manuel could hear Padre Alberto begin to recite the rosary outside his mother’s window. He could hear the shuffling crowd that had gathered and repeated the words of the priest in unison. The final mourners trickled out of their front doors to gather quietly on the dirt road in front of the house, to wait for the family, to pray and offer her a final mass, to process and bury her. It had to be done within the day—the town still wasn’t large enough to make a funeral home a viable business—and so the town had no choice but to adhere to tradition. Anyway, it was best for the departed to enter the Kingdom of Heaven the old-fashioned way—right away.
Candida pulled back the sheets to reveal her mother fully dressed in black like an ominous cloud.
Georgina held on to the woman’s thin ankles, and Candida—only after much urging—tucked her arms under her mother’s shoulders. On the count of three they lifted her stiff body and awkwardly dropped her into the pine coffin. Manuel caught his children’s awe as their grandmother floated straight and hard as a tabletop. Georgina arranged the dead woman neatly and properly in the box lined with raw linen, then took it upon herself to lower the lid.
Terezinha held on to her mother’s gloved hand as she drew aside the lace curtains, flung the shutters open to lean out the window. She signaled for the priest to begin the funeral march that would take them to Nossa Senhor do Rosário for the last time. They were just about to begin when Manuel motioned the pallbearers to stay where they were, to give them all a few moments alone as a family.
“Come here, Candida,” Manuel said. Georgina closed the shutters.
Manuel pried open the lid and slipped something inside the coffin. Candida reluctantly moved close to the lip of the box. Manuel felt his children nudge their way between them and grasp onto the ridge of the casket. Georgina moved beside her sister-in-law.
“A cold fish. She was no mother to me,” Candida heaved.
“She took so much from you, Candida. She took from me too, but no more,” Georgina said.
Georgina reached for the photograph of her husband and her son that Manuel had placed inside, tucked somewhere in the ripples of fabric, and slipped it into her purse.
Candida reached inside her purse and pulled out a silver cylinder. She twisted it, then lowered her hand to her mother’s white face. She smeared the woman’s mouth with bright red lipstick, went beyond her lips and up toward her cheeks like a child who chose not to color inside the lines. She trembled as she hummed a song that Manuel faintly recalled. She took a step back, cocked her head as if to admire her work. She looked to her brother, who moved away from them until his back pressed against the cold wall. He understood as much as he could but was beginning to feel uncomfortable. Candida then rammed the tube between the dead woman’s hands, where it lay next to the jet-bead rosary and silver crucifix.
She took one last look, smiled, and gently lowered the lid.
Everyone waited outside. The box was lifted onto the men’s shoulders. They carried her with heads down, up the uneven road, kicking at the wild dogs with their now dusty shoes if they dared come near to sniff. As the procession wound its way up and passed Nossa Senhora do Rosário, Manuel noticed the sudden rustle of curtains, the occasional sign of the cross and the obligatory cries and sniffles from the men and women behind him. Terezinha walked in front of Manuel, holding on to her aunt’s hand. Manuel drew his wife close to him. Antonio’s arms were secured around his mother’s neck. Manuel saw him pull his mother’s veil over his head too. He whispered, “Mãe, how is she going to breathe? Why didn’t they put some holes in the coffin?
“Fish need air to breathe too,” Antonio said with conviction.
BARNACLE LOVE
MANUEL USED HIS FOREARMS to part the stalks of corn. His blood coursed through him. He forged ahead, swiping at the brittle stems, nursing the anger that had pressed on him ever since he had arrived back home and Silvia had said no.
Two weeks ago, with an eagerness that overcame jet lag and saw him abandon his luggage on the front stoop of his crumbling childhood home, he had dashed through the fields to meet with her. She had agreed to go to Canada in her letters, but it wasn’t until he arrived, after some long anticipated and disappointing love-making, that she told him she didn’t want to leave. Not prepared for her excuses, he had stormed through the cornfields, allowing the husks to thrash against his face. She was his intended, but his dream was his alone now. Her futile calls for him t
o return—“Manuel! Volta, Manuel!”—receded as he broke through onto the dirt road.
A week passed. Silvia asked for a second meeting. He came into the clearing once again.
Silvia’s eyes rested in the dark hollows of her face. She looked smaller now.
“I’ll go! Is that what you want … I’ll leave with you as your wife.” She had crawled to him and tugged on his trousers with her chin up, pleading.
