Still I Miss You

by Inês Pedrosa

  PRAISE FOR INÊS PEDROSA

  Praise for Still I Miss You

  “Still I Miss You is a marvelous novel, a ballad of disenchantment.”

  —Diário de Notícias (Portugal)

  “Amidst the triumph of the commonplace, this novel by Inês Pedrosa is a mad torrent, a thread of light, a storm to which no one could remain immune or indifferent.”

  —Grande Reportagem (Portugal)

  “This book is all about a mystery made sublime by the author’s writing, in a meticulously crafted and virtually mirrored web of intrigue . . . A beautiful novel, with a desire to change the world, and which, besides everything else, one reads effortlessly, unable to stop.”

  —Expresso (Portugal)

  “Inês Pedrosa has enjoyed such tremendous success with her novels because her themes—brimming with powerful emotions, human frailties, and the misunderstandings of existence—grab hold of readers page by page, allowing them to lose themselves completely.”

  —Oggi (Italy)

  “Still I Miss You demonstrates all the literary gifts of this author who, born in 1962, embodies the new post-Saramago and post–Lobo Antunes literature of Portugal. The novel is a heartbreaking tale of love, abruptly ended, but recovered in the voice of the woman who has suddenly died, a literary conceit demanding total mastery.”

  —Bravo! (Brazil)

  Praise for In Your Hands

  **WINNER OF THE 1997 PRÉMIO MÁXIMA DE LITERATURA IN PORTUGAL**

  A LIZ & LISA BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH

  “This novel by a prizewinning Portuguese journalist intertwines the political and the personal through its incantatory prose . . . Absorbing in its history, as well as in its family dynamics.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “This passionate, resonant novel is now in English for the first time.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “In Your Hands is another work in the fine tradition of European literature. Told from a definite feminist perspective, it focuses on the inner feelings of its principal characters, each a finely drawn and vital woman, as they navigate the turbulent times of twentieth-century Portugal.”

  —Writers & Readers Magazine

  “Pedrosa’s extraordinary prose is colorful, thought-provoking, and emotionally rich. This is a novel that rewards the reader on every page with the thrill of great storytelling and the satisfaction of deeply etched characters whose lives are indelibly marked by the legacy of a forsaken love.”

  —Words Without Borders

  “Portugal through a woman’s voice is Amália Rodrigues with her divinely nostalgic fados; and now it’s likewise Inês Pedrosa in this, her powerfully evocative, but no less heartrending novel In Your Hands.”

  —Laura Restrepo, author of Delirium and Hot Sur

  “This beautiful, philosophical novel—lyrical, passionate, alert to the ways in which history shapes us—is also a profound meditation on love. Pedrosa writes about the romance between an unconventional woman and her wayward husband, about two men who loved each other at a time when such love was taboo, and about the love that connects three generations of Portuguese women who manage to flourish as human beings despite the horrors of dictatorship and Portugal’s colonial legacy. Inês Pedrosa is a great novelist in the tradition of the Brontës, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, and another singular writer who also writes in Portuguese—Clarice Lispector. In Your Hands is filled with wisdom and beauty like few novels I know.”

  —Jaime Manrique, author of Latin Moon in Manhattan and Cervantes Street

  “A wonderfully poetic novel, in which you can immerse yourself with pleasure.”

  —Brigitte (Germany)

  “The author succeeds in conjuring up powerful emotions for a wide audience while at the same time pursuing her aesthetic and political objectives.”

  —Die Zeit (Germany)

  “Inês Pedrosa’s writing leaves us completely in her hands.”

  —Em Frente Oeste (Portugal)

  “[Pedrosa] has focused on the inner feelings and emotions [of her characters], illuminating them with her prose, exploring their tensions and conflicts.”

  —El País (Spain)

  ALSO BY INÊS PEDROSA

  In Your Hands

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2006 by Inês Pedrosa

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Andrea Rosenberg

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as Fazes me falta by Dom Quixote in Portugal in 2006. Translated from Portuguese by Andrea Rosenberg. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2019.

  Quote from Luís Filipe Castro Mendes’s “A Ilha dos Mortos” reprinted by permission of the author.

  Two short quotations from Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair : New York:

  The Viking Press, 1951, by permission of Penguin Random House, New York.

  Copyright © Graham Greene, 1951; Copyright renewed Graham Greene, 1979.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542093330 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542093333 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542044417 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542044413 (paperback)

  Cover design by Philip Pascuzzo

  First edition

  In memory of my father, Ricardo Pedrosa.

  For Nelson de Matos and José Francisco Feiçao,

  my companions in undying nostalgia.

  Contents

  Start Reading

  1 - Dying isn’t enough...

  Only your laughter...

  1 - I’m alone. Alone...

  2 - God pushes slower...

  2 - Did you think...

  3 - Whose death is...

  3 - I was in...

  4 - There are so...

  4 - And to think...

  5 - I wish I...

  5 - How many days...

  6 - If only I...

  6 - There’s a sort...

  7 - It’s three thirty...

  7 - In the dark...

  8 - I need your...

