Chronicle of the Murdered House

by Lúcio Cardoso

  (Sadness—and I have had long hours to ponder its meaning—is not a feeling or an impulse or even an emotion, it’s a permanent state, a way of being. Yes, the house is the same, with its verandah, its pillars, its rooms and the potent botanical world surrounding it, and while some essential part—its soul, for example—has been taken from it, its cold stone and concrete structure remains the same. I wander the empty rooms alone, feeling that the air has become unbreathable, and telling myself that it really doesn’t matter if the others look at me or what they think of me. What matters is to escape, to save myself, because everything around me is like a shipwreck, and what remains of my instinctive self has taken refuge in the one thing that keeps me from going under: remembering.)

  It happened soon after we met. You would think the meeting had been purely accidental, had it not occurred in such a strange place: a small clearing by the wall of the original house, of which only a few stones remained, with the tall grass surrounding the area like an undulating fence. Someone must have had the idea of planting a vegetable patch or something, because a square area had been cleared, a few trees cut down, and the logs piled up on one side. The work had gone no further than that, however, for beyond that cleared area, the displaced dry clods of earth had already been colonized by ants. We sat down on one of the tree trunks, her in the shade and me slightly more in the sun.

  “The sun’s good for you,” she said. “You’re too pale. Why don’t you undo your shirt?”

  I obeyed and, feeling somewhat embarrassed, undid a couple of buttons.

  “No, not like that,” she said, laughing.

  She tugged at my shirt and rapidly undid all the buttons.

  “Like that.”

  I was breathless with emotion, ashamed to show my chest, which I knew to be thin and still almost childish. She studied me:

  “You’re not a child any more, you’re almost a grown man.”

  She said this in a calm, flat voice. She picked up a twig from the ground and with one end of it touched my chest and flicked my shirt open wider still.

  “You need sun, lots of sun. How can you bear to spend all your time in that old house? Does no one take care of your health?” And she exposed my bare torso, as if casting a precise, disapproving eye over the consequences of that neglect.

  I was about to explain that I went riding and hunting and that I was naturally skinny, but I stopped myself, because it seemed foolish and inopportune. Besides, she didn’t let me speak, but waved the twig at me and continued talking:

  “It would be different if you lived in the city. There, boys go to clubs, swim, live more freely.”

  At the word “city” something lit up inside me, and for a few seconds I hoped she would tell me about Rio or São Paulo, which I knew only from magazines and photographs, and which, frankly, had never much interested me, despite my father always saying: “You need to find out about the world beyond the walls of the Chácara.” But despite the unexpected charm of the subject—listening to her, finding out about her life, what more could I want?—she failed to notice my sudden interest and continued talking about me.

  “Given how little exercise you take, I’m surprised you have such a good physique.” (She was examining me meticulously, coolly, studying my chest—my ribs visible beneath the skin—pausing to look at a scar or at the point beneath which my heart was beating wildly.) And it was through her eyes that I discovered my own body, which, up until then, had had no reality for me—my ribs, my sparse chest hair, my rather under-developed shoulders became shoulders, hair, and ribs with all the responsibility and weight of a living being taking its place in the world we lived in. Oddly, it was as if she were looking not at me, but at a map, and what was even more frightening was the idea that she might be able to see inside me too and notice my wildly beating heart. The examination continued, while I automatically obeyed her orders:

  “Come on, stand up. I want to see what you look like.”

  I stood up, feeling as though I were naked. I wasn’t actually trembling, but was filled with an uncontrollable feeling of panic. And yet her slow voice, more even than her veiled eyes, was breathing calm into me. I gradually began to lose that feeling of nakedness, and the sun, which I hadn’t even been aware of before, now slipped warmly and fondly over my whole body like a sweet oil being poured over my skin.

  “Excellent,” she said at last. “I’m glad to say that you’re just as good as those city boys.” (She again prodded me with the stick.) “There’s a kind of repressed energy in that body of yours, which I like.”

  Whether unintentionally or not, the twig slid down to my knees.

  “Strong legs,” she said, “young muscles.”

  And suddenly, she pressed her lips together and hit me hard on the leg with the stick. A shudder ran through me, and I rubbed the place where the mark would have been, but which I could not, of course, see through my trousers. A strange, impetuous emotion began to rise up inside me; my eyes grew dark. I stood up again and buttoned my shirt. The sun was beginning to burn my skin.

  “Sit down,” she said in a commanding voice.

  I slumped back down onto the tree trunk, my legs shaking uncontrollably. An embarrassing silence ensued: words seemed to elude us, as if unable to cope with an emotion that was as intoxicating as a strong drink. Around us the trees glittered in the hot sun, and everything gave off a kind of metallic steam. From beside the stream came the cry of a bellbird, and on a rock not far off, a lizard, asleep until then, suddenly twitched into life. These insignificant details engraved themselves on my mind. My leg was still smarting, and I again rubbed it slowly. I was actually grateful to her, because when she made me reveal my chest and stand before her, she had not done so as one might with a naughty child, and there was on her face a fascinatingly perverse expression, and in her eyes a severe, grave look. Suddenly, with that short, sharp blow, she had made me aware of my own dignity, and out of the boy she had found sitting in the clearing, she had made a man, still slightly surprised to be a man, but ready to carve out his own path. Many years afterward, when I remembered that blow, I would feel a voluptuous shiver of pleasure, and on other occasions too, I felt the same sensual tremor when, like another short, sharp blow, it would surface in my memory, as if a distant childhood echo were repeating the bitter-sweet taste of her discovery. By looking at me as if I were a man, she had perhaps gone beyond her own intentions, and actually made a man of me.