He grabbed her shoulders. “I don’t want to begin my new life with a lie!”
She swiped the snot across her cheek. “But I’ve changed my mind. I’ll make a life with you there if that’s what you want.” She reached for his hand and pulled him down as she arched her back. His knees buckled and she placed his hand between the warmth of her legs. She grasped his back to lower him even further.
He withdrew his hand and caressed her face. He whispered, “I thought it was what you wanted also,” as he stood up to leave.
“Your mother said you would stay; that all I had to do was ask you to start a life with me here and that we would all be together. She said she knew you, she knew what you wanted and that everything would be okay.” Silvia looked around now as if expecting someone or something to appear from within the thick crop of corn and save her. “She said it would all be okay.”
He stormed up to Senhora Theresa’s small house on Rua Nova. He walked straight up to the window, and with not even an inkling of restraint, he asked her for her daughter Georgina’s hand.
Those who lived in the village of Lomba da Maia would often assemble in its cobbled square to hear Amalia’s fados drifting out of Senhora Genevieve’s gramophone and through her open window. Although she herself was deaf, the songs of lament served as a backdrop for the town square as the men smoked, balancing hand-rolled cigarettes on their cracked lips as they slammed their cards down, knuckles red on bistro tables. Their wives and women sat like aged schoolgirls, repeating their family histories, shared events borne from a past as if newly found. It was in that square, as a boy of six visiting for the first time, that Antonio heard the story of the blessed union between his mother and father.
Antonio sat in his shorts and navy blazer at the bottom of the steps that led up to the whitewashed church. His father, Manuel, who sat playing cards at the other end of the square, had insisted his wife and children be dressed to perfection. Terezinha sported a bowl cut that reminded Antonio of Casey from Mr. Dressup. She wore a simple dress and bobby socks. They both wore patent-leather shoes in the dusty heat of summer. Antonio sat with his legs opened in a V, playing with his marbles while his sister skipped around him and along the fancy loops and bordered patterns of inlaid black cobblestone.
“I can see your birdie, I can see your birdie, I can see …” Terezinha chimed, and pointed and snickered.
Antonio’s reaction was immediate; he shut his legs and gathered the marbles that stuck to the back of his sweaty knees. He saw his father and took a few steps toward him but then saw the agitated look on his face. Antonio ran to his mother instead, who sat on a bench between her sister, Aunt Louisa, and her best friend, Carmen, whom she hadn’t seen since she had left more than ten years ago. Aunt Candida had refused to stay after the funeral. She had departed on the first flight home.
They sat lazily licking their gelados. His mother dabbed beads of sweat from her face with her kerchief and raised the burden of her hair with her forearm to cool the back of her neck.
“What is it, filho?” she asked as Antonio crawled up and slipped into her lap. She offered him a lick of her gelado. Terezinha came running after Antonio but stopped behind the bench and took the weight of her mother’s hair into her hands.
“Blow, filha.”
His mother closed her eyelids in the refreshing pleasure of it all and raised her glistening face to the sun. She sunk further into the bench and Antonio enjoyed sliding down with her.
“Was it all worth it, Georgina?” Carmen asked.
“Carmen,” she responded, “what my mother-in-law did will always remain with me. But, yes.” She lifted Antonio’s bangs with the side of her open palm. She looked at him through slit eyes and blew on his forehead through smiling lips. “I’d say it was all worth it.”
Aunt Louisa turned to Carmen and whispered, “That woman’s with the devil now.” Georgina responded with a reproachful glance, as if to suggest the children had been through enough already, witnessed far more than they should have at their age. Antonio stopped twirling his mother’s gold crucifix. Undeterred, Aunt Louisa began to tell the story of the wedding preparation …
Antonio could almost picture his mother’s soft, plump arms and delicate fingers reaching up to the ceiling so that her mother and sister could shimmy the poof of white over her head. It was the town’s wedding dress, the same one that all young girls in the village of Lomba da Maia wore when they married men they were barely allowed to know. They would wiggle their hips to allow the communal dress to sit as well as it could before it was unstitched, pinned, and stitched and seamed once again for that week’s bride.
“Your father loved me,” Grandmother Theresa had said to her daughter.
“Manuel loves me too.”