  8 - I organized my...

  9 - I was always...

  9 - Money. Abstract time...

  10 - And we disagreed...

  10 - On this game...

  11 - What do you...

  11 - You never knew...

  12 - A tiny part...

  12 - Nobody remembers you...

  13 - I need to...

  13 - I’m tired of...

  14 - Is it you...

  14 - The day disappears...

  15 - There are some...

  15 - I tried many...

  16 - “Faith prevents us...

  16 - Most of the...

  17 - I know you...

  17 - I thought I’d...

  18 - I’m looking for...

  18 - You could have...

  19 - The friend with...

  19 - Friendship, an endless...

  20 - “Keep the desires...

  20 - Weddings, like funerals...

  21 - How rapturously we...

  21 - Your fingers—could...

  22 - Lia. In a...

  22 - Your body, still...

&nbs
p; 23 - I see the...

  23 - You died without...

  24 - You’re the only...

  24 - You used to...

  25 - For many months...

  25 - Guilt is what’s...

  26 - Values. As if...

  26 - Another horror story...

  27 - Truth. Another supreme...

  27 - Belated angel, my...

  28 - The substance of...

  28 - So many men...

  29 - I wanted you...

  29 - I can’t really...

  30 - Listen. They’re about...

  30 - At least come...

  31 - Children take a...

  31 - Since you died...

  32 - The purest nights...

  32 - Blue, icy, washed...

  33 - Only by listing...

  33 - I’m giving you...

  34 - Writers cut out...

  34 - I bury myself...

  35 - What is respect...

  35 - I never threw...

  36 - Why do I...

  36 - Maybe paradise is...

  37 - We returned to...

  37 - Why is it...

  38 - Messing up your...

  38 - I hang on...

  39 - Don’t let me...

  39 - Our friends keep...

  40 - If only I...

  40 - I bump into...

  41 - You never liked...

  41 - Maybe it was...

  42 - I am moved...

  42 - Why is everybody...

  43 - If I hadn’t...

  43 - You couldn’t forgive...

  44 - I let myself...

  44 - If only I...

  45 - At least I...

  45 - If only you’d...

  46 - I’m not going...

  46 - I sometimes used...

  47 - You, Teresa, Pascoal...

  47 - I list the...

  48 - I’m with you...

  48 - Incompetent murderer, where...

  49 - I used to...

  49 - Teresa came across...

  50 - Quick. The girl...

  50 - And suddenly you’ve...

  About the Author

  About the Translator

  Happy for having everything I am.

  Happy for losing all I’ve ever known.

  Only I can’t give you what I will no longer be.

  No, my death, I cannot give it to you.

  Pedro Tamen

  1

  Dying isn’t enough to get you a glimpse of God’s smile—even if, like me, you’ve spent your entire life basking in it. When the worst happened, that smile descended into my darkness with a swing’s sobbing lament, a swaying of hinges pulled from the chains of childhood. I sat on it and rose, swinging, toward the light. I was lucky: the worst happened to me early. God embraces first those who suffer before having any concrete knowledge of pain, maybe because everybody else knows too much to be able to be saved.

  You used to say it was just the opposite: that God is born of the ignorance that characterizes premature suffering. But you, my favorite student, were quickly inhabited by an excess of knowledge. God didn’t know anything about the universe when he created it. I imagine he must have been lonely. I imagine that, at a certain point, that loneliness must have become larger than God himself, bursting into an enormous bloom of light. And I imagine him, afterward, trying to make sense of each petal of that scattered light. Now that I’ve left the body that used to be me—now become pollen, dust in your eyes, pure imagination—I can imagine it even better, drunk on light, lucid, dazzled by a hidden Lucifer, a creative Lucifer embedded in his own being, in a state of passion, with all of history unleashed by his omnipotent solitude. And I soar within his smile once more, for good this time, since my body is lying supine down there, in a coffin, being contemplated and remembered and mourned for the last time.

  I won’t be getting out of bed tomorrow after asking in a muffled voice for him to give the swing a bigger push, to push hard till my feet fly beyond the grounded warmth of the bedsheets. Nobody else will be waiting for me; I won’t have to wrap myself in apologies; I’ll never deceive or disillusion anybody again. I won’t be going back to die in the body of the only man who ever opened the secret passageway to death inside me. I won’t be returning to the disappointment of rebirth. Most of all, I will never disappoint you again—you, unbeliever who taught me to believe better, my ancient, pocket-size god, my friend.

  Stripped of my body, I more easily transform into the swing, into the dancing light it’s made of. In a whisper of wind, I implore him not to push me so swiftly toward that illuminated place that is His Flesh; I implore him to let me take one last breath here, linger a little longer in the world I left so suddenly. A little longer near you. Or take your last breath, the way children do, so I can start over with another story in the everyday oscillation of your smile.

  Only your laughter remains. I showed you the sea.

  I showed it to you before and after your death.

  Luís Filipe Castro Mendes

  1

  I’m alone. Alone with my heart shattered into pieces by visions of you. I can no longer offer you my heart on a silver platter. Did I ever want it? Did you? What I need now is some sort of god to act as my messenger boy. A god who would stroke your hair and remind me how soft it was. A god who’d free me from this persistent image of your body in a box. Remember how you always used to laugh at what you called my “compulsive boxification”? “One of these days, I’m going to come in and find you in the middle of a rising tide of papers, totally exhausted, about to drop dead. But there’s no way I’m boxing you up—dead bodies freak me out.”

  I always told you fear attracts misfortune—go ahead and laugh. Laugh all you want now; nobody can hear you. Go on—if your God exists, let out a big belly laugh and prove it to me. Actually, no, don’t: a posthumous chortle would spoil my beautiful archive of your laughter. It would screw up the aesthetics, you know? And aesthetics, frankly, were never your strong suit. You couldn’t stand fakery. You hated the knee-jerk rejection of life’s paradoxes. Your death is a perfect example—couldn’t you have died of something less bizarre? Held out for the dignity of your first wrinkles? What a penchant for kitsch you had, my dear—but God always manifests himself in kitsch, doesn’t he?

  Rest in peace. You made a pretty corpse—prettier and more serene than you ever were in life, kid. They touched up your image. Public figures live—and die—by their image. Image über alles. Maybe it would have been better if I hadn’t seen you, hadn’t kissed your forehead. I clung to that last trace of your warmth. You left me with the lingering scent of incense and dead flowers. The fragrance of the forbidden love we left scattered across the landscape of our prehistoric past. I call it love for simplicity’s sake. Some words are like that; we use them as a way of calming ourselves. Rattle them off to keep ourselves from thinking. What used to exist, what still exists between us is a science of disappearance. I started to disappear the day my eyes dove into yours. Now that your eyes are closed for good, I know you’ll never give mine back.

  In that story that no longer includes me, the story I rode like a carousel, the story that is always only a temporary dwelling place, people have questions. What sense does it make for a thirty-seven-year-old woman to die, damn it, destroyed by her own posterity? You’d quit smoking so you wouldn’t die of cancer. It wasn’t death itself you were worried about, you said, but the meandering of it, the torment of illness. The story. I don’t think I ever saw you sick—except with love. You nurtured the vice of passion with methodical implacability. You always ran counterclockwise. You sought the motionlessness of a stone-carved time that was already yours. Or ours—but how could we ever say that, when we had to keep on living? During those brief periods when you weren’t in a relationship, you became unbearable. You weren’t excited about anything. Later, when you started a career in the halls of power, you lost that tendency toward romantic ecstasy. You shifted into storytelling, the soothing burble of gossip.
Even your wardrobe changed—the last few times I saw you, you were wearing these horrible power suits, clumsily cut and sewn Armani knockoffs, in garish grays. “Wow, check out the business-lady getup!” I said, and you explained it was just for work. On the weekends, you said, you went back to your usual style. But style is a way of being, not a weekend outfit. Politics robbed you of your style and stole you from me. Politicians don’t need friends, they need a retinue—it’s textbook. You went to your life and I to mine. As you know, I live my life in flashes of lightning; the thunder you and I shared rumbled on a little longer than usual—that’s all. Anyway, death hovers over the joys of that chronology we seized on in an effort to escape the bounds of time. What are we beyond what we’re actually being? You were my beyond—the magnet of my intimate, impersonal temporality. Redemption from the evils that amputated me. You. Now pure vapor of the universe. You’re like God for me now—who could have imagined it? I turn to you for what I do not know how to be, and that’s the truth. I look out at the sea at Guincho Beach, at those cold, fierce waves you relished diving into, and I, too, feel like I’m half dead, half cold. Happy to be by your side again. Beside the woman who was already dead a good couple of years before you died. I miss you. But life, ultimately, is just all those absences that drive us. Your death has allayed my fear of dying. With you out of the game, I’m less interested in the whole ordeal. And since you’ve died, I, too, will be capable of dying, without disturbing the waves or the sky or the silence. Falling into you, further and further from the pathetic fiction of me.

  2

  God pushes slower, allowing me to revisit the city I loved so much with you. Little things: in the yard beside your house, a boy is spreading his wings in the middle of a flock of gray pigeons, which stir and leave him behind down there, still flapping. There’s a young woman pacing back and forth, watching the boy and talking on her cell phone: “You’re a dick. I don’t give a crap, you’re a fucking dick. Your son’s going to figure out what a dick of a father he’s got.”

  When I was dying, I didn’t see green valleys or my life in slow motion, didn’t hear celestial music. Maybe it’s possible to die like that, the way I’ve heard it described so often. Maybe it’s even possible that, in the final moment, the lightning bolt of genius might place a few redemptive words in one’s mouth. I always doubted it, but all our doubts are possible, I think, now that I no longer have the supreme pleasure of doubting. Death is a secret text, the only one whose copyright the author has not relinquished. I can tell you about my death, here in this space without space, because God knows you’re no longer able to hear me. But I know you’re imagining it in countless different ways and that, because of those imaginings, all those deaths of mine exist in this intimate space of nonexistence.