  She spoke again then, some comment about how hot it was or about life at the Chácara, but what she said seemed strangely meaningless and unreal, like events that had happened in another age or in another place.

  Some time later—I remember it with delicious, bitter clarity—there was another incident, which could be seen as a complement to that first one. It had been dark for some time, and the bright moon shining down on the garden did nothing to diminish the heat. I was leaning on the verandah, as I often did, and yet, that night, for some reason, my being there seemed different and intentional, a kind of landmark moment. I saw someone sitting by the small pond in the middle of the garden. (It was an ordinary circular fountain, the stone parapet decorated with shells; the fountain itself, which had several spouts, was always out of order and had as its centerpiece a one-legged stork.) It did not take me long to realize that the person sitting by the pond was Nina. The house was its usual silent self; my father lay snoring in the hammock, and that was, perhaps, the one dissonant note in the monotonous concert of the days. For he never usually lay in the hammock after supper, and if he did so then, it was probably because of the heat, and to take advantage of the slight breeze in the garden. The other inhabitants must have been in their rooms and so there was no risk of bumping into any of them. I went slowly down the steps and, when I reached the sandy path, I set off to the pond as if I wanted to enjoy the moonlight, which was at its brightest there. It shone through the partial canopy of the leaves onto the water, forming a single, vast column of milk-white light. I walked toward it, whistl
ing a tune. She may well already have spotted me when I came out and leaned on the verandah, but seeing me suddenly appear before her, she nevertheless pretended to be startled:

  “Oh, it’s you!”

  “What’s wrong?” I said, walking straight over to her.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I was deep in thought.”

  “Did I frighten you?”

  “A little,” and she patted the stone parapet. “Why don’t you join me?”

  I sat down beside her, so close that our knees were touching.

  “It’s a beautiful moon tonight,” I said as an opening gambit. And in the tremulous, wind-blown moonlight, this banal remark seemed to me neither inappropriate nor untimely.

  She raised her head, and I saw the soft, unadorned curve of her throat, its pure classical lines.

  “Yes, it is. In the city, people don’t even notice the moon.” And she gave a somewhat constrained laugh.

  “Do you like it?”

  “I do.”

  She looked up at the light silvering the tops of the trees, and I was able to study the grave silhouette of her profile, which gave off an air of terrible melancholy. From that angle, her nose seemed very slightly aquiline, but far from giving her an exotic air, it only emphasized the forceful beauty of her features, which was sometimes lost in the diffuse light of the sun. Then she turned away with a sigh, reached out a hand and trailed it languidly in the water.

  “And yet the water’s still cold,” she said. “We’re barely out of winter.”

  (How could such factors as winter and summer exist for her? I thought of her as being as gloriously indifferent to such things as one of those plants that grows in all seasons. Listening to her, I was thinking that, for me, all that existed was before and after her presence at the Chácara.)

  She moved her hand back and forth in the water, making tiny waves. In the dark water, beneath the bright moonlight, her wedding ring glinted, as did her pale, slender hand as it came and went. Like a delayed, but still resonant echo, I felt the same deep emotion as on that day she had struck my leg with a stick. Her feminine curves filled my eyes, like a drug beginning to take effect. Slowly, I was traveling through her toward a discovery of myself. She must have noticed my silence, because she looked up.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, and perhaps sensing what was happening to me, her eyes glinted as brightly as her ring in the water. I shook my head and sighed. Then she took her hand out of the water, exclaiming:

  “See how cold it is!”

  And she placed her hand on my lips. I was more aware of the perfume her hand gave off than of the cold, and was overwhelmed by a feeling of faintness, like a wave breaking over my body. This lasted no more than a second—and then she slowly withdrew her hand.

  “Your lips are dry,” she said. “It’s almost as if you had a fever.”

  She went back to dabbling in the water, but this time, kept her eyes fixed on my face. I did not move, listening to the music of the water lapping against the sides of the pond, and it was as if I had heard that same music long ago, a time forgotten by myself and by my senses, as if the sound were merely a repetition, suddenly retrieved from the past, but also like a real echo about to be undone by the wind.

  “Listen, André,” and her voice was softer, more caressing, “I wanted to ask you something.”

  “What?”

  And still stirring the water, she said:

  “Have you ever kissed a woman . . . on the mouth, I mean?”

  I was tempted to lie—why shouldn’t I?—to play the strong man, to impress her with my knowledge, inventing women and experiences lost in the darkness of that garden, outrageous acts, surrenders, separations, but the truth came pitilessly to my lips:

  “Never.”