“You are not the one he came for and—”
“And what, Mãe? Huh? Silvia was the one he came to Portugal for. Is that what you want to hear? Well, she said no … and I said yes.”
Georgina knew very little about Manuel, other than that he was twenty-six and he looked forward to sharing a life in Canada. They weren’t allowed to spend time together. She could only lean out the window as Manuel stood outside, his two feet planted firmly on the dirt road. That was just the way things were.
“That’s the way they still are,” Carmen added. The women laughed.
“I thought that what was there could grow.” Georgina contemplated her words lazily. The women all nodded in agreement; Carmen even sighed.
Terezinha cupped her mouth with her hand to stop herself from giggling. All this talk of romance and marriage was too much for her. Luckily, Senhora Genevieve’s small dog came yelping into the square, chasing after the hens. Terezinha saw it as a necessary diversion and ran after it—tormenting things smaller than her is her specialty, Antonio thought. Antonio stayed still, hopeful that his mother had forgotten he was sitting on her lap, breathing in her smell of Skin-So-Soft; she had purchased the whole line from the Avon catalogue.
Georgina said that Manuel’s offer of marriage had been an ongoing topic of conversation for the better part of the week. It was his mother’s duty to propose on his behalf, and she had done so grudgingly.
“‘As you know, my son Manuel has chosen a different path,’” Aunt Louisa mocked. “I have heard, Maria,” had been Grandmother Theresa’s response. Grandmother Maria had held up her hand. This was something she had to do and it would be done as duty dictated.
“‘He has now chosen your daughter.’” Aunt Louisa could still mimic the bitterness in her voice. “‘One can only hope that your daughter is … a virgin.’”
The two women, Maria and Theresa, had been friends since childhood. Their words were few, but even back then Georgina had sensed they could read each other with an acuteness usually reserved for siblings.
“My mother was furious,” Georgina said. “‘That woman … she floats up to my front door in her black dress, saying, You should be happy my Manuel has chosen your daughter.’
“‘Stop Mãe, please,’ I had pleaded.
“‘One would hope she’s a virgin, Theresa. The nerve of that woman.’”
Grandmother Theresa had wiped the spittle from her lips, stepped back and sat on the wooden chair by the bedroom window. She had reached back, slid her black kerchief from her head and brought her graying hair up over her shoulder. She had begun to braid slowly as she gazed out the front window.
“‘She doesn’t want this to happen. She’ll make it a hell for you.’
“‘I’ll be far away from her, Mãe, in Canada.’
“‘S
he is a presence that will cross the oceans to Terra Nova. Mark my words. I know her. She has spoken of nothing else these last two years while her Manuel was away in Canada: Silvia, the heiress to forty head of cattle … my Silvia, so delicata, will make him come home—will make a life for him here full of fortuna. I lost him once, I won’t lose him again.’
“I knelt before my mother and looked up at her fragile neck. ‘I need to get away, Mãe. This is my chance.’ I looked out my window toward the church of Nossa Senhora do Rosário. My mother continued braiding her hair and mumbling her prayers. Soon, she would knot the few strands that remained at the tip tightly to keep her braid in place. My hand rested on the windowsill and I’ll always remember the heat of my mother’s hand when she placed it over mine.”
Antonio watched the dogs that lay carelessly in the middle of the road. Some had matted clumps or patches of fur peeling from their skin. Every so often, one would lift its head and lamely attempt to snap its crooked jowl at a fly before laying its head back down on the parched earth.
Antonio’s mother looked down at him. She kissed his nose, drew him in close to her, then rested her chin on his head.
“I remember looking down the dusty street of Rua Nova until it disappeared into a wide swatch of blue. Beyond was my future.”
Antonio rested the side of his head on his mother’s chest. He could feel the crucifix digging into his temple as he looked across the square and met with his father’s stern look. Antonio closed his eyes, pretended to sleep.
“Take this off, filho.” Georgina seemed agitated by the heat and Antonio’s drenched blazer. She fought to get him out of it. He slid down her bare legs and sat at her feet, just as Terezinha came bouncing along. She held her hands open, all plastered with white fur. Her worn Thumbelina was tucked under her arm. “Mãe, that stupid dog, Pocas or Pipocas or whatever, he was playing with my Thumbelina and look what he did!” Her doll’s feet had been chewed off right up to the ankles, leaving her with hollow tubes for legs.
Barnacle Love Page 8
