He stopped and slowly turned to face me.
“André!” I shouted again, and this time there was a new conciliatory tone in my voice.
Then something incredible happened: as if I were threatening him, he turned again and began to run, literally began to run, through the drawing room and onto the verandah where one or two latecomers still lingered. Sensing that I was about to lose him forever, I called out his name and started to run after him, because with him went something that was absolutely precious to me and irreplaceable. One of the people on the verandah tried to hold me back, asking if I needed something. I pushed him to one side and rushed down the steps after André. He was still running, and had now almost reached the pond. I continued after him, calling out his name again and again, but he did not turn around—it was as if I were precisely the thing he wanted to avoid. However, the chase could not last long: he was younger and faster than me, and his motive for fleeing the house was, quite possibly, stronger and more powerful than the motive impelling me to follow him. I stopped and wiped the sweat from my forehead—I had lost the race. With André gone, the last knot binding me to the past was undone.
(I could still see him—and I will never forget. The searing, late afternoon sun was bathing the garden in the golden light of one of its final days of splendor, but not even that could hold him back. I knew he was not even aware of the garden, just as he could no longer hear my voice. He was still running, and the last image I have of him is of his hair flying behind him in the wind as he raced toward the Chácara’s main gate, running faster and faster until, when he reached the gate, he flung himself out into the road like a bird escaping its cage. I’ll finish with that image. Needless to say, I never saw him again.)
Looking around me, I suddenly found myself alone, completely alone in the garden. I heard the gate creak open again and saw the hearse driving up the main avenue. It was an entirely unremarkable vehicle, painted black and decorated only by a few dull golden tassels. Its wheels squeaked ponderously over the sandy path and, when it passed in front of me, I saw that it was driven by Senhor Quincas, the Vila Velha carpenter who made the coffins, also drove the hearse, and, in the absence of the official gravedigger, sometimes buried the dead. Senhor Quincas, old and ruddy-faced from too much rum, stared at me as he drove by, and with such a look of surprise that, for a second, I felt I was in the wrong place, somehow a stranger, an intruder. A small group was gathering on the verandah, getting ready to carry the coffin.
I leaned blindly against a tree, watching that clumsy vehicle, so at odds with the splendor of the afternoon, and I whispered softly, several times, not the name André (which, in any event, was not the name I knew him by), but Nina, and I let the sweet sound of that name mingle freely with my salty tears.
56.
Postscript in a Letter from Father Justino
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Yes, I have decided to respond to that man’s request. I don’t know him and I can’t think why he’s collecting such information, but he seems to have an urgent interest in the matter. Moreover, I believe that whatever the reason for his urgency, it must have God’s blessing, for the last thing the Almighty would deny his consent to is the revelation of the truth. I don’t know what this person is looking for, but in the way he asked me for my statement, I sense a thirst for justice. And if I am now finally—and fully—agreeing to his request, it is not so much out of a desire to recollect past events (for so many things are lost with the passage of time), as in the vague hope of restoring some respect for the memory of a creature who paid so dearly in this world, and for failings that were not entirely her own.
I can still remember the last time I saw her, when we were halfway through the terrible epidemic that ravaged our town. The Meneses house was one of the last to fall, although it had already been thoroughly ransacked by the infamous Chico Herrera gang. I can still see the house now, its massive stone foundations rising up as simply and majestically as an ancient monument in the wilderness of the garden. Almost all the rendering had flaked off the walls, the windows had come loose from their frames, and the garden and even the worm-eaten steps were completely overgrown—and yet, for anyone who knew the history of Vila Velha, life still seeped out through the cracked walls, exposed joists, and fallen roof tiles of its abandoned skeleton, which continued to ring with the echo of recent events.
When the main house threatened to collapse, Ana (the person I am writing about), went to live in an old gazebo at the bottom of the garden. It could not have been a less appropriate or less salubrious choice of accommodation. As soon as I entered, led by a black servant who seemed perfectly familiar with the place, I heard someone coughing in one of the farthest rooms. I asked the servant if it was Dona Ana, and he nodded. In my priestly vocation—following in the ways of the Lord as one might say—I have been summoned to attend the dying in many strange places. However, I have seen none as sad and forsaken as that hovel. In other places there was an energy that throbbed until the very last second, a warmth that clung to the surrounding objects no matter how wretched, but there, in that tiny cellar that seemed more like a suffocating prison cell, the air was stale and heavy with the stench of sweat, and the departing soul was leaving this life surrounded by utter indifference and desolation. I had never seen a sadder sight, nor one so abandoned by the Grace of God.
She was lying on a pallet bed made of planks from a packing crate, covered with a straw mattress that was full of holes. I could not, at first, see her face, but I could hear her labored breathing. The cramped space was filled with the tepid, nauseating smell of someone who has been suffering from a prolonged illness and been unable to attend to her personal hygiene. For a moment, I thought I was in one of those adobe shacks that serve as shelter for the lowliest of peasants, not by the bedside of the last known heiress of the proud Meneses family. It would be impossible not to reflect upon the transience of worldly glory and, while the servant struggled to open a jammed window to give us some light, I unconsciously began to say a few prayers. In the corners, like shadows waiting in ambush, I sensed some breathing, shapeless thing, something like the spirit of evil.
Finally, a thin, watery light entered the room. There she lay, half sitting up, her eyes shining, her face gaunt.
“Ah, Father Justino,” she murmured. “I thought you would never come.”
I sat down beside her, trying to hide my feelings. Whichever way I turned, though, I felt her eyes following me. Her insistent gaze rather irritated me—it was almost as if she were waiting for me to say something to soothe her troubled soul. And what could I, a poor, miserable priest, say? What words, what consolation, could I say to her beyond what I had already tried to tell her on other occasions, and which had proved so entirely useless in the face of her desperate will to oppose me and to resist? She sensed my hesitation and, removing one trembling, still strangely youthful hand from beneath the tattered bedspread, she grabbed hold of one of my hands and pressed it to her soft, feverish lips, covering it with the drool of a toothless kiss. A slow dribble of saliva dripped between my fingers; she stared at me with pleading eyes.
“Speak, my child. That is what I am here for.” With my other hand (for she was still holding on to me, as if fearing I might flee), I stroked her hair, by now almost entirely white.
“Only one thing matters, Father. There is only one thing I want to know.”
Perhaps it is our intimate knowledge of the dying that tells us they will only give their last (and most painful) confession at the moment when it can no longer be postponed. Or perhaps, who knows, as we sit by the bedside, we have a sixth sense that allows us to anticipate what is about to happen. I don’t know. The truth is that, with my eyes attentively closed, I could tell almost exactly what wounds she was about to re-open. That desperate, lost soul had been struggling her whole life with a problem she would never manage to resolve on her own, and which even after all this
time still kept her there, her life perhaps hanging by a thread, and waiting for someone—possibly me—to come and tell her the one thing she wanted to hear, but which, out of honesty or simple pity, was precisely the thing neither I nor anyone else could ever say. Because clearly present in her shriveled body was a voice ceaselessly asking what is goodness, does heaven exist, do we have a right to be happy, is there life after death? Or is there any justice in the face of death and (for such is our blindness) does anything survive of our pathetic, futile human passions?
The most extraordinary thing is that the conversation flowed as if it were simply the continuation of something that had already gone before. She had not changed one iota since the last time we saw each other, neither the course of her life, nor the way she lived it. What I saw (and for this I did not even need to look at her), was that she was entirely part of that proud, obstinate family who followed their destiny as if swept along by a current to their inevitable fate. The torrent was now rushing to its end, and what could she possibly want but to afford me another glimpse of what had constituted her life or her mistake, if you like, but which had been her sole motivation, the reason for her battle with the others?
“Father . . . I don’t know if you remember . . . the last time . . .”
Of course I remembered, and I can set it down here, for it wasn’t a formal confession, nor on that or any other occasion, did she ask me to keep it secret. I remembered—and with such clarity—how several years previously she had asked me what sin was. What could I say in response—me, a poor priest—other than what I had learned in books and embraced through my faith in God? And yet, I think I did add something that derived more from my own experience than from the teachings of the catechism. I told her not what was laid down in law, but what accorded with the things, the people and the house I saw around me. (Such is the true law of God: it can take on the appearance and color of the moment in which it is called upon. Is that mere flabby ambiguity or compromise? No, truth must encompass all aspects of human contingency. What does truth bring us when it embraces only one single aspect or shows one single face, which often hide the true essence of the facts? I repeat: God’s law is mutable and various, precisely because it has the candor, the austerity, and the fluidity of liquid: it penetrates and refreshes, it brings life and fertility to land that, before, produced nothing but the dry thorns of death.) Ah, this clamorous, nebulous thing we call sin, this victory of the strong which is yet so characteristic of the weak and indecisive, of the monsters and tyrants, who, throughout the centuries, have used its banner in order to massacre and oppress! The dark shadow of the Jesuits who, in its name, raised bonfires and lit infernos—how then can sin be set in a context of understanding and justice? Ah, the bed of the weak, the resting place of the sad and effeminate! And how much greater is the sin of not risking the supreme sin, of being human and alone, and gazing upon the one resplendent face of God, that beacon of light and forgiveness shining in the abyss? What can we say to those melancholy guardians of fruitless virtue, to those aesthetes of goodness, to those warriors without stomach or courage or imagination for the fight?
However, I felt another peril beginning to circle around me, and only then did I perceive its true nature. It was error—the false eagerness of the predestined, the cravings of troubled souls whose only support is their own reason. Reason. At least that was what I understood as I listened to her recount a series of atrocities with an effort that seemed to transfigure her. I repeat: none of this was told to me in the form of a confession; on the contrary, she herself asked me to disclose the facts so that this stain—for stain there was—should weigh less heavily upon her tomb. If I have kept silent until now, it is because I considered it unnecessary, as you may judge from what follows, to return to the subject. But since an opportunity now presents itself to establish the true facts, what prevents me from saying now what I heard, and thereby trying to raise from its shadows the massacred ruins of that house laid low by fear? (There lay the house, as if devoured by an evil nurtured in its very own entrails. In the midst of that luxuriant, untrammeled landscape, it maintained a strange reserve, as if turning in upon its own ruins and blindly meditating upon the void within and unravelling the harsh, lonely memory of days long gone . . .)
“It was years ago, Father,” she began, “when my sister-in-law left for the first time. I can hardly say how the whole madness began. All I know is that one evening, I was hiding in the bushes outside this Pavilion, and I watched Nina saying goodbye to Alberto. And then, as soon as she had disappeared, and as if driven by something stronger than myself, I called out to him: ‘Alberto!’”
For what was, I confess, the first time, I looked her straight in the eye. The black servant had succeeded in opening the window, and a remnant of dull, greenish twilight reached us now along with an occasional breeze. Her eyes slowly turned toward that sliver of light as if in remembrance of something that happened long, long ago, and which drifted in on a breath of wind and vibrated in unison with some final, dying chord of her soul. Of course, I already knew the story of that passion, which like all human passions had been a delusion, but I couldn’t help but shudder to see her eyes searching endlessly for the last few, broken pieces of that moment when she had truly lived, her miserable, half-dead body still trembling when she said his name. The enslavement of the flesh—what other name can we give to the soul’s long submission to the body? For the memory belonged less to her tormented soul than to the senses: a single, combined memory of pleasure, knowledge and death, one single shining moment in her entire existence, like a firework that shoots into the air and disintegrates, leaving behind it an even deeper darkness. Ah, but perhaps it would be better for us all if I spare the reader my own emotions and continue faithfully retelling what I heard that evening long ago.
She went on talking, telling me how he whirled around in alarm when she said his name, for he clearly thought that, up until then, his affair with Nina had gone unnoticed. “What do you want? What do you want from me?” he exclaimed as soon as he saw Ana. She was standing motionless beside a bush, and her face must have eloquently expressed the suffering that consumed her. And Alberto, despite his rough manners, could not fail to understand what was going on. “There’s no point,” he said with a look of evident disgust. She didn’t say a word and moved closer. She touched him with her hand, lightly on his forearm, then sliding her hand up to his elbow, then to his chest. Suddenly, like someone in the grip of a sudden madness, she flung her arms around him and, sobbing and crying, clasped him to her. Alberto tried to push her away, afraid that someone might see them, even though it was already dark. But Ana would not let go and stood there with her eyes shut tight, as if every sign of life had drained from her body. He tried in vain to free himself from her embrace, but that embrace was not so much an impulse of life as a spasm of death. Then the inevitable happened: the night, the scent of the roses, and, above all, Alberto’s youth, all played their part. But more than all those things combined was the part played by Nina’s recent presence, and the heat she always left pulsating though his veins. Finally, he returned Ana’s embrace and kissed her, and Ana gave herself to him right there, on the grass, as if it were the first time a man had ever possessed her.
From that point onward, as far as I recall, her account became somewhat confused, perhaps because she no longer had a clear recollection of what had happened, or perhaps because, having reached such a climax, what came afterward was not as interesting. The fact is that what happened next was plunged in obscurity, one of those pauses that exists to reinvigorate our life, and perhaps—who knows?—lead it on to greater challenges. All Ana remembered was that, at a certain point, she realized she was pregnant. And pregnancy was certainly a pressing matter, particularly since it was the first time any such signs had manifested themselves even after all those years of marriage. How would she explain the situation to her husband? What could she tell him? Such were the questions ceaselessly occupying her mind. It was around th
is time, more or less, that the troubles between Valdo and Nina became more acute. The goings-on at the Pavilion were no longer such a secret, and Nina, under the pressure of circumstances, was threatening to leave the house. (I believe, my friend, that we are now reaching the crux of the whole story. No matter how far ahead we look, no matter how divergent the paths we follow, we will always find ourselves returning to the events of that period—they are the foundations of the building, the keystone of the arch, the mainspring on which everything depends.) To add to an already difficult situation, Nina also pronounced herself to be pregnant, and the prospects of this future Meneses heir became the subject of keen discussion among the entire family. Are you following closely the plot of our little story? Two women, both pregnant, one of them the center of attention and the subject of daily conversation within their little world, whilst the other one is alone with her secret, feeling, minute by minute, a new life growing and pulsating within her. Ana took to following her sister-in-law like a shadow: she drank in the other woman’s every gesture, every move, every thought as if it were a life-giving tonic. It was instinct that guided her, with that sixth sense that only women possess (and only certain women at that), knowing that it was from there that salvation would come. However, Nina needed freedom to live; she was like a bird, and blithely unaware of the evil of her ways. (And at this point, gripping my hand tightly, Ana asked: “Can such a woman be aware of right and wrong, Father? A woman who burns her own clothes because she thinks they’re infected with the disease devouring her? Is it possible? And other things, countless other things too.”) The truth is that Nina was sick to death of the suffocating atmosphere of the Chácara and was talking of leaving and yet, if the scandal had not broken, she would have stayed forever. I believe it was Demétrio who threw her out—he could forgive her for sleeping with her husband, but only because he believed she didn’t love Valdo. But with the other one, the one he came across one day kneeling at her feet . . . (Ana recalled these things reluctantly, wearily.) Before leaving the Chácara for good, there was one last period of relative peace when even Ana thought everything had been sorted out. The affair with the gardener had not yet been discovered, and Nina, on the pretext that it was summer, had moved into the Pavilion—the very Pavilion in which I now sat listening to the dying woman’s confession. Summer was not the only motive: Valdo, convalescing after his failed suicide attempt, maintained that he would be able to rest better in the Pavilion. Even she could no longer remember how long the truce lasted—two or possibly three months? Until Demétrio, who had never really accepted the move to the Pavilion, revealed the scandal and practically forced Nina to leave. As if the air had suddenly grown thinner, Ana felt a void opening up around her. Emptiness, total emptiness. She would spend all day sleepwalking through that house of sleepwalkers. Then, terrified her secret would be discovered at any moment, she had an idea, an idea that would be the greatest lie of all. She could not even say how long the thought had lingered at the back of her mind; she simply felt that she could not wait another day and that now was exactly the right moment to try to save herself, if indeed she wanted to be saved. And so, one morning while sitting in bed brushing her hair—a habit she had learned from Nina—she said to her husband: “Demétrio, I know that, despite everything, you’d like Nina to come back. Well, I know how to bring her back.” (He was suffering as he never had before. Despite having made her leave, he had never loved her more or been so much in need of her presence, drifting aimlessly around the house like a rudderless ship.) Demétrio stared at her, pale and surprised—although perhaps less surprised than he should have been at such a proposal. (And yet, who knows what Ana herself thought at that moment? Watching his troubled face, full of subterranean fears that, despite his best efforts, revealed the secret that had been torturing him for so many months, had she perhaps finally understood the reason for her husband’s remoteness and disdain for their marriage? Had she perhaps found a justification, however fleeting, for her own acts of madness and adultery? Now, I’m not trying to downplay any of these events—I am merely, as I said earlier, seeking to restore some respect for the memory of a creature who paid so dearly in this world for failings that were not entirely her own.) “Demétrio, I know how to bring Nina back,” she repeated. He did not believe her, but seeing a new determination on her face, as if nothing mattered more to her than her sister-in-law’s return, he asked: “How?” Ana lay down beside him and, such is men’s blindness, he did not for one moment feel suspicious of that gesture of studied resignation. “We talked about it once,” said Ana, forcing herself to contain her own emotions, “and she hinted that if I were to go and fetch her, then she might perhaps come back.” “You?” asked Demétrio, astonished. “Go to Rio? To find her?” “Yes, why not?” “To Rio?” he repeated. “But you know nothing about Rio!” Ana smiled: “No, I don’t, but so what? I only need to ask.” Now there was a look of distrust in her husband’s eyes. Then he thought for a few moments about his wife’s proposal. Ah, but it was easy enough to read his thoughts! He was probably thinking: “They never got on before; they always avoided each other like the plague, like enemies. Why this sudden closeness?” But then his old-fashioned reasoning, so easy and accommodating, quickly followed: “Well, they’re women. What do I know of these things? Women understand each other.” He looked again at Ana: “If that’s how things are, then I agree. But you must, of course, speak to Valdo first.” She’d had her suspicions before, but had never been sure. She had seen only vacant stares, a certain distance, unexplained silences when she entered a room—but what was an absence or a silence in a house so full of silences? Now, as she looked at the man lying in bed beside her, his eyes closed, she not only understood everything, but even guessed the precise details of the drama: his sleepless nights thinking about the woman lying so near and yet so far, in the arms of another; the times he had gotten up and tiptoed into the hallway to listen at the other door to the sounds of a pleasure that eluded him; the moments of unrelenting lucidity when she noticed him looking at that magnificent young woman, and saw him run his hand through his white hair, saw his cold, mean-spirited face; and countless other such incidents that were now confirmed by his present reaction; and she gazed at him almost triumphantly.
Chronicle of the Murdered House Page 59