  Then she bent toward me—if I close my eyes, I can still feel her breasts touching my arm, the perfume of her body rising up to my face—I can still feel her, as vividly as if her skin were actually touching mine—and she again placed her hand on my lips, not as she had before, but pressing against them, almost violently pushing them open, then slowly brushing them with the tips of her fingers.

  “That’s what it’s like . . . like that . . . cold . . . like that.”

  Then, before I dared say or do anything—I was, you might say, paralyzed by emotion—she got to her feet.

  “It’s late,” she said, “I need to go inside.”

  She stood looking down at me, and I could feel how fast the spell was fading. She waited a moment longer, then slowly walked back toward the house. I saw her silhouetted in the moonlight. She reached the steps, went up, paused—would she look back at me?—then disappeared indoors. The desert closed brutally about me. An insect with iridescent wings was now moving about on the tranquil surface of the water. And yet my heart was pounding and would do so for as long as I stayed there, lacking even the strength to stand up. The insect skittered about the pond, creating a series of concentric circles on the water, then took off and vanished, buzzing, into the mango trees. For a while afterward, something seemed still to tremble in the air—then everything went quiet. Fascinated, I suddenly plunged my hands into the water and splashed my face, once, twice, three times. However often I did this, though, however often I ran my fingers over my lips, I could not find the origin of the emotion that had me in its grip.

  Sitting beneath a tree, or some other place I thought would be free of any memories, I tirelessly relived that and other scenes. What is the point of setting them down in this notebook? None of them, however powerful, will bring back the happiness I lost. (Written in the margin: On the day when I wrote those lines, I imagined that everything was lost forever. I still didn’t really know what was going on. It would not be long, though, before I understood the exact meaning of “forever” when spoken in a way that allows for no hope, however remote, apart from the desperate hope of saints and madmen.)

  And despite everything, I only have to close my eyes to relive this or that episode—the day, on the steps, when she gave me her hand to kiss—another, when she went riding with me and got stuck in a marsh (I remember her, in improvised amateur horsewoman guise, shrieking with laughter among the saffron and tabebuia bushes)—and another when she stripped off in a wild gesture of freedom, in order to bathe in the pooled waters of a river—or more recently, when she pretended to be angry with me and spent the whole day—what torment!—refusing even to look at me—and that other time when I found her rummaging around among my papers—“What’s this? A novel? A diary?”—and, finally, the time when she was feeling sorry for herself and complained about pains in her side, and so that I could better understand what she meant, pressed my hand hard against her breast, rubbing slightly, until I felt her nipple grow erect beneath my touch . . .

  Is there any point in thinking and remembering? By going over and over these events, I have lost any real notion of them, mixed them up, confused everything—and for better or worse, whether under the influence of a truth or a fantasy—the name doesn’t matter—I have relived the hours that were given to me, learning that there are many ways of being a man, the least dignified of which was certainly not that which makes us live silent and alone in the midst of the rubble of all the dreams we create.

  (Written in the same hand in the margin, in a different colored ink: So many years have passed, and yet I still have not forgotten. I have loved other women, but that love was never more than a faint echo of this first love. We do not love different people during our lifetime, but the same image found in different individuals. I have felt despair too, until I despaired not of love, but of humanity. And now that I have this poor wretched notebook in my hands again, among other remnants of that house which no longer exists, I tell myself there is not much difference between the person I was and the person I am now—it is just that, with time, I have learned to overcome what, as a boy, was pure despair; now, albeit silently, I still suffer, but without the darkness that so often hurled me furiously up against the four walls of my own self
—a madness that was merely the adolescent version of the deep human fear of losing and being betrayed, which, alas, accompanies us throughout our whole existence.)

  39.

  The Colonel’s Statement

  When I arrived, she was already there waiting for me—which was the first time this had happened since we met. She was sitting at a small table toward the rear of the bar and was clearly very agitated: fidgeting in her chair, opening her handbag, looking at herself in her mirror, closing her handbag, sighing impatiently—in other words, showing all the signs of a person who has been kept waiting, a person accustomed to making others wait for her. I noticed at once how she had changed; she looked older, visibly thinner and paler. It was rather as if she bore a remarkable resemblance to someone else of the same height and the same features, but who wasn’t her. I should also explain that I had not given much credence to the more-than-friendly terms of her letter and its implicit proposal, but I certainly did not expect her to receive me in a manner so entirely at odds with those warm words, which is to say that she greeted me with a veritable explosion of anger, jumping to her feet as soon as she saw me and crushing and twisting her handbag with unbridled fury.

  “So this is how you treat me, is it? This is how you intend to humiliate me?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she pushed the table away and began pacing up and down.

  “I may have written you that letter, but I won’t have you thinking I’m some miserable beggar woman lying in a ditch. I’ll never be that. I’m still a married woman and I’m not about to let people walk all over me.”

  This little scene naturally attracted the attention of the waiters, who lined up at the cash register and were following everything with sardonic grins.

  “So what happened? What’s wrong?” I asked.

  She stopped in front of me, her hands on her hips: